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The killing of George Tiller on Sunday is a reminder, as if we needed one, of why so few doctors dare to become abortion providers outside big cities, why even fewer perform late-term abortions, and of the bravery it takes to be a member of these small bands. Tiller, 67, performed late-term abortions in the rare cases in which his state, Kansas, allows it. (Two doctors have to say independently that a woman would be irreparably harmed by giving birth.) For his willingness, Tiller was hounded throughout his career... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You're right, Hanna. The White House, and Sotomayor, too, by agreeing to the walk back,
are giving the "wise Latina" mini-fracas more air, not less. Her speech
sparked an interesting and even vital discussion this week about the
value of having judges with different life experiences on the bench.
Now we move to hedging and hemming and hawing? I'll ask the next
question they'd all be better off not spending the weekend fielding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said today that the president would say that Sotomayor's word choice in her suddenly-infamous Berkeley speech
was "poor." It's maddening that the White House is now taking this
line. Maybe they mean to take the air out of it, but I bet it will
accomplish the opposite, and give everyone license to talk about it
again all weekend. This was a published speech, after all, not an off-the-cuff remark, and presumably the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal allows authors to edit copy, like everyone else.
It wasn't the best choice of words, but I would downgrade that to
"poor" only because it is likely to be taken out of context when, eight
years later, she is nominated for the Supreme Court. As we have hashed
out here... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about
Sotomayor raising "questions about her judicial temperament and
willingness to listen" was subject to a headline makeover this morning? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said
the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared
to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the
pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally
criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation,
humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and
their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the
effects and aftermath of violence more than its... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I’ve been reading a lot of headlines to the effect that “Identity
politics are condescending,” and I’ve come to the conclusion that I
have no idea what identity politics are. To me, the phrase has always
referred to the dated assumption that the interests of any particular
subgroup are best represented by other members of that subgroup. So the
expectation is that Sotomayor will... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There's a fascinating piece in The Star about a manuscript discovered by a Canadian researcher that appears to be ... a medieval women's magazine. It contains content about "cinnamon," an excerpt from Chaucer, recipes for making sealing wax, and more. As the Star puts it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last night's 10-round National Spelling Bee final was a nail-biter, and
an awesome one at that. There were redonkulously hard, beautifully
arcane words (schizaffin, palatschinken, Neufchâtel).
There was heartbreak (heavily-favored Sidharth Chand, last year's
runner-up, crumpled before our eyes in the second round, when he
realized... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Cornell law professor Eduardo M. Peñalver, who
clerked on the Second Circuit for Judge Guido Calabresi and on the
Supreme Court for Justice John Paul Stevens:
As some of you have pointed out, considered in the context the rest of her speech, it is clear that Sotomayor merely meant
that appointing “a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences” to the bench would (on average) do more to improve
judicial decision-making than appointing a(nother) comparably wise
white male judge. Understood in this way, the comment is benign and,
more importantly, almost certainly true.
Crucial to understanding Judge Sotomayor’s argument is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Guest post from The Big Money reporter Chadwick Matlin:
Sarah,
your clarion warning to men everywhere is too late. The cougar invasion
has already begun. I found myself mingling amongst the mythical women a
month ago, when, in the interest of journalism, I served as cub bait
for a Slate piece on the cougar phenomenon. That piece, written by the estimable Troy Patterson... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ann, the Spelling Bee makes me squirm too,
sometimes. But it also makes me want to jump up and down—kind of like
those hyperactive contestants—and squeal, because I love spelling bees
so much.
Maybe I'm culturally wired for it: As the Washington Post noted on Tuesday, spelling bees have a special place in Indian-American nerd culture. ("In the same way that Hakeem Olajuwon's success in the NBA inspired a generation of Nigerians to take up basketball... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Tonight you can see the finals of the National Spelling Bee on television
and watch as the kids contort under the mounting pressure. They “tug at
their hair and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to
manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates, let alone... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Jason Linkins
has a great piece up at Huffington Post quoting Justice Samuel Alito on
the virtues of judicial empathy. (“When I get a case about
discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who
suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because
of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.")
And also quoting Antonin Scalia on the power of courts to “make law.”
To which I add... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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One of America’s longest-running love triangles is about to come to an end: According to the official Archie Comics blog, Archie Andrews—hapless ginger kid and proto-Zack Morris—is getting married... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last week, Michael Kinsley wrote a brutal takedown of the redesigned Newsweek,
attacking it page by page and graph by graph for failing to be readers'
"guide through the chaos of the Information Age." It's something that
editor Jon Meacham wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek
would not "pretend" to be, and that Kinsley thinks newsmagazines
totally need to be in order to survive. The assessment was shrewd, but
perhaps needlessly vicious, as noted in New York's Jessica Pressler's response, titled: "Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, and We Feel Bad About It." (Full disclosure: I'm particularly sympathetic to Newsweek, since I used to work there. Plus it's owned by the same company that owns Double X.)
But if the new Newsweek's inaugural issue falls short of making sense of the week's chaos, I wonder what Kinsley makes of the New York Times today, which ran an article—ON THE FRONT PAGE, and with a jump to the highly coveted A3 page—about teenagers hugging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There is some brewing international trade drama between the E.U. and
Inuits about seal meat which is deeply, incredibly fascinating, and I
will fill you in later, but the main takeaway is: This fine lady,
Governor general Michaelle Jean, who is Queen Elizabeth's
representative in the Canadian government, butchered and ate RAW SEAL HEART... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here's a guest post from Current TV's Sarah Haskins, whose videos will air weekly on Double X.
Each week she addresses a theme in marketing, advertising, or
entertainment aimed at women that she finds silly, such as the idea
that yogurt
is an unbelievably indulgent, wholly beloved miracle food for women.
She's giving XXers a sneak peak of tonight's video subject:
Young American Men, this is your warning. For so many years, you've
been safe: ensconced in fraternities, apartments with other dudes,
sports bars, and post-college intramural leagues.
Yet the natural order cannot long survive without balance. And thus
your herds, like deer in the backyards of New Jersey, must be thinned... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bloomberg has a story proposing the health of global trade can be judged by extramarital affairs, and Latvian hookers. Why Latvian?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Between the recession and feminism, we have reached the inevitable
moment when the stay-at-home dad becomes a real, quantifiable
phenomenon. Journalist Jeremy Adam Smith just published the Daddy Shift tracing this "startling evolutionary advance in the American family," and Lisa Belkin interviews him.
Smith argues that our maternal lens causes us to miss the things dads
do differently and well—encourage risk taking and independence, for
example... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Yale law professor Heather Gerken:
Over the last day, I’ve been fielding calls from
reporters, members of your tribe, many of whom have asked some
variation on the following questions: “What role does identity politics
play on the Supreme Court, and should those who support civil-rights
causes be happy about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination?” (This, for what
it’s worth, is almost a direct quote).
placeAd2(commercialNode,'midarticleflex',false,'')
There is only one sensible answer to such questions. Please stop.
Honestly. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this, but let me spell
it out... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Daily Telegraph reports unreleased Abu Ghraib photographs
include sexual torture and "rape." Does that have any bearing on the
debate over whether we should be allowed to see the photographs?
According to the story, the pictures include an American soldier raping
a female prisoner and a "male translator raping a male detainee." Other
photos include prisoners being sexually violated with a "truncheon,
wire and a phosphorescent tube"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In The Supremes Edition of our XX Gabfest this week, Hanna and Meghan
and I talk about (of course) Obama's pick for the Supreme Court, Judge
Sonia Sotomayor. Also a new study showing that women are more unhappy,
not less, 30 years after the sexual revolution, and why Terminator
Salvation has such lame female action stars... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Alongside all the finger pointing about bank failures and the collapse
of the US housing bubble has come the slow puncturing of the legend of
consequence-free 1990s economic growth. Peter Baker's fantastic New York Times Magazine piece takes a good, hard look at the maker of that world: Bill Clinton. Like Hanna,
I find the portrait both honest and poignant. The meat of the
article—which follows Clinton on various travels, speeches, meetings,
and duties related to the Clinton foundation—is naturally the
substantive, frank, and reflective conversation between Bill and Baker
with respect to the Clintonian economy. David Leonhardt, also of the Times, parses the back and forth, wherein Bill admits that he "should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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With all this talk of Sotomayor, we've neglected the other big story from yesterday: Proposition 8 was upheld in California.
Maybe this makes me a cynic, or even close to a conspiracy theorist,
but I wonder if Obama deliberately announced her nomination yesterday
so that Sotomayor would dominate the news cycle, and he wouldn't be
forced to comment on the gay marriage ban... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I agree that the issue isn't really one of reverse-discrimination, even if think Hanna is right that Sotomayor's views on affirmative action
may sound dated to some contemporary ears. Rather, the issue, I think,
is similar to one that arose during last year's Democratic presidential
primary. Then the election was often portrayed in terms of identity
politics, much as Sotomayor's nomination is now. It was black (Obama)
v. woman (Hillary), with criticisms of either dismissed as so much
racism or sexism. But to me, the far more distinguishing characteristic
of both candidates, and of Sotomayor, has less to do with their sex or
skin color than with their respective ages... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times
reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the
Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character
sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying
to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the
indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant
man... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Unsurprisingly, Rush Limbaugh just called
Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor "reverse racists." He is referring to
the controversy over Sotomayor's line, from a speech given in 2002,
that she believed a Latina woman would make a better decision than a
white man. Limbaugh might have ground to stand on had Sotomayor been
making a blanket reference to the inherent superiority of Latina women
to white men. But she wasn't. As Hanna pointed out yesterday,
Sotomayor was talking about sex discrimination cases, about which there
is evidence that having female judges leads to outcomes that appear to
be fairer for women. She was not being a reverse racist; she was being
a pragmatist, and perhaps, a wee bit of an activist in that moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I agree with Dahlia that humility is rare in Sonia Sotomayor's professional circle, but I do hope this self-effacing quality helps her in the very humbling confirmation hearings coming up. In the context of introducing herself to the American public, however, I doubt, as Samantha wonders, that the judge was downplaying her achievements
to counter critics who consider powerful women "bitchy." (But as an
aside, I'd add a little self-deprecation in the face of such dazzling
glory is certainly not "harmful to the rest.") Although modesty is
encouraged in immigrant families, in fact, in the nominee's
biographical statement, "ordinary" was an apt comparison to the
odds-overcoming determination of her extraordinary mother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dahlia, I agree—the more I digest Sotomayor's Berkeley speech, the more I also appreciate it.
Where Sandra Day O'Connor was too macho to admit that being a woman on
the high court made her different, and where Ruth Bader Ginsburg is
still hesitant to step too far from that party line, Sotomayor is frank
and full-throated... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Romance novels inhabit a literary ghetto that is very easy for readers
to visit (though they usually do so surreptitiously, by cover of
night), but extremely hard for books to leave. Every so often one of
the novels is smuggled out, into the literary mainstream, and millions
of women wind up reading mediocre, but riveting prose about an extremely handsome vampire
as fast as they can. But for the most part, romance novels stay in this
ghetto—and so the only people lucky enough to know about the existence
of mind-boggling sub-genres like Amish romance novels are Amish romance novel readers themselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When it opens this weekend, I hope a lot of XXers will go see Drag Me to Hell,
the new Sam Raimi horror movie, so we can discuss it here. In addition
to being (I thought) a satisfying two hours' worth of alternating
laughs and screams, it's a very rich text about female power. So rich,
in fact, that I'm not sure yet exactly how to read it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sam, I had the exact opposite reaction to Sotomayor’s claims of ordinariness
yesterday. My thought was, “How refreshing. Instead of making multiple
earnest claims about her vast personal humility, here we finally have a
nominee who actually is humble.” Or at least appreciates that she
didn’t make it this far on her own steam... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Back in January, a bunch of copies of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight arrived
in the Philippines, and a customs official demanded an import duty.
It’s illegal to tax books in the Philippines—no such duty had been
levied in 50 years—but the Twilight importer paid up. The Bureau of
Customs, apparently facing a budget shortfall, began to demand the
impromptu tax for every new air shipment of books. Importers refused to
pay, so huge numbers of textbooks and novels waited in warehouses. For
months, virtually no imported books got past the blockade... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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f Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, six out of nine Supreme Court justices will be Catholic.
Barbara Perry, a professor of government at Sweetbriar College who is
writing a book about Catholic justices went on CNN radio to discuss
Sotomayor's nomination. She was joined by Catholic League President
Bill Donohue.
Perry claims that "in our politics, religion doesn't matter
anymore," but then she added, "I don't think our politics are ready for
an Islamic justice at this point"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A friend of mine just directed my attention to the cover of the most recent J. Crew catalog... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Accepting Obama's nomination to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor said:
I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me,
they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with
extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Set aside the choice to describe her childhood—growing up with diabetes
in a poor, single-family household—as having been "blessed with
extraordinary opportunities." What troubles me is the plea from a woman
just nominated to fill one of the most powerful, demanding,
intellectually challenging positions in the nation to be viewed as
"ordinary"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, Hanna: To me, Sotomayor's speech
is most interesting for its embrace of a way of thinking about identity
politics that seems almost mystical in nature: She stresses the
experiential over the rational. In beginning the speech with
descriptions of the Puerto Rican food she loves, she emphasizes the
ways in which we're the products of hundreds of years of culture and
genetics; she lavishes attention on a particular "Puerto Rican" way of
loving and living to suggest how old and deep our identities are. This
is identity politics, yes, but it's bound up with a sensual, visceral
sense of the texture of life that I don't usually hear in the language
of judges... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, you pull out the critical quote from Sotomayor's speech:
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life."
