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On the subject of matrimonial name-changes, Josiah Neufeld has a piece in the Globe and Mail about his own decision to change his name to that of his wife. There's all the usual angst that comes with a semantic switch of identity, plus some gender-based scorn from the relatives (they think he's joined a "matrilineal cult"), plus a kind of lexical void: What does a man who assumes a new name call the one he leaves behind? As Nuefield puts it, "I need a good title for my maiden name: 'former name' is boring; 'ex-name' sounds like a cast-off lover; 'birth name' implies I was adopted; 'unmarried name' evokes a monastic twin who hasn't called since moving to Tibet." What say you, commenters? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In our "Your Comeback" blog today, Emma Gilbey Keller writes about Allison Yarrow's decision to change her name when she got married—something
Keller never thought she'd do. She's looking for more submissions from
women whose relationships have inspired life changes: Did you convert
as part of a committment? Did you move across the country or to another
continent? Emma wants to hear from you at emma@thecomebackbook.com ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Is Kate Middleton Britain’s Henry Louis Gates? That is to say: Is she a
public figure whose personal upheaval has lately sparked a national
conversation over deeply ingrained prejudices? That’s the theory bubbling beneath this Washington Post piece parsing the recent uproar over Middleton’s uncle, Gary Goldsmith, who was caught on tape prepping cocaine for consumption at the Ibizan villa he’s dubbed La Maison de Bang-Bang ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Margaret Wheeler Johnson:
Behold, Marc Jacobs' latest foray into T-shirt activism.
Jacobs has two new politically themed tees for sale, both bearing the
statement: "I pay my taxes. I want my RIGHTS!" He's really going for
provocateur status with one of them: The shirt features what we are
supposed to assume is a lesbian couple with their very own toddler.
It's the iconography of the holy family, and the American nuclear family, just without the XY phenotype ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Last night I caught up on Drop Dead Diva, Lifetime’s new comedy about an aspiring Price Is Right
model, Deb, who dies and returns to Earth in the body of an
accomplished, but fat, trial lawyer, Jane. I agree, June, that credit
for the show’s greatness goes wholly to Brooke Elliott, who plays Jane.
Her walk alone is enough to bring me back for Episode 4. It’s also fun
to watch the cameos unfold. You can just picture Rosie O’Donnell
getting the script and calling her agent right then to say “A show
starring a fat woman that’s not making fun of her? I’m in.” I wonder if
a legal battle with Camryn Manheim is in Jane’s future ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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A newly published paper in the journal Media, War, and Conflict dissects “the art of shoe-throwing”
in light of George Bush’s December near-encounter with the liberated
footwear of an Iraqi journalist. Though the political significance of
shoes predates the incident—statues of Saddam were so pelted back in
2003—the University of Brighton’s Yasmin Ibrahim argues that Bush
helped set off a wave of loafer-related uprisings ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I am too embarrassed by Emily's trumpets-blaring charge against texting while driving
to admit to doing it. But if I did, my sin would of course be committed
in the service of the holy grail of multi-tasking. The research the NYT cites,
however, has reminded me that when the risk entailed by squeezing two
tasks into the same minutes is death, it is utterly and obviously a
risk not to take ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix makes an interesting connection between ESPN’s prompt response to the creepy nude tape of sportscaster Erin Andrews and its extended silence on the rape allegations against Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger.
If ESPN truly understood from the Andrews case the abusive relationship
between women and the world of pro sports, Reilly argues, it should
have known the importance of covering the rape charges. He writes ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Rock dreams really do come true. Green Day played a show at Madison
Square Garden on Monday. Lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong went looking
for an audience member to join the band on guitar—and settled on a girl
named Stephanie. Who shredded it ... (Read more in Double X.)
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June, Drop Dead Diva ties together two things we’ve been kicking around the blog the last few days: Is T.V. a better place for women than film?... (Read more in Double X.)
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I was a major, unabashed fan of Sex and the City. (The show, that is—the movie was a grating, be-crinolined, poopy joke nightmare.) The things that bothered other people—the sex and status obsession, the what-planet-are-you-on depiction of a freelance writer's earning potential—never really bothered me. Its lily-white vision of New York, however, did ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A guest post from Newsweek writer Jessica Bennett:
I've never been in a relationship with two people at the same time,
but I've spent the last two months talking about it constantly. Not
because I'm obsessed with the idea—though, um, increasingly I am—but
because I was writing a piece for Newsweek about one particular multi-partner family ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Yesterday’s David Brooks column was written in response to the rarely asked question: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized everyone in the Western Hemisphere?
Without progeny, explains everyone's favorite National Greatness
Conservative, we of the West would plunge into a “cataclysmic spiritual
crisis,” deem our lives to be “without meaning and purpose,” and forgo
any grand ambitions we might once have nurtured ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Tracy Quan, who is normally so sex-positive and has written extensively about her life as a call girl, has an article in the Daily Beast warning women against using withdrawal as a birth control method, even though new research has shown it to be almost as effective as condoms ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Barack Obama isn't the only person in Washington whose schedule has
been all discombobulated by healthcare reform. Patrick Mahoney,
director of the Christian Defense Coalition, planned on staging a
"pray-in" at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office on Wednesday, but he's
rethinking that now. Apparently the efficacy of a prayer is determined
by its proximity to an event; Mahoney said "it wouldn't make any sense
to be there all day praying if the vote isn't going to be this week."
(He also admitted that there is a "chance that there may be some
arrests" at a speaker's-office pray-in, and he didn't seem to want to
put his group through that more than once.)
But even though the events most likely to get their participants
arrested have been postponed, the delay hasn't stopped activists from
making their presence felt ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Nina, I’m glad you brought up Grady Hendrix’s complaint that vampires aren’t doing enough blood sucking these days, because I have a bone to pick, too ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Or so argues Grady Hendrix in Slate today. Hendrix hates emo-boy vampires, with their all-swoon, no-suck brand of human relations. Latoya Peterson argued here in Double X that Twilight and True Blood are bad for women because they're all about pigeonholing female characters into a virgin/slut binary ... (Read more in Double X.)
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What is television good for? Curbing population growth,
of course! Ghulam Nabi Azad, India’s Health and Family Welfare
Minister, wants to bring electricity to the most rural parts of his
country, in hopes that it will slow down the baby making... (Read more in Double X.)
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Emily and Willa, I completely agree with you that it’s time to get serious about cell phone use while driving—and I think there’s an interesting generational angle to consider as a crusade, I hope, gets under way ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In last Sunday’s New York Times Modern Love column, author Joyce Maynard wrote about trespassing
into the e-mail account of her 22-year-old daughter, Audrey. The
daughter had temporarily relocated to the Dominican Republic when her
communications home were abruptly and, to Maynard, ominously silenced.
From reading the correspondence, Maynard learned that her daughter was
embroiled in a personal dilemma—one that she apparently needed to
resolve without involving her mother. After justifying the invasion of
her daughter's privacy ("I dreamed my daughter was running ... her face
a mask of grief"), Maynard goes on to tell Modern Love readers the
details of her daughter's very emotional crisis, including results of
her HIV tests.
Maynard has, apparently, always had difficulty with boundaries. In 1972, when she was 18, the writer published a confessional essay in the Times
about her generational perspective (sample: “Marijuana and the class of
'71 moved through high school together”) that brought her national
attention. She was later criticized about her 1999 memoir that excruciatingly detailed her teenage affair with then 53-year-old novelist J.D. Salinger. Maynard also auctioned off her love letters from the reclusive author.
Even had Maynard not been notoriously ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The Senate Judiciary Committee voted in support of Judge Sonia Sotomayor this morning almost entirely along partisan lines—13 to 7, with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican in favor. Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. She made it through her hearings without the “meltdown” that Graham said would be needed to stop her confirmation, and also without giving Republicans any additional ammunition to oppose her. Yet today’s "no" voters included John Cornyn of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and so presumably thinks about the long-term national health of his party, and comes from a state that is 36 percent Hispanic, and Jon Kyl of Arizona, which is almost 30 percent Hispanic. The GOP stance leaves the party without an answer to this headline in Politico: “Democrats have huge day with Hispanics.”
Why don’t the Republicans seem to care? Three reasons ... (Read the rest of this post, or the entire conversation on the Sotomayor hearings in Double X.)
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It’s not a good week for Alpha Kappa Alpha. For starters, the group’s national president, Barbara McKinzie, may be forced out following allegations of using "the organization’s money to commission a $900,000 ‘living legacy wax figure’ of herself." Then in the New York Times Magazine profile of Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, there was an anecdote about the president dissing AKA on the campaign trail. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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There was a hugely fascinating article in this weekend's New York Times about a Japanese social phenomenon that needs to be read to be believed: A growing community of men are happily in love with 2-D animated characters. It’s like Lars and The Real Girl, but instead of being in love with anatomically correct dolls, these men are in love with pillows, decorated with the image of ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Katherine Heigl's newest romantic comedy, The Ugly Truth, is
clearly an insult to women—nay, humans—with brains. So why did it earn
a whopping $27 million at the box office this weekend? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The U.K.'s Daily Mail has a photo of Madonna
that really must be seen to be believed. It's hard to know what to feel
about Madge's muscle-y arms, in all their ropy glory. Scared? Sad?
Personally inadequate? Slightly ashamed for pointing and staring at a
fellow woman's unconventional body? All of the above, I guess. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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My grammar-sensitive family is in a tizzy over the “On Language” column from this weekend’s New York Times Magazine on the absence of a gender-neutral singular pronoun,
a source of copy editing agony that has most recently surfaced on
Twitter. In truth, the 140-character limit of the Twitterverse ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I've never felt particular kinship for Nancy Pelosi. She has the
shellacked visage of a long-time politician, and she has said enough
tone-deaf things over the years to make me wince over the San Francisco
liberal stereotype. But I like Pelosi better for her laughing statement to Politico that she doesn't actually care about being liked. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Margaret Wheeler Johnson:
On Monday Double X published an excerpt from Lizzie Skurnick's new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, and I've since found myself paging back through my own copy of her ode to the young adult novel. In the office earlier today, Noreen and I were discussing what the book suggests about why women read. We thought others might want to chime in here ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Torie, you wondered whether MTV's show 16 and Pregnant
will encourage teenage moms-to-be to consider adoption. At least one
pro-life group hopes so: Lifeline Adoption oversees several
pro-adoption websites, including the fortuitously-named 16andpregnant.com.
Fans of the show who type in that URL won't get a site about the show.
They'll get one aimed at girls who are precisely that: 16 and pregnant.
