6.1 How Leo Tolstoy & Tony Tulathimutte Write Funny Men

Embroidered on the couch pillow of our collective brain is the first line of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” What is rarely remembered is the immediate domestic catastrophe of Prince Stepan “Stiva” Arkadyevitch Oblonsky and his unhappy family:

Page 1 of my copy of Anna Karenina. If you want a color code on the annotations…The black pen is from my 2013 summer reading, and the dark green felt-pen-thick notes are from my AP Lit class not...