An Ode to Spam

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

I would like to take time now to thank everyone who sent me holiday messages via the Internet: The wishes of good cheer, the reports of family achievements in the year past, and the multiple requests for my email or bank password.

Possibly that last group was not acting on its own volition. Just last week I got a note from the novelist Erica Jong, asking me for my email password, and another from the historian Carol Berkin, requesting my Bank of America account number. Thanks to my skills as a journalist, I instantly deduced that both were fraudulent.

Also, I had immediate doubts about a message from another prominent author I know, offering to help me turn my computer “into a money-making machine.” And I quickly figured out that the email I appeared to have sent myself, offering an inside track on “male penis meds” did not really come from me.

I have been feeling pretty darned proud of my own increasing technological sophistication. True, I am still not fully skilled in the operation of our home television, but I blame that on Time Warner Cable, which is responsible for half the problems in our modern world. Someday, we’re going to find out it was Time Warner Cable that screwed up the Obamacare website and then I will say that I told you so.

(More here.)