Most of Your Intermittent Lex is available for free to everyone. Some folks choose to become paid subscribers, which is of course incredibly kind. A small number of posts are just for them. This is one of them, but here’s a short preview for everyone.

A decade ago — and wow does that hit me hard, that this was a full decade ago — Jessica Winter published a story that stuck with me for Slate, which she called “The Kindly Brontosaurus.” (For what it's worth, I always always think of it as “The Friendly Brontosaurus,” and mistakenly used “Friendly” several times in my original draft of this piece.)

The key section is reproduced below, but I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing: