Floating Off the Page

I sometimes feel I’m cheating when I read the quirky human-interest stories in the middle column of the Wall Street Journal. Those stories aren’t the reason why the Journal exists, after all. They’re just a sop to English majors like me who get tired of reading about GDP and inverted yield curves.

But how many yield-curve stories would still be fresh and readable forty years after they’re published, or even forty days? The pieces collected in Floating Off the Page still live, and some are forty years old, or older. Short, varied, and entertaining, they make perfect reading for hot summer days when the attention span is limited.

A surprising number of the columns are about animals. There’s one about people who get high by licking toads, one about people who put their dogs and cats on a vegan diet, and one about a guy who turns roadkill into recipes like “groundhog baked in sour cream, spiced mustard and a bit of rosemary.” There’s the New York City truck that picks up dead horses, sea lions, and bison, a man paid by the FDA to sniff fish all day, and the cannon that shoots dead chickens at the windshields of aircraft. There is also a heartbreaking story about the struggle to save sea otters oiled by the Exxon Valdez.

Some of these pieces actually have something to with business (though frequently coupled with animals). We find out about copyright enforcers who have cracked down on Girl Scout singalongs, about a Chinese restaurant that cornered the market on rat recipes, about a Scotsman who makes stainless steel braces for sheep, and about a maker of prison underwear whose business became much more profitable when he started turning the underwear scraps into gun-cleaning patches. Enjoy!