“My dog fully had diarrhea on the street,” is the way actress Meredith Hagner kicked off our phone call, and there is really no better way to meet her, however unfortunate it might be for the dog.

You may be familiar with Christopher Hitchens’s odious 2007 Vanity Fair essay, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” either because you had the misfortune of reading it in real-time, or because you’ve had to ...