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Over at Slate, Johann Hari has a fascinating essay on The East, the West, and Sex, the "strange new book"—Hari's words—by journalist Richard Bernstein, which details the centuries-old history of Western men seeking out a little strange in the East ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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There are many things that I find deeply upsetting about Sarah Palin. But in the new Vanity Fair assessment of Palin's
current place in the political universe, the most disturbing thing Todd
Purdum reveals is her inability to discern or care about the truth:
At one point, trying out a debating point that she
believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin
told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their
marriage had been unable to ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.
At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says
something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man,
right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker:
A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being
tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the
forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.
Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its
heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be
public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you.
There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit
as self-conscious as tall women.
Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this
unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female
public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure,
there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you
probably don’t know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I agree with you, Dahlia, about the pole dance of grief in Away We Go: The amateur night performance of barren Melanie Lynskey (Munch Garnett), while riveting and poignant, indeed seemed like it belonged in a different movie. Like Dana,
I thought the quirky, uneven road movie had some great moments along
the hapless, mapless, trip of expecting parents seeking their adult
selves. For example, Maya Rudoph was a pitch perfect Verona, asking her
goofy but loveable boyfriend, Burt (John Krasinki), “Are we fuck-ups?”
(My husband, who usually is a good sport about chick flicks, audibly
conceded that indeed they could be.)
When miscarriage and profound disappointment were added to the
narrative, though, the couple’s journey became about more than simply
growing up the hard way. Perhaps director Sam Mendes ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Reading Hanna's and Dana's
posts about a Swedish couple's attempts to raise a gender-free child,
I’m struck by how pointless it is for parents to try to program their
children.
Of course, I think it's awesome and essential that parents make a
conscious effort to raise open-minded kids (by discussing the sort of
issues that Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson addressed in their piece
about childrens' responses to Obama becoming president, for example),
but there are some things you just can't control—like how other people
respond to your child.
I'm sure my parents were less than thrilled that strangers referred to me as ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled
5-0 that Al Franken is the winner of the contested 2008 Minnesota
Senate race, by 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. Finally, right?
Minnesota has been down one senator for almost half a year. That's
already too long. The state shouldn't have to half sit out the summer's
big business on Capitol Hill: health care, the energy bill, and the
confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor.
But there's one avenue left for Norm Coleman, Franken's Republican
opponent, and that's a federal lawsuit. From a legal standpoint, such a
suit would be ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Hanna’s post about the Swedish couple who are attempting to raise their child “gender-free” (not
telling anyone its birth sex or permitting the genitals to be seen by
anyone but a select few intimates) has had me thinking all day about
the chicken-and-egg problem of gender identification. Do I think the
category of gender is more constructed than the dominant culture gives
it credit for? Definitely. Does the parenting of this couple horrify
me? Completely.
Hanna, your analogy (to a “militant feminist friend” who tried
unsuccessfully to make her daughter play with trucks) doesn’t quite
hold up; in terms of the violence visited on the kid’s sense of self,
the Swedish family’s choice to conceal the fact of gender altogether seems infinitely worse. Being told by your parents that you should ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Nicole Allan:
The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano
stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore
dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked
into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating
their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.
Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank
Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic
amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp
peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and
jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly
Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at
some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights
laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they
deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of
competence for the sake of identity politics.”
It took some audacity indeed to ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
Liz Garbus, the Oscar-nominated director of The Farm, has a new documentary premiering tonight on HBO called Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech.
Her obsession with free speech is understandable: She was raised by
Martin Garbus, a First Amendment attorney who risked the wrath of the
federal government with his involvement in the dissemination of the
Pentagon Papers in the early '70s. Ultimately he is the center of his
daughter’s film.
Shouting begins (free speech is “a miracle”) and ends
(“Don’t let the fucking guys win”) with quotes from the elder Garbus.
His synopses of 20th-century free speech milestones are woven
throughout the film and lend context and depth to the 21st-century
cases his daughter highlights. These are the “stories” of the film’s
subtitle, the cases of three individuals and one group who are
astonished when ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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On Slate, Walter Dellinger and Linda Greenhouse
agree that Judge Sotomayor has little to fear from today's Supreme
Court ruling in favor of the white New Haven firefighters who sued
their city when it threw out the results of a test for promotions.
Justice Kennedy's majority opinion barely mentions the brief panel
opinion Sotomayor signed. Justice Alito's concurrence is a little more
critical, but not much. Court observers, including me, will patiently
explain that the Supreme Court came up with a whole new rule in its
decision today, which it wasn't Sotomayor's job, as a Second Circuit
judge, to do. This is how the law is supposed to develop: The lower
courts abide by their own precedents, and the Supreme Court's prior
rulings, until the high bench tell them to shift course.
But as Linda points, out the right will try to make hay
with today's decision anyway. Alito gave them some pretty good lines.
He talks about the idea that the white firefighters who sued deserve
"sympathy," an idea that is in the opinion Sotomayor ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Parents of children born with an ambiguous gender often beg doctors to let them choose one gender or another. Now, in Sweden, a couple has decided to raise their now 2-year-old with no gender.
Of course, the kid has one, but they won’t tell anyone what it is. They
dress the kid in any old colors. When they change the diaper, they hide
its parts. The kid’s name is Pop. “We want Pop to grow up more freely
and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,”
Pop’s mother told a Swedish newspaper. “It's cruel to bring a child
into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”
I had a militant feminist mother friend like this once. She only let
her daughter play with cars and trucks, and then one day came in the
room to see her daughter swaddling Baby Tonka in a blanket and feeding
her a bottle ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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This weekend, both the Times and the Post published complimentary yet enormously frustrating profiles of Mark Sanford's wife Jenny.
They portray her as a tough, sharp domestic goddess, without ever
questioning what such a tough, smart woman is doing playing domestic
goddess in the first place. Both pieces make clear that Sanford is a
very intelligent, hard working, focused, “Old Testament woman with a 170 IQ,”
who has been indispensable to her husband’s rise. A magna cum laude
Georgetown graduate and a former vice president at the enormously
reputable Lazard Freres & Co., Sanford walked away from her career
to have a family and help her husband realize his political ambitions.
Junk trade?
A typical Jenny Sanford anecdote goes like this: Mark Sanford
apparently told his wife he wanted to run for Congress while she was
still in the hospital, just having delivered their second child.
Despite the fact that this news came out of nowhere, on a very busy
day, she took it in stride. This—supportive and game, but never at the
expense of her family—seems to be her M.O. “The Sanford house was in a
perpetual state of constructive chaos, friends said. Jenny Sanford
would be ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Last weekend, 17-year-old, Marietta, Ga. native Melanie Oudin beat
24-year-old, sixth-seeded Serbian Jelena Jankovic in a surprise upset
at Wimbledon. Earlier this year, Jankovic was ranked No. 1 in the
world. This is Oudin's first Wimbledon.
After the match, Oudin scored critical praise for her ability to get
herself out of scrappy situations. Jankovic begged to differ: "She
doesn't have any weapons, from what I've seen."
According to the more experienced tennis player, she lost because
she wasn't feeling well. In other words, she blamed it on her period. ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I am wondering what you all thought of the miscarriage scene in Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ new film about pregnant slackers seeking a home.
As Dana’s already pointed out,
it’s not a perfect movie. Too many cartoon characters bouncing around
cartoonishly (although Allison Janey, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Josh
Hamilton are such brilliantly wrought caricatures, it hardly matters).
But as soon as we meet Melanie Lynskey, playing hip Montreal supermom,
Munch Garnett, we know something different is coming.
Munch can’t conceive, and has thus adopted a Victorian houseful of
impossibly tidy, polite children with perfect pitch. But the instant
she finds herself in a room with the explosively pregnant Verona
(played by Maya Rudolph), it’s clear Munch is being devoured by
something. And later that evening, after a good amount of wine, Munch
takes to the stage at an open mic night to perform the saddest, least
sexy pole dance ever witnessed, all jerking head and hollow eyes. Her
husband, Tom, played by Chris Messina, explains that ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Lizzie Skurnik's new book on classic teen novels from our past, Shelf Discovery comes out next month. What better woman to weigh in on the intersection of twin adolescent rites of passage: the bat mitzvah and the Farrah 'do. ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I'm truly heartbroken. MJ was my very first love. I wrote him letters
through his fan club when I was a girl, of course never imagining that
his cute baby-face would eventually morph into something that looked
like a laboratory creation. I loved him through my teen years and even
stuck with him through high school and into my first years of college.
By then I was long over wanting to marry him and was doubtful that he
even liked girls. Still, watching his physical transformation ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Now that Michael Jackson has gotten what always seemed to be his
wish for eternal youth, I expect participants in his secretive life
will emerge for a last reminder of the extremely gifted pop star’s
lifetime of sad dysfunction. The Jackson Family will surely have a
stake in resolving who will attain custody of Jackson’s offspring. Any
dispute will no doubt also involve Debby Rowe,
the dermatologist’s nurse who bore Jackson his oldest two, 11-year-old
son Prince and 10-year-old daughter Paris. Rowe seems to have upheld
her end of their strange bargain, but their businesslike marriage ended
in businesslike divorce. (He found a less personally taxing way to reproduce by using a surrogate to create his third child, also named Prince II, but nicknamed Blanket).
