{"id":1420,"date":"2007-06-15T15:27:37","date_gmt":"2007-06-15T15:27:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/cant-touch-this.html"},"modified":"2007-06-15T15:27:37","modified_gmt":"2007-06-15T15:27:37","slug":"cant-touch-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/cant-touch-this.html","title":{"rendered":"Can’t touch this"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday, the NYTimes Magazine<\/em> was all about poverty, wealth, and income inequality. With John Edwards on the cover, so that’s nice. And full of ads for multi-million dollar cottages and hundreds-of-dollars children’s ensembles, we can assume. Anyway, part of the package, which I didn’t know until a kind reader emailed me today was an end essay, contributed by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, aka the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books. <\/a>Hate to say it, for fear of getting all judgmental and psycho-analytical and all, but this opening paragraph does put the tone and theme of the books (children under constant threat) in an interesting light:<\/p>\n

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Let\u2019s start by saying<\/span> I have a lot of money. I\u2019ve acquired it by writing children\u2019s books about terrible things happening to orphans, and this seems like such a crazy and possibly monstrous way of acquiring money that I give a lot of it away. I mean, I guess it\u2019s a lot. Let me put it like this: My wife and I recently became obsessed with a Web site where you plug in the amount of money you made in a year and find out where you stand. If your salary equaled the amount of money my wife and I gave Planned Parenthood<\/a> one year, you\u2019d be in the richest 1 percent in the world, which is pretty great. Still, there would be 60 million people richer than you, and that\u2019s a lot. They wouldn\u2019t fit in your home, for example, even though you\u2019d have the sort of home that only the top 1 percent of people in the world can afford.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday, the NYTimes Magazine was all about poverty, wealth, and income inequality. With John Edwards on the cover, so that’s nice. And full of ads for multi-million dollar cottages and hundreds-of-dollars children’s ensembles, we can assume. Anyway, part of the package, which I didn’t know until a kind reader emailed me today was an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1420","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCan't touch this - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/06\/cant-touch-this.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can't touch this - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Last Sunday, the NYTimes Magazine was all about poverty, wealth, and income inequality. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1420"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1420\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}