Read all about it here.

Also, I found this story about the scholarly/waitressing/boxing career of New Yorker staffer (or something—it doesn't really say) Suzie Guillette mesmerizing and uneasy-making; it raises a whole passel of questions I don't really feel like writing about. I present some of it—originally printed in her hometown paper, the Attleboro Sun Chronicle—for your deep thoughts:

NEW YORK -- The pretty young woman hits, cuffs and clutches a 68-year-old man while another man shouts at her to do more of it, and better.

A group of tough-looking men, boys and several women, encircle, wait, smile, shout or stare -- all waiting to follow her.

Into the ring.

Suzie Guillette, 28, Attleboro High School Class of 1994, is sparring in a Bronx gym with an ex-New York Golden Gloves champion named Willie Soto who is old enough -- and kind enough -- to be her grandfather.
...
Elbow to elbow with this slice of rugged humanity stands Attleboro's Guillette.

Blond, blue-eyed, slender and academic, Guillette will spar, box, skip rope, and then write about all of these memorable encounters by April.

She studies boxers by becoming one. It's her master's thesis.

Guillette, who majored in philosophy at George Washington University, is a second-year graduate student now at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers.

Four to five days a week, she takes the 20-minute drive from her idyllic ivy-covered campus to two large, concrete and fluorescent-lighted rooms smattered with old fight posters and dried blood.

It is a repository of tattooed dreams, swollen lips and bloodied ambition.

And Guillette couldn't be happier.
...
When she returned to Sarah Lawrence [from the Czech Republic] for the second year of her master's program, she still entertained thoughts of immersing herself in Rwanda.

Then, after a bizarre meeting in a laundry with a neighborhood man who was looking for women to model his line of underwear for black and Latino women -- "His wife and daughter were right there," Guillette said -- she thought, perhaps, she should write about the colorful people who inhabit the Bronx.

By September's end, however, she had found the Morris Park Gym and had begun renewing her love affair with boxing.

"I realized it was perfect for my thesis, a very manageable idea," Guillette said. "It was really fun, and the other part of me had really enjoyed boxing in Prague. So, I said I might as well do something that I love, two hours a day, four days a week."

Her thesis adviser agreed, and encouraged her new pursuit.

As Guillette developed her jab and her cross, she also developed her hook -- five essays that will serve as chapters in her planned 100-plus page thesis.

"There will be four or five essays in totally different styles," Guillette said.
...
A third piece will be on dishing out and receiving punishment, itself, gleaned from the denizens of Morris Park.

"It's a survey piece on how it feels to be hit," Guillette said. "There are so many different people, so many different levels. How do you feel to be hit and then hitting someone?"
...
Boxing has gotten into her blood like ink did when she did a stint at The New Yorker magazine; when she was writing proposals; when she studied writing abroad.
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She plans to modify her pieces with hopes of getting them published in The New Yorker or as stand-alone essays.

She is writing sample chapters and seeking a literary agent. If she returns to Europe, she will work on a book.
...
Down the road, she is entertaining the idea of applying for a license to train young girls how to box.

What's there to say, really, except make cracks about how you better learn to get comfortable being hit and then hitting someone if you're going to make it in the word game? I can't even say anything about interdisciplinary studies at Sarah Lawrence, seeing as I almost went there. This is so obviously going to be a book, and why not? It's been done well before. Maybe she'll get a chapter into the magazine; hey, I've had plenty of boxing fantasies myself, though I don't like getting blows to the head. Damage to the aqualine nose aside, though, I hope she gets signed sooner rather than later—better to have a million-dollar contract than be a million dollar baby.

Bard of the Rings [Attleboro, Mass., Sun Chronicle]
Embracing the Housewife Within [Guillette, Sexing the Political]