Speaking of mothers, I doubt we’ll hear again from the housekeeper at Jackson’s amusement park ranch, whose son testified he was molested by her ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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"Everything's falling apart." So begins the first episode of HBO's Hung,
a new dramatic comedy that premieres this Sunday, June 28, at 10 p.m.
The opening shots highlight downtown Detroit's urban blight, and the
economic downturn serves as backdrop for the tale of a man who takes
desperate measures to survive financial hardship. Because it's HBO,
this particular red-blooded American man doesn't score a part-time
position at Starbucks. He becomes a male prostitute.
Thomas Jane stars as Ray Drecker, a once-great athlete who's fallen
from his lofty pedestal. His homecoming queen ex-wife (Anne Heche) has
left him for a wealthy dermatologist who's kind enough to give her
Botox injections in the kitchen while ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I was particularly touched by Emily Yoffe's remembrance of Michael Jackson
as the young, innocent, and extraordinarily talented boy he once was,
before his life went terribly wrong. Despite such cautionary tales,
parents continue to push their kids in front of the cameras long before
the age of consent. Just look at the children of Jon & Kate.
It's already too easy picturing the Gosselin brood all
grown up: the plastic surgeries to come, the TV specials of their
family "reunions" (complete with vicious sibling rivalries), the
"comebacks" for child stars who are famous merely for having always
been famous. Maybe they'll be lucky. Their fame,
after all, is diluted by ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A friend told me last night the sort of thing that you only admit
when you’re standing in a bar where the entire room is grooving on the
18th song in a marathon of Michael: that recently, for no real reason,
he had read through a bunch of the coverage of Michael right after Thriller
was released. The general sentiment at the time, he told us, was awe at
what Michael’s music did to existing standards of “black” and “white”
music. Back then, Billboard had its top-10 mainstream chart, and a
separate “Black LPs” chart, and there was little overlap between the
two. Michael changed that.
I was less than born when Thriller came out in 1983, so for
me, it was strange last night to think of Michael as he once was:
someone who raised issues of race not by being some ever-changing
hybrid of black and white, but by being black. I remember ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Michael Jackson was blasting on the streets of New York City last
night, out of car windows, restaurants, bars, and radios set up next to
makeshift fruit stands. People were paying their respects, but also up
to something more. They were taking the first steps towards reclaiming
his music, turning it on, turning it up, and finally, finally, ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I was 10 years old when Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976. This is my school picture from that year, my aggravatingly straight and unstyleable hair awkwardly plastered into the style that was referred to, at least in Texas, as “wings.” Wearing your hair in wings, with a middle part and plenty of hairspray, was near-obligatory in the fifth grade at Helotes Elementary. Even the boys, at least those aspirationally cool enough to have left behind the childish mushroom bowl cut, feathered and sprayed their hair. When the girls played “Angels” at school or at each others’ houses (tossing our wings, pointing imaginary guns and shouting “Freeze!” in breathy voices), I usually took the part of Kate Jackson’s Bree. (She was the "brainy one.” Now there’s a low bar: The brainy Charlie’s Angel.) But the beautiful, athletic, popular girls, the ones who could run fast and had hair that feathered right (and who lacked the pink plastic glasses and epic overbite on view in this photo), got to be Farrah Fawcett's golden and gleaming Jill Munroe ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Tracking celebrities' final moments has become a kind of collective,
Internet parlor game. The e-mails start flying: Who's getting the best
scoop? Who can spot the first credible death announcement? I'm
currently standing vigil over Michael Jackson's Wikipedia page,
wondering if I can catch the moment when someone adds in a date of
death and all the verbs fall, like dominoes, into the past tense. ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Has there ever been a major celebrity who so wholly turned himself
into a freak? He destroyed his face (the tabloids loved to get photos
of him sans surgical mask, a prothestic tip taped to the end of his
ruined nose), he was involved in endless pedophillic scandals, and it
was awful to think of him as a father. What happens now to his
children, who have been trapped in his mansions, forced to live out his
fantasy of the childhood he never had? And don't you just wish you
could reach out to the beautiful, supremely talented boy he once was
and make it all ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Los Angeles Times confirms that Michael Jackson has died of cardiac arrest. Two pop icons down in a day, and to me their lives moved in opposite directions. After her flash appearance as a sex symbol, Fawcett spent the rest of her years backing away from that image, playing (and looking like) a battered spouse in the Apostle, making a video about her anal cancer, generally reminding us that body beautiful is fleeting, and we all go to dust in the end ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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This seems to be the week for obituary headlines I hope I never have. On the New York Times homepage now, Farrah Fawcett is called “A Sex Symbol Who Wanted to Be More.” Pretty pathetic, but not quite as bad as the treatment Ed McMahon got on the hompeage on Tuesday: “Quintessential sidekick.” (The headline on the article itself isn't much kinder, calling him the "top second banana.") Sidekick ... who wanted to be more? The headline didn’t specify, but one can only assume that "second banana" is not anyone’s first aspiration.
So in the spirit of Emily Yoffe's excellent poll on whether you'd rather be the wife of Sanford or Spitzer (which is generating some thoughtful replies in the comments section), I’ll offer another “which is worse”: Would you rather your obituary call you a sex symbol who wanted to be more, or a quintessential sidekick? ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Nicole Allan:
In the wake of Farrah Fawcett's death this morning, thoughts turn to the superficial. Ellen has already focused on her hair—those "feathered bangs, feathered layers, feathers, feathers, feathers"—but what about her teeth? Those shiny, snow-white teeth? Or her endless, hairless legs? All of these assets were duly capitalized upon by America's beauty product industry, leading to a few spectacular TV ads from the '70s ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Farrah Fawcett paid dearly for being a beauty queen with great hair and very white teeth. In the beginning it must have been fun to be a contestant on the Dating Game, marry a 6-million-dollar man, become an Angel (then an ex-angel), and have her own personal complicated love story with Oliver Barrett IV. But through it all, she was more of an image than a real person: a one-dimensional cover girl whose real life fell short in so many ways. Being a former sex symbol must have been difficult. Illness and addiction don’t have to follow, but objectification can’t be that great for the soul ...
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Have you ever feathered? Feathered extravagantly? Feathered desperately, in an effort to give off the Farrah-mone? If so, please e-mail photos of yourself to doublex.slate+farrah@gmail.com, and we will post the best ones on the blog. I’ll offer myself up first for ridicule. Here is me, on what must have been my 12th birthday (I believe there’s a Go-Go’s cassette in that stack). That poor sap with the 'fro is my older brother. Include your own Farrah memories. Here are mine ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I'd heard about The September Issue, a documentary that screened at Sundance, now slated for an August 28 release, that goes behind the scenes at Vogue and focuses in particular on editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, she of the unmessable bob. The trailer makes the film look better than I'd expected ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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For a boy growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Farrah Fawcett was a dreamgirl; but for a girl growing up then, she was a nightmare. Everyone knew that she was the quintessential Charlie’s angel. She was the prototype. Jaclyn Smith was the brunette. Kate Jackson was the “brainy” one. But Farrah, she was perfect—pretty, blonde, and with a gorgeous body, posterized in a bathing suit and adorning every teenage boy’s bedroom wall. I remember the first time I saw that poster at Spencer Gifts and was shocked on two accounts: that the poster was so overtly sexual, and that a human could actually have a body that looked like that. When Farrah left the show, the producers tried to replace her with a series of other, lesser blondes: Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, but no one compared to Farrah. She even had an unusual and angelic name.
And her hair ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional this morning the strip search of Savana Redding, the 13-year-old student who was supposed to have somehow been hiding prescription ibuprofen in her underwear, only wasn't. That's a relief. At oral argument, some of the male justices got all jokey about their own school experiences of people sticking things in their underwear in middle school while they were changing for gym. That particular reminiscence came from Justice Stephen Breyer: Here's Dahlia's great write-up of the argument. And today, Justice David Souter specifically notes, in his majority opinion, that "changing for gym is getting ready for play." A strip search in response to an accusation, by contrast, is "fairly understood as so degrading that a number of communities have decided that strip searches in schools are never reasonable and have banned them no matter what the facts may be." I want to live in one of those places ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Slate’s Will Saletan has a provocative defense of Sanford today:
I feel awful for Sanford's wife and kids. But compared with all the cheaters who have gone before him, I don't think less of him for genuinely loving the other woman or for admitting it. It beats the hell out of seducing somebody, kicking her to the curb, and pretending she was nothing to you—or really meaning it.
I suppose there is some honesty in that. But let’s remember that he was doing it at a press conference ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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“We careened… from not having enough information about the governor to having too much. Way too much,” says Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post. “There was Sanford talking about ‘that whole sparking thing’ and ‘serious overdrive.’ Really, if Sanford’s sparking, I don’t want to know about it, whatever drive he’s in.”