This quote does not go down easy. As Stuart Taylor pointed out last week, what if Samuel Alito
had said: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his
traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a
Latina woman who hasn't lived that life." We would chuck him over to
some Idaho compound, no?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Can this marriage be saved? Yes, it can—through letters. Check out yesterday’s Op Ed in the Times by a military wife facing marital strains, who turned to an old-fashioned remedy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here in XX-ville, we've long been fascinated by American Girl,
the upscale doll company—excuse me, "premiere lifestyle brand"—that
sells morals and history lessons alongside its hundred-dollar dolls
(and their similarly expensive pinafores, trestle tables, chifferobes,
and other painstakingly detailed accouterments). The New York Times ran an article this weekend about Rebecca Rubin, the newest American Girl,
which (who?) goes on sale this Sunday. The piece describes the years of
work and research that went into creating Rebecca—not just so that
she'd be historically accurate, but also so that she'd be culturally
sensitive. For example: Since "Jewish" is a religious category and not
a racial one, what should a Jewish doll look like?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It's rare for a prominent public official to confront identity politics head on, as Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor did in this 2002 speech at the University of California, Berkeley. She says, "Who am I? I am a "Newyorkrican." For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II." She talks about what that means in terms of her upbringing—eating "mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir—rice, beans and pork," singing merengue, watching Spanish comedy films, playing with her cousins at her grandmother's house. She mentions that she speaks Spanish while carefully noting that her brother does not, and that this is not a necessary ingredient of Latino identity.
Then Sotomayor grapples with how being a Latina makes a difference in her judging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan wasn't the only person who missed Sarah Connor. Terminator Salvation lost the weekend's box office war to another sequel, Night at The Museum.
There's surely some "in this economy" fauxrgument to be made explaining
this outcome (ITE people want family friendly fare, not dark tales
about the world's end), but I think Terminator's problem is more basic, a structural flaw, a storytelling 101 screw-up.
Apocalypse narratives—movies, books, TV about the end of the
world—can be divided into two groups: stopping the apocalypse
narratives and surviving the apocalypse narratives... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The eternally awesomely grouchy Copyranter points to a provocative ad campaign
from the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The pair of
arresting images features a "woman" as a) a punching bag and b) a slab
of meathook-hung carrion. The accompanying copy reads: "IT'S NOT
ACCEPTABLE TO TREAT A WOMAN LIKE ONE." Copyranter wonders: "Like what?
A woman?"
The ads are akin to PETA's shock-happy petsploitation ads... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
Philip Gourevitch’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times adds
another compelling argument to the ones I’ve been making recently about
why releasing more photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan is
a bad idea. Obama first supported the release of the latest batch of
photos but subsequently changed his mind, saying
that the pictures in question are associated with “closed
investigations” in which the perpetrators have already been identified
and sanctioned, and that they “would not add any additional benefit” to
our understanding of detainee treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gourevitch, who has written a book about the soldiers who took many of the photos at Abu Ghraib, rightly notes that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Good news for boomer celebrities, People magazine wants you on its cover. The New York Times Generation B column, in which Michael Winerip tracks life trends of 78 million middle-aged people,
struck an encouraging note Sunday reporting that relics of the
counterculture still appeal as commercial sex symbols, at least from a
marketing standpoint. Since magazine readers between 45 and 59 make up
28 percent of People's circulation, over the last 11 years, its editors chose five annual "sexiest man alive"
covers from the aging hipster demographic. Famous senior-ish ladies
have also called out from checkout lanes for various newsworthy
achievements, especially losing or gaining an enormous amount of
weight. When Valerie Bertinelli, dropped 50 pounds, she posed in a bikini. Kirstie Alley's extra 83 pounds got her a People
cover wearing a hot pink sundress. Some prominent prehistoric persons,
especially longtime favorites of the 35-year-old celebrity glossy, such
as Farrah Fawcett and Cher, have appeared on People covers multiple times... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Terminator
movie franchise is notable for its creation of one of the earliest
tough female action-hero characters: Sarah Connor, mother of John
Connor. In the later movies, her son becomes the leader of the
resistance to Skynet, the computer system that launched the war against
humans, but in the first two she plays a crucial role. In a sense,
she’s a Mary figure, the mother of the savior, but rather than cast a
vulnerable softie, James Cameron cast Linda Hamilton, tough girl. Who
can forget her biceps, or her famous chin-up scene? So I went to see Terminator: Salvation hoping to find more of the same gender complexity. Instead, this movie, directed by McG is as conventional as can be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In an effort to answer why so many "lady lawyers, doctors, and MBAs" at their class reunions "were still slaving after forty," authors Elizabeth Ford and Daniela Drake (a lady doctor, herself) have explored "why do bimbos fare better than the smart chicks" in their new sociological study from Perseus publishing: Smart Girls Marry Money. Sadly, the pink-covered book is not a comic novel by Anita Loos, but a... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Every day the media attention paid President Obama’s Supreme Court shortlist
gets a little more bogged down in reviving cheesy literary archetypes. Articles
like this one unerringly paint Judge Sonia Sotomayor as the tempestuous
“Fiery Latina” to Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s tender “Den Mother,” and then
contrast both to Diane Wood’s brainy “Bench Balancer.” Why do these three types
seem so eerily familiar?? Hmm. Might it be because... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I’ve been mulling the responses I got, via email and comments,
to my question about
why a recent Gallup poll might show a seven point jump in the percentage of
people who define themselves as prolife (from 44 percent last year to 51 percent
this year). Several theories from readers:
The Election.
I think this past year forced me to think about how I really felt. The election
has something to do with it . . . Obama’s mother also set me on a course of
reflection. As an intelligent, curious single mom who struggled to give her son the best, I could relate.
I really want to be liberal, but in my life the most tangible support as a
poor, single mother came from people who looked, acted, and talked just like
Sarah Palin. Other high-status women didn’t give me chances; they were the first
to complain when I needed time off for a sick child. Academics can write about
women’s issues but the evangelicals made sure I could afford to go to work. In
contrast, my university still doesn’t offer onsite child-care.
The Aging Population.
Perhaps when folks pass the age at which their daughters may be faced with
this decision they can more easily be moved...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On Wednesday, Hanna asked "Is it
normal to be transgender?" On Thursday, Adam Reilly at the
Boston Phoenix asked whether being transgender is newsworthy.
Reilly analyzes the coverage of Aiden Quinn, the 24-year-old subway driver who
crashed a Boston train earlier this month, injuring 50, moments after texting
his girlfriend. And hey, by the way, he used to be a woman. Reilly writes:
Given Quinn's admission that he was, in fact, texting prior to the accident,
there's a general consensus that he's a dumbass. But there's no such agreement
among the Boston media as to whether his switch from identifying as a woman to a
man was...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Linda Hirshman:
In responding to my column, “The Trouble With Jezebel,” Jaclyn Friedman
writes that I "said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they
may be raped if they’re going to insist on being such public sluts."
Friedman says she is paraphrasing. Definition: "to rephrase, summarize,
reword, interpret, translate, restate." Only problem: Something like the words
used to paraphrase must be there in the first place. I have never... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 12, the New York Times ran a photograph featuring a
soldier in his underpants. The photo was eye-catching—I know it caught my
eye—and appeared above the fold on the front page. The photo was taken by David
Guttenfelder for the Associated Press, and its subject was Spc. Zachary
Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas. But what made it a standout was that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here's a really interesting study showing that proximity to women appears to
shape male views on policy. I recently wrote about a study showing the influence of female judges on their male
counterparts in gender discrimination cases. Courtesy of FiveThirtyEight,
here's a bunch of fascinating studies showing that fathers
of daughters tend to support more liberal programs, ranging from... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Palin family's message machine seems to have gone haywire of late. Governor
Sarah has plastered on her serious face, forswearing this month's White House
Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington to concentrate on the recession
in Alaska. She sent her husband to D.C. instead to hang with Greta Van Susteren
but say nothing to the cameras. At one WHCA post-party, former Palin
running-mate-in-law Meghan McCain seemed confused about how to deal with... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Over at Seed, Josh Rosenau describes his organization's long,
failed attempt to get the Texas School Board to adopt evolution-friendly
standards for the state's textbooks. Much as I'd like to, I cannot get
exercised over this issue; my own public, and later parochial, elementary
education was full of so much misinformation (America will run out of landfills
by the year 1990! Marijuana kills! New York City is the capital of New York!)
that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Irish government has released a report
detailing the vicious beatings, rape, and emotional abuse inflicted on tens
of thousands children entrusted to the care of Catholic orphanages for 60 years,
until the 1990s. The Times pulls out this description:
“Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks ... burning, scalding, stabbing,
severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed
positions for lengthy periods ..." (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It turns out Adam Lambert was too weird to win American Idol. Possibly gay, possibly Jewish (here's a video of him singing in Hebrew!), definitely wearing nail polish, Lambert was too much of a challenge, as they say politely, to American notions of masculinity. There was no way... (To read the rest of this post... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week, Hanna, Meghan, and I inaugurated the Double
X weekly podcast, called the "XX Gabfest" in tribute to some of
our Slate offerings, the "Political Gabfest" and
the "Culture
Gabfest." We hashed out our thoughts about Obama's speech on abortion at
Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi's troubles, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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You know, it's funny, Hanna: I listened to Adam Davidson duking it out with Elizabeth Warren on Planet Money (love that podcast) and came away filled with satisfaction. That's partly because I like a good argument. But it was also because Davidson and Warren were having a substantive, heated disagreement about economic policy, and they trusted each other enough to argue both rationally and with real... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Recently on Planet Money, host Adam Davidson got into a tiff with Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor who oversees the Treasury's bank bailout. In the days since, their argument—which lasted all of two minutes—has ballooned into a comment war that taps into lefty passions about the economy, the future of the American family, and latent sexism.
Davidson is disappointed because he was hoping the Congressional Oversight Panel, which Warren chairs, would be something like the 9/11 Commission, a respected nonpartisan advisory board of "senior statesmen" that would sagely guide the administration on how to save the economy. "Senior statesmen" is a phrase he repeats a few times. In the clip, he raises his voice and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Judy Berman writes a great story today in Salon's Broadsheet about transgender activists
fighting to remove "gender identity disorder" as a category in the DSM,
the Bible of psychiatric diseases. The activists argue that they are
making the same case gay activists made in the 1970s, when they fought
successfully to get "homosexuality" removed as a mental illness. Only,
as I wrote in a story earlier this year in the Atlantic, it's not quite so simple.
For adults, the activists' case seems fairly straightforward. Strong
feelings of identification with the opposite gender recur throughout... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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If you're interested in adding another woman-authored blog to your list, I recommend Sarah Scott's Mayday Productions. A former Martha Stewart employee, Scott ended up "tits-up in a ditch," as she put it to me once in a line borrowed from the title of an Annie Proulx short story,
when she was in a cycling race accident in 2005. "I don't remember if
the EMT woke me up, or I just came too on my own, but I remember
looking down at my thighs and thinking... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com)
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When the focus of an economy changes from making stuff to helping
people—that is, manufacturing to services—low-skilled men drop out of
the labor market in droves. A new study of unemployed men in Manchester, England,
suggests that "idealized embodied masculinity" is partly to blame.
Manual labor, claims Sociologist Darren Nixon, imbues working class men
with a sense of pride that helps compensate for the very fact of being
working class. They may not be financially dominant, but they feel
relatively masculine compared to their white, middle class counterparts.
The kind of low-skill jobs that service economies
create—receptionists, sales clerks, retail cashiers—offer no such
compensation. And the men Nixon interviews find the "emotional labor"
required to perform such jobs well incredibly... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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As Slate columnist John Dickerson pointed out late last week,
by saying that the CIA "misleads us all the time," Nancy Pelosi "put
the spotlight on herself and has given weakened Republicans a fight
they can enjoy, engage in, and possibly win." Newt Gingrich took to the
Daily Show last night to promote his new book, 5 Principles for a Successful Life, but before getting into the heart of his shill, he called for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I really, really wanted to love Glee, the new Fox comedy about show choir—that strange, unholy amalgam of drama club, choir, and dance team. After all, I have already made my love of such dorky performance activities rather public. And before the first commercial break, it seemed like Glee was really gunning for my affections in particular, showcasing all of the following... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It is not easy to stop being somebody's mommy, but there comes a time
when your kids are done. The five-year-old gets on that damn carousel
and only two or three horses go up and down before she has a tattoo and
a boyfriend. Mimi Swartz in her Double X Empty Nest column wonders how she will restart her life as her son Sam transitions away to his own adult life. Over the next few months... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The joyful, saccharine, karaoke-inspring Glee, which premiered last night on Fox, got me wondering: What did we do before Tracy Flick? She first appeared, embodied by Reese Witherspoon, in 1999's Election,
a previously unidentified personality type, the driven, ruthless,
terrifyingly ambitious striver who micromanages her inevitable rise to
power in relentlessly cheerful tones. In the decade since Election, Flick has been transformed from a fresh, new character into an archetype, found frequently in... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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I'm not really sure why I keep watching American Idol contestant Adam Lambert's take on the creepy Tears for Fears song, "Mad World," which he sang again last night. He doesn't have any of the authenticity of unadorned British wonder Susan Boyle or even of the other finalist from last night: sweet, baby-faced Kris Allen. They call him "Glambert" because... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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No longer the home of hits like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire,
HBO is looking to replace its sex-and-violence lineup of yesteryear
with ... more sex. Last spring, the network issued a somewhat
mysterious announcement about Hung, a dramatic comedy that debuts this summer... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In seven seasons of 24, I've never given much thought to
its gender politics. For one, I've mostly tuned in for the escapism of
watching Jack Bauer save the world. For another, it's always had enough
strong female characters—villains, heads of CTU, and the
ass-kicking-yet-socially-awkward Chloe—to make up for the damsels in
distress. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Kim Bauer.)
