Manolo says, here is the Manolo’s latest column for the Express of the Washington Post.

Dear Manolo

I recently graduated and started a new job as a research chemist. This means long hours on my feet in the lab, and close-toed shoes in the summertime!. Can you recommend any close-toed shoes that are comfortable, fashionable, *and* affordable? It seems an impossible combination.

Genna

Manolo says, since the time of the famously maladapted and nerdy Isaac Newton, scientists have been the modern priestly class, intermediaries between our superstitious world of ignorance and their logical world of higher knowledge, engaged in arcane rites that are as incomprehensible to us lay people as the differences between homoousios and homoiousios were to the medieval serfs.

And as members of this modern priesthood–as guileless and unworldly in its way as the Benedictine order–scientists are not expected to be overly concerned about the matters of this world. They have bigger fish to dissect.

Unfortunately, unlike the medieval monks, the modern scientists must pick out their own clothing, the practice that has resulted, more or less, in disaster. And thus one cannot help but notice that most scientists fall somewhere between the Nutty Professor and Steve Urkel on the continuum of fashion.

Thank heavens for the lab coat!

Look, here is the Make the Braid from Kenneth Cole New York. The cute loaferish shoe that will look good as you unlock the secrets of the universe. And it is on the sale!