Well, neither do I ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Mark Sanford's shocking presser from this afternoon is all anyone can talk about. Salon's Gary Kamiya admires Sanford for going off-script, and describes the Governor's confession as "so intimate it was almost unwatchable." Politico is reporting that Sanford went to Argentina on South Carolina's nickel back in 2002, but it's unclear if his relationship with "Maria" had already begun at that point ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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How about a poll, XXers. Which worse: Your husband turns out to be Client Number 9, Eliot Spitzer's code name in the prostitution scandal; or your husband, Governor Mark Sanford, writes erotic e-mails to his dear Argentinian friend, Maria, such as this ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
Sara, I agree that the way the truth about Sanford's whereabouts unfolded underscores the importance of local newspapers. But said local newspaper's release of e-mails between Sanford and Maria, the mysterious Argentinian, complicates things a little bit. The State's reporter didn't go to the Atlanta airport on a hunch. The paper had known since December that Sanford was having a transcontinental affair ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Actually, what's odd to me about the Sanford train wreck is how long it took the national media to decide something was truly amiss in the increasingly bizarre explanations coming out of Sanford's office for the governor's disappearance. For a while, it seemed the press just wanted to chalk the whole incident up to Southern eccentricity. This is unfair to Southern eccentrics. Or maybe the press just didn't want to appear to pile on after the Ensign debacle; there's only so much family-values hypocrisy a country can take. But as a friend of mine joked yesterday, it was if Sanford had woken up in a hotel room with a tiger and a baby and was still trying to piece together a story of what happened for his staff ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)
But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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It’s a catchy, catty angle, that’s for sure: An article in today’s New York Times about a recent study of potential gender bias in Broadway theater opens by suggesting that women playwrights do indeed have more trouble getting their work produced than men do—and that female artistic directors, producers, and literary managers “are the ones to blame.” That’s the conclusion purportedly arrived at by a precocious female Princeton undergrad, who undertook the study for her senior thesis in economics, and who recently gave a presentation to a mostly-female audience of playwrights and producers.
If you read further, and check out the thesis itself, it’s clear Emily Glassberg Sands says no such thing ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Hanna and Meghan, I guess that’s your answer to your debate about the pitfalls of the boring old “companionate marriage.” To hear Mark Sanford tell it, one day you’re home digging holes in the yard... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Perhaps South Carolina governor Mark Sanford was moved by the remarks of Sonia Sotomayor ("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")... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, I suspect S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford’s wife, Jenny, was hinting at her husband’s infidelity during her interactions with the press while her husband was AWOL... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Absent from Gov. Mark Sanford's amazing press conference: His wife, Jenny. Present: A man so utterly in the middle of a self-made disaster that he had to process it in front of us. Could it have possibly been more mortifying? Hanna, you're right, Sanford just couldn't save himself from total mortification even when the press threw him a rope. In the middle of one of the most unfortunate and self-indulgent bits, when Sanford was going on about how he met his "dear dear friend," a reporter tried to ask a question. "Wait, let me finish," the governor said, holding up his hand. Oh no no... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who’d been missing for several days, gave an incredible press conference this afternoon about his affair with a mystery woman in Argentina... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
In the moments before his press conference, Double Xers offer ideas of where Mark Sanford's been... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Author J. Robert Lennon has a very amusing and delightfully honest story in the Los Angeles Times, "The Truth About Writers," that answers any gnawing questions you may have had regarding exactly what writers are doing with all that time in which they claim to be writing. Writing? Mmmm. Not exactly. In fact, most of their writing time is spent... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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This week I chided Andrew Sullivan for posting an e-mail supposedly confirming the details of Neda’s death. Andrew Sullivan defends himself, saying the details in the e-mail are confirmed in this Los Angeles Times story. Since then, I’ve gotten dozens of e-mails from Sullivan fans asking me to apologize and run a correction. I politely decline. Neither the Los Angeles Times story, nor any of the news stories that ran yesterday confirm any details in that e-mail. Instead, they all just bolster my conviction that we are witnessing the creation of a myth, not the investigation of a murder... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Last Friday, the State Department issued a travel alert for China, citing “random” swine flu quarantine measures and noting that the U.S. Embassy will be “unable to influence the duration of stay in quarantine.” Not everyone listened, and among the approximately 200 U.S. citizens currently quarantined in China, you’ll find me; my 7-, 5-, and 3- year olds; my mother; and my husband, who—against all odds, according to our docs at home—actually caught it from someone seated behind him on the plane... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yesterday, the Obama administration held a roundtable at the White House campus celebrating the 37th aniversary of Title IX. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, and Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, hosted "an all-star line-up of women athletes and scientists," per the White House release. That included Billie Jean King and Dominique Dawes (rapidly becoming an administration favorite), and a slew of representatives from women's groups like the Feminist Majority, NOW, the Women's Sports Foundation, and the National Women's Law Center... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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From the AP write-up of the newly released Nixon tapes:
Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ask and ye shall receive. Just yesterday, some of us here at Double X were waxing nostalgic for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and lo: Today, Salon book critic Laura Miller offers a run-down of "urban fantasy" novels whose heroines would make our dear, departed, demon-killing California girl proud... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Early in the first episode of NYC Prep, Bravo’s new, Gossip Girl-inspired reality show about New York City high school students that starts tonight, PC, the self-styled Chuck Bass
of the bunch, says to the camera, “In New York City, money flows like
the wind.” It was at this, the moment of the overly knowing, slightly
off metaphor, that I realized it was going to be impossible for me to
hate him. Try as he and the five other teenagers featured on the show
might—and God they try—there is no talk of money, sex, or power, no
uncanny preciousness, no shopper at Barneys, no address on the Upper
East Side, no limo rides, and ultimately no reality show that can turn
these kids into adults. Despite their best efforts, and all of their
privileges, they are in a high school state of mind.
Take, for example, Camille, a senior at tony all-girls school
Nightgale-Bamford, who asserts about her own future: “I will go to
Harvard. Then I will be the business head of a genetics firm. And then
at 40 I will have a husband and two kids.” This is delivered with the
frightening intensity we have come to expect from Blair Waldorf, and is
not, exactly, typical of the average 17-year-old. And yet, it is still
wholly laughable. Check back in a few years, Camille, after life has
gotten in the way.
Even more of the series is taken up with genuinely unprecocious high
school antics, just enacted on the glamorous streets of New York City.
Taylor, a 16-year-old who attends, gasp, public school tells her mother that...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context,
by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama
or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the
protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many
years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil
rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely
unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the
presence of so many women on the streets matters:
For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their separation on last night's much-hyped episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8.
This surprised no one, as tales of Jon sweatily cavorting with coeds
and Kate's utter nastiness have been littering the tabloids for months.
What did surprise me is that the Gosselins will be doing what Sandra
Tsing Loh is doing with her kids: instead of just having Jon or Kate
move out, the couple's 8 children will remain in their Pennsylvania mcmansion, while the parents switch off living there.
In her post describing Tsing Loh's set up, Liza already pointed out the major cracks in this scenario, like what happens if...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Erika Kawalek:
Rarely is the public let in on how clothes actually get made—the
gritty world of sourcing, manufacturing, cross-ocean container
shipping, distribution and slick marketing that goes into supplying
that perpetually regenerating stock of textile novelties we call
fashion.
That may change. On June 7, the New York Times ran a story about the new barcode sticker called GS1 DataBars.
DataBars store information that is useful to retailers, the kind of
tidings that are meaningless to shoppers: inventory stats and sales
data. I marveled at the possibilities of an enhanced version. What if
we could...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video”
yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that
I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after
being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean
that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More
subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the
world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body.
I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this
(Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it
haunted me all last night.
Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness
the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps
because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to
transform it. Ironically...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday;
this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were
in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As
Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.
I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for
me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives
untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to
imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context;
far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the
family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here
the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more
fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the
Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in
Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who
acknowledge the conversation to be insular... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yes, Dana,
you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian
woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff
movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has
absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This
isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening,
frantic look at a woman dying in the street.
But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus
and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, just so you know, I wasn’t calling your marriage “boring”; Cristina Nehring was. No, in all seriousness, I’m glad you posted in response to Loh and to my piece about The Vindication of Love.
Your point that for every crazy artist in a series of chaotic
relationships there’s one in a stable partnership is well-taken.
Virginia Woolf, no slouch in the achievement department, may have had
one of the most boring marriages of all time. But she liked it.
Meanwhile, many partnerships you mention—like Joan Didion and John
Gregory Dunne—were hardly boring. (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hey ladies—are you weirded out by the strange sexual power dynamics in Twilight? So is Buffy the vampire slayer, and she's got something to say about it. Like to hear it? Here it goes... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, thank you for the necessary astringency of your last post about
the "Neda" video and the construction of a martyr mythology in the
blogosphere’s reporting on Iran. I haven’t been able to bring myself to
watch the entire unedited Neda video on YouTube; it feels too close to
a snuff movie. Assuming this graphic clip really does document a young
woman’s death at the hands of paramilitary snipers—something we lack
the reporting to confirm—what gives us the right to watch it and
forward to and fro as proof of our solidarity with the forces of
democracy and reform in Iran (something that, as you point out, Mousavi
is far from representing)? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Looking for a dad-themed movie to rent this Father’s Day? Most movies
about dads portray them in one of two ways: as an incompetent boob (National Lampoon’s Vacation, Daddy Day Camp, Three Men and a Baby) or as a problem-of-a-father (The Great Santini, Life With Father, Father of the Bride).