But two sequences at the end of last night's finale jumped out at me
for their portrayal of the women. (Warning, if you have the finale
waiting on your TiVO: Spoilers ahead.) To wrap one storyline, President
Allison Taylor has to decide... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph
from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion
on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without
attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation
sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story
in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a
beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds
of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and
headaches of borrowing, and throughout the story, a basic disbelief
that he, a reporter *who covers economics,* could have been caught up
in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he
wrote about for the Times.
His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing
among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:
Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if
they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing
here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by
rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.
Missing from this entire kerfuffle is one crucial point. Women aren't... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan McCain was on The Colbert Report last night and despite some giggles and a hideous, huge, Bedazzled ring,
she acquitted herself admirably. When is someone going to give this
self-identified "24-year-old, pro-sex woman" and Republican her own
television show? Young and Republican In America, hosted by Meghan McCain, running on one of the cable news networks twice a week? I'd watch.
Colbert tries his best to throw his guests off their talking points, but McCain could recite hers in a coma. She was not to be derailed. While defending her core position... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My husband has been in love with Bruce Springsteen longer than he's
been in love with me. Bruce's lyrics were the soundtrack for our
courtship (I came for you, for you, I came for you), our long-overdue wedding (So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore), the many years of our marriage (This life, this life and then the next, with you I have been blessed), and his own work (sick of sitting round here trying to write this book).
He rarely misses a Springsteen concert and can recite tracks, covers,
and lyrics for any occasion. It was no surprise to me then that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:
The Preakness Stakes is
not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple
Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a
certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women
as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut,
brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the
Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels
approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat,
the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout
demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Agreed, Dahlia, that Justice Ginsburg is carefully applying the law as she sees it in her dissent in AT&T v. Hulteen. Her problem is a bad old ruling that haunts this case and that all but one of her male colleagues refused to banish. In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert
in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy
is not discrimination based on sex, because some women (the nonpregnant
ones) won't be discriminated against. By ignoring how... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In his review of the new Warren Buffet biography, Michael Lewis
has a great description of how writer Alice Schroeder won over the
billionaire by turning his need to be mothered by lovely brainiacs
against him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Supreme Court ruled, 7-2 yesterday in AT&T v. Hulteen,
that women denied credits toward their pension for their pregnancies in
the 1960s and '70s—before it became illegal—were not the victims of
gender discrimination. The question came down to whether AT&T could
rely on past discriminatory practices—before 1978 pregnant women were
denied disability leave granted to men—to calculate pensions. Writing
for the majority, David Souter found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote
about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his
campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues.
I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m
right with the president on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The striking jump in the new Gallup poll of people defining themselves
as pro-life—7 percentage points in one year, for a total of 51
percent—doesn't explain itself. You may be right, Hanna, that scientific advances or a truly deep shift in attitude aren't the rationale,
given that the breakdown didn't change when Gallup pinned people down
further by asking them if they think abortion should always, sometimes,
or never be legal. But the words "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have long
been... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Did anyone catch Anna Wintour's interview with Morley Safer on last night? (Side note: I like the way this YouTube teaser's headline makes it sound like Anna Wintour is, in fact, the Secretary of Defense. This seems like a sensible foreign policy move to me.) Despite the frisson of excitement that came with actually seeing and
hearing Wintour speak—she lives! she lives!—the interview was mostly a
puff piece. However, there was one moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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More and more frequently, movie trailers
are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become
increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and
increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot,
they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and
emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you
hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.
David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Caryn James:
With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama
embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she
repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of
independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those
forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.
These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the
surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse.
She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise
to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope
that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd
say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.
How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In case you haven't heard, magazines are dying right and left. Who
knows which one will be next? One day, that may be the sound of Anna
Wintour's head rolling across the floor. Not unlike the adult movie
industry, which thought it was so ahead of the curve,
technologically-speaking, that it neglected to jump on the Internet
bandwagon until its product had gotten away from them and it was far,
far too late, magazines and newspapers have failed to exploit the Web
to their advantage. Now, they're suffering for it.
No one will ever say so of Nick Knight, the British fashion photographer who created SHOWStudio.com, a website dedicated to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Does the idea of a candy bar with pink girlie wrapping, a sexualized
name, and a marketing promo urging women to "pleasure yourself" by
eating said candy bar seem annoying as hell to anyone else?
When I heard this piece on NPR yesterday about the new Fling candy bar,
also known as a chocolate finger, I thought it was a joke. When I
realized it was a real news story, it made me so mad that the only
finger I thought about was the middle finger I'd like to give to the person who came up with the idea. I so hope... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Just when you thought the right was dead or dormant, and it was safe
to say the word "abortion" on the campus of a Catholic university,
reality hit back hard. In his commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame
yesterday, President Obama said all the right things (clips of the
speech are below). He acknowledged "admirable" convictions on all
sides. He said abortion had heavy moral and spiritual consequences. He
did not stop at the old tepid "safe, legal, and rare" but took it one
step further, saying he wanted to work to reduce unintended
pregnancies, and make adoption easier. Still, a woman outside called
him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the spirit of Meghan's stated desire that the XX Factor blog remain a site of amicable cacophony, I'm feeling the need to stand up for my girl Dooce.
Well, the blogger who goes by that name, Heather Armstrong, is "my
girl" only in the sense that, like millions of her readers, I've been
following her life online for more than five years now on an almost
daily basis. But after reading Susannah Breslin's recent takedown of the "bad mommy" phenomenon, Ann Hulbert's review of a spate of recent confessional parenting memoirs, and a terrific discussion of those same books between our beloved Double X editors and the redoubtable Stephen Metcalf, it strikes me that something obvious is going unsaid... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Men, skip this post. A new study revives a very old method of birth control, and it's not happy news for you. Withdrawal, says the Guttmacher Institute, is not a bad way to go... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Our first week at Double X is drawing to a close. And we’ve heard all sorts of responses. We’re not feminist enough. We’re too feminist. We say we’re not feminist but then we talk a lot about feminism. We (and Slate) are ghettoizing women. First, I want to second my co-editors Hanna and Emily in what they wrote yesterday and today about why we wanted to create Double X and its relationship to Slate. Second, I want to take this moment to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I know that Sonia Sotomayor is a crazy, overemotional, hysterical, aggressive bitch because some anonymous lawyers told me so. On the other hand, she sounds quite rational in this 2002 speech on whether the gender or race of a judge should affect judicial decisions. The New York Times has... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I had a sense of déjà vu watching the Grey's Anatomy denouement
of the Katherine Heigl character Izzie's season-long cancer diagnosis,
juxtaposed with the surprise hit-by-a-bus plot twist killing off T.R.
Knight's George O'Malley in the last scene. Until I read Willa Paskin's
post, I wrote the feeling off to general season finale redundancy.
After all, just this week... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Science reporter Joshua Wolf Shenk describes his visit to the famous Grant Study archives (named for the dime store magnate who originally funded the experiment) in the new issue of the Atlantic and includes a video interview of George Vaillant,
the longitudinal assessment project's director for the last 42 years.
Vaillant's perspective on the 268 "well-adjusted" sophomore male
participants' much-examined lives boils down to.... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Like Hanna, I accept Ann Friedman's welcome challenge. Yes, please! We want to influence the national conversation,
and send our writers and editors out to go forth and prosper in plenty
of other pastures. We're not interested in roping ourselves off into a
pink ghetto. I understand the fear that other people will do the roping
off for us. When we first started talking about the idea of a separate
site early last summer, several of the veteran women of Slate
said, hey, we've spent years getting strong women's voices into the
magazine. We've succeeded. Now you're taking us out and putting us
somewhere else? The answer we all settled on, in the end, was... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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There's a sort of covenant, an unspoken contract, entered into when a
person commits to a television series. Something like, "I, the viewer,
agree to watch this program, to care about these characters, to invest
in this world week after week, because you, the TV creator, agree to
make it fun." Last night, Grey's Anatomy
creator Shonda Rhimes broke this "we watch, she entertains" contract by
engaging in reckless character assassination—by which I mean... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Last night's season finale of 30 Rock wasn't the best episode
of the season—the A and B plots didn't hang together especially
well—but the episode provided some of the best lines of the year. The
Liz Lemon plot revolved around... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Sara, I agree with your defense—in response to Katie Roiphe's piece about women hiding behind their children on Facebook—of a woman's right to put her kids first. I'm 25 and enjoying my selfish years now, because, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out
in her piece about the seasons of a woman's life, I fully expect them
to end when I have kids. And I think that's natural. Just as natural,
in fact, for fathers as it is for moms.
My mother once relayed to my sister and me a hypothetical question... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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As a woman who has declined to put her picture on Facebook—my profile
photo is a drawing of me by my daughter—I respectfully disagree with Katie Roiphe's assumption
that this somehow represents some reprehensible self-effacement on my
part as a working woman. I'm admittedly a little late to social
networking, and not exactly a devotee. A friend of mine jokes that my
status line should read... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Today in the American Prospect, Ann Friedman asks a question we've heard from many feminists since we launched Double X
on Tuesday: Why do we need a women's web site? Did we kill the "ladies"
page in the newspaper only to recreate it online? This is an excellent
question, and one we wrestled with ourselves... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, you posted yesterday on those Gallup numbers
suggesting that Americans are less worked-up over the gender of the
next Supreme Court justice than the media has been led to believe. I
wonder whether Obama read the same polls, because his very short
shortlist was evidently expanded yesterday... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I remember being taught in art history that the Venus of Willendorf,
the Paleolithic sculputure of a gloriously zaftig female, was probably carved by
a man as a shamanistic fertility figure. Now the New York Times has an
article
about a stunning discovery of one of the oldest figurative sculptures ever
found, another “Venus,” this one dating from 35,000 years ago. She has pendulous
breasts, a capacious stomach, and... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Vanessa, I share your concern that women have limited workplace stereotypes
from which to choose: We’re either the nurturing pushover or the
demanding bitch. We’re not the only group, though, struggling with how
to present ourselves in the workplace. A study out last week found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ever wonder where S&M bondage gear—whips, straps, masks, assless pants—is made? No? Well, you should have. The Times has a fascinating video piece about a company in Karachi, Pakistan that manufactures fetish wear and exports it to the West. (None of it looks quite as fanciful as the colorful, strange lingerie coming out of Syria). "Most of our customers are from... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Aung San Suu Kyi's home sits beside Inya Lake, beyond a guarded
checkpoint where an armed military officer screens cars, essentially,
for the presence of white people. Burmese are allowed to drive on past
the house where Suu Kyi has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house
arrest. Caucasions are stopped and questioned. It's a line, literally
and figuratively, most expats would not even think of trying to cross.
But as with most of Myanmar's control apparatus, enforcement relies on
fear. A determined person could just swim across the lake and show up,
dripping wet, at her back door, which is exactly... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Vanessa, I agree that we don't gain much by adding the office bitch stereotype to the working woman's repertoire. And like you and lawyer-mom, one of our first commenters, who writes astutely
about her bullying female boss, I also have a story of an older and
more experienced woman who put me down rather than pulled me up. I
wonder, though... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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For most of us, sitting down with our Sunday New York Times is a relaxing experience. But for an unlucky few, it can suddenly turn into a choke-on-my-scone nightmare.
Flipping idly through Sunday Styles, the hapless reader comes to the famous "Modern Love" column, soon to be turned into a TV series. There she reads about "Nick," whose girlfriend broke up with him using a PowerPoint, or Husband X, whose wife no longer wants to sleep with him, or "Froky," the ex-girlfriend who... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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It's been a little over three months since Rihanna missed the Grammys after being allegedly assaulted by her boyfriend Chris Brown. As she more or less announced last week, when she appeared at the Costume Institute Gala in a feisty tux, she's back—and now she has the single to prove it. "Silly Boy," her new song, is a... (To read the rest of this post, please visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
I get what you say,
Meghan, about the benefits of broadening the range of publicly-noted
female roles beyond those old standbys, “nurturer” and “supporter.” But
I can’t share your pleasure in the finding that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at doublex.com!)
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This week, is there a tabloid that doesn't feature Jon and Kate Gosselin of TLC's mega-spawn reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" fame? Today, Kate vomited her guts to People, revealing that her marriage to the man with whom she fathered a pair of twins and a set of sextuplets may be deeply...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Forget your budding little artists’ portraits of Obama, and check out Michelangelo’s “Torment of St. Anthony.” There’s a fascinating—and somewhat frustrating—article in the New York Times today
about the debate over whether he did, as a 12- or 13-year-old, in fact
paint the portrait, based on an engraving. The controversy has been
raging for 400 years or so, so I was expecting some decisive new
evidence... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Latoya Peterson:
You know, screeds like Linda Hirshman's in Double X are why I waffle so much about identifying with the feminist label.
It isn't even that Linda Hirshman is using every ounce of her online persona to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The Real Housewives of New Jersey premiered last night on Bravo and it was just as gaudy, Mystic-tanned, and big "bubbied" as any trash-television lover could have hoped. The series, part of a growing Housewives
franchise that also includes New York, Atlanta, and the original Orange
County branches, depicts "real-life versions of Carmela Soprano, loud,
nasal, nouveau-riche wives who raise spoiled children and spend their
husbands’ money in vast marble and onyx starter palaces in Franklin
Lakes, N.J.," according to Alessandra Stanley at the New York Times.
Though Slate television critic Troy Patterson finds RHNJ
the most "synthetic" of the franchise because "the drama queening in
these parts is much too blatantly contrived," Stanley thinks that this
is... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Though I was not qualified to be a secretary when I was 25 (nor am I
now, 35 years later, based on the super organized executive assistants
I've run into since then), I would certainly have been affronted to be
mistaken for one as Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote she was when she shared an elevator with a veteran newswoman at the New York Times three years ago. The younger woman was quitting a great job, with nothing lined up, to move to Boston with her fiancé... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A few days late to this one, but author Jennifer Finney Boylan had a great essay in Monday's New York Times about how complex the gay marriage issue becomes one when of the partners is transgender. Because different states have different regulations as to who "counts" as male or female... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at doublex.com!)
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"The World of Womenomics has arrived," announce Claire Shipman and Katy Kay in a breathless piece over at the Huffington Post.
Shipman and Kay insist that as the recession tips the gender
composition of the workforce in favor of women, companies will be
forced to accommodate womanly demands. What follows is some extremely
promiscuous... (To read the rest of this post, please visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Over at The Root, Lisa Crooms has penned something of a takedown of the recent, very Lysistratan Kenyan sex strike, wherein women, organized by the Nairobi-based Women’s Development Organization, went on an, ahem, handshake-only basis for one week. Their aim, as yet unresolved, was to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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There’s an interesting Gallup poll out today
about whether Americans feel the next Supreme Court nominee should be a
woman. The media has reported on expectations that Obama will nominate
a woman to fill Souter’s seat; but according to Gallup, 64 percent of
Americans “say it doesn't matter to them whether Obama appoints a
woman”... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Forgive me for injecting this note of sadness, but I'm mourning the
death today of my friend Eden Ross Lipson. Eden was for a long while
the children's book editor of the New York Times. I knew her after she retired. She e-mailed me one day a few years ago about a piece I wrote on reading books to boys that are usually given to girls, like Little House in the Big Woods.
I'd just started writing about kids and motherhood, and I felt the
opposite of confident about whether I had much to say worth hearing.
Eden's brisk e-mail made smarter points than mine. But she didn't point
that out. She offered suggestions for the next piece, the best kind of
deft encouragement. From then on, she wrote when she wanted to tell me
I'd gotten a children's book right, or when I'd gotten it wrong. She
suggested topics. She became my literary fairy godmother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
The announcement that Gen. David McKiernan is being removed from command of NATO forces in Afghanistan—apparently the first firing of a U.S. commander in a theater of war since Korea—is
a very big deal. But what does it actually mean? One thing it means is
that the dust has yet to settle in the transition to a new U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan, which suggests that any fruits of that
strategy remain distant. Laid out in a white paper this spring,
the new strategy stems from a wholesale rethinking of our approach that
has been underway at least since Gen. David Petraeus took the helm at
CentCom last fall. It includes, but isn’t limited to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most
important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's
what you'd think, judging by today's launch of DoubleX.com. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?
At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I was perversely pleased to read this story in the New York Times
about women bullying other women at work. A new study by the Workplace
Bullying Institute—who knew such a thing existed!—reveals that men
aren't the only elbow-throwers in the workplace... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, you masterfully parse Elizabeth Edwards' public persona, but you don't really touch on the other people who might be affected by her ill-fated tale. No, I'm not talking about John. I'm talking about her children: Catharine, Emma, and Jack. When Edwards was on the Today show earlier this week, she said she wrote the revealing Resilience explicitly for her children. This morning, Tina Brown and Gloria Allred argued in front of Today's Meredith Vieira about whether or not Elizabeth's choice to speak out about her husband's affair was a good one.
Gloria was staunchly pro-Edwards. She said that Elizabeth was revealing herself "with dignity," as she had done everything else in her life. Tina was anti-Edwards. She upheld Hillary Clinton as the model of how to weather a cheating husband in public, because she barely acknowledged Bill's wandering eye. Tina described the situation as "squalid" and added "I regret that [Elizabeth] used her book to drag everyone into this."
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Are you with Tina, thinking Elizabeth's young children must be damaged by their mother's public discussion of their father's philandering? Or do you side with Gloria, who believes that Elizabeth is being a good role model for her offspring by showing them that life is "complicated"?
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In a column
today on the famous Harvard Study of Adult
Development, which has followed the paths of a group of graduates from
college to old age, David Brooks quotes lead researcher George Vaillant's
conclusion about what matters in life: “Happiness is love. Full Stop." It's a
somewhat odd conclusion since... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Today's New York Times hosts a bloggingheads debate on
breast-feeding between me and Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a researcher from from
the University of Rochester and a major breast-feeding advocate. The
occasion was my recent Atlantic story taking issue with the science behind some breast-feeding research. When bloggingheads found my opponent I swallowed hard... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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It's May, the month of nice weather, pretty flowers, weddings,
declarations of love, pregnancies, hallucinations, fatalities,
cliffhangers and shocking twists. It's the month of TV finales, wherein
shows wrap up the season that came before, while providing incentives
to watch the season that comes next, manipulating you into thinking
"Finally!" and then "Really?!" in quick succession. House did exactly that last night... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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If you're reading this you already know that Double X, the new magazine from Slate Group, about "what women really think" launched today. Double X inherits a legacy of women's content that spanned decades of comfort food factories such as Ladies' Home Journal ("Can this marriage be saved?"), McCall's, and Redbook, then spawned junior versions Seventeen, Glamour, and Mademoiselle (featuring David Newman and Robert Benton's advice column, "Man Talk"), before blossoming... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Calling all XX Factor readers: Today is the launch of Double X, the new women's site that this blog has given birth to. Come take a look! The blog will continue to live in Slate, so you can still access it the same way you always have. The one change is that to read posts and conversations in their entirety, you'll click over to the new site. We also hope of course that you'll find much more to interest you there. To kick things off today, we have:
A thought-provoking piece by a mom who is giving pot to her son. He is 9, and he has autism and a medical marijuana license.
Celebs including Amanda Peet, Margaret Cho, and Sandra Day O'Connor on who they wanted to be when they were little girls.
Hanna on the passive aggression of Elizabeth Edwards.
What's the Problem Now? A discussion about the ongoing dilemmas of feminism. Includes Linda Hirshman taking down Jezebel.
To make Double X succeed, we need you. Much of the site's vibrancy will depend on your comments about blog posts,
articles, and everything else. The comments on Double X will be
directly beneath the blog posts and the stories. And the homepage will regularly
showcase excellent quotes from commenters. Our goal is to generate dynamic
conversation. That's what has made XX Factor thrive, and now we hope your
feedback on Double X will add depth and new view points to the discussion. We're
especially eager to seed the site in its first weeks with smart, thoughtful
comments. And so we are turning to you for your help. If you post early and
well, you'll set the tone for the site right from the start.
We'd also love your suggestions about how to make your reading
and commenting experience a good one. Post a comment or send mail to
doublexletters@slate.com. We already consider you part of the
Double X community, and to that end
we're going to start having cocktail meetups and other fun events for our core
commenters in New York and D.C. Again, any suggestions for meeting places or
event ideas are welcome!
Thank you,
Emily, Hanna, and Meghan
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Like every other former sci-fi geek in NYC, I (sorry) trekked out to see the Star Trek
movie on Friday night. My assessment? J. J. Abrams has turned out a
well-made B movie: The film moves along at a crisp pace, hits all the
key retro-nostalgia moments, and is designed to be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Washington Post is calling attention to the friendship
between U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and Georgia Supreme
Court Justice Leah Ward Sears, who is on some short lists for the open
Supreme Court seat. It's an odd-couple alliance that seems to cast
doubt on Sears by bringing up old bitterness over Thomas' appointment.
As the Post piece puts it, "The old lions of the civil rights
movement in Georgia and elsewhere have never accepted Thomas as heir to
the late Justice Thurgood Marshall's seat and legacy." But it seems to
me that Sears' friendship with Thomas would be an asset on the court... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, www.DoubleX.com!)
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Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake, the duo responsible for Saturday Night Live's viral video "Dick in A Box," were at it again this weekend, pasting on absurd facial hair and recording "Motherlover," a spoof song in honor of Mother's Day about two friends who really want to love each other's mothers (played, in the video, by Susan Sarandon and Patricia Clarkson). Like really, really. (To see the video and read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan, I so feel your pain about being motherless on Mother's Day. I lost my mother last October and have felt unmoored ever since. Losing my mother was like losing my sense of place in the world; the sense that I belonged to this one person in way that I could never belong to anyone else.
Still, instead of trying to avoid everything Mother's Day-related, I planned to embrace the day and comfort myself with good memories of good times with my mother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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Bonnie, Jess, I confess I haven't been able to read Jess's piece about talking to her mom yet; I started to, and it brought tears to my eyes. Like Jess, I used to talk to my mom all the time, about matters large and small. (Should I refrigerate peanut butter? Should I take that job? Who are you voting for?) But my mother passed away on Christmas Day of 2008. And so I can't talk to her. I didn't think that Mother's Day was going to hit home at all, because my mother, a wry pragmatist, considered it a fake holiday... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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To all you young men out there swearing to mom this Sunday that when you grow up, you'll be lucky to find a woman just like her, and to all you moms out there who believe what your sons are telling you, we are about to burst your bubble. Christine Whelan, a professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, has been analyzing results of a survey taken steadily by college students over the last seven decades asking what they want in a mate... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, www.DoubleX.com!)
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On this Mother's
Day weekend, here's a shout out to Jessica
Grose's mother who as Jess writes, "didn't want to get in the way" of her
college age son's and daughter's independence so she would never call them,
though they could call her whenever they wanted. It takes a lot of self-discipline... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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While Bristol Palin was enjoying another prime time moment making her ambassadorial debut as the Candie's Foundation's abstinence spokesperson—Meghan, you're right, what dizzy come-hither-hypocrisy is at work there!—you probably missed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Moreon Rosen attacking Sotomayor: It's not just women judges who get blasted for being tough. It's also tough male judges—including judges whose intellectual and personal qualificationsfor the Supreme Court it's hard to imagine anyone questioning. As a commenterat the New Republic pointsout, it's worth comparing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Bristol Palin is partnering with the Candie's Foundation, a subset of the Candie's company, to promote "abstinence" as a way to "raise awareness" and "combat teen pregnancy." Never mind that one form of awareness, of course, is the awareness that pregnancy and STD rates often drop when teenagers are educated about birth control. Or that abstinence-only education doesn't seem... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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The Root has a set
of takes on motherhood today (and yesterday, and tomorrow). We’ve allowed four women in their
20s, 30s, 40s and 50s riff on just how significant is it is that someone,
somewhere, grinned and bore it—literally—pushing a football-sized version of
themselves out into the world.
They’re all great pieces. I notice that in the younger ages,
there is downward pressure... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In his response to the justified hoopla over his attack on
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, Jeff Rosen writes:
I was satisfied that my sources's concerns were widely
shared when I read Sotomayor's entry in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary,
which includes the rating of judges based on the collective opinions of the
lawyers who work with them. Usually lawyers provide fairly positive comments.
That's what makes the discussion of Sotomayor's temperament so striking.
Rosen quotes a bunch of negative comments from
attorneys-"overly aggressive," "abuses lawyers"—followed by a brief
acknowledgment of... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What struck me most, Kerry, about Elizabeth Edwards interview with Oprah was her repeated insistence John's possible child with Rielle Hunter is irrelevant. She told Oprah that she doesn't know if the baby is John's (She also said John didn't know if the baby was John's, which reminds me of Emily's post wondering why, if Elizabeth Edwards has such an infallible bullshit detector, she's married to this dissembler in the first place) and that it doesn't matter. Here's a quote of her talking about the child, always an "it", at length:
"It doesn't make any difference to me [if Hunter's son is John's]. If I have to analyze why that should make a difference to me [it would only be because] I care about something completely extraneous to my life. That is not my life. And if we were to discover it was, that would be part of John's life, but it is not part of mine. And I cant see any upside to making it part of my life. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything. It's not going to change my life in any way. I could try to make it change my life and could keep myself up about if I thought he was trying to start a family with this woman. That would be one thing, but I do I not think that's true. I do not by any stretch of the imagination think that's true. And therefore, it doesn't have any effect on me. Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable about something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter."
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And her children's possible half sibling is something that doesn't matter? And can something, a something that's really a son, be "part" of John's life without being a part of hers? Does saying something won't change anything over and over make it true?
I found this exchange even more blinkered in the context of the entire interview, during which Edwards seemed, as she usually does, remarkably open, likeable, thoughtful, and authentic—as Hanna pointed out, her key trait. (In an age of disappearing privacy, it's worth remembering that we're not all equally equipped to kill our private lives. Some people, Edwards and Oprah among them, are better able to totally explode the distinction between their public and private lives by virtue of being more natural, comfortable, and open at television and publicity than the rest of us).
But on this subject, her husband's probable kid, Edwards seems willfully unthoughtful, as if she has artificially cordoned off one of the more painful aspects of her husband's philandering and decided that her ability not to think or feel about it means it doesn't warrant thoughts of feelings. I wonder if there will be another book that comes after Resilience, like Acceptance (or maybe Divorce).
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Thanks for all of the amazing Obama drawings you've been
submitting for our Drawing
Obama series. We're still on the prowl for more, so if you haven't yet, go
scour the fridges and playrooms of homes with kids and send us whatever wonderful Obama portraits you
turn up.
We now have the grisly counterpart to our princess-ified
Obama: Monster Obama. Five-year-old Wyatt "makes everything he draws into a
monster," writes his mother, Jayne Hayden. "To Wyatt, monsters can be good or
bad—the thing that he seems to like about them is that they're powerful. So
this is a portrait of power." For those who can't read Wyatt speak, Jayne
provides this translation of the text on the drawing: "monst/ r brocobom/ u."
Are those the hands of Wyatt's monsters reaching for the jack-o-lantern
Obama pictured below? Exposed light bulbs? Prickly boom mics? Only the artist,
7-year-old Nathan, knows for sure. This one was submitted by his mom, Janice
Malloy.
