Sometimes big problems have simple solutions and sometimes simple solutions cause big problems.

On this week's selected shorts, stories that share a little of each.

Big Brother interferes with the natural order of things for our own good. a family mourns with the help of some

crabs and tips for packing when you're between two worlds. I'm your host, Meg

Walitzer, and you're listening to selected shorts where our greatest actors

transport us through the magic of fiction one short story at a time. The great and caustic American newspaperman H. L. Menkin observed that every complex problem has a simple solution that doesn't work.

That's a provocative idea.

But there are other ways of thinking about this.

Sometimes the solution to a problem comes from an unexpected source.

You know, you burn your food when you're cooking and Google tells you to peel a bunch of

potatoes and add them to the dish for an extra 45 minutes to soak up the scorched taste. Other times though, the simplest solution is best,

like throw out the whole thing and order takeout. Our first story is by contemporary

master T.C. Boyle, who has been part of the selected

shorts literary family since our beginnings.

Boyle, a playful inventive and humanist writer, has a bulging portfolio of great work, including most recently the novels

Talk to Me and Blue Skies. Boyle was a favorite of selected shorts founder Isaiah Sheffer,

and over the years we featured stories that range from a

retelling of Lassie to a gripping tale about a landslide. The story that we're

about to hear, top of the food chain, a selected short listener favorite.

It may be the challenging nature of our times

or Zach Grenier's great read or the pleasure of hearing a truly complex

piece of humor play itself out.

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