At first glance it's a relatively generic, "We know you're scared, here
are your options," sort of site, but it quickly becomes it clear that
the site designers really only have one option in mind ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
This year marks the 10th Anniversary of Putumayo Playground, the series
of albums from the famed world music compilers created especially for
kids. Fans credit it with being part of a revolution in kids' music
which, along with artists like Dan Zanes and Laurie Berkner, turned
what had been a wasteland of painful ditties into music kids and
parents could enjoy together. Indeed, there's some catchy stuff out
there, but you won't hear it playing in my car. What's wrong with Bruce
Springsteen? If ABBA isn't kids music, what is? Is there anyone out
there whose kid doesn't rock out to Flo Rida's "Jump?" ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Abortion didn't get much air time during the Sotomayor hearings, but
it's become a flashpoint in the fight over Obama's health care
legislation. Conservatives are saying that the various bills Congress
is considering would increase access to abortion and subsidize the
procedure with government funding. Meanwhile, a separate bill with
support from both the pro-choice and pro-life sides designed to prevent
unwanted pregnancy, with more money for contraception, could get caught
in the crossfire ... (Read more in Double X.)
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That's a really upsetting litany of stories, Marjorie, about the cops accosting you and your relatives.
The confluence of Skip Gates' arrest and the Obama presidency are
making white people, at least some of us, take in these stories
differently. We've heard them before, but now maybe we're absorbing
them. Obama's election has both raised expectations of a post-racial
America and given us a lens through which to see clearly how we still
fall short. (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Last night was the annual Planned Parenthood-sponsored “Summer Sex & Spirits”
night at the Museum of Sex in New York, which I somehow have failed to
visit until now. There was plenty of the expected—some porno flicks,
some stylish anal plugs, even a hands-on display of rubber sex dolls
with rubbery vaginal openings. But the real gem is the exhibit on the sex lives of animals. Here are a few highlights to share at your weekend BBQs. And Miriam, please chime in with any other fun animal sex factoids for this summer Friday ... (Read the rest of this post, and Miriam Goldstein's response, in Double X.)
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Via Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward we learn that New Jersey legislators, in “recognizing
that teenagers who e-mail nude or sexually suggestive photos of
themselves to friends aren't really child pornographers,” are
proposing an alternative to prosecution. If the bill passes, charged
sexters will merely be forced to attend a “course focusing on the
consequences of such acts.” (Read more in Double X.)
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16 and Pregnant has been appointment television for me since I reviewed it for Double X's “Xxtra Small” and was thrilled to learn it’s been picked up for a second season. But like Jess, I find myself wondering whether the show will keep any teens from becoming moms. I suppose the National Campaign To Reduce Teen and Unwanted Pregnancy, which helped produce the series (get used to these sorts of nonprofit/TV partnerships),
would measure success by whether more teens get intimately familiar
with contraception and, for the love of god, use it correctly. The
show’s teen stars are utterly thick-headed about family planning. One
couple claims conception happened after they used a condom that had
been through the wash; another baby came about because of that oldest
excuse—the young dad just doesn’t like condoms ... (Read the rest of this post, and the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Thanks to Kerry for linking to her compelling personal story of the ovum marketplace. As for the question of market forces bearing on gestational surrogacy sticker price, I have two words to illustrate the right circumstance for the right seller: Debby Rowe. $4 million payoffs not withstanding, however, I do sympathize with Kerry’s and Sarah’s observations on the hazy protection surrogacy contracts offer to potentially exploited owners of host wombs.
I remember well the first major legal case exploring rights of the
surrogate involved a contract gone awry (in the opposite way of the
urban legendary wealthy gay man of Nina’s classic six,
were he to renege on the apartment after the baby is born). In that
famous 1986 case, the surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, made a deal with
William Stern to donate her egg and rent her womb to create a child
with Stern, by artificial insemination, to be raised by Stern and his
wife ... (Read the rest of this post, or this conversation, in Double X.)
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An odd, not-quite-paradoxical consensus is forming in our discussion
over surrogacy. There is the assumption that the sticker price of
$20,000 is surprisingly low, along with the assumption that surrogacy
is so astronomically expensive that it’s only available to rich ladies with billionaire husbands and baby nurses.
Both might well be true, but I’m more convinced by the former than the
latter. Is surrogacy really out of the reach of your average
middle-class dual-income couple that can, at any rate, afford to raise
a kid for 18 years? Traditional pregnancies are by no means cost-free,
so the cost of hiring a surrogate over becoming pregnant is lower than
it first appears.
The real question is why, in the age of the active,
mercury-avoiding, one-glass-of-Merlot-will-destroy-your-baby-forever
pregnancy, wealthy women are not bidding up the price for equally
vigilant super-surrogates ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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I've aged out of almost all of MTV's programming—watching barely legal
20-somethings binge drink grain alcohol on various incarnations of the Real World is no longer my idea of entertainment. But I've caught a few episodes of the MTV series 16 and Pregnant, and althought I'm not the target audience, I have found the show to be pretty riveting stuff ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Thanks, Samantha, for pointing out a tendency by some
white people to show, as you say, a “reflexive defense mechanism”
whenever another white person, usually one in a position of power, is
accused of showing racism. Coming from me, a black person, similiar
sentiments are often dismissed as biased. But aren't the white people
defending Officer Crowley and criticizing Skip Gates also showing bias?
The difference in perception is predicated on a simple fact: Most
white people have never experienced, and could never imagine, such a
thing happening to them or their loved ones. But if you’re black,
you’ve probably experienced an unpleasant, potentially dangerous,
encounter with white police, or know some other black person who has.
