The storybook isle of Martha's Vineyard is well known for sandy beaches, trendy celebrities, randy handymen who seduce their wives, insanely overpriced real estate and – healthy food? Hel-lo?

Anyone who's scarfed down the fried dough at the West Tisbury fair, the fried clams at the Menemsha Bite, the fried calamari at Giordano's or the fried – well, you get the idea: Martha's Vineyard may be many things, but a haven for dieters isn't one of them.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't try to peddle this week's dangerous and stupid crash diet book by associating your harebrained scheme to a locale with somewhat more cachet than Nagadoches, Texas (where we understand the fried food is pretty tasty, too.).

Who knows? Maybe you'll rake in enough royalties to afford a July rental in Chilmark and dinner at the Outermost Inn on Gay Head. But we doubt it. 

Remember Amity Shlaes?  We didn't think so.  At last sighting, she was inking a column for the Financial Times in praise of George Bush's tax cuts and all the wonderful things that were going to happen to the economy as a result of cutting Mitt Romney's and Steven Schwartzman's tax rate on income to 15%. And she was right: wonderful things did happen to Romney's and Schwartzman's economy. The rest of us? Not so much.

It's no wonder then that she casts an envious eye on the Hoover Administration when the rich were rich and the forgotten man was, then as now, forgotten.  In her retelling, FDR was an unprincipled improviser and the Depression didn't end until World War II. This is actually known.

What's also known, except by Shlaes, is that Roosevelt did bring honest work to the destitute, a transformed infrastructure to a prostrate nation, income security to the aged and hope to millions mired in grueling poverty.

FDR's greatest crimes, in the eyes of Shlaes and her reactionary ilk, were enshrining the notions that government exists to serve the interests of all, not just the rich and their coked-up offspring, and proving that a government so constituted could successfully co-exist with, and indeed foster, a market economy.  

Sadly, thanks to the unceasing efforts of those like Shlaes, those simple truths, like the wretched of Hoover's Great Depression, have been utterly forgotten.

It's another installment of You Read It First in the Spy: Some French guy (no doubt an eminent professor of semiotics at the University of Paris XXXVI) has now written an entire book addressing the question that has not bedeviled readers of the Spy: How to bullshit [Surely, talk? – Ed.] about books you haven't read?

No doubt he'll create some idiotic classification and then drop a few thousand ponderous literary references to unreadable Frenchmen, but Spy readers know better, or they're about to. First, are you a man trying to nail a woman or vice versa? (Sorry, the other team is on their own tonight.)

Guys, you have to figure out if your date has read, say, Bayard. If she hasn't, just start blabbing in a loud authoritative voice. If she has, find a book she hasn't read and go back to step one. That wasn't so hard, was it?

Gals, it's even easier. All you have to do is bat your eyelashes and whisper in your most adorable voice (you do have one, don't you?) the simple words expressed at left by our spokesmodel, Chantal Bayard. Don't worry – he doesn't give a shit if you've read Bayard or Spiderman. Trust us.