And this Fairey-inspired piece comes to us from Eric
Gollihar, whose 6-year-old daughter, Anna, works in dry-erase marker on
whiteboard.
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In her much-discussed Tuesday column on Elizabeth Edwards, Maureen Dowd wrote:
Elizabeth said when they married, the only gift she asked John for was to be faithful.
Yesterday, while interviewing Edwards in her home, Oprah teed up the same anecdote. "You asked your husband for just one gift when you got married; what was that?" she asked. "I wanted him to be faithful to me," Edwards replied.
I found this strange in Dowd's column and stranger during the interview. Maybe I'm naive, but... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!"
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Hanna, you brought up the Gosselin affair. According to every tabloid in town, Jon Gosselin, costar of Jon & Kate Plus 8, has been cheating on his wife, Kate. The rumors, accusations, and carefully-worded statements are flying fast and furious. Today, Kate defended her husband on the Today Show, where Meredith Vieira read a written denial by a no-show Jon, and now one of the supposed mistress's exes has launched a website featuring stills from a sex tape that he claims to have made of himself with the Hester Prynne of the moment.
It's all sort of ugly—the mudslinging, the sleazy screencaps, the angry recriminations. Kate: "Jon's poor judgment and irresponsible behavior has also without a
doubt caused some added tension and stress between the two of us." I'll bet. As if twins and sextuplets weren't enough. Now, this.
But the fact of the matter is that anyone who has spent any time watching the show knows its subplot is their marriage, and the majority of that relationship seems to consist of Kate treating her husband like something that got stuck on the bottom of her shoe, the property of which she cannot quite identify, eliciting a nonstop look of thinly-veiled disgust and disappointment. In fact, it's hard to think of moments in which this housewife is not humiliating, degrading, and emasculating her husband. On camera, no less. In one episode, she actually chastised him for breathing too loudly. There she is in the supermarket ripping him a new one for being a lousy spouse. There she is at the pumpkin patch shouting at him for being a substandard father. There she is telling him to stop mumbling like a fool. There she is explaining to the camera that she doesn't care what anyone else thinks.
As of late, much as been made of "naughty mommies." Why, they've even got their own twitter feed! (Sample question: "What is the Worst Thing You Have Ever Told Your Child ..." Sample answer: "I told my six year old that if he picked his nose one more time his brains would fall out, shame that he then immediately had a nose bleed, much panic in my house then.") It's all so cool. Bad mommies rule! That their fearless leader Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, earns a purported $40,000 a month in the role of uber-naughty mommy only inspires the rest to be the baddest mommy in the blogosphere.
But what of their husbands? Those men who are regularly depicted by the same bad mommies as fools, as incompetents, as co-failing parents? Well, I guess Jon Gosselin has answered that question. When bad mommies, bolstered by their online sisters, become bad wives, it sucks, doesn't it?
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We live in an environment where self-branding is a lifestyle choice and self-promotion is confused with achievement. Breaking through the 4th wall (when reality contestants talk to the camera) is not the same as actual contact between player and watcher, however, and does not substitute for honesty or intimacy. When the Octomom had her litter in January, Jess and Noreen wrote about the Gosselin and the Duggar families who became television commodities by inviting reality producers from the Discovery Channel into their reproduction-driven lives. Now I learn from Hanna's post that one reality celebrity husband, Jon Gosselin, has a secret life with a secret friend. I have to say, I can't really blame the guy. Maybe he just wanted some privacy?
I sometimes wonder about living our private life in public. Since my husband, my daughter, and I are each involved in different aspects of the media, at times when our home life is particularly surreal, I can imagine us inspiring a sitcom. But my family's imaginary TV series would be more like a small-cast version of the ABC series of 30 years ago, Eight is Enough. In that now-quaint series, the family of newspaper columnist and former CIA agent Tom Braden was fictionalized, their identity was disguised and the eight actual Braden children kept their relative obscurity.
Like Hanna, I cringe at the level of self-exposure necessary to tear down the 4th wall in the manner of that "family of renovators" featured in the New York Times article "Branding the Family." Bravo, the cable network that brings us Real Housewives of New York City and other urban locations, bets the exploited exploits of the Novogratzes, another multi-offspring family, will be riveting to audiences because, as the series executive producer told the Times, "audiences are craving authenticity." I doubt they'll get it watching Bravo. Real reality happens without cameras, inside the four walls of our own lives, fueled by truly unscripted, unedited, conversations. It is sometimes uncomfortable and usually, in our case at least, decidedly unphotogenic. Though, it may be exciting to imagine a life in front of an audience, genuine people tempted by reality-shattering reality cameras should follow the advice of fray poster ScrewJack2008, and run for their lives.
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Dahlia, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would surely agree with you that it's long past time to rub out the equation that a woman justice equals a second-rate one. To make the case for why she needs a female colleague (or colleagues), she took the unusual step of talking about a case that's just been argued and not yet decided—the one involving the strip search of 13-year-old Savanna Redding. You wrote vividly about Ginsburg's apparent distress at the clueless reactions of some of the men on the court at oral argument. This week Ginsburg said as much to Joan Biskupic of USA Today. "They have never been a 13-year-old girl," the justice said. "It's a
very sensitive age for a girl. I didn't think that my colleagues, some
of them, quite understood."
Ginsburg also remembered being ignored by male lawyers at meetings in the 1960s and 1970s, only to have a man present repeat her point, and get a response. And incredibly, she feels the same way even now: "It can happen even in the conferences in the
court. When I will say something—and I don't think I'm a confused
speaker—and it isn't until somebody else says it that everyone will
focus on the point." Biskupic writes: "It was a revealing observation from a justice who generally praises her male colleagues, some of whom are close friends." No kidding.
Ginsburg also directly addressed the question of what women bring to the bench, as women:
"You know the line that Sandra [Day O'Connor] and I keep
repeating … that 'at the end of the day, a wise old man and a wise old
woman reach the same judgment'? But there are perceptions that we have
because we are women. It's a subtle influence. We can be sensitive to
things that are said in draft opinions that (male justices) are not
aware can be offensive."
The differences between male and female
justices, she said, are "seldom in the outcome." But then, she added,
"it is sometimes in the outcome."
PS: Ann Althouse (U. Wisconsin law prof, blogger extraordinaire) discuss diversity on the court.
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Dayo, I think Richard Just's argument needs one more shade of subtlety. Conservatives do not generally say they are not anti-gay. They say some version of what Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who has just replaced Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter as the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee said: "I don't think a person who acknowledges that they have gay tendencies is disqualified per se for the job."
The key phrase of this quote is "gay tendencies." Conservatives, especially religious conservatives, are OK with someone who has "gay tendencies." They do however have a problem with someone who acts on those gay tendencies. This is the new "enlightened" conservative stance, because it acknowledges that people are born gay, but still preserves the belief that "homosexual acts" are a sin. The Catholic Church takes a similar line, and Andrew Sullivan has written often and passionately about what's wrong with it.
I too look forward to a debate over a gay nominee, but not necessarily an openly gay one. The most interesting debate will happen over one of these is she or isn't she candidates Dahlia and I have discussed. Then the right will be in a serious bind. Technically, such a person will be living by the conservative rules, feeling one way but failing to act on it. But conservatives will surely be uncomfortable with such a person. So they will have to contort themselves to find new creative euphamisms to express their discomfort.
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Richard Just has a
knockout post over at the New Republic
adding another wrinkle to the discussions that have surrounded the
naming of a Supreme Court justice to replace the retiring David Souter. If the
president nominated an openly gay jurist, it’s easy to assume a confirmation
firestorm of Roe v. Wade proportions,
led by Bible-clutching protesters and the intolerant Senator Jeff Sessions on the Senate judiciary committee.
But Just wonders whether it’s not only not damaging, but in fact beneficial to have an openly gay court nominee. It would, he reasons, naturally
separate the wheat from the, um, haters:
[N]ominating
a lesbian to the court would put conservatives in a politically awkward
position. As the gay rights battle has come to center more and more on the
specific question of marriage, conservatives have frequently insisted that they
are not anti-gay, just opposed to gays getting married. Conservatives are
attached to this distinction because they know that, without it, they end up
looking like bigots. But if they decide to make an issue of a Supreme Court
nominee's sexual orientation, they would effectively be conceding that this
distinction was a lie. …
Given that
most Americans are no longer comfortable with transparent homophobia (while
conservatives still have the majority on same-sex marriage, liberals enjoy
majorities on various other gay-rights questions, such as workplace
discrimination), it would be a risky move for conservatives to toss aside their
cherished distinction between anti-gay sentiment and anti-gay-marriage
sentiment. So maybe they would think twice about raising sexual orientation
during a confirmation battle. And if they decided to do it anyway, it could
become one of those defining moments where the American political center gets a
glimpse at the fundamental ugliness undergirding a particular crusade--and
turns decisively in the other direction.
Ooh, snap. It’s
not too often that bigots get a real, live hoisting on their own petard—but
this court opening could be just such an opportunity. I really believe
that a public political fight around whether conservatives are anti-gay or anti-gay
marriage is one that the religious right would lose, definitively—and might do
more to advance the cause of gay rights than the rolling boil of states that are
legalizing such marriages. Maybe I've been watching too much of the NBA finals, but I would call this the political equivalent of a flying dunk in Tony Perkins' face. Who doesn't want to see that?
Of course, this all depends on Barack Obama, who has been
fairly cowardly about gay rights, both on the trail and in office. (And, judging
from those “leaders” like DC Councilman Marion Barry, who now claims spokesmanship
for blacks on gay issues, the leadership vacuum is hurting the cause of justice.) Sure, there is a risk of flameout with any nomination, but if Obama really wanted to leapfrog past the current unsatisfying, incremental approach to gay rights, this is a great idea.
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Emily, you are so right that Jeff Rosen’s unsupported whispers about Judge Sotomayor have become the conventional media wisdom in three short days. But more troubling still, he seems to have been arguing that female jurists are by definition “mediocre” for more than a decade! Here’s a piece he did for the New York Times in 1995, arguing that President Clinton’s “single-minded pursuit of diversity, combined with an eagerness to avoid controversy, has kept him from appointing the best available legal minds to the courts.” He then names the many, many white men passed over for federal judgeships and contends that liberal judges lack the intellectual firepower to challenge brilliant conservative jurists because “nearly 60 percent of the Clinton appointments have been minority members and women.” (Read: mediocre.) His single data point to illustrate that mediocrity: Instead of appointing a serious intellectual heavyweight to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (a/k/a “The scholars Court”), Clinton tapped “Diane P. Wood, a little-known professor of antitrust law at the University of Chicago, who is currently an assistant to Deputy Attorney General Anne Bingaman.”
That same mediocre Diane Wood is not only on every shortlist for the Supreme Court today. She’s also widely regarded as one of the finest judges on the bench, to whom other brilliant judges turn for reviews of draft opinions. I don’t begrudge Rosen or other white men who feel they are always the bridesmaid. But the suggestion that a diverse bench must inevitably be a second-rate bench is really quite shocking, even 15 years later.
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Compared to what's bubbling up in the culture this morning, Elizabeth Edwards seems positively demure. This morning on the Today Show, Kate Gosselin, star of the one family reality circus, Jon and Kate Plus Eight, went on to flog her new book, Eight Little Faces, but also to talk about whether or not her husband, who was seen walking out of a bar with another woman, is having an affair. (The woman's brother said they've been seeing each other for three years; Jon made a very unconvincing denial on the show.) Kate says she really wants to "weather the storm" and "just focus on the kids." She said this with her usual sweet, wholesome expression. The whole exchange left me feeling not that she was opportunistic, but that she actually believed that going on the Today Show to talk about whether he was or wasn't having an affair was the best thing for her family.
So there really is no distinction anymore in the culture between an actual private life and a private life chronicled on weekly television. The Truman Show, which came out in 1998, would seem like a relic now in an age when it's impossible to believe that the star of a reality show would not be complicit in his own exposure, or that he would be troubled by it in any way. And Elizabeth Edwards, who was blogging about her son's untimely death in a car accident before there were bloggers, is a pioneer in understanding the collapse of these distinctions.
If we need more proof, read this story in today's New York Times home section called "Branding the Family" about the fabulous duo of decorators, Robert and Cortney Novogratz, who will have their own Bravo reality show in the fall. Given that they only have seven children and are much more fabulous looking than the Gosselins, there will surely be a storm to weather soon. So tune in...
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Rebecca Traister has already expertly parsed Jeff
Rosen's hasty, uncareful slamming of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for what it
shows about how we—actually, white male legal pundits—talk about
women who are up for huge jobs like the Supreme Court. Dahlia and Hanna
dissect the put-down and the code words, too. At the National Journal,
Stuart Taylor Jr., who also jumped on the anti-Sotomayor bandwagon, has
had the grace to jump off, writing in an editor's note that he regrets
being "unfair" to the Second Circuit judge, in particular by "citing anonymous claims that she has been 'masquerading as a moderate,' which I do not know to be true."
But it's too late to sheathe the claws. They've already produced this dreadful, not funny David Letterman parody of Sotomayor as a screechy gavel-banger. Is that Spanish she's speaking? But of course. The Washington Post Wednesday quoted "a lawyer who has been consulted on the Obama selection process" saying that Sotomayor may
have to overcome a perception that she "doesn't play well with others." Today, a news story in the paper makes nice.
Let's just hope that anonymous supposedly-consulted lawyer is wrong and
the Obama administration doesn't care about the swirl of perceptions
and is doing it's own reporting. There is an abundance of excellent
women candidates, as Dahlia and Chris Wilson and I have been discovering as
we begin to read up and write about them. Picking one of them isn't
affirmative action, no matter what the white guys writing the columns
say. (And no, Ben Wittes, I'm not crying for
the excellent white men who aren't at the top of the list this time,
and it's not just Democrats who take identity politics into account
when they make Supreme Court selections—hello, Clarence Thomas, not to mention Harriet Miers.)
