Failure, loser or jackass?

Now that we’ve finished reading James Atlas’s “I was fired” essay in New York magazine, we’re going to go watch “Dying Young,” look at photos of starving people in Africa and think about how no one loved us when we were eight—to cheer ourselves up. (Whose idea was it to schedule that on Valentine’s Day? Is Xanax advertising on the opposite page?) Between the scene at MSG with his 12-year-old son and Atlas bursting into tears one…two…three times in the course of 3,900 words, we’re one Willy Loman reference away from curling up in fetal position under our desk and never coming out.