In my case there have been several such encounters ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In response to Meredith's request to the mothers among us to tote up the number of "billable hours" in a pregnancy: This sum seems inherently incalculable, not only because it would differ wildly and unforeseeably from person to person and pregnancy to pregnancy, but because the normal model of pay for work just doesn't apply to bearing a child for someone else in exchange for money ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Although she now has been buried, I wanted to comment about the death
of Chechyn rights activist Natalia Estemirova. The stories of her life
are singularly stunning ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Jessica, Kerry, and Sarah,
your posts have me curious about the price of parenthood in surrogate
situations, for both “intended parents” and surrogates. I crunched some
numbers using the $20,000 payment that you mentioned, Sarah, and was
shocked to realize that a surrogate making that much for a full-term
pregnancy would earn less than half the federal minimum wage... (Read more in Double X.)
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Just as upsetting to me as the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest, Emily, is the way that so many people have been responding, including in our own comments section ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Longterm friendships—like any other relationships that are important to
men and women—sometimes hit bumps in the road. But when do you decide
to bail out? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Sarah Elizabeth Richards:
Kerry, you’re right that surrogates
need not be motivated by compassion alone. That’s because being a
surrogate is a tough job. Never mind the social stigma they face
explaining to their families and neighbors why they’re carrying someone
else’s kids.
Surrogates often have to deal with multiple births, Caesarian sections and mandatory bed rest. One Arizona surrogate even carried quintuplets for one couple ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Italian Vogue is celebrating Barbie's 50th anniversary—not to mention the first anniversary of its historic all-black issue
(isn't that the most gorgeous photo of Naomi Campbell you've ever
seen?)—with a very cool little supplement called "The Barbie Issue,"
full of fashion shoots starring black Barbies. Jezebel has an excerpt; may I recommend it as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up?
As one commenter, dandelionbrowne, pointed out, one of the most
striking things about the spread is the wide range of skintones, facial
structures, and hair types on display. It sounds like the dolls are ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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There's much to rue in the story of how Henry Louis Gates Jr. (editor-in-chief of our sister site, The Root)
was arrested at his house last week. Was it supposedly disorderly
conduct when Gates asked to see a Cambridge cop's badge and ID? Or when
he said the cop was making a mistake based on racial profiling? The
charge was dropped this afternoon, lucky for the cop ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Chris Brown has a thing or two to teach Mark Sanford and John Ensign about how to say you're sorry. In his taped apology to Rihanna,
for punching her in February, the singer sounds forthright and sincere.
He's straightforward and direct. He invokes his mother, more than once.
He says he's getting help and he promises not to do it again. All the
boxes checked, including remorse.
Should we believe him? For me this raises all kinds of questions about ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Amy Bloom:
In reading the conversation about the double assisted suicide of Sir Edward and Lady Joan Downes,
I'm baffled by the idea that it was either selfish or super-romantic.
Old people dying quietly is nicer than old people being crushed by the
pain of terminal cancer or old people having their consciousness
obliterated by morphine. But romantic? (Read more in Double X.)
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Jess, Emily and Dayo, I saw Tina Brown's column on Hillary through a slightly different lens. Brown is writing The Clinton Chronicles, a book about Hillary and Bill, reportedly due out in 2010. The subject makes sense after Brown's terrific, dishy bio of Lady Di. The Clintons, after all, are our messy royalty. (The book deal was announced in January 2008, back when it must have seemed like Hillary would still be crowned our next Commander in Chief.)
Given this, Brown probably has some inside dope on what the Clintons are really thinking. She could be channeling Bill's thoughts about his wife. (Maybe The Big Dog is tired of being muzzled.) She could also be trying to raise Hillary's profile in advance of the book. Or, maybe Brown is just trying to do Hill a favor, by casting a little deserved limelight her way. (Read more in Double X.)
Photograph of Hillary Clinton by Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images.
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
When a pack of smartly-uniformed firefighters strode out of Sonia
Sotomayor's confirmation hearing Thursday, they were greeted by a
throng of reporters—and six girls in green t-shirts, their
point-and-shoots at the ready. The members of Greater King David
Baptist Church's Girl Scout troop had just listened to two of the
firefighters testify, and now they crowded together, photographing the
firemen as they walked by. This was the best day of their trip. (Read more in Double X.)
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Jess, here's a theory: Tina Brown told Hillary to take off her burqa
in hopes of starting a rumble. Once the Sec of State has derobed, she
and Obama can start the fight Washington watchers expected them to have
when she took the job ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Earlier this week, Tina Brown referred to Hillary Clinton as Obama's submissive "foreign policy wife"
in a Daily Beast column. In that same space, she urged Hills to "take
off her burqa." Though Brown scored some points in her critique of
Clinton's invisibility (where was she this week in Russia?), those
critiques were somewhat buried in deliberately provocative and arguably
racist asides about how Hillary is Obama's "Saudi" spouse ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Meredith Simons:
If Sen. Jeff Sessions' 20 minutes with Sonia Sotomayor this afternoon is
any indication, Republicans feel a new urgency in this second (and
final) round of questioning. Before he began, Sessions' aides
distributed 70-page packets of highlighted, tabbed documents regarding
Sotomayor's tenure with the Puerto Rico Education and Legal Defense
Fund. When his turn came, Sessions dispensed with the usual niceties
about how well the nominee is holding up and jumped right in, accusing
Sotomayor of promoting the idea that judges' "backgrounds, sympathies,
and prejudices" should and do affect judicial decisions ... (Read more in Double X.)
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While I agree with Nina that the gesture of dying along with his terminally ill wife was insanely romantic, in my book, Sir Edward Downes was also insane ... (Read more in Double X.)