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Hanna, I have to take issue with your statement that Elizabeth Edwards has an "infallible bullshit detector." Sure, she would have spotted what an on-the-make idiot Rielle Hunter was. But her detector's been on the blink for the past 30 years as far as John Edwards was concerned. As soon as he appeared on the scene it wasn't hard to see he was an oily, vain phony who would take on whatever pose seemed useful for his own advancement. You're right, Elizabeth is not simply "standing by her man" and pasting a fake smile on her face. But as Susannah points out, she's trying to portray John as a naif taken in by a New Age seductress, which just prompts an "Oh, please." But John Edward's political career is over, and Elizabeth Edwards is mortally ill—it's understandable that given the circumstances she doesn't want to end her marriage. Still, why is she making so public this private pain?
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Eleanor Squillari, Bernie Madoff's former executive assistant cooperated with Vanity Fair reporter Mark Seal for a juicy secretary's point of view on her crooked ex-boss that will appear in the VF June issue. Squillari spent two months helping the FBI and SEC unravel Madoff's financial accounts after Madoff confessed to operating a $50-billion Ponzi scheme in December 2008. Squillari says in the article that following Madoff's arrest, his wife Ruth called the office frequently asking the 25-year employee to provide her with information without notifying the bankruptcy trustees. Squillari said no dice. "Instead, I told the FBI what had just happened. I was working for them now, not for Ruth and Bernie Madoff."
I've always been curious about how much the financier's wife of nearly 50 years knew about his decades-long fraud. In a video interview with Seal, Squillari tells the veteran reporter she "would have no way of knowing if Ruth knew," but she shares a telling anecdote about when a colleague of Madoff's employee embezzled from him. In discussing the matter, Madoff told his own subordinate, "He should have been keeping an eye on his personal finances. That's why I've always had Ruth watching the books. Nothing gets by Ruth."
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Meghan, it kills me to read that Newsweek piece about Rielle Hunter and her "New Age jargon," as Jonathan Darman calls it, and offers this example:
Human beings were dragged down by "blockages" to their actual potential; history was the story of souls entering and escaping our field of consciousness...Her purpose on this Earth, she said, was to help raise awareness about all this, to help the unenlightened become better reflections of their true, repressed selves.
One undeniable thing about Elizabeth Edwards is her infallible bullshit detector. When I interviewed friends and staff that's the first thing they all mentioned about her. If one of her assistants had tried this "blockages" line on her—or God forbid mentioned it as a cause of her cancer, as New Age types are wont to do—she would have dunked the assistant's head in the sink. It must be doubly dismaying to her that her own husband was seduced by it.
Also, as you mentioned, she is a curious combination of vulnerable and strong. This New Republic story I wrote about her opens with all the times she told other women she met on the campaign trail how pretty they were. Then, in a roundtable with all the wives of candidates, she said:
"My gosh, you are all so beautiful. Which one doesn't belong? I feel a little bit like that—one of these things just doesn't belong." The remark was typical of Elizabeth Edwards—spontaneous, unfiltered, generous, and a little domineering: It takes a unique combination of vulnerability and supreme confidence to say something like that on a stage. The main effect of her compliment was to set her apart. They were a group of fresh faces one could marvel at, and she was the old hand, a woman to be dealt with on her own terms.
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Hanna,
I hear what you say about moxie. What interests me about Edwards is that she
doesn't fit any clear mold. She seems at once very strong and very vulnerable.
One almost feels that in the very fact that she has lived with advanced cancer
for such an extraordinary length of time. On the other hand, Susannah's
close reading of the passage about Rielle Hunter is spot-on, to my ear. In
this description of how the affair began, Edwards uses language that implicitly
depicts Rielle as a fierce, amoral hunter (her last name, after all), and John as
little more than biological silly putty; if Elizabeth doesn't quite make John out
to be an innocent pup, she does suggests he is merely too pliable. The agency is all the Huntress's.
I suppose that's natural; most of would be angry at the other woman,
especially if she's as touchy-feely as Rielle sounds. Do any of you remember this Newsweek piece by
Jonathan Darman about his encounters with her? If I were Elizabeth, I'd
be both threatened by Rielle's brand of sinuous femininity and put off by it. If
you buy the portrait painted in the Darman piece, Rielle seems to possess a
brand of sexual wile that I can’t help feeling is somehow more deeply
associated with womanhood, to this day, than almost any other quality. When I read
about these women, with their New Age sensitivity, their way of leaning in
close at the bar and asking “What sign are you?” I often find myself thinking
they're the true "XX" and I'm, say, X and a 1/2.
What's interesting to me about the passage Susannah posts is how you can see
that Edwards sort of feels that too, otherwise she would never use words like “target.”
The Rielle that Edwards writes about is just a new version of Crystal Edwards from
The Women. She sees something she wants and doesn't hesitate to wreck a
marriage to get it. These days, though, Crystal Allen doesn’t sell perfume at the
perfume counter; she is into astrology and cleanses and freelance video
work. In this reading, Elizabeth, of course, is the wholesome wife (Mrs.
Stephen Haines) played by Norma Shearer; only the movie doesn't end with her
reconciliation with her husband. It ends with her on a talk show, sharpening
her nails a bit. And who could blame her?
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Politico reports that Tim Gunn made an appearance on Capitol Hill this morning. He and Leanne Marshall, winner of Project Runway's fifth season, met with Republican Congressman Lamar Smith about what Politico is calling "designer rights." Gunn dished out some free advice to before getting down to business:
Smith lined up his staff and had Gunn provide notes of wisdom, wardrobe-wise.
The staff fared pretty well. "Small tweaks" were made—a shorter skirt was one—and the congressman replied, "two inches?!" in shock. Gunn replied, "no just one." Another lucky female staffer was complimented on her grey skirt and sweater paired with a light brown belt. Gunn said, "this outfit is all about the belt and it works."
Given that the average congressional staffer's wardrobe ranges all the way from Ann Taylor to Ann Taylor Loft, this is quite the coup. But much as I respect Gunn's taste in textiles, I'm not sure the idea he has come to promote will do a thing to help the fashion industry. Senators like Chuck Schumer have long wanted to extend copyright protection to fashion designers, but they've never made a strong case for the idea that the American fashion industry suffers for a lack of innovation. (Shows like Project Runway do not help.) As UCLA law professor Kal Raustiala has argued, it's possible that cheap knock-offs—the very thing copyright protection would criminalize—actually help fashion designers by accelerating the fashion cycle and spurring demand for newer, high-end designs. Add to all this the sure-to-be-ugly costs of enforcing fashion-related IP, and the whole plan starts to look like the legislative equivalent of that strappy neon ruched thing Blayne came up with last season.
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I just got a note from GLAD saying that Maine's Governor Balducci has signed into law a bill that gender-neutralizes marriage, initiated and passed by Maine's legislature without any court case or judicial involvement whatsoever. That makes Maine the first equal-marriage state to do so entirely on its elected officials' own initiative.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay, indeed. A friend from Maine says the Gov. is very close to his out lesbian sister; she expected the signing to come quickly. It's just hard to tell someone you've known and loved and fought with from birth that you don't think she should have the same rights and responsibilities that you do. Maine has a very active referendum process, so it will go up for a statewide vote soon. Go Mainiacs! Marry early, marry often, and hang on to those licenses!
Goodness, fairness is breaking out all over. I thought June was the marriage month! Perhaps judges and legislators in Iowa, Vermont, and Maine thought it might be nice to give same-sex couples and their families a chance to plan before they set those bells ringing?
Next in queue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York. And I'm told we should expect a California rematch next year. Now that no state has to worry about being vilified for going first (Massachusetts), second (Connecticut), third (Iowa) or even fourth (Vermont), maybe equality seems like a no-brainer?
I don't know when it takes effect.
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Meghan, Susannah, Hanna, I think Maureen Dowd is right when she asks: Why is Elizabeth Edwards dragging this scandal back before the public? It just makes her look naive and foolish, and reminds us what a slimy cad her husband is. Dowd mentions, as have so many others, that Elizabeth herself could have been a successful politician. Her situation now speaks to the dangers of subverting one's entire life to the ambitions of someone else. Anne, I also agree that Margaret Thatcher doesn't get the credit she deserves for being a path-breaker and a role model. But also a model was her husband, Denis. He had been a successful businessman and while he was supportive of her career, he mostly stayed out of the way. Angela Merkel's husband, a scientist, barely ever shows up for her official events. These husbands of successful, ambitious women are perhaps better role models of what we should expect of a political spouse than Elizabeth Edwards' head cheerleader.
And while we're on the subject of ambition and marriage, Dahlia and Hanna have a fascinating look at why so many of the women on the short list for the Supreme Court are single. They raise the point that the pressures of getting to the top of the legal profession may discriminate against women with children. So it's comforting to remember that two women who got to the Supreme Court first, when women in the law were a distinct minority, were both happily married with children.
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Meghan, Susannah, I think we have to give Elizabeth Edwards some credit for what she does do. That moment where she portrays her husband as the victim of the vixen Rielle is really the only blind spot in an otherwise brutally honest—cringingly honest—account. Whether or not this counts as a public flogging, as Maureen Dowd suggests, is really beside the point. The typical thing for a political wife is to cover for her husband, stand by him on the stage the way Eliot Spitzer's wife, Silda did. And for that we liberated feminist types gave her a public flogging. I suppose Elizabeth did that to some degree, by standing by him during the campaign. But then she undid it, by writing this book which is a tick-tock of the entire affair, including his lies, the cheesy come-on line she has to know will make it to late night TV ("You are so hot") and more lies. And then she goes on Oprah and says she doesn't even know if she loves him anymore. Mixed in with whatever we fault her for is some serious moxie. What other political wife has ever done that?
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Meghan, I think Maureen Dowd's column on the Edwards debacle now chronicled in Elizabeth's new book, Resilience, is spot-on to call the media spectacle the book has spawned a wife's public flogging of her errant husband. What I find off about Elizabeth's take on the matter is her seemingly recurrent positioning of her husband as a victim of a wanton woman. After John revealed his affair to her, she called for him to “protect our family from this woman."
"It didn’t occur to me that at a fancy hotel in New York, where he sat with a potential donor to his antipoverty work,” Elizabeth writes in her book, “he would be targeted by a woman who would confirm that the man at the table was John Edwards and then would wait for him outside the hotel hours later when he returned from a dinner, wait with the come-on line ‘You are so hot’ and an idea that she should travel with him and make videos. And if you had asked me to wager that house we were building on whether my husband of then 28 years would have responded to a come-on line like that, I would have said no.”
Targeted? Rielle lying in wait? Give me a break. When it comes to adultery, women too often posit the other woman as the enemy, their husband as the victim, the affair the two had some kind of sordid transgression that never would have happened were he not coerced by this Jezebel. Too bad that in her attempt to share the truth, Elizabeth got mired in the quagmire of not vilifying her husband for his misdeeds enough.
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So Maureen Dowd has a slightly caustic column about Elizabeth Edwards' new book, which details her reactions to her husband's affair, online today here. She says that Elizabeth is dragging John out for a public "flogging" and then notes, of Elizabeth's bewilderment about the affair: "She may be smart, but she doesn’t seem to know much about men." It's hard to imagine a man writing this acerbically about another man's savvy about the other gender. But I'm curious: Who agrees with MoDo, and who thinks that she's wrong to describe this book as a public "flogging"? Does John Edwards merit a flogging, in any case?
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While we are on the subject of elderly female pathbreakers, Emily—and before the 30th anniversary of her ascent to the British prime ministership passes—maybe it’s worth reflecting for a minute or two on the career of Margaret Thatcher. Long before Hillary, decades before Sarah, there was, after all, Maggie: The idea that female politicians can run important countries, make tough decisions, get elected and re-elected to office is not actually all that new.
What is extraordinary about Thatcher, in retrospect, is how unimpressed she was by her own groundbreaking role, and yet how feminine she remained while holding what had been, up until then, an exclusively masculine job. She was not a member of the all-male clubs where the Tory party allegedly made its secret decisions, but she didn’t seem to care. She was often the only woman in the room, but didn’t appear to be in the least intimidated. At the same time, nobody ever mistook her for a man. On the contrary, she had, in the words of then-French president Francois Mitterand, “the eyes of Caligula and the lips of Marilyn Monroe.” Gorbachev called her the “Iron Lady.” She was immaculately dressed and coiffed, and never wore trousers. She terrified many of the men who worked for her. Once, she famously snapped across the cabinet table at Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer: “Nigel, get a haircut.”
Though sometimes criticized for not helping other women make it in politics, this is not entirely fair: In fact, Thatcher set the stage for the rise of a whole generation of prominent female politicians. Since her prime ministership, women have run the British foreign office, the Home office, the Northern Ireland office, and many other important parts of the government. In the past decade or so, women broadcasters, political columnists and newspaper editors have become commonplace in the U.K.—more so than in the U.S. I can’t help but think Thatcher’s example had a role in that, too. Because she was a conservative, feminists have never wanted to claim her as a role model, and have never celebrated her achievements. But as time goes on, her premiership looks more revolutionary, not less.
