Hi, I'm Meg Wallitzer.

Before we begin, a quick reminder that Selected Shorts relies on the support of listeners like you.

If this show has ever kept you company on a long walk, made sitting in traffic feel like a treat,

or given you that sudden, wonderful urge to read more, please consider making a donation.

Your support helps us bring great stories to life every week. You can give

at selectedshorts.org slash support. Thank you. 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 Wallitzer, 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 newspaper man H. L. Mencken 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 scorch 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. The story that we're about to hear, top of the food chain, is a selected

shorts 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.

Zach Grenier is a protean character actor whose roles span tornado chasers, twist her, to deep throat

...