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A post from DoubleXer Julia Felsenthal:
Fox is making a TV show about disenchanted teenagers killing their classmates? That’s right: apparently a TV adaptation of the 1988 cult classic, Heathers, is currently in development ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Katie Roiphe’s recent essay for DoubleX, on the narcotic effects of new motherhood, has generated quite a bit of heat in the blogosphere. Yesterday afternoon, Salon’s Broadsheet published a roundtable on Roiphe’s piece. If you can stand to hear a little more on the subject, I highly recommend it.
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Today we introduce DoubleX’s new book of the
week feature. Each Friday, we will let you know about a book that turns
us on in some way. It could be a book we love, a book that infuriates
us, a book that’s rich or exciting or eccentric or moronic in some
interesting way. Usually, it will be a new book that just came out or
is about to be published. Sometime it may be a classic or a classic
reissued that seems suddenly relevant. Of course, we would love
suggestions from you. Please send to doublex.slate@gmail.com ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A new book by Arianne Cohen says that estrogen correlates to shortness.
Testosterone correlates to height. Though I spent my ‘tween years in a
steady hunch—the better to hear my wee male classmates—the idea of
taking hormonal treatments to squelch normal growth seems medieval ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Michael Vick trotted back onto the preseason field for the Philadelphia Eagles last night to a partial standing ovation
in his first game since he got out of federal prison after serving a
19-month sentence for his infamous dogfighting crimes. The NFL is
handling Vick's return gingerly, though, giving him game-by-game
conditional approval to play rather than reinstating him for the
regular season. What bothers me is the contrast between the care the
NFL is taking about Vick because he hurt dogs compared to its relative
indifference when football players commit crimes against women ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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For women in Muslim countries with sharia-based government, gains are of a one-step forward, eight-steps back nature. CNN checked in with Nujood Ali, the Yemeni girl who became famous at the age of 10 after escaping her husband and making her way to court. Poor Nujood has not gotten her happy ending ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This week I stepped blindly into the circumcision debate, which, lately, seems to generate as much fervor as abortion. I am guest blogging at the Daily Dish, and wrote in favor of the CDC's proposal to recommend more circumcisions as a protection against HIV and STDs. My posts drew dozens of e-mails that ranged from vile to condescending. "You're a typical woman," began one, and went downhill from there.
Always a sensitive topic, it's gotten even more so during the health care debate. Conservatives have lately taken it up as the symbol of what Obama ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Here’s one other take on Katie Roiphe’s addiction to her newborn: In addition to the mistake of assuming that all or most “feminists” think X, I think Roiphe has fallen prey to the error of conflating what happens when a woman stops working with the magical experience of having a baby. Which is just to say that the professional experience she’s describing here—of fearing the return to work, of the soggy cognitive skills, of cutting short professional commitments, and of her complete lack of enthusiasm for the impending return to “the great world where people talk and think and write” is precisely what I experienced on my own maternity leaves. But it’s also what I’ve just experienced in the days after my recent vacation to Israel.... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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On the Daily Dish, Hanna waded into fearsome waters when she suggested that the reaction to the CDC's consideration of promoting routine circumcision for babies in the United States has been hysterical. I generally find the anti-circumcision advocates to be on the crazy and rabid side, too. I have two circumcised boys, and I thought at the time that getting snipped... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Amy Bloom:
I'm glad that Katie Roiphe is crazy about her baby. I was crazy about my babies, too. Even better, I am still crazy about my children, now that they are adults. I don't fault her for the headline, as I'm sure that was chosen for her. What baffles me is her claim that somehow feminists have failed to acknowledge, in writing, that many lucky mothers love their babies. (We do understand that that is a gift, right? That many mothers find themselves unable to experience that lovely, dopey, mind-altering attachment?) Really? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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As a lover of crime writing, I am mourning the passing of Dominick Dunne, one of the best practitioners of the genre. Dunne wrote about the degenerate side of the wealthy, and even though he had an eye for debauched detail, he always kept his sympathies with the victim, because of his way into the subject: the murder of his daughter Dominique. Dominique was a 22-year-old emerging actress when she was ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Hanna, I hadn't seen your insightful post about the welcome end of the expectations laid on the last generation of Kennedy women when I posted on how not being expected to be president was probably beneficial to Kennedy females. When I think of the Kennedy women who were able to escape the family pathology, I was looking at the current generation: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maria Shriver, Rory Kennedy, etc. This generation of Kennedy females has... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The Last Days of Disco
is one of my favorite movies. It follows a group of recent college
grads awkwardly copulating in New York in the waning days of a Studio
54-ish club. Disco was out of print on DVD until the
Critereon re-released it this month. The Whit
Stillman-written-and-directed film was such a cult classic that when I
tried to buy it on Amazon a few years ago, the going rate for copies of
the film hovered around $100. Today on Slate, Troy Patterson points out Stillman's virtues as a social commentator and chronicler of "WASP decline." The reason I love Disco, though, is because it is the piece of film that best illustrates the deliciously awkward post-collegiate years. (Read more in DoubleX)
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While the papers are full of words like “dynasty” and “legacy,” Mary Jo Kopechne, according to Google Trends, is uppermost in our thoughts. (Read more in DoubleX)
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Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2012
London games would be the first to feature women’s boxing—and India is
gunning for the gold. Somini Sengupta reports in the Times today on how the boxing ring “represents a new kind of freedom” for Indian women ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain
generational model of the proper role for the family women in public
life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will
miss ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This is a guest post from DoubleX contributor Alison Gopnik, the author of The Philosophical Baby:
Many DoubleX readers seem incensed by Katie Roiphe’s story, My Newborn is Like a Narcotic.
But Roiphe is absolutely right that the intense love between mothers
and newborns is a very neglected subject in both literature and
philosophy and yes, also feminist writing. (Compare it to the enormous
literature on the profundity of sexual and erotic love.) So it might be
helpful to see what the science has to say about Katie’s experience,
and to think about what the science means.
I write about this at length in my new book, The Philosophical Baby.
In short, the scientific literature shows that the mechanisms behind
our love of babies is remarkably similar to the mechanisms involved in
sexual love. There are clear hormonal and chemical changes that come
with pregnancy, labor, and birth, which affect the way we feel, just as
there are with sex. In natural labor and the period following, the body ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The NYT’s Arts Beat blog reported this morning that Allison Silverman, the executive producer of The Colbert Report, is stepping down from her post, apparently rather suddenly, at the start the show's three-week vacation. The Times
cites a source as saying that, more or less, Silverman is burned out by
the unforgiving schedule of putting together the daily fake news
broadcast.
Until I saw Silverman speak at a panel on political humor last year, I’d always maintained that, although I tune into The Daily Show more regularly than The Colbert Report, Colbert himself is ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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On the New York Times' Motherlode blog, Lisa Belkin brings
up an issue that seems to get play every late August/early September:
whether or not high schools should begin later to cater to teens'
natural sleep cycles. I say: Get out of bed, adolescent lollygaggers!
Pro-late-starters say that teens are involved in fewer car accidents
when school starts later because they get more sleep, and also that
they can absorb material better because they are less tired. These are
not insignificant benefits. However, the reason a lot of these kids are
so exhausted ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This is a guest post by XXtra Small reviewer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Actually, not one enraged commenter on yesterday's NYT article about the possibility of the CDC recommending circumcision
as an HIV preventative raised that question. But the fierce opposition
that still surrounds the HPV vaccination for girls centers around exactly that. If both procedures might make unprotected sex marginally safer, why is the conversation so different?
I'm not actually opposed to the CDC recommending circumcision—especially since the main effect of the recommendation would be ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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We all know that celebrity gossip can wreck your brain, but apparently
it can also wreck your computer. Cybercriminals use our insatiable lust
for celebrity minutiae to lure surfers to malicious websites. And
according to the security tech company McAfee—which just released its third annual report on the riskiest celebrities in cyberspace—Jessica Biel is the interweb’s most dangerous famous person. ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Nina, like you, I love a good revenge story, especially one as empowering as MC Roxanne Shanté’s story. I was struck not by her
awkwardness in the video (I actually thought she was pretty poised for
a 14 year old), but by how innocent and unsophisticated hip hop videos
seemed back then. I mean, she was fully clothed and in an argyle
sweater, no less. Her pants look to be either velvet or leather, but
tasteful. There was no skin showing. No provocative rump-shaking. No
cursing or bragging about her sexual prowess. That video would have
little trouble earning a Good Housekeeping seal of approval ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Samantha, Rachael, yes: Women over 40 are, if not yet terminal, terminally uncool. That seems to be the sole reason that More magazine
has not been able to attract the kind of advertisers you would think
would sign up for a magazine with 1.3 million readers whose average
income is $93,000. Ironically, More's advertising staple of
processed food manufacturers has helped insulate them from the ad page
drop-off suffered by magazines that rely on luxury brands. But the
notions behind this de facto ad boycott are themselves antiquated and
based on decades-old thinking about consumers ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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Sam, I had a different reaction to the NYT story on More magazine
and its dearth of luxury advertisers. Whereas magazines geared toward
younger readers are full of ads for expensive clothes and purses and
jewelry, poor More, with its target audience of women north
of 40, is stuck with Oscar Mayer and Bertolli even though its readers
make more money than readers of magazines such as Allure and Vogue. Where you saw perhaps “illogical discrimination,” I saw a big “Duhhhhhh.” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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In 1984, MC Roxanne Shanté—nee Lolita Gooden—recorded the brash “Roxanne’s Revenge,” which launched the Roxanne battles and made the 14-year-old hip-hop’s first female celebrity. (Watch the video here: What’s amazing is how she’s simultaneously so cool and so awkward. And you must respect that sweater.)
Shanté left the business at 19 after two more albums, “disillusioned
by the sleazy music industry and swindled by her record company,”
according to a piece from yesterday’s New York Daily News.
But then she remembered that her contract with Warner Music had a
clause that promised the company would fund her education for life—and
Shanté rode that clause all the way to a doctorate in psychology from
Cornell.
Warner didn’t part with the money easily, though: ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I can’t quite get my head around the piece about More magazine in today’s New York Times.
Apparently the fact that a magazine aimed at women over 40 is pulling
readers who are women over 40—and rich ones, at that—is off-putting to
advertisers. Silly me, I thought all advertisers cared about was money!
But even though “the average More reader makes about $93,000, around $30,000 more than the average for Vogue, Allure or Harper’s Bazaar,
according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence,” the ads it runs are
notably low end: “The July/August issue’s ads included Crystal Light,
Pringles, Coffee-Mate, packaged meals from Oscar Mayer, Bertolli, Tyson
and Marie Callender’s, and two liquor ads—for wines under $10. Oh, and
Friskies.” (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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Paging super-fan Lindsay Lohan: Marilyn Monroe acolytes have just under 30 minutes to bid on eBay for the crypt above hers, according to the L.A. Times' local blog. The current occupant has been R.I.P.-ing there for 23 years; his widow now needs the money to pay off her mortgage ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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There’s a moment in Which Way Home,
a documentary airing tonight on HBO, in which someone tells a group of
Central American men that 20 percent of them will die on their way into
Arizona. “Who wants to go to the United States?” he shouts after
imparting this factoid. Every man cheers. It seems that no traveler
considers himself part of that unlucky minority ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The New York Times Magazine published a special issue yesterday devoted to women in developing countries. The entire issue is extremely well done, but I was particularly intrigued by an article about the "daughter deficit" in India. The gender imbalance in China and India—due to cultural preferences for sons that caused parents to abort daughters and even resort to infanticide—is something that's been written about for several years. But contrary to popular assumptions, the "daughter deficit" is more the fault of the rich than of the poor. What's more, when women are given more power, they sometimes use it to favor boys ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Dana, I have an Inglorious Basterd’s question for you. I saw
the movie over the weekend and I loved it—it’s not perfect, by any
stretch, but, damn, it was fun—and, unlike you, it didn’t leave me
feeling a bit queasy. In your review,
your major critique of the film was that Quentin Tarantino, again and
again, “unproblematically offers up sadistic voyeurism as a satisfying
form of payback.” Certainly, there are many scenes where this is the
case, but I thought
there was at least one scene in which Tarantino served up his violence
very problematically ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer K.J. Dell'Antonia:
I wasn't as dismayed by Project Runway as Hanna and Jessica, but that's probably because my reality TV addiction lies elsewhere. The original Brit version of What Not to Wear has always outclassed the TLC version, and now Trinny and Susannah are heading stateside. For all their groping, Trinny and Susannah have heart ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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South African runner Caster Semenya is being forced to submit to a gender test. If she is intersex—born with genitals of both sexes, or even had a sex change operation—is she not a woman? She is, by any humane standards ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Hanna, I'm with you that last night's Proj Run was a lackluster event. But the thing that's really going to make me stray from Heidi and Tim is their competition: Lifetime is airing the show at the same time as Bravo airs Real Housewives of Atlanta ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Can you destroy a great franchise in one episode? Project Runway is certainly trying hard. The new season, which aired last night, is now on Lifetime
at 10. These two minor facts alone have ruined it as a family viewing
experience. Ten is too late for the hordes of girl fans, including my
daughter. And commercials on the Lifetime network (Spa
Breeze, vacuums, odd vaginal ailments) are just too embarrassing for
any self-respecting husband to sit through. More importantly, the show
has moved to L.A., and now seems to be aiming for the tabloid-reading
public’s vision of what life in L.A. is like ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir, Persepolis—released
in the United States in 2003—was a clear-eyed, sensitive portrayal of
the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, seen through the eyes of
a young girl. Now Satrapi’s stark, inky images have been “remixed” with new text to tell the story of the recent disputed elections in Iran—ending with the death of Neda Agha-Soltan ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I don’t know if any photo can be more ironic than this one, which spent
part of Thursday as the top photo on MSNBC.com. Lockerbie bomber Abdel
Baset al-Megrahi, suffering from terminal cancer, was sent home to Libya
to live out what’s left of his life. And to board the plane, he walked
up a staircase bearing an ad that exhorted flyers to “Relax Before You
Fly” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Kerry, though married heterosexuals without children seem
to have caused much Canadian ire, octomom Nadya Suleman, back in the
press because of Octomom: The Incredible Unseen Footage, a documentary about her that aired last night,
inspires even more furious levels of vitriol. But in Suleman's case,
the vitriol seems at least somewhat warranted ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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Anne Kingston wrote a Maclean’s cover story on “the case against having kids.” Then she wrote another Maclean’s story—on all the hate mail she received for making the case against having kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Sometimes, you can unearth a gem on YouTube. Here’s something to start your morning on an inspirational note: a 1930 newsreel clip of Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan.
The whole thing is mesmerizing, especially the close-ups of Keller’s
fingers on Sullivan’s face, as she feels the vibrations of her speech.
Watch it all the way through, because the final few seconds will kill
you ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Sheryl Weinstein, former chief financial officer of Hadassah, tells as much as there is to tell in her memoir of her affair and financial investments with Bernie Madoff. The litte detail that will have everyone talking is this: “Bernie had a very small penis. Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. It clearly caused him great angst" .... (Read more in Double X.)
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KJ,
Let me start off by saying that I admire your ability to vote for the candidate and not the party. I consider myself a moderate along the political spectrum, yet I’m fiercely loyal to the Republican Party.
But if I had to go blue ... let’s see .... (Read more in Double X.)
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At the risk of sounding like a helicopter parent (which believe me, I'm
nowhere near; my parenting style hovers closer to the "Whoops, I clean
forgot I had a child, where'd she go again?" end of the spectrum), can
I just say that I have some sympathy for the anti-Mr. Softee camp? .... (Read more in Double X.)
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I think it’s already a cliché for bookish girls to be into MMA, but Nina asked—so here’s why I, like novelist Katie Kitamura, frequently find myself watching muscled young men disfigure each other on national television .... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Julia Feisenthal:
Jessica, what I found so odd about the Mister Softee article was the language used to describe the allure of the ice cream man .... (Read more in Double X.)
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Kudos to the New York Times for providing an endless supply of parenting trend stories to irritate and delight. There's a doozy in today's paper, about moms and dads who are trying to oust ice cream trucks from their local parks .... (Read more in Double X.)
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The Long Shot—featured
in the Daily Beast this morning—seems like an unlikely project. First
of all, it’s a literary novel about the violent, gut-churning
free-for-all known as mixed martial arts, or ultimate fighting. Second
of all, it’s by a girl. And she used to be a ballerina! .... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Rachael, describing my ideal GOP-ster
isn't hard. She supports civil liberties, she wants the government out
of its citizens' personal lives and favors smaller, effective,
government-run programs where needed. She supports free trade,
recognizes global warming and opposes the death penalty. No invasions,
no torturing—and no bailouts. Finding her—on either side of the
aisle—proved harder .... (Read more in Double X.)
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While watching Sunday’s Mad Men premiere, a very dirty
Japanese print hanging on an executive's office wall caught my eye; I
knew I’d seen it before, but couldn’t quite place it. But now, thanks
to the “The Footnotes of Mad Men”—and to kottke.org for pointing me thataways—I know that it’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, by Hokusai. (NSFW, unless, it seems, you work at Sterling Cooper.)
I have yet to hop on the Mad Men bandwagon, but if this blog
keeps up—it only launched a few weeks ago—the annotation-loving nerd in
me could very well get hooked. (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Jenny Sanford has been fairly quiet in the months since her husband, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, held that bizarro, totally captivating press conference admitting to an affair with his Argentinean sweetheart. She's broken her silence by giving an interview to Vogue, of all places. Sanford gets the standard Vogue treatment: an off-hand reference to her association with the Kennedys, the implication that she's so down-to-earth, despite the million-dollar view from her island abode. But what's really notable about the article are the retrograde notions Sanford has about her husband's dalliance ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
We Texans love our matriarchs, from Ann Richards to Miss Ellie. So Kay
Bailey Hutchison's gubernatorial run strikes a chord for many who like
to see big hair in the governor's chair. But if this primary is truly a
battle for the soul of the Republican Party, should even Texas Dems
support the anti-Palin? ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, this season of Mad Men
has a new tagline—no longer "Where the truth lies," but rather, "The
World's Gone Mad." Things seem relatively normal in the early 1963
moment with which the season begins—though by year's end, we know that
history alone, not to speak of the tangled lives of Mad Men's ensemble cast, will make a sense of cultural and political vertigo inevitable ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from DoubleX intern Meredith Simons:
********
I was raised to fear rape. As a high schooler, I was certain that when I left the safety of the suburbs for the wilderness of a big state school, I would be surrounded by serial killers, rapists, or at least predatory frat boys. But in college, what I actually discovered was a group of women who had been educated and empowered to within an inch of their lives. We took our drinks with us to the bathroom, but we didn't take trash from guys. After four years of feeling very, very safe in an environment that is supposed to be festering with sexual violence, I was startled by this video about "rape culture." While I understand that assaults happen, I was surprised by the assertion that we live in a rape culture. My own experience suggests that we live in an anything-but-rape culture, where some men are more likely to ... (Read more in Double X.)
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There are times when I think we should just embrace the mommy wars and
stage actual wrestling matches—celebrity smackdowns with XXtreme Moms.
This one week is one such moment. On one side, all the way from
Tunisia, we have our latest entry into Mad Momdom. She is so MOM we
don't even have a name for her yet, as she is pregnant with 12 babies.
On the other side, we have the slew of American moms who can feel
utterly overwhelmed by just one child, so overwhelmed that by 4 p.m.
they just have to pop the cork and find themselves ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The Los Angeles Times has a story about yet another study raising questions about the efficacy of mammograms. As Charles Krauthammer noted in his recent column
on the health care debate, Obama is pushing the idea that prevention
and early detection will save us billions. But the mass testing of
people for all sorts of diseases racks up enormous costs—not just
because of the testing, but because of the treatment of symptoms and
signs that turn out to be meaningless, and because of the imperative to
"cure" diseases that may never have progressed. (The PSA test for
prostate cancer is one such example.) The LAT article notes that the new theory of breast cancer is that many cancers found by the X-rays
would actually just sit there minding their own business, and some
would actually disapear on their own. These constitute a whopping ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A guest post from Slate intern Kim Gittleson:
Should what we learn about an author’s personal life change the way we
view his or her work? That’s the eternal question that’s sprung up
again in the wake of the revelation that William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies,
tried to rape a 15-year-old girl, Dora, when he was 18. Biographer John
Carey stumbled upon Golding’s admission in an unpublished memoir that
Golding wrote for his wife. Golding writes that he went on a walk with
the unfortunate Dora after returning from Oxford and “felt sure she
wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and
desirable mouth.” Although Sigmund Freud might have agreed with Golding, it turns out Dora ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Did Nancy Drew wear a hat? Well, put on something that makes you feel sleuth-y: Wired magazine reporter Evan Ratliff is on the lam—and Wired is offering $5000 for anyone who can find him.
The contest accompanies Ratliff's piece in the magazine's September issue about Matthew Alan Sheppard,
an Arkansas man who tried to fake his own death. In the article,
Ratliff notes that our always-on, always-connected lives makes it much
harder to truly disappear. "It’s almost easier to steal an identity
today than ... (Read more in Double X.)
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It seems like a strange time to be hopeful about a change in U.S.
policy toward Burma, what with the regime having just sentenced a
Missouri man to seven years hard labor and all. But opponents of U.S.
sanctions have more reason for optimism than they've had since the
embargo began 12 years back. In February, Hillary Clinton dared to
point out that sanctions against the Burmese people hadn't had any
appreciable effect on the regime. The Huffington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and DoubleX
have all published recent pieces critiquing the West's myopic focus on
Suu Kyi's release. Yesterday, to my amazement, Suu Kyi's lawyer himself
published an op-ed cautioning ... (Read more in Double X.)