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What’s amazing to me about this double assisted suicide story is that it’s never come up before ... (Read more in Double X.)
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After The Wrestler, Nacho Libre, Rocky, When We Were Kings,
and scores of other films about hand to hand combat, you would be
forgiven for thinking there’s nothing that could go down in a ring you
haven’t seen before. You would be wrong ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:
Emily, I think Reihan Salam is onto something in his recent piece
on the end of male power, in which he notes that the recession’s
disproportionate impact on men resonates in the world of politics,
where women are gaining ground (at least in places like Iceland) in a
backlash against male financial mismanagement. Salam is right that the
recession provides one more lens through which to observe global
power’s shift from men to women; he’s also right that the backlash
against men can spark a sometimes-violent secondary backlash against
women in places where they gain economic and political power ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
Of all the stylistically tone-deaf things Sen. Lindsey Graham said to
Sonia Sotomayor Tuesday, the worst was his declaration that he was
going to tell a 55-year-old judge with 18 years of appellate experience
how the world works ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Nina, I too was touched by the quiet, unassuming dignity of Edward Downes’ choice to die
clutching the hand of his sick wife. It seems to matter very much to
critics whether Downes himself were ill or not, which is interesting
given the universal prognosis for 85-year-old men (and, indeed, all of
us.) Is there really a significant ethical difference between his
choice and that of his cancer-stricken wife? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A sobering story from Europe: It's been announced that the British conductor Sir Edward Downes died last week, alongside his wife, at an assisted-suicide facility in Switzerland. Lady Downes was in the final stages of terminal cancer; Sir Edward was ailing ("almost blind and increasingly deaf," according to his son), but his condition wasn't fatal. He just wanted to die with his wife ... Read more in Double X.)
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Emily, if you’re still collecting anecdotes from parents who are envious of their children, and children who outshine their folks, I can add to your list ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Last night, on the latest episode of The Bachelorette,
the inevitable happened: One of the contestants—lovelorn, earnest,
ready-to-drop-on-one-knee Ed—was given an opportunity to have sex with
a girl he is “crazy about” in a hotel room, tricked out with roses,
body oil, and ... a crew, cameras, and millions watching at home. He
failed to get hard. How has this not happened before? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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KJ, your fury over the New York Times Magazine essay by the high school girl slumming it as an IHOP waitress
seems to have hit a nerve: Our commenters tend to agree with you that
she’s a spoiled brat, the emblem of an entitled generation who won’t
get their hands dirty. I read the essay entirely differently ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I prefer Sotomayor’s effort to put her wise Latina point in context to
the talking points the Obama administration previously came up with ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A simple but telling little study
from the University of Brussels challenges the idea that college kids
are gobs of clay passively waiting to be molded by their professors. In
general, students of social science are more likely to graduate college
as self-defined leftists, while law and economics graduates tilt the
other way. To find out why, sociologists gave various cohorts of
university students surveys when they entered their schools and when
they graduated. They found that while ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I’m feeling deflated this morning. For many decades, the legal
academy (and to some degree, even the rest of the universe) has been
debating the degree to which law is a scientific abstraction—a computer
you crank up that spits out the right answer—and the degree to which it
is malleable, subjective: a piece of clay that judges necessarily
shape. At times, legal realism, as the second position is called, has
gone too far. But mostly it’s a hugely welcome breath of fresh air, a
way of articulating what everyone intuitively understands. Judges are
not robots! They are not, in fact, umpires who just call balls and
strikes, to give in to John Roberts’ now all-pervasive sports metaphor,
because sometimes they have to determine the size and all the other
parameters of the strike zone.
But now we have Sonia Sotomayor going along with and indeed
promoting a view of the law as all about Input automatically dictating
Output. As she keeps putting it, in this or some other variation, “I’m
a judge who believes the facts drive the law. By drive the law, I mean,
determines how the law will apply in that individual case.” Sometimes,
it is true that ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Susannah Jacob meant to write a humorous account of her failures as an IHOP waitress. Instead, she offered yet more fodder for our “entitled generation” conversation,
and revealed herself, intentionally or not, as being unable—or
unwilling—to succeed at one of today’s most elusive goals: an actual,
if unglamorous, job.
Jacobs lives in an affluent Dallas suburb. She’s heading to college
in the fall. She doesn’t, by her own admission, “need the paycheck.”
And it’s clear that she thinks it’s funny that someone like her ... (
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Read the rest of this post, or the
entire conversation about Generation Y at work, in Double X.)
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When I saw this photo yesterday of Obama checking out this fine, shimmering booty, I felt—dare I admit this—a
weird kind of pride. Obama has always portrayed himself as master of
his own impulses. He exercises every day, doesn’t eat the cupcakes,
dines every night with his kids, makes regular date nights with his
wife. Nothing wrong with this self-control. It’s impressive, in fact. Except
that it makes one long for some glimmer of the old male appetite ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam is predicting
that male dominance will be a casualty of the economic downturn (or the
he-cession, as he calls it, since more men than women are being laid
off). He writes:
The great shift of power from males to females is likely to be
dramatically accelerated by the economic crisis, as more people realize
that the aggressive, risk-seeking behavior that has enabled men to
entrench their power—the cult of macho—has now proven destructive and
unsustainable in a globalized world.
What will follow is not a femitopia, but rather ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Emily, you wrote yesterday about the tricky feeling of watching your son outperform you,
and finding it discomfiting. But kids can be just as uncomfortable in
the surpassing role as the parents are about being bested. My all-girls
basketball team used to gather every Sunday afternoon to scrimmage our
parents. It was mostly dads who took the bait ... (Read more in Double X.)
