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 end essay, contributed by Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, aka the author of the Series of Unfortunate Events books. 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:

Let’s start by saying I have a lot of money. I’ve acquired it by writing children’s 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’s 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 one year, you’d 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’s a lot. They wouldn’t fit in your home, for example, even though you’d have the sort of home that only the top 1 percent of people in the world can afford.