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John Edwards is apparently about to acknowledge that he is father of Rielle Hunter's baby girl. A photo of the baby in last year's National Enquirer was as good as a DNA test, so much did she look like Edwards, down to their shared dimpled chins.
Of course the confession is an anticlimax after Edwards' various assertions: from there was no climax with Rielle and it was a top aide who was the father, to maybe there was a climax with Rielle, but just one, to that one time couldn't have resulted in a child because of timing issues, to "Daddy!" Surely this guy will have the decency to finally slink off the public stage. And not because he had an affair, but because ... (Read more in Double X.)
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June, I think maybe we have reached a profound truth about our respective conditions. By Satran rules, I bet lesbians are always young and moms are always old. So we could do the same exact things and ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I’m gearing up for the intense decade envy sure to set in when I watch the season premiere of Mad Men on Sunday night. Pity the aughts; we just can’t compete with the crisp suits, crystal decanters, and Bloody Mary breakfast meetings of the ’60s. And we may have brought back the pencil skirt, but it’s not the same when Joan’s not wearing it.
Still, there’s one thing that 2009 has to offer that the Mad Men time period can’t compete with. (Well, two—we have Mad Men.) Yep, Twitter. So on Sunday night, a crew of Double Xers, and we hope a bunch of you, will gather in the Twitterverse to discuss the show live. You don’t have to be an expert Twitterer to take part. Here’s all it takes: ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The latest issue of Marie Claire has an article by Ying Chu on the supposed phenomenon of "Asian trophy wives." The basic premise of the piece is that several recent instances of young, beautiful Asian women getting involved with older, rich white dudes—e.g., Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch, Ziyi Zhang and financier Vivi Nevo, violinist Jennifer Chun and George Soros—constitute some kind of culturally relevant trend. And that trend is icky, but icky in a totally different way than the normal ickiness you feel when an old guy shacks up with a much younger, hotter lady. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The New York Times reports that Yale University Press is publishing a book on the Danish Muhammad cartoons and their violent aftermath. After consulting with various experts in Islam and counterterrorism the press decided not to include the cartoons in the book, nor any other depictions of Muhammad—even benign historical ones—out of fear of the bloodshed that could result. This Yale decision—and the original decision of newspapers in this country not to publish the cartoons—is the way America, and the West, undermines what it stands for by supinely giving up its core value of freedom of expression. The author of the book, Jytte Klausen, a Dane who now teaches politics at Brandeis, only went along with this censorship because ... (Read more in Double X.)
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John H. Richardson’s Esquire feature on abortion doctor Warren Hern is the best profile I’ve read in a very long time. It’s an emotionally complex piece of writing about an emotionally battered man—abused by his patients (“you should all be killed,” a 14-year-old asking for an abortion tells him), disturbed by the violence of his work (“I think we're hardwired, biologically, to protect small, vulnerable creatures,” he tells Richardson), attacked by even the pro-choice crowd for refusing to deny the ugliness of what goes on in his office. The relationship between abortion providers and their patients seems more fraught, because it's more intimate, than the relationship between abortion doctors and their politicized critics. As Hern’s Spanish wife tells Richardson: ... (Read more in Double X.)
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No debunking of the Miyazaki cult here! Yes, Dana, please do report back about how your daughter fares when you take her to Ponyo. That dilemma of a few scary moments plagues me, as a parent, for so many kids' movies. As a fellow worshipper, though, I assume Miyazaki puts them to good and necessary use here. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Your question about what age his latest movie, Ponyo, would be right for is one I'm actively struggling with right now. While I was watching it, my pleasure was augmented tenfold by the image of my 3-year-old daughter flipping out as all of her favorite things (Magical transformations! Iridescent bubbles! Swimming! Brave girls performing heroic rescues! Queens of the sea with long flowing pink hair!) came together in one glorious rainbow-hued bundle. Honestly, I think if she saw this movie she might disintegrate from pure joy. But I can't decide whether the scary parts, which include ... (Read more in Double X.)
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As always, the French end up looking like idiots when they ban certain items of Muslim wear. In the latest flap, officials at a pool in a Paris suburb banned a woman for wearing a “burquini,” the latest fashion in Muslim swimwear. Surely some Muslim entrepreneur invented this thing, with its fetching name, to draw the French into a fight. As always, ... (Read more in Double X.)