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I remember reading Marilyn French's The Women's Room, her 1977 novel about the world of oppressive, forced domesticity that was the expected lot of women of her generation—French just died at age 79—and being so grateful that world had broken apart because of women like her. Her obits in the Times and the Post show French remained a woman of the second wave of feminism —who saw the institutional oppression by men everywhere and who retained a burning anger about it. Probably she was angry that young woman didn't share her anger. But why should they be incensed about their oppression when they live in a world in which their opportunities are abundant and assumed? As I was reading her obituaries, and feeling that she had become an anachronistic figure, I saw this line quoted from her 1992 book, The War Against Women: "“Men’s need to dominate women may be based in their own sense of marginality or emptiness; we do not know its root, and men are making no effort to discover it.” She suddenly didn't seem so anachronistic anymore, since every day we read in both the Times and the Post about the inroads the Taliban is making into Pakistan. We are living in a time when women on the other side of the world have to worry about having acid thrown in their faces for wanting to go to school, a time in which a nuclear power is ceding territory to a group which beats, even murders women, for leaving the house unaccompanied by a man. Saudi Arabia does not allow its female citizens to drive. A few years ago they let schoolgirls trapped in a fire burn to death because if the firemen rescued them they'd see the girls not completely covered. The urge to dominate—and obliterate—is frighteningly present.
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A guest post from Slate contributor Vanessa Gezari, who writes frequently about Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Others have remarked on the mainstream media’s penchant for
lumping together hip hop with all that’s wrong in the world,
up to and including radical Islam. But I was reminded of it once again by a
breathless CNN report
on the latest video from Al-Shabaab, an Islamic group in Somalia, which the
network compares to reality TV “complete with a hip-hop jihad vibe.” The video
(which you can watch in part here) is said by al-Qaida watchers to feature
Sheikh Abu Mansoor al-Amriki or “the American,” a white, goateed young man who
speaks American English, a sort of Adam Gadahn
for the Somali music scene, if you buy CNN’s line. The problem is that
al-Amriki looks and sounds a lot like some of the guys I went to school with,
white dudes whose rap skills ended where their comfortable middle-class
backgrounds began. If he’s a rapper, so am I.
Rap has of course become a favorite protest genre for
underclasses everywhere, and the originating impulse of American hip-hop is
deftly echoed in its French and Palestinian offshoots (“You don’t listen to our
voices, you silence and degrade us,” goes a song by Palestinian group DAM.
“We fight for our freedom, but you’ve made that a crime.”) Insurgents often
echo this sentiment; the problem is that while the music in the Al-Shabaab
video sounds sort of like rap, it sounds a lot more like the often beautiful
battle songs and Koranic chants that are sung behind al-Qaida and Taliban
videos coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, a selection of which can be
viewed here.
You can hear at least two American-sounding voices singing in the Al-Shabaab
video, one of them presumably al-Amriki’s. There’s a bit of something like rap
there, but to me the tone is more devotional than angry, much like the Qaida
video songs, which are often set hauntingly against a background of explosions
and gunfire that resembles a drumbeat. The relationship between Al-Shabaab
(which means “The Youth”) and al-Qaida is unclear—CNN calls the Somali group
“al-Qaida-backed,” yet the Council on Foreign Relations notes that any institutional connection between the groups is “weak, if it exists at
all.” The latest video strengthens the case for that relationship, at least in
regard to production and soundtrack selection, but does nothing to link hip-hop
to global terrorism. Chanting and choral arrangements are much more in line
with al-Qaida’s musical taste.
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Ms. magazine reports a brief story today about the suspiciously high
number of women registering to vote in Afghanistan's upcoming election.
Officials are starting to think something is up, given that some of the
areas reporting record registration are regions where women don't
travel.
Normally, that headline wouldn't merit my second glance, but today
it held me. Late last night I finished reading Åsne Seierstad's 2003
account of her infiltration into an Afghani home, The Bookseller of Kabul. Her
glimpse into the kitchens, bedrooms, and walled-in courtyards that make
up the entire world of many Afghani women is terrifying and
tear-inducing. It provides the backstory to today's news and reveals
exactly why those officials sense fraud. They know that women don't
have the freedom to show their faces, fall in love, or earn money, let
alone to vote. And when I read the headline, all I could think about
was the stories of Leila, Sharifay, and Sonya.
Stories trigger paradigm changes the way news can't. So just wanted
to give a shout-out to all the women journalists out there, like Åsne,
whose work transforms far-away issues into intensely personal ones.
Let's hope future presidents around the world have the chance to echo
what Abe Lincoln supposedly said when meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, "So you're the little woman
who wrote the book that started this Great War!"
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Willa, I tried clicking through that Costume Institute Gala slide show, and got ...
bored. You'll be shocked, shocked to learn that I am no one's idea of
fashionable. There are many reasons I live up here in the land of the
bluestockings. Among them: Here, I can get away with dressing in a combination
of Goodwill, Gap, and Ann Taylor (that last saved for my high-end items: black pants).
But flipping through the frippery did make me think of a film event I attended this winter at
Brandeis, featuring Alan Alda and Kate Beckinsale—who, you will also not be shocked to know, is the opposite of my type. (Cf: Rachel Maddow.) It drove me crazy how
Beckinsale kept wriggling in her seat, showing off her death-defying heels, legs,
and all-but-exposed breasts from first one angle and then another. We've got the point, I texted dryly to my
prosecutor. She should sit still now and let my hero
Alan Alda speak. My gal texted right back, "Your job is being smart. Her
job is being beautiful. Let her do her job."
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As part of an anti-domestic violence campaign in Portugal created by Amnesty International, liquid soap in bar and nightclub men's bathroom wall dispensers was replaced with a red soap that looked a lot like blood. The shock tactic was accompanied by a sticker warning that those who do not speak out against domestic violence are partners to the crime. "WASH YOUR HANDS OF IT," the copy howls. Purportedly, those who encountered the substance that resembled blood in color and consistency were hit with "a sense of shock and revulsion." While the campaign's creators claim "the initiative helped increase the level of empathy with the cause," how they came to that conclusion after freaking out drunk guys in Lisbon toilets, it doesn't specify.
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When we talk about barriers to the entrance of women in the American workforce in the 20th century, the story we tell is largely cultural and economic. Married women with career aspirations had to contend with wage discrimination, marriage bars, and the perception that a working woman was ipso facto a degenerate wife and mother. A neat new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that we often understate the role of basic medical advances when talking about that sudden, collective jump from home to workplace. It's easy to forget how dangerous childbirth used to be; complications associated with sepsis, toxaemia and obstructed labor could ravage a body well into middle age. "Many maternal conditions had very long lasting or chronic effects on health," the researchers report, "hindering women's ability to work beyond their childbearing years."
Using historical data to quantify the effects of various maternal conditions, economists Stefania Albanesi and Claudia Olivetti find that medical advances like the introduction of antibiotics, the standardization of obstetric practice, and the hospitalization of childbirth were absolutely critical to the rise of married women's participation in the labor market over the last century. They also find a very large effect for the introduction of formula as a mainstream alternative to breastfeeding in the 1930s. A typical woman in 1920 between the ages of 23 and 33 would be nursing for something like 40 percent of her potential working time. As Hanna has so forcefully illustrated, our cost/benefit calculations change when we start to consider the possibility that a mother's time might have some kind of value.
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Oh Jess! Rihanna's was just one of many ensembles of interest at this year's Costume Institute Gala, which is sort of like the prom of high fashion, except all the most popular ladies attend on the arm of their main gay. (Or does that make it even more like the prom?) In addition to Rihanna's tux, there was... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, www.DoubleX.com!)
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Jeff Rosen's bashing this week of Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the Second Circuit—who is on all the Supreme Court short lists—is making the rounds. Glenn Greenwald calls Rosen's attack a "smear" and points out his problematic reliance on anonymous sources. I'm just starting to gather string on the judges on the short list, so I called Jamal Greene, a Columbia law professor who clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi, one of Sotomayor's colleagues. Here's his rebuttal of Rosen's unnamed critics:
I was always impressed with her memos. I thought that they always said exactly what was on my mind. One particular opinion that stands out: Hayden v. Pataki. Not sure that's the opinion she'd want to talk about most, because what she wrote was quite short, but I thought it was also quite brilliant. The case was about whether felon disenfranchisement"—taking away the vote from prisoners—"fell under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, as a form of vote dilution or vote denial. Her short dissent said: This is a really easy case, and only becomes difficult if you try to make it that way. There were all these long opinions flying back and forth—Judge Cabranes in the majority, and Judge Parker in dissent, and Guido too. She had a short one that got it right.
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For the first time since she was allegedly beaten by now-ex-boyfriend Chris Brown, Rihanna made a public appearance last night on the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute Gala. Her stroll down the carpet is noteworthy not just because she's been off the celebrity circuit for months, but because she chose to don a Dolce & Gabanna tuxedo. While it may be a mistake to overly scrutinize her clothing choices (or any celebrity's clothing choices, for that matter), her outfit is the way she's choosing to present herself for the first time to the public after a harrowing couple of months. Ostensibly, she is making the statement that she is powerful; that she does not need protection. However, it troubles me that she feels that she needs to dress in masculine garb to express her self-possession. It sends the tacit message that feminine equals weak, and what happened to Rihanna has nothing to do with weakness. Am I reading too far into this, or does anyone else find Rihanna's choice unsettling?
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It hardly seems possible that, more than five years after Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl, the highest court in the land is still deliberating the question of how outraged we as a nation should be by that long-ago glimpse of pop-singer flesh. Today, the Supreme Court ordered a federal appeals court to consider reinstating the $550,000 FCC fine on CBS, which was thrown out last year on the grounds that the boob flash (which lasted nine-sixteenths of a second) was protected by CBS’ rule allowing for “fleeting” instances of obscenity.
To the extent that I ever had an opinion on this by now absurdly musty controversy, I would have been on CBS’s side. It’s the nature of live television coverage that things (Bono's F-bombs, Janet's nips) slip out, and the constant threat of fines could have a dampening effect on networks' freedom to broadcast live, amounting to a kind of pre-emptive censorship. But given the drop in the bucket that a half-million dollar represents in the context of the bank bailout, what if we as a nation just pick up the tab for CBS’s fine so we never have to talk about this again? Here’s a litmus-test tip for President Obama as he begins his SCOTUS deliberations: Man or woman, “contructionist” or “activist,” just please, in the name of God, appoint a Supreme Court justice who does not give a prawn about Janet Jackson’s right nipple.
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As of Friday, Britain has its first female poet laureate: Carol Ann Duffy. She is a writer who favors plain language arranged "complexly" rather than what she has called "Seamus Heaney words" like "plash." She is also openly bisexual and much has been made of that in the press. Coincidentally or not, America's poet laureate, Kay Ryan, is a gay woman who favors plain language arranged complexly too. Women are coming into their own, it would seem; just this weekend, I was talking with a poet friend who felt very powerfully that women were about to become a major part of the next generation of poetry here and abroad; she's a teacher, and she felt the power and range of her female students was extraordinary and, somehow, new.
Britain's poet laureates hold the job for a term of 10 years, unlike American poet laureates. They also have to write poems to honor royal occasions, unlike American poets. It'll be interesting to see what Duffy, with her slyness, does with those moments. Here's a poem of hers called "Words, Wide Night":
Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.
This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.
La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you
and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.
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I did a dumb thing over the weekend: I went to see Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. I have excuses—it was raining, a soft spot for Matthew McConaughey—but they are insufficient. I don't think I've ever seen a movie for women that is so disdainful of women, and I've seen He's Just Not That Into You. Ghosts assumes that we're all so predictable and pliable that every single one of us—from the 16-year-old to the MILF (duh, this movie has a MILF), from the desperate-to-get-laid bridesmaids (are they any other kind?) to the heroine—would want to shag a man with no redeemable qualities except that he looks like Matthew McConaughey. Bongo McC is a handsome guy, but I remain stalwart in my belief that at least some of us could resist a sleazy, cheesy, untrustworthy, commitment-phobic, game-playing cad who says things like "Every night I swim in a lake of sex." Ew.
How does a film such as this, a chick flick that doesn't understand or even like women, come to be? I blame Judd Apatow, the director/writer/producer responsible for the ongoing bonanza in dick flicks, romantic comedies with male protagonists. (Thanks to New York's Vulture for noting that this particular rom-com sub genre needed a name.) These movies aren't a new phenomenon—Annie Hall, Say Anything, There's Something About Mary all qualify— but thanks to the success of Apatow's The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, they're more popular than ever, with at least four similar films coming out this summer.
Now, it's not really Apatow's fault that some of the movies copycatting him suck—his movies don't suck—but Ghosts sucks so hard because it has taken a subtle flaw in Apatow's oeuvre and blown it into a whole movie. Meghan wrote in an incisive critique Knocked Up:
If Apatow tries to suggest that guys need to grow up a bit to meet women's high expectations, he, like his own characters, doesn't seem to get that maybe there's a lot more to women than these expectations.You might say his critique is muddied by its own joyful enactment of male high jinks, and the corresponding absence of anything similar on the part of the women.
Apatow's male characters may have to learn a thing or two, but they still have richer inner lives, more imagination, and more spark than his female characters. His women are less interesting and less fun than his men. And in lesser hands than Apatow's, these lesser-than female characters become totally cardboard, as they do in Ghosts, and we're left with a dick flick masquerading as a chick flick that no woman or man could possibly enjoy.
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Etan Patz vanished from the streets of New York City 30 years ago this month. He is not living in an alternative universe as a 36-year-old man who grew up on Prince Street in Soho, the middle child of a school teacher and a photographer who then went to Brown or Reed and became a journalist or documentary maker married to his college sweetheart with a 7-year-old little girl and a boy, nearly 5. He doesn't live in Tribeca near his wife's former office at the Department of Homeless Services. The man Etan would have been, if a very bad person hadn't stolen his future, doesn't exist. The 6-year-old tow head did not grow into a handsome sandy-haired man with an open smile. Along with his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who weathered an unspeakable loss, the world was robbed of an independent spirit full of curiosity and joy.
