Jon Stewart summed up the train wreck thusly: “You don’t cold-call a Kennedy at 5:00 in the morning. Do you know how many unexpected tragedies this family has suffered?”

It wasn’t the first time things went horribly awry with this cockamamie idea. As I watched, squirming and deeply embarrassed for everyone involved in the call, I realized that our culture can still be saved. We can still be embarrassed – we still feel shame. In the reality tv blitz where people discuss the most private events of their lives, it is good to know that there is not an audience for this kind of mindless stupidity.

It is a truly inspiring story. I found these two paragraphs particularly insightful.

[...] I myself don’t think, striking though the image may be, that an entire “hamlet” can be manic-depressive. However, I can forgive la Plath her possibly subconscious metaphor because most of what I know about manic depression I first learned from Hamlet.

*The feminist school has often looked in a manner of marked disapproval at her husband, Ted Hughes. I find it difficult to imagine him actually maltreating Sylvia physically, but there’s no doubt that he could be quite stupendously wanting in sensitivity. I once went for some drinks with him at the apartment of my friend and editor Ben Sonnenberg, who was by then almost completely immobilized by multiple sclerosis. Hughes droned on for an agonizingly long time about the powers of a faith-healer in the (perhaps somewhat manic-depressive) Devonshire hamlet where he lived. This shaman, it seemed, was beyond praise for his ability with crippled people. On and on went the encomium. I could not meet Ben’s eye but from his wheelchair he eventually asked with commendable lightness: “How is he with sufferers from MS?” “Oh, not bad at all,” replied Hughes, before blithely resuming with an account of how this quack could cure disabled farm-animals as well.

Excerpted from Hitch-22: A Memoir by Christopher Hitchens.