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The great genius of How Not to Act Old is that it simultaneously taps into our anxieties and deflates them. Most of the time, it’s hard to tell whether Pamela Redmond Satran is making fun of the youth or the old folks. Like Julia, I find myself nervously going through her checklists. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Reading Dana's lovely and whimsical review of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki's new film Ponyo—which itself sounds lovely and whimsical—I swelled with gratitude for his sui generis filmmaking and the way he seriously applies it to children's themes. When we discovered Miyazaki through his film for young children, My Neighbor Totoro, I felt like I'd walked through the Disney looking glass into a world of animation that would actually make my kids see their own surroundings differently. Later we discovered ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Say you have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday, when you get a call
telling you the meeting's been moved forward two days. What day is the
meeting scheduled for now? Your response may reveal whether you're an
"angry" person or a passive one .... (Read more in Double X.)
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Molly Ringwald's heartfelt farewell to John Hughes in the New York Times today makes a good companion piece to the blog post "Sincerely, John Hughes" that we wrote about last week. Whereas Alison Byrne Fields was a teenager who loved Hughes from afar, Ringwald was a teenager who loved him up close .... (Read more in Double X.)
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The latest issue of The New Yorker is full of myth
busting, and the targets are two cherished classics of children's
literature. Malcolm Gladwell argues that Atticus Finch, star father and
lawyer of To Kill a Mockingbird, is not a brave reformer, but an accomodationist .... (Read more in Double X.)
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Noreen, you make a good point about Sec. Clinton’s reaction to a Congolese man who asked her about Bill Clinton's thoughts on a potential loan from China to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet I’m hard pressed to believe that many people in the Washington cocktail set would be so impolitic, or clueless, to exhibit anything remotely close to such condescension and sexism. After watching her campaign for the presidency last year, is there really any one left in the U.S. who doesn’t believe she can hold her own on weighty matters? .... (Read more in Double X.)
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Via the blog Sociological Images: The Candie’s Foundation—a nonprofit organization founded by the shoe company of the same name—has a new weapon in its mission against “the devastating consequences of teenage pregnancy.” And it looks super cute with flip-flops! ... (Read more in Double X.)
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So Blagojevich and Fabio walk into a karaoke bar. No, really. Video,
and another favorite butt of the joke, Levi Johnston, enjoying his
position as such, after the jump ... (Read more in Double X.)
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How to explain the complexity of Burmese political theater? Suu Kyi, says a Burmese judge, is guilty
of harboring an American who swam to her home, thereby violating the
terms of her arrest. No one is even mildly surprised by this. And yet,
as the Post’s Tim Johnston puts it in his excellent Post
analysis, the case “had all the trimmings of due legal process: judges,
defense attorneys and a system of appeal when the judges barred some of
the defense witnesses.” After she was sentenced to three years of hard
labor, General Than Shwe made a show of magnanimously commuting her
sentence to 18 months under house arrest ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Via Gawker,
the wife of Twitter founder Ev Williams, Sara Morishige Williams,
tweeted last night about her water breaking. "Dear Twitter, My water
broke. It wasn't like Charlotte in Sex and the City. Now timing
contractions on an iPhone app." This reads like a New Yorker parody of Silicon Alley power couples. First she tweeted the gush of water from her loins, then she let the public know: "Epidural, yes please." ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Deep in the hottest, doggiest days of summer, Disney is bringing audiences a refreshing treat: Ponyo, the latest film from legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.
Ponyo is the story of a spunky little goldfish who falls in
love with a human boy and, after getting her fins on some of her
father's magic elixir, turns herself into a little girl. Little does
she know, that act is about to throw the entire natural world out of
whack ... (Read more in Double X.)
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At an event on Monday in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a young man asked
Hillary Clinton what "Mr. Clinton" thought about a potential loan from
China to the financially strapped country. She paused, amazed, and
replied: "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks? My husband is
not secretary of state, I am. If you want my opinion, I will tell you
my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.''
