Just the small bit of video I saw of this guy creeped me out. He was obviously a very angry person and I'm sure this came across. Attention rage-men: your rage comes across to most women even when you are acting "nice" or being "sweet." Some of us have better radar than others, thank the goddess.

These guys would do much a better service to themselves and any potential la-dee friends by getting therapy instead of going to pick-up classes.

I also lost one of my best friends, a straight man, nearly two years ago. We never so much as kissed but the occasional jolt of attraction was part of the fun.

However, I don't think a woman necessarily needs to be BFF with a straight man to feel assertive power surges. Maybe it's because I'm a mom but I've often asked my teen daughter if she needed me to kick someone's ass for her. Maybe it's b/c I'm a feminist who has never felt the need to have a middle-man between me and kicking ass or being assertive in my career.

Either way, friends are friends no matter the gender. Appreciate them all.

Are you freakin kidding me? Listen, this is how it works:

You support and sacrifice for your causes - let's say equality in the home. Like dividing up housework evenly. Your husband supports and sacrifices for his causes - like drastically working to leave no carbon footprint. Even though you may be on board in general with his cause - to a sane degree - it's HIS cause. If it's super important to him to not use the dryer, he needs to be in charge of laundry. Otherwise, he needs to lay off about how you do the laundry.

Try saying this out loud: "Listen, buster, if I do the laundry, I do it MY way!" Doesn't that feel good? It's called not being a doormat.

Now for your new cause: equality in the home. You can try assigning chores and hope he does his share. You can leave chores undone if he doesn't do them, but most women I know eventually cave and clean the bathroom, or vacuum or dust or whatever. Unfortunately, you can't push your cause on him any more than he can push his on you. But hopefully he will eventually realize that doing his fair share makes you happier which will make him happier. Do I have to spell it out? nudge nudge wink wink.

Oh, and if he claims that being in grad school doesn't leave him time to do his fair share: bullshit. Total BS. I promise you that working a 50 hr/week job is more demanding than being in grad school.

Just reading the review, much less the book, was like listening to a man describing giving birth to a baby. It can only be described second-hand if you've never actually done it.

It seems very obvious to me that this author really has no idea what AA is about, has never actually "surrendered" to, or admitted, the full range of his addictions, and has written this book to justify and rationalize his ongoing addictive behavior. The sad thing is, lots of people will buy it, trying to avoid dealing with the real issues of their addiction, just like so many of us first went to shrinks, counselors, other drugs, etc. before finally giving our all to a 12-step program.

A good example is this sentence in Miller's second paragraph, "The 12-step ceremonies of public confession and contrition, the emphasis on humility before the community, the promise of an enlightened, remade self awaiting anyone willing to work hard enough...." I assume Miller is referring to a theme in the book here. There is no requirement for anyone in an AA meeting, or least not any I've been to, to confess or be contrite. There is no "humility before the community." An actual AA slogan is "To Thine Own Self Be True," which is the program in a nutshell. The steps of AA stress rigorous honesty with *yourself* rather than public acts of contrition. You can go to Catholic church for that. (And yes, there probably is a 12-step program for recovering Catholics.)

I have worked in the field of science for 15 years, rely heavily on fact rather than wishful thinking, tend to validate the "facts" through perusing peer-reviewed research published in reputable journals (not the internet), and I have been in recovery, in AA, for 22 years. If you go into an AA meeting with a chip on your shoulder, with suspicions and preconceived notions, you will fail.

Bring on the pill for addiction: I won't take it and it wouldn't make me want to stop going to AA meetings. The meetings I go to nourish my soul, connect me to others "like me," whether they are sober one week or 20 years, and bring more joy into my life than a lousy pill ever could.

Books like these -- perhaps, somewhat, reviewed by people like Miller -- are sad advertisements of what hell truly active addiction can be.

Dear LW,

You are focusing on a very small, elite group of people as your judge and jury. The world is full of humble, unselfconscious people who don't know that Facebook exists. If you were to come with me to rural Louisiana, for example, and sit on the screened-in porch of a small house surrounded by lush vegetation, topped with a rusted old tin roof that makes you pray for rain, you might forget all about Facebook and your old classmates.

Or you might try to achieve that same enlightenment with prozac. Either way.