Sitting at your computer screen, refreshing Facebook, procrastinating from doing your work as the long weekend approaches? Why not procrastinate by reading an article about procrastination? Not only will you be able to procrastinate for a decent amount of time (it’s around 4 pages), but it’s also a New Yorker article, which means that you not only might actually learn something interesting about what procrastination really means, but the people sitting around you at the SciLi might think that you’re actually doing something intellectual. Procrastinate away!

If you’re a reader of ‘The New Yorker,’ especially of the fiction section, then you probably caught the story “Extreme Solitude” in a July issue by Jeffrey Eugenides. Eugenides, who wrote “The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex” (which, if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend), and an alumni of Brown, uses Brown as the backdrop for this story about two Brown students studying semiotics who fall in love–or something like it. The story is good, and that it’s set at Brown makes it even more interesting and fun for a Brown student to read. Though this story is set during the 80s, maybe it will inspire some of those who are looking for love to sign up for semiotics this fall.

Click here to read Eugenides’s story.