Recently, however, I saw two movies (both out on DVD now) that I think
exemplify another kind of movie about fathers: the über-daddy movie... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Andrew Sullivan posts this e-mail today under the headline “Confirming the Basij Murder of Neda.”
The video, for those who haven’t seen it, is graphic and disturbing.
The e-mail Sullivan points to, however, confirms nothing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The reliably wired Marc Ambinder flags National Journal's almost foolishly comprehensive, 366-person omnibus study
of the folks working in every nook and cranny of the Obama
administration (complete with phone numbers)! I've only carved my way
through a third of it, but Marc dishes the important stats... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, you call out the false dichotomy between the miserable married and passionate single, and in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Ginia Bellafante discusses Jodi Picoult's novels, and the false dichotomy between good parent and bad. Substitute marriage for parenting—"the difference between marriage that assumes the shape of performed concern and marriage that takes the form
of active tending"—and you've hit on what we've been discussing all week with Tsing Loh's piece... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anna Balkrishna’s article about her mother’s ill-fated love for a convict in Double X
last week was a fascinating story, compellingly told. I posted an
(unsolicited) suggestion that the author, whom I have not met,
communicate directly with her mom as genuinely as she did with her
readers. Anna and her mother both replied with more insight into their
relationship and their collaboration on the piece, prompting me to
reconsider my assumptions about them, and reflect anew on my own
efforts to write about my family—and my own mistakes with love... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dame Helen Mirren (my #1 girl crush) is currently starring as Phèdre at
the National Theatre in London (my #1 arts institution crush). Stuck
Stateside this summer? You're in luck: Starting on June 25, the
National will be beaming the production to cinemas around the world... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A video of the death of a young Iranian protester named Neda has been traveling incredibly quickly around the Twittersphere and the rest of the Internet (first link contains disturbing images). She has become an instant symbol of Iranian opposition... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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And you thought human sex was messy: A paper published in Science yesterday introduces the world to a bunch of tiny, ancient crustaceans that produced relatively massive sperm. And io9.com has pictures! (Don't worry; they're safe for work—and oddly beautiful.)
Researchers in Europe used cutting-edge "synchrotron X-ray
holotomography" to non-invasively examine 100-million-year-old
fossilized ostracods.
The descendants of these millimeter-long creatures produce giant
sperm—up to 10 times as big as their bodies, in some cases—and the new
fossil images prove... (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:
I experienced yet another burst of joy on behalf of Iranians today as I read this dispatch
about the meaning—and more importantly, the feeling—of the
post-election demonstrations. The piece, by an Iranian student named
Shane M., is very good until the last four paragraphs, when it becomes
astonishing. The writer paints an image of a country surprised by
itself—by its own spirit and audacity and modernity and
intellectualism—and by the dramatic pace of change that was supposed to
unfold slowly, almost imperceptibly, until it snowballed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dayo, I disagree that mothers—even single mothers—should be honored on
Father’s Day. If we systematically turn Father’s Day into yet another
celebration of all of the child-rearing and housekeeping that female
heads of household take care of, I worry that will inadvertently
suggest that there isn’t enough child-rearing and housekeeping to
celebrate among dads... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A friend urges me to tell you that you might want to check out this weekend's call to stand with the people of Iran. Groups are gathering on Sunday at 3 p.m. in select cities to show support for protesters in Tehran... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the past few days, on my own website, my life has been reduced to
vanilla pudding. I am dull, devoid of passion, pedestrian, the human
equivalent of a “yawning chubby house cat,” says Meghan, summarizing Cristina Nehring’s new book Vindication of Love,
the caged bird who forgot how to sing. This is because I am trapped in
something that goes by the clinical name of “companionate marriage,”
and worse, I like it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It would have been so much easier for me to find the time to write
this post if I had voice-recognition software, a sophisticated
self-built database with all my contacts including my Double X blog
posting instructions, which I keep losing, and most of all if I had an
administrative-assistant-type of husband who handled all the household
bills and dental appointments and child-care challenges and playdates
and grocery shopping and left me free to spend more time at the
keyboard.
But I don't have these things. I mean, I do have a husband, and he
does what he can, but he leaves for work earlier than I do, so this
morning I was the one who took the cat to the vet. Despite the
resulting time crunch, I am posting anyway to say that I was fascinated
by David Pogue's column in the New York Times revealing his work efficiency secrets... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When word broke that Barack Obama is pausing his busy schedule of revamping health care and heeding climate science and not intervening in the electoral process of a sovereign nation in order to spend three hours preaching "responsible fatherhood"—why, I nearly did a jig. The celebrity-stuffed event in the East Room sheds light on a little-reported obsession of the president whose own father abandoned him when he was barely 2 years old... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Coming from a family of writers, I am all too familiar with the
delicate issue you raise, Bonnie, of whether and how to write about
one’s family. For me, the most uncomfortable part of having a writer
for a mother isn’t when she writes about me. The unsettling part is
when she writes about herself... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Susannah, you're right that the appeal of the Real Housewives of New Jersey lies in their outsize cattiness. But in today's XXtra Small, Torie writes about the anti-Housewife: The Hills' Lauren Conrad and her new, semi-autobiographical book L.A. Candy. Conrad's appeal has always been as the bland nice girl... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Why is The Real Housewives of New Jersey a smash-hit? The season finale's 4.6 million viewers
in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic testify to its broad appeal, but
why are we so enamored with these table-tossing housewives? Is it the
big hair? The brash talk? The back stabbing? One thing's for sure. It's
not their manners.
Out of all the Real Housewives series—from Orange County to Atlanta to New York City—"New Jersey" is the breakaway hit. Because I have deeply bad taste in TV... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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We’ve debated whether to hug or not to hug
in professional settings, but what’s the proper protocol when it comes
to titles? At a hearing on Tuesday, California Sen. Barbara Boxer told
Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, division leader of the Army Corps of
Engineers, "Could you say 'senator' instead of 'ma'am?
It's just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title. I'd appreciate
it." The General, with all the quickness of an Army lifer, responded... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sandra Bullock is right that The Proposal, out today, is not about cougars.
The movie ignores the age gap between leading lady Bullock, almost 45,
and leading man Ryan Reynolds, 32. Which is good, according to Bullock:
"The word cougar makes me want to throw up in my mouth,” she told USA Today.
But Bullock is wrong when she tries to duck the romcom label. “It's
a comedy that has romance in it,” she insists. ‘When you say romantic
comedy, everyone cringes.” Sorry, but the plot is as romcom as it gets... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Politico writer Lisa Lerer:
Obsessive White House watchers can't stop talking about an ESPN article
on the political pecking order of presidential basketball games. Author
Wright Thompson breaks down the sociology (and some of the psychology)
of how power works in Washington.
"What's the hottest invite in Washington?" former Clinton press
secretary Dee Dee Myers asks in the article. "Yeah, it's great to go to
White House state dinners or Stevie Wonder kinds of events. But what's
the sine qua non? It's a pickup game with Obama. That's the inner,
inner, inner sanctum."
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All over town, people are playing hoops—in newly started leagues, in...
(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
There's something a little different about the State Department's most recent annual Trafficking in Persons Report, released Tuesday. Under former Secretary Rice, the reports’ introductions cast the U.S. as a crusader against the evils of human trafficking. "President George W. Bush has committed the United States Government to lead in combating this serious 21st century challenge," she wrote in 2007. But Secretary Clinton admits that America has its own “struggle with modern day slavery”... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The talking point about Obama’s memo on domestic partnerships is that “It’s a first step.” Obama said it, and John Berry, the openly gay head of the Office of Personnel Management, has been repeating it all day. The implication is that the administration is ready to march proudly down the path of ever more gay freedom and equality. This strikes me as only half believable, as Emily pointed out yesterday. All the administration did was scan the existing law and see where they could apply it without violating the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). That counts as barely a step at all... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Generally, I try to avoid advertiser-created viral videos like the plague. Created by corporations, they tend to make me feel duped into watching them, whether they're any good or not. But I found a new series of viral videos by Tampax to be unusually amusing and surprisingly endearing.
At Zack16.com, 16-year-old Zack Johnson wakes up to find his penis has disappeared and been replaced by a vagina. Quelle horror!... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Kerry: Returning to Tsing Loh, for a sec, I want to second your point: It is odd to describe a 20-year-old relationship that produced two kids and a lot of domestic support as a "failure" just because it doesn’t last until death do us part and all that. Like you, I find it troubling that we routinely describe marriages and relationships that end with this evaluative language. “They had a failed marriage,” we say; or, “He had a failed relationship with a ballet dancer.”