I've written before about After Etan, Lisa Cohen's riveting book on the effect of the boy's disappearance on his family and the community, which is excerpted in New York Magazine this week. Etan was detoured by something terribly evil along the two blocks from his front door to his school bus stop at West Broadway in Soho in 1979 and was never seen again. The primary suspect for Etan's murder (the first-grader's small body was never found), Jose Ramos, currently imprisoned for molesting another child, was not charged for the crime. "Stan and Julie recognized at some indefinable moment that their son was never coming home, no matter what they said, so they stopped saying anything, turning away from the spotlight," Lisa writes. But, as long-serving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau prepares to retire, the victim's father has renewed demands for Ramos' indictment. With the 30th anniversary of his kidnapping approaching, it's worth reminding ourselves how the child who never grew up changed society's perception of danger to unsupervised children, adding a vigilance and parental fear that was, and sadly remains, all too necessary.
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One further—and purely speculative—thought about the conversation between Emily, Bonnie, and E.J. about the need for a woman justice to replace David Souter. And this one is based on conversations I have had over the years. I have heard at least a few powerful women lawyers who could be in the running for this type of gig say without reservation that they would never, under any circumstances, put themselves through the nasty, personal, and hate-filled confirmation process that has become almost unavoidable. (I keep thinking of Justice Alito’s wife bolting from her husband’s hearing in tears a few years back). One woman judge bluntly told me she could never do that to her family, no matter what the prize. Others have said they just wouldn’t want to go through something that was almost designed to make them look ridiculous or awful for all time. Just reflecting on the abuse that’s recently been heaped on Dawn Johnsen—Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel—I can see why. I’m not quite prepared to assert here that women have thinner skin than men when it comes to being called the Spawn of the Devil on national television. I’m sure many of the women on the so-called short list have endured far worse. But it’s a good time to recall the rumors that there were several highly qualified women ahead of Harriet Miers on President Bush’s short list, who all evidently took themselves out of the running for some of these reasons.
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For today's installment of Drawing Obama, we'll start with a terrific companion piece to Dahlia's son's "Dead John McCain." Deanna Newsom swears that she "did not indoctrinate" her 5-year-old son, Jonas. Still, he "came home from kindergarten one day with 'John McCain Falls into a Black Hole.' It was accompanied by another one entitled 'John McCain with Mold Growing on his Face.'"
Breaking into the double-digits for our artists, here's a drawing by 6th-grader Amber Adams-Holecek, submitted by her art teacher, Lindsay Davis. The assignment was to "make a tribute drawing to Shepard Fairey's famous red, white and blue print."
Jonah Goldman got into the game of drawing Obama early—and it paid off. A week before Obama announced his candidacy for president, then 13-year-old Jonah by chance shared a flight to Chicago with the then-Senator, and got him to sign the portrait below.
Keep sending us Obama drawings from the kids in your life.
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This transcript of an interview with Keith Lewis, the co-director of the Miss California Pageant, must be among the strangest artifacts ever produced by the creepily enthusiastic industry that is the American pageant circuit. (Miss California, you'll recall, is the contestant who believes "the way she was raised" to be sufficient justification for her policy preferences.) In the course of explaining that yes, his organization did pay for Carrie Prejean's boob job, Lewis argues that the organization did not "encourage" her to surgically restructure her chest area (but did bankroll it!), that the procedure was paid for simply so Miss California would have a positive self-image (though "of course" size matters in the competition), and that he totally agrees it's time to "look at the way we perceive real women." From an appearance with Maggie Rodriguez of the The Early Show:
LEWIS: ... it's a personal choice. Well, I think that it's about how a woman feels about herself. In terms of, for me, it's not a personal choice that I would recommend. But at the same time, I know so many women that have done the procedure and feel better about themselves and the way they present themselves.
And I think that's the question is, whether or not, when you're looking at that procedure as an option, am I going to feel better about myself? It's not about one night. It isn't about one night of competition. And doing a procedure like that for one night of competition would be foolish...
RODRIGUEZ: ... if you have a flat chest, what are you supposed to do?
LEWIS: You use chicken cutlets. You use tape. You use anything that you can to enhance the line. There's lots of tricks of the trade. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to go to that next level.
RODRIGUEZ: I wonder if you should change the rules and maybe not judge it so much on proportion.
I find both sides of this exchange deeply bizarre, perhaps because I lack the imaginative capacity to envision a swimsuit competition not premised on a certain conception of the female body. What are they going evaluate? Perkiness? Gait? The actual swimsuit?
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Bonnie, FAB idea about Justice Mikulski! I hope you have POTUS's ear on this. Or at least FLOTUS?
In unrelated news, this week the Senates of both New Hampshire and Maine passed bills to gender-neutralize their states' marriage laws. NH's Senate bill now has to be reconciled with its House bill (also passed); no one's sure whether the governor will sign, veto, or leave it alone to become law. Maine's hasn't gone to the House yet; that state also has a nastier referendum process, which could make it harder to keep a marriage law even if passed.
Why is the Granite State getting behind same-sex marriage? Well, there are a lot of possible reasons. It's watched its neighbors (Vermont, Canada, Massachusetts, and a little farther to the south, Connecticut) open marriage to same-sex couples, with yawn-worthy results: no locusts, plagues, or hurricanes. New England LGBT advocacy groups, especially GLAD, have been extremely savvy about working toward equality throughout the region, with a slogan of "6 x 12": equal marriage in all six New England states by 2012, a goal that's looking quite realistic. And, of course, the air is just a little clearer up here than in the more humid parts of the country. (Okay, maybe that was unnecessary...).
Renee Loth, editorial page editor at the Boston Globe, has yet another idea: It's because of women. New Hampshire's legislature is now majority female. And women are more socially liberal on family-related issues in general—including such issues as early childhood education and gay rights. You go, girls!
Yet another reason for at least two female Supremes? I guess this post is related to the potential nomination of Justice Mikulski after all.
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I agree with Dahlia and E.J. on the importance of another female justice, so thanks to Emily for that list of competent women. I know this is a little out there and, since she is not a lawyer, I doubt she is on anybody's short list (except perhaps in regard to her diminutive height—under 5 feet), but how about Barbara Mikulski for the Supremes? The self-appointed "ambassador to the United States from the United States" is unfailingly liberal, deeply knowledgeable and very accustomed to being outnumbered by males. The Maryland senator may lack "judicial temperament" but, as the longest serving woman in the body, she knows the Hill better than any potential nominee.
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Emily, you aren't convinced that the next USSC justice has to be a woman? I'm startled. If there were eight women and only one man in the Article III branch of government, you can be sure there would be outrage among the minority sex. (Men are a slight minority in the world, since females make up 51 percent of the planet, more or less, except maybe in China.) Women and men have different enough experiences in the world that I find it shocking that we aren't equally represented in all branches. (Okay, maybe that would be hard in the presidency, unless it went back and forth from one to the other.) The U.S. ranks 71st on a list of percentage of women in the lower house of the world's national legislatures, well below such feminist countries as Suriname, Kyrgyzstan, Serbia, Namibia, and Honduras. The Nordic countries, with the highest percentage of women in legislatures, also have some of the most family-friendly laws in the world—which is hardly a coincidence. Surely an array of female judges with different political perspectives would help our top court better reflect our national realities? Justice isn't blind, you know.
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Keep your eyes open. That sweet little grandma next door: possible heroin dealer. The AP reports that Pennsylvania's Monroe County District Attorney, David Christine, expressed shock that two innocent-looking sisters, age 65 and 70, were raking in $10,000 a week as heroin dealers. You have to wonder why the neighbors never thought it strange that grandma was being visited by a steady stream of addicts...
...but then, it turns out not all heroin addicts look the part. I should know, since you can actually watch my acting debut on YouTube (starting 2 minutes in to the clip—and ignore the weird Chinese subtitles) where I reenact the real story of 16-year-old girl next door, Jenna, who, unbeknownst to her parents, becomes addicted to her heroin and ends up overdosing in her bedroom. Moral of the story: Keep an eye on your kids—and grandma too.
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There's a Q&A with Quentin Tarantino in this weekend's New York Times Style Magazine. (It's online here.) The occasion is the upcoming debut screening of Tarantino's latest movie, "Inglourious Basterds," a war-'n'-gore flick starring Diane Kruger and Brad Pitt in which a band of Jewish American soldiers attempt to kill a hell of a lot of Nazis. (I read the script before it was sold, and it is bloody.) "This was the hardest movie I've ever made," Tarantino admits, before not-so-humbly deeming it a "masterpiece." Interestingly, the photo accompanying the interview features Quentin in a black suit and black patent leather high-heels. In one hand, he holds his drink. In the other hand, he holds a bra. Not sure what's going on there, but while some may say he's a hack, few can ever say he's boring.
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The spectacle of Senator Arlen Specter surely had nothing to do with Justice David Souter's timing—if indeed reports of his retirement plans are true. But it's a pointed, and also rather poignant, contrast. The almost-80-year-old guy who's got every reason to hang it up just can't let go—and hogs the spotlight by grabbing the chance to shift the balance in the Senate. I'm with you, June and Emily, in thinking the time had perhaps come for the gentleman from Pennsylvania to go potter in the garden. Meanwhile, the justice who hasn't yet hit 70 (at 69, Souter's the average age of those now on the bench) reportedly can't wait to head for the hills—and he is giving up a historic role. Maybe the two of them should have had lunch and swapped career advice, though as Souter chomped his apple I somehow doubt he would have changed his independent mind (assuming it is now made up). That's one of the many reasons he will be missed.
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Emily, I suspect that the rumors are true and that most of the serious contenders for David Souter’s seat are women. I was less sure that was necessary last week before the strip search case. Now I think its pretty much imperative.
There are already a lot of appreciations of Justice Souter up this morning, many focusing on the eccentricities of the man himself (he eats an entire apple, seeds and all, and cup of yogurt for lunch every day. He had never heard of Diet Coke before coming to Washington), and many more focused on his unexpected shift from what John Sununu assured President Bush would be a "home run for conservatism” to a liberal stalwart. When Souter was sitting through his confirmation hearings, NOW was distributing leaflets that read, “Stop Souter or women will die.” But as Jeff Toobin reports in his book The Nine, that same Justice Souter was the fulcrum that eventually held the court together in the landmark Casey abortion case in 1992. And also according to Toobin, for a while after Bush v Gore, Souter would just think about the decision and weep.
But Souter has been a lot more than just a massive disappointment to the right. Watching him at oral argument—as recently as Wednesday in the Voting Rights Act case—you just didn’t see the bookish, reclusive man from another century. You saw an incredibly passionate and eloquent spokesman for equality and racial justice, often willing to dominate an argument and wear his heart on his sleeve in ways his colleagues would not. The public has often underestimated Souter because he shuns the spotlight and writes, for the most part, in a pretty bookish, temperate way. We also tend to glide right past him because given any chance to do so, he will run himself down as well. But if you’ve been watching him for the past few years, you know that more often than not the passionate, fiery and even outraged voice from the liberal half of the bench has been Souter’s. If it’s indeed true that he is leaving, the left of the court won’t just be losing a bright light, but some much needed heat as well.
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Does Obama
have to pick a woman to succeed Justice David Souter, who is reportedly
retiring? I'm not convinced—if he picked a great black male judge, who
would complain? But that's the conventional wisdom. And it sure would
be nice if Ruth Bader Ginsburg weren't all by her lonesome up there. So
below, a list of ten plausible women for Supreme Court justice. Also, a
word about process. Inside the White House, Greg Craig and Dan Meltzer
will be at the center. But don't forget Joe Biden. As chair of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, he presided over more nominations than
anyone else around (six, I think). His chief of staff, Ron Klain, also
has all kinds of experience with nominees, in the White House, the
Judiciary Committee, and the Justice Department. And as Rick Hasen
points out, the Judiciary Committee will get a new ranking minority
leader with Sen. Arlen Specter switching parties—a bit of a wild card.
Knowing the Hill always matters.
First cut at a list:
Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Diane Wood, Seventh Circuit
Margaret McKeown, Ninth Circuit
Elena Kagan, Solicitor General
Martha Minow, Harvard law professor
Janet Napolitano, Department of Homeland Security
Jennifer Granholm, governor of Michigan
Kimba Wood, U.S. District CourtN Southern District of New York
Joyce Kennard, California Supreme Court
Kathleen Sullivan, Dean of Stanford Law School
Pamela Karlan, Stanford law professor.
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Wash your hands. Fill up your tires. Don't stuff money in your mattress. "If you are considering buying a car," Obama said yesterday, "I hope it will be an American car."
As our national crises mutates and fills different corners of American life, Obama increasingly sounds like dad yelling down the driveway as his kid is driving away for college. "He is, I hate to say this, the father of the country," says Irwin Stelzer, director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies at the Hudson Institute.
Republicans, meanwhile, are increasingly filled with horror (or partisan glee) at how perfectly he is embodying their nightmare of Big Government. So, to continue the dad analogy, that would make them...the Deadbeat Uncle? The College-Bound Kid in the Car, rolling his eyes?
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It's nearing prom season, which means...we need the recession angle. From today's New York Times, we have "A Prom With All the Glitz, But Every Dollar Squeezed"—and thus another installment in our occasional series on the dubious science of how women spend in hard times, and what supposedly happens to hemlines.
The prom gown business is doing so well in the recession that it's
expected to outperform last year. Michael Kasher, owner of the Los
Angeles-based gown line La Femme Fashion—whose La Femme gowns cost
about $350 and whose Gigi gowns cost about $225—called the Northeast
his "strongest territory," with sales in New York growing by "double
digits" in the last year.
The parents of Lindsay Rescott are feeling the pinch this year, the story reports, but they don't plan to deny their daughter her beaded, zebra-print gown, or her special side ponytail. I say, if you can still afford to outsource a side ponytail, things can't be that bad.Lipstick Level: 10