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So between Marjorie and an e-mail from a friend, I'm going to recant a bit about Paris Jackson speaking at her father's funeral.
I can’t take back that on a gut level I found the entire spectacle
off-putting, but I ought to have reminded myself that being in the
limelight can be tough, especially when you're having real feelings.
What's genuine seems staged, what's staged is supposed to be genuine,
it's hard to parse the difference, and the difference hardly matters ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Erika Kawalek:
The Paris haute couture shows have come to a close. The reviews are
in and there’s discussion going on about how luxury is being “toned
down” for these “hard times,” how "fancy" is being "snubbed."
In the case of the officially bankrupt house of Christian Lacroix
this makes sense. He was forced to make do with bolts and scraps of
fabric he already had lying around his studio. He drastically cut back
on ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Why do women keep their maiden names? Some of us take the answer to
that question for granted: Those names are the ones we were born with.
Others go ahead and swap when they get married. I don't have a big
political wind up for this one: It's a deeply personal choice, there
are a lot of factors to consider, and if my maiden name was something I
thought dreadful or dull, I might have jettisoned it. After all, ... (Read more in Double X.)
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If you're a great web developer who loves Slate and Double X, we want to talk to you. We're looking to hire a senior-level web software engineer for Double X ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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How sad that Summer Stiers,
the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was
profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine,
has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health
where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her
many medical maladies.
One of my daughter's favorite shows is Mystery Diagnosis, which presents the story of someone with strange symptoms who goes for years without being able to get a diagnosis ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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If ever you think you have too much to do or you’re fretting about your “work/life” balance, peek into the life of Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur activist
who did or didn’t set off the latest protests against the Han Chinese.
She started off as a laundress and somehow became the Uighur
community’s most successful business person by importing steel from
Kazakhstan ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Whew Willa, you offer some tricky psychoanalysis here.
None of us can say what the Jacksons were thinking on that stage with
Paris, or what they were trying to project to the YouTube audience.
What we can safely say is that despite being a dysfunctional family,
they are clearly a family in grief. I think it’s unfair to try to
interpret their intentions. Would it have been better, or more
believable, if they had not embraced Paris and just stood off to the
side and whispered to her to suck it up? Is it really that implausible
that with Michael now gone they would want to surround his children in
a protective cocoon? ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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From my many years of writing about evangelicals, I often get e-mails
from conservative Christian sites. One I got yesterday labeled:
“WARNING: Protect Your Children” caught my eye. Bands of child
molesters? Gay teachers? More abortions? No, worse. Sacha Baron Cohen.
The e-mail is a classic in the genre of scold while titillate ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Last night I listened to a member of the U.S. Coast Guard narrate the
experience of intercepting a boat full of Haitians trying to reach
American soil. The worst part, he said, was that the immigrants thought
they’d found “the welcome wagon.” The Coast Guard was enthusiastically
invited onto the boat before they burned it and repatriated its
passengers ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):
The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine,
made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her
perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a
wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what
was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed;
she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia
while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had
frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye,
and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued;
her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31 ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Our own Emily has a fantastic and revealing Q & A with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg up on the New York Times
website today. Their conversation ranges from Roe v. Wade to summer
camp in the Adirondacks to Savana Redding to losing her shoe under the
bench ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica, I saw nothing cruel or exploitative
about allowing Paris Jackson to speak about her dad and I’m inclined to
believe the Jackson family didn’t force her to do so. According to
several news reports, Janet Jackson was slated to speak but let Paris
speak instead because she wanted to say something about her father. I
watched the whole thing and found the memorial to be tasteful and
well-executed, not the bizarre spectacle you describe ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Margaret Johnson:
Sam, your post on Gen Y's educational entitlement
sounded eerily like a schpeel that plays through my mind every morning.
As you know, I am a grad student getting a master's degree in your
field. Government and private loans, check; no more earning potential
with my degree than without it, check; denial—not really. I went back
to school last fall for a specific purpose: to make up for what I, one
of those Gen Y strivers, didn't get out of my supposedly idyllic
undergraduate education ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Obama 2012 watchers are all aflutter over yesterday’s news that the president’s approval rating in bellwether swing state Ohio has dipped to just 49%, down from 62% in May ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Sorry Dana, but I’m with Jess on Paris. The contrasts contained in the moment of her speech, to be really eloquent about it, freaked me the eff out. Here’s a young girl, a daughter, having a genuine, raw moment of grief
and she’s surrounded by a bunch of… actors. Her authenticity was
matched in pitch only by the performativeness in the people surrounding
her ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica, though there were plenty of things to be creeped out by during the Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday, for me Paris Jackson’s short and tearful tribute to her father didn’t number among them. In fact (along with Brooke Shields’ speech and Jermaine Jackson’s
vocally unsure but heartbreaking performance of “Smile”), Paris'
appearance struck me as one of the day’s few uncreepy moments ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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So. That happened.