But some—maybe even many—of these relationships are not “failed” at all... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dear XX Factor and Double X readers in NY: Tomorrow is your chance to meet with Double X writers and editors in person. We're co-hosting a meet-up with Guernica, the excellent online literary magazine of politics and culture, from 6 to 10 pm at Le Poisson Rouge at 158 Bleecker Street (please rsvp here).
Come join us and raise a glass to celebrate our recent launch. And
check out Guernica beforehand if you haven't already. This issue
(pleasingly to us XXers) focuses on some smart, independent women:
There's a fabulous interview with Geek Love author Katherine Dunn about what drew her to boxing, among other things; a moving excerpt from Katherine Russell Rich's memoir, Dreaming in Hindi, about traveling to India after a remission from stage 4 breast cancer; and a revealing interview with correspondent Michaela Wrong about corruption in Kenya. (Plus, we like the pretty pink looping design that pops up when you scroll over the site logo.)
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Bruno approaches. It’s three and a half weeks until the arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat follow-up, about a gay, Austrian fashion reporter who talks like this “Ich sleep in a seaweed body wrap under a Zac Posen Navy-Cut Nightshirt. In mein dreams, ich sleep naked in a giant reed basket drifting slowly down ze Nile, cradled in ze arms of Daniel Radcliffe.” But Cohen’s already posing naked on the cover of GQ, worrying Austrians, troubling troubgay rights groups, and sticking his bum in Eminem’s face. The emerging question: Will Bruno be good for the gays?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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As riveting images and stories pour out of Iran, the Obama administration's lack of moral clarity today is getting to me. As in:
The State Department asked Twitter to defer maintenance so that Iranians could keep using the site to organize and inform, but Obama could only bring himself to say that he found the violence "deeply troubling," a muted response in the circumstances, as my colleague John Dickerson pointed out.
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The administration will announce some benefits for the partners of gay federal employees today, but not full health insurance... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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There’s something fishy about Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign’s admission yesterday that he had an affair.... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Earlier this month, an Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz, undertook an intriguing experiment. What would happen if, instead of traditional journalists, novelists and poets wrote the news?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When I was reading Sandra Tsing Loh's article in the Atlantic that we've all been discussing, I found myself getting distracted by a lot of things, among them the ostentatious dishes of the male cook in the household she visits for dinner. I know she emphasized this for bitter effect, but it did ring true in that it sometimes strikes me that when men cook, they like to cook fancy—as opposed to women, who are what one food editor I know calls the "little brown wrens" of the cooking world... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dahlia, Hanna, Jess, Abby: This debate over marriage arrives as I am
in a perfect storm of marriage-related texts. In addition to Tsing
Loh’s provocative piece about why everyone should get divorced, I’m in the middle of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese’s controversial account of the 1960s sexual revolution, and Christina Nehring’s excellent A Vindication of Love,
a polemic making the case for the importance of love—messy, violent,
volcanic, inequitable love—in women’s lives. Perhaps I, too, have read
too many books, but I don't quite agree that a) the real drag is
children, not marriage or b) that Tsing Loh is a victim of magazines
that peddle a vision of a life of “perfect romantic intimacy” and
“perfect mothering.” Taken together, all this material suggests just
how idealized the "companionate" marriage has become. So let me ask:
Could she just have decided that such a marriage is, well, not for her?
And that—gasp—she was going to be arch about what has, after all,
become the sacred cow of feminism?
Her piece is most interesting to me for the personal corrective it
offers to the view that a present-day equitable partnership between a
man and a woman is the ideal arrangement to which all of us should
aspire. In a sense, Tsing Loh is just writing about the old division
between passion and intimacy / security. She doesn’t have much new to
say (this has been a debate forever, and at some point
someone—me—inevitably reminds us all that “courtly love” was originally
adulterous love, an ameliorative balm to the tedious social
arrangements that were marriage). But I found it refreshing to hear a
woman confess so baldly that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I found myself gagging at the first line of Sandra Tsing Loh's article
where she says, "Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing." Something
about that horror part got under my skin—that she was trying to
convince us, her readers, that divorce was something that "just
happened" to her, outside of her control. And that was only the
beginning of the pity-party. Having an affair, she confesses, "was a
surprise." Her decision not rebuild her marriage: "heart-shattering."
Words to induce our pity, to absolve her responsibility to her
committment, her husband, her friends, and her children. The whole
article, to me, read as ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood,
but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh
describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of
merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains in this piece are
the books—the piles and piles of books that she uses to arrange her
life. From what she depicts as her “lazy, undisciplined attachment
parenting” to the nearly pornographic, Pottery Barn descriptions of her
friend’s kitchen renovation, the story leaps from one fashionable
marriage book to the next. She won’t hire a nanny because of Barbara
Ehrenreich’s dictum that she’d “never let another woman scrub her
toilets.” Her friends’ absurd husbands are either “cheating” with
subscriptions to gourmet magazines or bookmarked porn sites. Whole
conversations with her girlfriends ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Late last Friday, in a development that hasn't gotten enough attention,
a judge appointed by George W. Bush breathed a big breath of life into
a lawsuit that seeks to hold John Yoo accountable for the abuse suffered by Jose Padilla, one of the Bush administration's most notoriously mistreated one-time enemy combatants. I've written about Padilla's suit against Yoo for Slate.
When it was filed, Padilla's lawyers were accused of abusing the legal
system by going after Yoo, a sole former Bush lawyer who is on the
faculty of Berkeley's law school. (Disclosure: Padillla's counsel
include Jonathan Freiman, who is a friend of mine, and students in a
Yale Law School clinic, where I'm a fellow.) Let's just say that last
week's ruling by Judge Jeffrey White is a major victory for Padilla and
sweet vindication for the lawyers who represent him. The judge rejected
all but one of Yoo's claims of immunity and said... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, I too read the Sandra Tsing-Loh piece in the Atlantic, and I think she's missing part of the point. It's not modern marriage that's the problem, it's modern child rearing. Motherhood and marriage are inextricably linked in Tsing-Loh's piece, and while she never explictly says it, she chooses modern motherhood over her marriage:
Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I cannot take on yet another arduous home- and self-improvement project, that of rekindling our romance. Sobered by this failure as a mother—which is to say, my failure as a wife—I’ve since begun a journey of reading, thinking, and listening to what’s going on in other 21st-century American families.
But even though Tsing-Loh complains about the "staggering working mother's to-do list," she refuses to ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In this month’s Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh
writes about her recent divorce from her husband of 20 years. Divorce
is not, for her, what it was in the Gloria Gaynor days, a path to
delirious freedom and dramatic rebirth. Instead, her marriage dissolves
the way it was lived, with haggling over domestic tedium. Tsing Loh,
who had the affair (as she confesses obliquely), guiltily offers to
keep changing the kitty litter.
What’s ultimately distressing about her essay is not the details of
the divorce (affair, alienation, what to do with the kids) but her
dismal portrait of the modern American marriage. Long-term monogamy is
obsolete and unnatural in any age, she argues, with some support from
anthropologists. But in our age, when relationships are governed by
children’s needs and defined in management speak, they are doomed.
“Given my staggering working mother’s to-do list, I can not take on
yet another arduous home and self improvement project, that of
rekindling our romance,” she writes.
The piece has its exaggerations and tropes—for example the scene
where her group of girlfriends, who stand in for all womankind,
suddenly break down and confess that they, too, are dying to get
divorced.
But many of the details in her very vivid and damning portrait are
bound to resonate. The most common and seemingly happy marriages are ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yes, Vanessa, you are right that the Iranian elections are an argument against "U.S. interference" as a tool of democratization—if, by that, you mean U.S. military intervention. However, they are an excellent argument in favor of more peaceful forms U.S. democracy promotion, by which I mean radio programs like Radio Free Europe's Radio Farda, support for human rights websites (such as the excellent iranrights.org) based outside the country and training and other kinds of support and training organized by the National Endowment for Democracy and similar groups. The point of such exercises is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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So Iran's Guardian Council has agreed to do a partial recount of the votes, according to the New York Times
and other sites, in response to street riots and protests larger than
any in the country since 1979. If you haven't yet seen pictures of
what's taking place, you have to check out this gallery
from The Big Picture. (The image of the protestor helping the injured
riot officer is amazing.) As everyone else has already noted, too, it's
fascinating that social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have
helped fuel protests and fervor. It's become a cliche that ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it.
It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when
Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project
in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex
about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean,
he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was
one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A)
he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.
Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch,
and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up
over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate
tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Do women novelists work in "miniature"? This was the question posed by the cover piece in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. The piece was a review of Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women,
a novel that offers a canny fictional portrait of how women's rights
have (and have not) evolved over time. In the book (which I haven't
read in full yet) Walbert tries to summarize women's history by
dramatizing it. At the opening of the piece, the review's author, Leah
Hager Cohen, restates Virginia Woolf's famous quote about how we see
men and women's novels differently: “This is an important book, the
critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant
book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.”
