The World's Fair

We don't deign to actually do it. We're all about Unpaid Interns. They just looked up "deign" for us, in case you were wondering. The system works.

This, we say, because Sciencebloggers have been asked:

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?...

Unpaid Interns is the answer. Dave and I have yet to type a single word for the sake of this chump-infested blogging enterprise. We don't write this crap. Get real. You think we'd pen such canned tripe? Dave and I are elitists, high rollers, type A's, out on the leading edges of science and technology frontiers. Way out there. You can't even see us from back where you are, with our staff.

Get yourself some interns, tell them it'll be "educational," tell them, "oh hell yeah the admissions boards look for internships...oh hell yeah they do," tell them cable shows about interns and Steve Zissou movies to the same effect are all documentary-based, all true-to-life in their depiction of the glory and ubiquity of unpaid interns, tell them you did four unpaid internships for Roger Penrose, and if they don't know who that is, tell them, like David Suzuki did, that Jim Watson is an asshole. Unpaid interns people. In some countries they're called "graduate students." Any bloggers tell you otherwise, any bloggers are full of it. And by it we mean crap. Did you see the Arrested Development episode where Henry Winkler jumps that shark on his way to Burger King? Golden. The only sign of elegance in all of Hollywood. One of our interns taped it for us. We were too busy delegating tasks to be bothered. But luckily we'd delegated the sitcom-taping task the week before. That's our point: unpaid interns.

In any case, our names are still lead author on any and all publications that come out--the interns, as we say, are not paid with money, but with patriarchal doting, and hell if they're taking any of the credit we deserve as the managers of their interning output. We run the lab. We make the decisions. Yes, we are The Deciders.

Our interns are so well-trained that, even as they write this very column, they won't betray our non-authorship. You still think this is us, Benjamin and Dave, and it is. So our interns will be instructed to say. Barthes long ago announced the Death of the Author, and I guess we're just playing his game, finagling authorship issues. One of them added that part. We'd never drop a Roland Barthes reference in the middle of a science blog. That's stupid. Julie Kristeva, maybe. Maybe.