The bizarre spectacle of Michael Jackson's funeral was everywhere
yesterday, and the most talked-about moment was when Michael's
daughter, Paris Jackson, went up on stage and told the world,
"Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever
imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much." Her Aunt Janet
softly urged her forward and said, "speak up." Though I don't doubt
Paris's emotion was genuine, the thing felt creepily staged ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I read Liza’s summary of Mimi Swarz’s take on mature women in the most powerful workplace in the world with some interest. After all, I’d previously written on the preponderance of single women in the Obama White House,
lamenting the fact that a bold-face name like Melody Barnes put off
marriage for years, in order to run policy in an administration poised
to overhaul health care, energy action, and the economy ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Am I losing it, or does Sarah Palin have a point? I mean, when she says
that if she'd remained in office, she wouldn't have accomplished
anything because state business would have been tied up in the many
ethical charges against her? That strikes me as a hard kernel truth in
the middle of the sea of bullshit Palin is wading in (today, literally,
by giving TV interviews while out catching fish).
Palin is right that she became a different kind of politician when
McCain has picked her as vice president. Maybe that's because ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Has J. Crew pushed the boundaries of their symbiotic Obama relationship a little too far? Politico posted an item
disclosing a press release the retailer sent to reporters yesterday,
advertising the fact that Sasha and Malia Obama have been spotted out
and about in J. Crew wares. Specifically, if you must know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Perfect kids are more likely to murder you in your sleep. At least,
that's according to horror flicks that fall into the "evil kid genre,"
inaugurated by 1956's The Bad Seed. Other warning signs: ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I agree with you, Jess, that the poor job and internship prospects for today’s college students are more about the underperforming economy than an over-supply of participation trophies,
or any other Gen-Y generalizations on which people like to pin such
trends. But I disagree that Gen-Yers’ (that is to say, “our”)
entitlement is purely economy-driven. Following your theory, that sense
of privilege should diminish with the foundering economy. That would
mean that our peers, many of whom are getting laid off or fear they
soon will be, should right about now be tossing aside dreams of jobs
that let us save the world and stay intellectually stimulated all day
every day—all while wearing jeans and working from home when we feel
like it!—and settling for whatever jobs we can get. Instead, we’re
going to grad school.
The idea that young people choose to weather tough economic times in
the safety of university libraries is nothing new. What’s different
this time around is the opportunity costs that we Gen-Yers are all but
ignoring when we choose the post-bac path. Education is expensive—much
more so that it was for our parents, having gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades. The federal income-based repayment plan that kicked in this month underscores how bad the student loan trap has gotten. People are rejoicing over ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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We learned today that Rita Wilson is prepping an HBO series based on Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winner about a girl named Callie who grows up to become a man named Cal. In a bit of fortuitous timing, Salon has posted an interview with professor Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, a new book about intersex people.
Intersex people are born neither male nor female; the descriptor is "an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands."
There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system. (Hence the piece's title, "We're all intersex.") That's a concept that many of us are comfortable with vis-a-vis gender identity, but applying that framework ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I just caught up with the essay in the New York Times Magazine
by writer Anne Bernays about her dismay at her grandson, David,
becoming a Marine. His decision was an incomprehensible turn of events
for Bernays. After all, she writes, she is a liberal Jew who raised her
family in Cambridge, Mass. Her children went to the "best schools."
They had "no money worries." In other words, people like this simply do
not produce Marines. At David's graduation, she has a conflicted sense
of pride in his accomplishments. But nowhere does she question ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Police arrested a North Dakota woman yesterday for breast-feeding while drunk,
and now she is facing charges of child neglect. This case brings to the
surface all of our weird notions about breast-feeding. The cops were
called in for domestic disturbance and said the whole scene suggested ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Amelie Gillette, the brilliantly crabby woman behind the Onion A.V. Club column The Hater, has pointed out one of the scourges of the Bravo network: the repeated use of the completely insulting term, "gay boyfriend." Gillette has started a Hater podcast, and on her first cast she calls the Real Housewives franchise out on their mostly demeaning ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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In the Wall Street Journal, my onetime sparring partner Kay Hymowitz argues that the discussion over the meltdown of white, middle-class marriage
comes at a time when white, middle class marriages are particularly
likely to last; the divorce rate for college-educated women is
remarkably low. And despite the fact that her piece includes a
sarcastic shoutout to Double X, I think she
is mostly right. For all the talk of desperately bored empty nesters,
marital satisfaction generally suffers when kids come along and rises
when kids leave. The median age of first divorce for women is 29, not
59; it seems that the arrival of children is more likely to challenge a
marriage than their sudden disappearance.
Oddly, Hymowitz also insists that marriage is “suffering a
full-scale crisis of consumer confidence” among this same subgroup, and
reminds us that “in any crisis, people tend to panic.” In defense of
this claim she cites the Sandra Tsing Loh's piece in the Atlantic, our discussion,
John Edwards, and Mark Sanford. (The Gosselins, surely more powerful
cultural actors than any of the former, go unmentioned.) So which is
it? Is the institution of marriage safe and stable or ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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That's a good market-driven thesis, Jess, for why Gen Y-ers have a reputation for acting entitled in the workplace:
They've been demanding because they could be. Here's another way in
which your mid-20s peers are luckier than their younger siblings and
friends who are graduating from college right now. According to a study
by economist Lisa Kahn of the Yale School of Management, graduating
during a downturn has long-term bad consequences. "They include lower
earnings, a slower climb up the occupational ladder and a widening gap
between ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The New York Times had an article in its style section yesterday about college students' bleak prospects for employment this summer.
The content is entirely unsurprising: We're in a recession where jobs
are drying up for everyone. What interested me in this article was the
180 that experts are making on their previous assumptions about
Generation Y: ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time Magazine takes the occasion of South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that
“Marriage Matters.”