Ahh, I thought. Hager Cohen is going to take on the old dichotomies and
demolish them! And she's going to do so in the Book Review itself, one of the few literary edifices that still shapes people's careers—and itself sometimes reflects these same old fallacious assumptions. She is going to create a revolution from within!
Alas, no. In fact, this review is a prime example of what I'll now
call literary Stockholm Syndrome, in which women reviewers and writers
all too eagerly embrace the sexist—and hell, yes, let's call it what it
is—terms by which women's writing is still evaluated. An example: ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
If you're wondering why there isn't reliable polling data to help
settle the question of whether the Iranian election was a farce, the Washington Post offers all sorts of (contradictory) opinions:
Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty argue that reliable polling is possible, that they did it, and that the results were strongly in Ahmadinejad's favor. But Jon Cohen points out
that their poll was completed in May, before the contest got really
heated, and that even then more than half of the respondents said they
hadn't made up their mind yet (so the 2:1 number Ballen and Doherty
cite was only among people who had decided who they were voting for).
Meanwhile, Mehdi Khalaji says ... (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:
TV images of street protests following Iran’s disputed election offer
perhaps the strongest argument against U.S. interference as a tool for
democratization. The footage
shows vibrant, vigorous dissent of a kind not seen in Iran since the
revolution: protesters moving through the streets like a human wave,
ignoring the batons of riot police and shouting their support for
opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, the loser according to official tallies
that give Mahmoud Ahmadinejad 63 percent of the vote. Whether the
election was rigged, whether the protesters succeed in reversing the
results, they have already won a huge victory by disrupting on their own the political status quo in a nation that Anne Applebaum rightly calls “a classic example of managed democracy.” This is the kind of organic democratic movement that is ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Nora Roberts has written
182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new
romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million
copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline
in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I
should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with
Nora Roberts.
There are clear sociological motivations for reading Roberts (one in
five readers is reading romance; Roberts is the Goliath of romance; she
sold 17 million books last year, almost all, one assumes to American women), but Collins makes the case ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan: After watching Steven Soderbergh's call-girl movie, The Girlfriend Experience,
starring adult film star Sasha Grey, you ask: "Can Sasha Grey really
liberate herself—and other women—through porn?" My answer? Um, no?
But first things first. I thought the movie was great. I liked it
more than most, who, like you, found it to be relatively cold and
distant. (Although, frankly, I'm not sure how much you liked it or
didn't? Anyway.) I thought it was an intriguing, sometimes sweet,
occasionally disturbing, and frequently funny peek behind the curtain
at the business of sex. I thought his gently mocking, sympathetic
portrayal of the men who pay for it was pretty spot on. I think he
didn't quite "get" Grey, or her character. It's hard to understand what
it's like to sell sex for a living, especially if the seller is a
woman, and the voyeur is a man. Penises have a tendency to get in the
way.
Like you, I guess I see Grey as more of a self-constructed body politic than, well, genuine. But that's sort of the nature of ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 30 several men and a woman broke into an Arizona trailer,
killing 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father. This weekend three people were arrested
for the murder, two of whom are leaders of the Minutemen American
Defense, an anti-illegal immigrant group not connected with the
Minuteman Project. Here’s one of the accused on his web site:
"I take a very hard line with drugs and illegal
immigration. Make no bones about it, I have a zero tolerance for
terrorists, and that is what they are.”
It would not have occurred to your average anti-immigration
activist, before 9/11, to describe Mexican families seeking honest work
as “terrorists.” Nor would it have occurred to liberals to call the
Minutemen themselves “precursors of domestic terrorism.”
Yet George Bush used this rhetorical device so successfully, and so
pervasively, that it has now become ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here's a guest post from Slate V intern Lindsay O'Neal:
On Wednesday, I joined a hundred other voyeurs at the Rock 'n' Roll Hotel in D.C. to watch air guitar's scandalous sister sport, air sex. Air sex, as the name implies, is a theatrical sexual performance with an imaginary partner. The Air Sex competitions are to be held in 16 cities across the U.S., culminating in the World Air Sex Championship where the Ultimate Air Lover will be crowned. (It would have been 17, but the Utah venue, facing a threat of a revoked liquor license if it hosted the event, backed out.)
I was surprised to find that the performers and the audience were of the typical D.C. mold—professional and straight-laced. My favorite, “Dr. Love,” came straight from the hospital still donning his scrubs. (Watch him, and the rest of the highlight reel, below.) The first performer, Auto Asphyxia, a Georgetown Law student, told me... (To read the rest of this post, and watch the highlight reel, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Iranian voters go to the polls today in an election being discussed in apocalyptic terms,
as Iran’s next great awakening. Much of the popular excitement centers
around Zahra Rahnavard, wife of reformist candidate Mir Hussein
Moussavi, also known as Iran’s Michelle Obama. The 1979 revolution has
brought conflicting results for women. It’s created sexual hypocrisy
and fear of liberated women, as Janet Afary describes in her new book Sexual Politics in Modern Iran.
But it’s also raised the average age of marriage and opened up
opportunities for women. Rahnavard represents a slow awakening of... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Great job, Obama! You've finally succeeded in getting somebody else
to take some of those Guantanamo detainees off your hands. Your
masterful diplomacy, although strangely ignored by more than 100 of our
petitioned allies, has swayed the tiny island country of Palau to
generously take a small group of the least dangerous detainees. Perhaps
also helpful was the mere fee of $200 million we're paying them,
which—as the Wall Street Journal points out—is
a practical $10,000 for every citizen of Palau. On the heels of that
good news comes yet more: Saudi Arabia is willing to take almost 100 of
the most dangerous detainees. Details of that negotiation still to come.
I can't help but wonder if the protesters who raged over
America's abuse of detainees in Guantanamo will express the same level
of outrage for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, you brought up BlackBerry etiquette
yesterday, after Tom Golisano got mad at New York State Senate majority
leader Malcolm Smith for rude usage of his. I'm continually astounded
by the blatant disregard with which people whip out their devices and
start multitasking in situations where full attention is obviously what
etiquette demands. Or what safety demands—too often I've been the
backseat witness to the unnerving practice of BlackBerrying while
driving. I don't care that your BlackBerry has a map. Either pull over
to check it, or have the passenger navigate, just like in the old days
of paper maps.
But for the most part, it seems like even those guilty of succumbing to BlackBerry's pull toward constant communication, like Emily and Inci
admit to being, realize and feel guilty about their breach of
etiquette. The hazier question, I've found, is what's appropriate
regarding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Pixar’s making a movie about a girl! The animation company announced its schedule through 2012
and not one, but two of their films will feature females. Harping on
Pixar for not having made a movie with a female heroine sooner,
especially when I’m still high on Up! (just as Meghan is), feels a little like ragging on Jackson Pollack for not painting straight lines. Still, it’s exciting news.
The first film, Newt, out in 2011, imagines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My favorite part of this week's crack up of the New York legislature is Governor Patterson's plea, "Think of the lobbyists!" My
next favorite part is that Tom Golisano, the businessman who seems to
have prodded two Democratic state senators into flipping to the GOP and
instigating a Republican takeover, says he got mad at the Dems after a
meeting at which Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith couldn't take his eyes off his BlackBerry. Ah, the BlackBerry brush off. I think I'd put that at the top of a list of digital age breaches of etiquette. As in... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The crazy thing though, Hanna, about the fringe obsession with Obama and Jewish conspiracy
is that it's happening even as the Jews who worried that Obama wouldn't
show enough allegiance to Israel are worrying more. Before the
election, Obama the candidate held the hands of the little old Jewish
ladies with blue hair in Florida who want a president who will put
Israel first no matter what—even when the Israeli government doesn't
necessarily deserve that kind of fealty—and reassured them that he
wouldn't move even the teeniest step away from Bush's Israel stance. (I
won't call it pro-Israel, because I don't think it actually works out
that way all the time.) And in the end... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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What is it with Obama and the Jews? Ever since he chose Rahm Emanuel, the child of an Israeli, as his chief of staff, conspiracy theories have raged about Obama's connection to the Jews... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Ever since Hedda Nussbaum’s battered face appeared on the cover of tabloids in 1987, the wives of insane, violent men have faced a particularly cruel kind of scrutiny. Nussbaum called herself the victim of “intimate terrorism,” but the world judged her culpable for failing to protect her adopted 6-year-old daughter from her murderous husband. The BTK Killer had a wife and children. James von Brunn, the white supremacist who allegedly shot two people at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum yesterday, does too... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Lera Loeb, fashion blogger and self-described "mail-order bride," takes to the pages of Glamour to defend her relationship. Given the power a citizen can wield over a foreigner desperate for a green card, we're all familiar with stories of this kind that end badly. But Loeb's marriage is happy, and hers is a story about stigma... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Calling all intellectually curious, engaged, and excited readers: We're looking for fall interns for Double X. We have positions to fill in both the D.C. and New York offices. Interested applicants should e-mail us a résumé, three clips (published articles, blog entries, and classroom assignments all acceptable), and a short critique of the site. Please specify whether you want to be considered for the D.C. or NYC position, and what your availability will be (part-time or full? away for certain weeks?) for September through December. The deadline for applications is July 1.
