With Ed on the road, John called up LB alum Alice Bolin for a conversation about vanity and self-disgust, why men are so into history, the power of the dead girl on television, cooking the same two things for yourself again and again, letting people buy you dinner, and living where your favorite writers wrote. Follow links to Howard Blum's American Lightning, Alice's LARB article "The Oldest Story: Toward a Theory of a Dead Girl Show", and Missoula's Pearl Cafe.