Why does marriage matter? Not of course because of the harm to the
deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That
would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'midarticleflex',false,'')
Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the
only people who count ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica,
my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from
Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote
a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking
to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties,sure
we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually
being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that
marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox
scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Speaking of being bummed out, I felt oddly blue after reading Mimi Swartz’s excellent
piece in The Daily Beast about empty-nesters in the Obama administration.
Swartz, who also writes
for Double X about being
an empty nester herself, talks about (and to) White House senior adviser
Valerie Jarrett, and also offers up WH Social Secretary Desiree Rogers and First
Lady Chief of Staff Susan Sher, among others, as collective proof that
professional life isn't over for women—in some ways it's just beginning—when
their kids leave for college. This may well be true, and it's striking to see so
many redoubtable women in positions of power. I admit to a keen fascination with
Jarrett and Rogers, who live in the same apartment building on the Georgetown
canalfront and who I like to think of as popping into each other's apartments,
like the cast of Seinfeld, or Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, borrowing
clothes and gossiping ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Yes, I understand that Internet surveys are hopeless, and yes, I understand that
448,000 lonely hearts do not a random sample make, but still I ask: What is the
deal with this
OK Cupid map of debauchery by state?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) Read More... -->
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Carte Noire, a British coffee brand, has a new online video campaign directed
smack at cubicle-dwelling, former English majors (i.e., me). Every week, a
hottie actor of the Anglo persuasion reads a love scene from a new or classic
novel. Here's Dominic West—Jimmy McNulty of The Wire—reading the scene from Pride
and Prejudice in which Mr. Darcy declares his love for Elizabeth
Bennet ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Good news to wake up to: New Delhi's highest court has decriminalized
homosexuality—for New Delhians, at least.
The law overturns Section 377 of India's penal code, a colonial-era statute
that prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man,
woman or animal" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Sara, you said that childhood stardom
was such a destructive force for Michael Jackson, and you were right. But
the current issue of Vanity Fair has a cover
story on Heath Ledger that shows for a sensitive adult, stardom ain't all
its cracked up to be, either. This isn't a new idea: That's why "the price of
fame" is such a cliched phrase. But Peter Biskind's story of the Ledger demise
is particularly heart-stomping, since Heath was so young, so talented, and being
a movie star really did ruin every aspect of his life ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Palin is back among us not only as a God-loving runner (is that a strange shot with the flag, or what?) but also as a
hard-charging mama bear. In Todd Purdham's Vanity Fair profile, which
Dayo and Jess
dissected earlier this week, are new tidbits about Troopergate, Palin's
corrupt-seeming axing of Walt Monegan, who was Alaska's head of the Department
of Public Safety. My favorite: Twelve days before he was fired, Monegan sent
Palin an e-mail telling her that a state legislator had reported that she'd been
seen driving with her baby Trig not in an "approved car seat" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Emily,
I agree with you that Jenny Sanford should stop talking to the media. When a
husband describes his affair with another woman not as a regrettable
indiscretion but as “a love story” and refers to said woman as his “soul mate” and to his wife as someone he’s trying to fall back
in love with, does it not beg the question: Why is Jenny Sanford trying to save
her marriage?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I too got a huge kick out of the Sarah Palin interview in Runner’s World, Jess. I’ll
give her a break on the cheeseball factor, since I’ve found that it really is
hard to talk about running without sounding totally boring and preachy. But
you’re right, she was preaching more than the gospel of endurance. In addition
to the “faith in God” line you called out, there was also her weird
aside about calling on your rock ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Anyone who still thinks Sarah Palin isn't trying to use her enviable physique to her political advantage should read this Runner's World profile in which Palin says, "I knew my thighs were going to just throb."... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The moment when the political wife stands (or doesn’t stand) on stage
while her husband soberly confesses that he could not, try as he might,
keep it in his pants, has proven time and time again to be a moment of
high drama. This fall, it will also be the basis for a television show.
Jezebel points to the trailer for CBS’s forthcoming The Good Wife, a drama starring Julianna Margulies (aka ER’s
Nurse Hathaway) as a mother whose politician husband (played by Chris
Noth aka Mr. Big) has up and pulled a Spitzer, but landed in jail for
it ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Hanna,
perhaps the most enduring lesson of the Mark Sanford unraveling is that
when your marriage falls apart, don't call in the AP reporters. I
generally side with Ruth Marcus and
have been pro-Jenny Sanford. But the danger in claiming the moral high
ground is that the air starts to get thin, and the lack of oxygen makes
you say stupid things ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The Op-Ed Divas have a showdown today about Jenny Sanford ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I don’t know that it gives me any special insight into the situation,
but I was in Copan, Honduras, the night one head of state was replaced
with another. The military had apparently cut the power and water
supply, and walking to breakfast, a friend and I saw some armed
soldiers jogging in the distance. But waking up in a Central American
country and finding that the lights don’t work, the shower won’t turn
on, and some armed men are lining up outside isn’t really cause for
surprise. I thought nothing of it ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Like Jessica, I devoured Todd Purdum's blistering report in the current issue of Vanity Fair
about Sarah Palin that draws on sniping from former John McCain aides,
shrugging statements of disownment from acquaintances in Wasilla, and
sorrowful head-shaking from the Republican intelligentsia. The
wide-ranging “profile” of the woman who almost stood second in line to
the presidency pre-empts the forthcoming book that netted the Alaskan
governor seven figures. And, having undergone the saga of the 2008
presidential campaign—particularly the post-Labor Day sprint that made
up Palin’s first months in the public spotlight—it’s astonishing to
think that there could POSSIBLY be more to the story.
And yet, writes Purdum ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)