Heather McHugh's poem "Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies" in the May 11 New Yorker is a real surprise. Although it is a self-described collage of hacker jargon, the juxtaposition of the phrases echo conversations from decades of my own hacker life, and the arrangement is oddly pleasing. "Who wrote these tunes, these runes you need black art to parse?" That verse could apply to mathematics as well, and I suppose McHugh could have taken Niven and Zuckerman's elementary number theory book for the starting point of a collage. But "quadratic reciprocity" cannot compare to the imagery of "A berserker wizard gets no score for treasure." About 20 years ago the New Yorker published a short story based math word problems. I think it started, "A lies in bed next to B, dreaming of C." It seems to me that there have been few attempts to work the language of sci-math-tech into literature. Maybe McHugh's poem will inspire others to use nerdspeak beautifully in other formal writing, as if it were any other kind of valued ethnic speech pattern. McHugh was near MIT back in the day, I wonder if she ever had occasion to visit MAC or TMRC. Hilarie