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A post from Double X writer Garance Franke-Ruta:
From the department of small comforts: The sentencing Monday of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years in prison by North Korean authorities is likely to shine a bright light on the situation facing North Korean women who seek refuge in China... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Well, I'm glad the famous ones have off-days, too. Susan Orlean (staff writer at The New Yorker, author of The Orchid Thief, Meryl Streep muse) has been tweeting this morning about how hard it is to be an at-home writer—especially if you're a woman and a mother. She first posted: "When I was pregnant people said, Yr job is so flexible—perfect w/a baby! Clearly, they knew nothing about writing and/or kids."... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A new study from the University of Michigan shows that in metropolitan areas where men are scarce, they are less likely to propose marriage and tend to spend more time playing the field. This is not even remotely surprising, but ScienceDaily reports that there are other societal effects when there is a surplus of women in a reigon... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I dunno, Dahlia, why wouldn't American women want Michelle Obama's life? Sure, it's more superego than ego at the moment, and yes she has subordinated her professional ambitions to her husband's. But she has plenty of power, she gets to talk policy as well as fluff, and she can dine out on these White House moments for all the rest of her life. I mean, how much do you really chafe at being in the helpmeet role when your husband is the president, and you helped make him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Via Fark—a 1933 "Test for Husbands" (in two parts) that offers points and demerits for various behaviors. How would your husband shape up?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On the subject of "cougar dreams" and older women pairing off with younger men, the concept did not originate with Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher. Although the term "cougar" seemed to spring into the lexicon about 10 years after I could have qualified, I remember fondly a brief romance with a recent college grad of 23 who courted me when I was 29. Problem was, I couldn't stop... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Jessica, the most striking thing to me about Amanda’s great post on the widely-envied Obama marriage was that I read it immediately before reading Naomi Wolf’s quirky piece in Harper's Bazaar that Willa mentions about women who ostensibly covet Angelina Jolie’s entire life. I confess that while I have glanced longingly at the Obama’s marriage—the date nights; the obvious, palpable affection; the perpetual-motion-mother-in-law—it never once occurred to me to lust after Jolie’s domestic arrangement... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, Naomi Wolf has penned an absurd, overwrought, swooning love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf’s analysis, most fully embodies “having it all.” It’s just about impossible to read this piece and simultaneously remember that Wolf is a serious feminist and thinker. She has bent her erudition to the plainly ridiculous, plainly thankless task of explaining that, because Angelina Jolie is a symbol of both goodness and sexiness, she is a better, more complete woman than Mother Teresa, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently, if Mother Teresa had made time to screw hotties between her busy orphan-caring schedule... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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So I finally saw Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience this weekend. Set in late 2008, as the gilded age gives way to financial collapse, it is story of an escort (played by porn star Sasha Grey) trying to take her business to the next level, and finding, instead, that she is not as in control of her life as she thinks. The film is shot in high-def video; this, in addition to Grey's affectless performance has the effect of making everything seem distanced. One presumes this is Soderbergh's point... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In a brief essay in Salon, cultural critic Amanda Fortini remarks on the trend of Obama marriage idealization. "Not since JFK was in the White House has there been a political marriage Americans have envied to this extent, a first family they might actually like to emulate," Fortini writes. But I have no desire to mimic the Obama union... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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‘Cougar Dream' is Anthem for Hot Mamas Everywhere, was the
subject of the press release. I clicked through to the song, expecting
to hear a woman crooning about her conquest of some sex-toy "cub" (like
what The Big Money's Chad Martin could have been, if only he worked that room a little harder!). Turns out the cougar anthem for hot mamas... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Have you ever wanted to go on a road trip with David Lynch, but felt trepidatious about taking to the highway with the singular, seminal, strange director of Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive
for fear it would turn epically bizarre, necessarily lead to you
fleeing, as fast as possible, from someone beyond creepy and
mysterious, and give you unsettling, extremely vivid dreams likely to
involve riddle-spewing dwarfs? Lucky for you, the David Lynch road trip
experience... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In reporting a story for the New York Times Magazine about a yoga teacher who is going on food stamps, I started wondering about how the business of yoga is structured. There are few full-time teaching jobs, as far as I could tell, and almost no one I talked to was getting health insurance or other benefits. So, I wonder—what's the deal?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan,
thanks so much for posting about the importance of female mentorship.
I'm no physicist (anymore) but with many friends plus a mom in science,
I am especially sensitive to the need for and frequent lack of XX
mentorship in these disciplines. We've all heard reports that Americans
lag behind in the hard sciences generally—but less reported is the fact
that women rarely take on the quant-heavy jobs that do exist, or that
tenured female science and engineering faculty are almost nonexistent.
Then there are the other, real disadvantages talked about in the
Fisman/NBER report.
Some of this, of course, has to do with... (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:
Like you, Anne,
I’ve been wondering what kind of big, concrete policy changes will come
out of Obama’s Cairo speech yesterday. The specific programs he spoke
of—far down near the end of the hour-long address—seemed
soft-focus and shallow compared to the gigantic arc of intercultural
understanding traced by his rhetoric. But I want to spend a moment here
on Obama’s language, which, as always, rewards... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Samantha, David's dad in the dentist video was his actual dad, so we
hold him to the standard of life, not art. I actually found this MGMT video
refreshing, as an antidote to the Disney-fied, chock full o' lessons
kid fare that's out today. (Hola, Dora!) Once upon a time, fairy tales
helped kids make sense of their outsized terrors and emotions. They did
not teach them how to wash their hands, or say "recycle" in Spanish.
Babies do cry frantically when they are left alone in a crib, as if—and
many a parent has said this—there were monsters in there. Or they swear
they see monsters in the... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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When the David after the dentist video came out, we had a good conversation about whether it was wrong for the father to post this video of his son all drugged up and in pain. Hanna cried foul, but some of us agreed it was funny—and harmless—enough to be worth the potential privacy invasion. Not so with the latest music video from MGMT, in which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Over on Slate, there's a really interesting piece by Ray Fisman about the importance of female mentorship.
Apparently, a recent working paper from the NBER found a way to measure
the effects of female vs. male teachers on students at the Air Force
Academy. It can be hard to distinguish among various complicating
factors when... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Willa, it's amazing that Kate Gosselin—and Kate Gosselin's hair—have graced the cover of US Weekly for the past six weeks.
And it's clear that hunger for TomKat news has waned. But I've become
increasingly skeptical of economy-driven explanations for shifts in
mass culture, and I'm not as sure as you seem to be that this
preference for reality-based tabloid fodder is attributable to our... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sonia Sotomayor has a lovely smile, and like many Americans she has paid a price for it. According to the questionnaire she completed as part of the Senate confirmation process, she owes approximately $15,000 to her dentist.
Several writers have been boggled by the size of the bill. In fact,
it's pretty easy to spend $15,000 on dental treatment. Dental plans
generally cover... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Oh joy! I have discovered another reason why I love Rachel Maddow. The totally original MSNBC news anchor and XX Factor heartthrob twittered a link yesterday to Minnesota Zoo's interactive game highlighting their new Africa exhibit. (Maddow's tweet: "My inner 8 year old will not let me do anything today that does not somehow involve this website: http://whopooped.org/.") The game... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist, caused a tizzy this week with his proposal to decrease gun violence: strip all men of their firearms, and give women guns.
Men are way more likely to shoot and kill people, he argues, citing the
figure that “in 2005, 91.3 percent of gun homicides were committed by
men, 8.7 percent by women.” So taking away their guns should cut down
the number of gun-related deaths. As for giving guns to women... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Now that the insulting question of whether Sonia Sotomayor is just
another Harriet Miers has subsided, a new one arises: Does Barack
Obama's nominee have more in common with conservative justice Sam
Alito? Liberals opposed Alito far more strenuously than they did
current Chief Justice and George W. Bush nominee John Roberts. An
Italian from working-class roots who also attended Princeton, Alito
wields the same, "up from the bootstraps" personal history as
Sotomayor. And—much like the Obama administration's emphasis on its
nominee's "wisdom accumulated from an inspiring life's journey"—the Bush White House stressed... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Sunday night was when I first found out abortionist Dr. George Tiller had been murdered. But unlike Elizabeth Weil, I knew exactly who he was. I grew up in a conservative Christian family: loving my dad's lapel pin of tiny baby feet, dropping change in baby bottles to raise money for crisis pregnancy centers, and keeping up with relevant legislation. My family and I are probably a pretty good representation of 99 percent of the pro-life movement—people who wouldn't sabotage a clinic or use violence to stop abortion, but do our best with community involvement, prayer, and our votes. So I knew who Tiller was. I've prayed for him before.
I was following the lead-up to his trial for 19 misdemeanor counts all through March. Updates hit my inbox... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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For the sixth consecutive week, Kate Gosselin’s on the cover of Us Weekly. “Mommy You Are Mean” screams the headline, while her husband Jon declares, “Enough is Enough” on the cover of People. In Touch and Star are selling the Gosselins as well. Only the Enquirer has chosen an old standard for its cover, Brangelina, and even the most famous couple in the world had to share the front page, with, you guessed it, Jon Gosselin.
