My niece Meghan is a student at the University of Wisconsin. She’s a talented writer and recently co-authored an important opinion piece in the university’s paper. When she was in high school, Meghan wrote a parody of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye that I thought was brilliant, and given Salinger’s recent passing, it seems appropriate to bring it up now. The parody involves Holden Caulfield telling a fairy tale. An excerpt: “One hundred years passed, and then one day a prince came riding by. This is so phony. Let me guess, I bet it was Prince Charming. What does that mean, anyway? The perfect man? Cuz if I was the perfect man, I’d get pretty goddamn crazy about myself. The prince was amazed to find everyone in a deep sleep. I bet they’re a little goddamn dusty by now, too. At last, he entered the room where he saw the sleeping princess. He ends up kissing her. Boy, you’ve gotta be pretty horny to kiss a dusty, sleeping, 100-year-old phony. That’s like kissing your grandma.”…On a far more serious note, Meghan was instrumental in bringing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a prominent critic of Islam, to the University of Wisconsin as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series – which is what she wrote about in the guest column. Hirsi Ali will speak on Feb. 2nd. A citizen of Somalia who later became a member of the Dutch Parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spoken boldly against the Muslim subjugation of women, and Islamic radicals want to kill her for expressing her beliefs and recounting her experiences. She wrote the screenplay for Submission, a film directed by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh — who was later murdered as a result…I’m proud of Meghan for her part in helping Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak her truth in Madison.