Up until a few months ago, chances were good-to-great that if you picked up a tabloid one of the following subjects would appear on the cover: Brangelina, Jennifer Aniston, TomKat or Britney Spears. But recently, the attractive, famous folk who have dominated gossip for years and years (even when, as with Aniston, the relevant story happened eons ago), have suddenly, ignominiously been shoved to the side by a rag-tag crew whose members include the Gosselins, Octomom, Susan Boyle and, to a certain extent, Michelle Obama... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Judith Leavitt has written a history of fatherhood, specifically about the evolution of male participation in the process of giving birth. In a review of the book in the Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Last reports the less-than-shocking news: The 20th century saw men becoming more and more involved with the process of pregnancy, and less and less commonly banished from the premises during the birth itself. This has culminated, Last explains, in “all manner of idiocy,” from fathers who videotape the birth to fathers cutting the umbilical cord... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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"It's more fun to be an opposition bomb-thrower than a palace guard" was Dana Milbank's analysis in today's Washington Post noting the lackluster turnout of the former Take Back America crowd at the America's Future Now conference this week in D.C. Attendance at the gathering of liberal interest groups dropped to 1,500 from 2,500 last year, during the presidential campaign. The movement advocacy groups and think tanks may suffer a bit from brain drain as many organizers of progressive causes have migrated to the administration... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Without question, this was the first serious foreign policy speech Obama has made as president. In giving it, he broke a number of taboos and slid over several potential minefields, reaffirming America's commitment to Israel as well as to Palestinian statehood in front of an Egyptian audience, and going out of his way to make statements about democracy, womens' rights, and religious freedom. If the speech were the dawn of a new age of public diplomacy then I'm all in favor.
Two things worried me about it, however... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yesterday, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham met with Sonia Sotomayor and decided she was not, after all that, a racist. "There is no evidence of that," he said soberly. What did he expect? That Sotomayor would look haughtily down at him and say, "Old white man, you can't cook marcilla for sh--!".., (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Recently, British film censors cut a movie scene where a woman appeared to ejaculate, because they believed the fluid must be urine, and British obscenity laws forbid urinating on fellow actors. But female ejaculation is a well documented medical phenomenon, according to this history of female ejaculation in the New Scientist, and only resisted by the medical establishment because, well, women can't be equal in everything... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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So Barack Obama's historic speech in Cairo is already getting rave reviews. It was, indeed, vintage Obama (if that's not an oxymoron), using his biography as a point of entrance and connection, eschewing what he views as old, false dichotomies, and stressing a pragmatic, hopeful way forward... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Forbes.com has released its "Celebrity 100" list of the world's most powerful celebrities and the top four slots are held by women: #1: Angelina Jolie, #2: Oprah Winfrey, #3: Madonna, and #4: Beyonce Knowles. Half of the top ten are women, although they make up only a quarter of the top 25... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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An interesting new study reported on by Science Daily suggests that evolutionary psychologists might be wrong to speculate that women are choosier than men about mates... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the wider world, Oprah Winfrey is vastly more influential than Ashton Kutcher. But Ashton trumps Oprah in the male-dominated Twitter-verse, where men have 15 percent more followers than women do. New research from Harvard Business School has shown that not only are men more likely to follow other men on Twitter, but women are also more likely to follow men.... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Reading the obituaries column of the newspaper is so much cheaper than therapy, yet it's often just as effective at driving a trip down memory lane. This morning's tributes to British female impersonator Danny La Rue, who died at the age of 81, sent me back three decades to my grandma's house where the family would gather around the telly to watch his performances. (Scroll down for a video of one.)
La Rue disliked being called a "drag artist." His act was all about convincing the audience that the person on stage or screen was the most glamorous, dazzling dame in the world. Being a working-class lad himself, he knew how to tap into the ultimate British fantasy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Another friend describes his wife's late-term abortion. Read testimonials from Tiller's patients here.
I did not know Dr. Tiller, but his assassination vividly reminds me of events in 1983, when my wife and I had a devasting experience with a late-term pregnancy gone wrong at 38 weeks. We had a daughter (I will call her that—in our case, the distinction between fetus and child was not relevant) who developed hydrocephalus (water on the brain) late in the pregnancy, which was discovered at the last ultrasound. Her head was huge with fluid, and therefore would not fit through the birth canal...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It must be the season of the listicle. Too lazy to write an article, or, heck, even create a charticle, print and online writers turn to the list in an attempt to draw as many list-loving readers as possible. The latest comes from the folks at Nerve.com, who have seen fit to list: "The Twenty Sexiest Ugly People." Fair enough. I've long been enamored with the "beautiful uglies," or what the French refer to as jolie laide: "the aesthetic pleasures of the visually off kilter: a bump on the nose, eyes that are set too closely together, a jagged smear of a mouth."
Nerve's collection of the seemingly hideously sexy—or is that sexily hideous?—includes... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Greg Beato, my go-to source for weird insights into mass culture, has a very funny analysis of the DIY show Man Caves over at the Smart Set. The show is premised on the idea that men need man-friendly rooms in which to be manly, and the hosts help regular guys turn ordinary rooms into testosterone-rich dens featuring, say, stripper poles and motorcycles. But Beato thinks the masculine showboating is just the price of entry to an aesthetic realm typically reserved for women and gay men:
if today’s men don’t seem quite as grown-up as their grandfathers did, they show a much greater flair for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Stats sweetheart Nate Silver ran abortion-rate data from the CDC and has found that states with higher numbers of people who identify as pro-life have lower rates of abortion than pro-choice states. But, this finding is somewhat deceptive. As anyone who receives Guttmacher Institute press releases knows, 87 percent of counties do not have abortion providers,
and the CDC data does not always count state of residence, only the
state where the abortion is performed. Additionally, since CDC abortion
data is self-reported by each state... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com.)
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Yesterday, Playboy.com posted a provocative story: "So Right It's Wrong."
The piece was written by Guy Cimbalo, and its premise was to target
those conservative women that he would like to, as he put it, "hate fuck."
But if you click on that Playboy.com link, you'll find the piece is no
longer there. And that's because the blogosphere went crazy after Playboy published it, going so far as to call for a boycott, and Playboy pulled it.
If you want to read the piece in full, conservative blogger Caleb Howe has reproduced it... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A second friend recalls her visit to Dr. George Tiller's clinic:
In July 1993, my husband and I received the worst news about our son's impending birth: He suffered from multiple, severe fetal anomalies, both internal and external, thought to be the result of a rare blood disorder. If he could survive his early birth at 24 weeks he most likely would not survive his blood cancer beyond the age of 9.
After several years of trying to conceive our second child, the news could not have been more devastating. When we heard the news, I had been in Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC for more than two weeks, hooked up to a subcutaneous pump delivering a medication to stop contractions. While still reeling from the shock, we were told we could take our chances and let the baby be born, but that the state would be forced to intervene if we did not then take every measure to keep our son alive. Or, we could consider two late-term abortion clinics—one in Wichita, Kan., the other in Holland! Our initial thoughts were...
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Newsweek has an article out debunking much of the health advice shilled by celebrities on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
Most famously, Jenny McCarthy has been on Oprah several times claiming
that vaccines caused her son's autism (the vaccine/autism link has been
scientifically disproven). But, more entertaining is the anti-aging regime that Suzanne Somers promoted in January:
Each morning, the 62-year-old actress and self-help
author rubs a potent estrogen cream into the skin on her arm. She
smears progesterone on her other arm two weeks a month. And once a day,
she uses a syringe to inject estrogen directly into her vagina ... Next
come the pills. She swallows 60 vitamins and...
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It was horrible. We were driving onto the grounds and the protesters were there with their ugly pictures yelling at us. Just yelling. Then we got inside and it was calm, very professional. Those people are miracle workers, every last one of them, from the littlest nurse to the admin guys. They had to know their lives were in danger, and there was security everywhere, but they just wanted to reassure us... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The murder of Dr. George Tiller in his church this Sunday sent a special chill down my spine; not the kind one gets when someone young, or important, or defenseless is gunned down in cold blood, but the kind one gets when domestic terror strikes. I don't mean to be too alarmist about the first killing of an abortion provider since 1998. Of course, any such assassination is illegal and wrong. But the lawlessness and vigilantism of this particular murder—or, as the anti-abortion zealout who allegedly shot him might put it, judgment—is very worrisome. Is total anarchy just around the corner?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, on your recommendation, I saw the scream-filled, sharply funny Drag Me to Hell this weekend, and I didn't think the protagonist was punished for being a striving woman. I thought she was punished for trying to raise up from her humble farm girl origins... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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As Nina pointed out last week, and the Times pointed out over the weekend, Disney's The Princess and The Frog, its first animated feature to star a black heroine, Tiana, is already controversial, and it doesn't come out until December. Watching the trailer for it on the big screen over the weekend (it's playing before Pixar's totally awesome Up!) got me thinking about another potential source of contention: Tiana's voice... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)