My first thought upon seeing the clip of the exchange was, of course, good for you, Mrs. Clinton. But my second thought was: that poor guy ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I am not a first-thing-in-the-morning person. The minutes—OK, sometimes hours—between the moment my alarm clock goes off and the time my feet hit the floor are among the most unbearable of my day. Back when I clocked in at an office, the thought of having to shamefacedly skulk past my boss's door was usually enough to propel me out bed. But now that I'm a freelancer who sets her own schedule, what's to keep me from hitting the snooze button till 11 a.m.? My iPhone, that's what. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Time’s Mark Halperin goes on MSNBC’s Morning Joe
to discuss not the health care issue itself nor the controversial town
hall protests that threaten to disrupt debate of the issue but whether
the controversial town hall protests that threaten to disrupt debate of
the issue are getting too much attention in the mainstream media. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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There’s something profoundly icky about the breast-feeding baby doll, Bebe Glotón
(the name translates to “Glutton Baby”), a Spanish creation that will
be marketed internationally next year. But that ickiness has nothing to
do with the idea of children holding up fake babies to their
nonexistent breasts and pretending to feed them—a practice that no
doubt has been going on since there have been mothers, babies, older
children, and breasts. No, what’s gross about the Glutton ... (Read more in Double X.)
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My kids only use the computer to check for Red Sox scores. And even
then, in the morning they'd much rather read the newspaper. (A shred of
hope for the good old dead-tree version of the regional news that
Michael Sokolove mourned this weekend in the NYT.) So in our house, Nina, I'm the early-morning online offender. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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I don’t which infuriated me more: Bob Herbert’s sanctimonious Sunday column describing American society as “saturated with misogyny,” or the unusually thoughtless, “right-on” commentary
that followed it. Herbert’s thesis echoes the drumbeat of self-pity
that has been coming out of paleo-feminist groups and women’s studies
departments for decades: America, in their view, is a country where
“barbaric treatment of women has come to be more accepted,” where we
are all so inured to the victimization of the female half of the
population that we don’t even notice it anymore. What on Earth is he talking about? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes a defense of Judd Apatow’s Funny People as a kind of “realistic morality play,” claiming Apatow for the social conservatives. I too loved Funny People,
but precisely because its morality was so limited. Most of his other
movies involve a move toward redemption. You get a girl pregnant, you
step up and do the right thing. You’re stuck in an extended childhood,
you find a good woman and marry her. Funny People involves an
extended flirtation with redemption. Adam Sandler’s character almost
finds love, almost becomes a family man, almost becomes ennobled by
suffering. ... (Read more in Double X.)
But then Apatow rejects all those options.
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"We all know the future of sex involves robots and teledildonics," writes Annalee Newitz on io9.com, "but what will love be like in centuries to come?" Newitz—recently anointed one of "100 Geeks You Should Be Following on Twitter"—does a bit of forecasting and describes three potential scenarios, "based on current trends" ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A few weeks ago, Double X readers and
contributors discussed the case of Lady and Edward Downes, who traveled
to Switzerland, accompanied by their family, to die together at an
assisted suicide clinic. Today, BoingBoing directs readers to an essay
by British fantasy legend Terry Pratchett in which—spurred by the
recent Debbie Purdy ruling in the UK—he movingly, lucidly, outlines his
reasons why assisted suicide should be allowed under the law ... (Read more in Double X.)
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This is a guest post from Molly Haskell, a critic and author of Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited.
Karina Longworth describes the orgasm scene in the Ugly Truth as a cynical update of When Harry Met Sally.
Women’s pleasure, she writes, has been sidelined. But there’s a reason
the romantic comedy is displaying so much anxiety about women’s
sexuality. When the Nora Ephron-Meg Ryan-Billy Crystal movie came out
in 1989, Meg Ryan’s character was a journalist but most of all a
baby-faced cutie pie in no way threatening to the opposite sex during
her and Crystal’s 11 years of best-friend foreplay. Now, 20 years
later, women have moved up the economic ladder. They’ve become “boss
ladies”—that fright word of 1950’s movie heroines—and must deal with
the terror they inspire in men, not to mention the insecurities
underlying their own perfectionism ... (Read more in Double X.)
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John Hughes, the writer and director behind such era-defining comedies as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, and Pretty in Pink, died today of a heart attack. Yes, he gave us Long Duk Dong, but he also gave us Duckie, and for that, almost all can be forgiven ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Hanna,
I agree with you about the unfortunate trend of senators opposing
perfectly qualified nominees for the Supreme Court, cabinet posts, etc,
just because they are from the opposite party. As Republican Kit Bond said
in announcing his support of Sotomayor, "Elections have consequences."
And when your party loses an election, you should extend the courtesy
of approving the people the president chooses except in the cases in
which the person clearly doesn't meet the standards for the job.
However, Senator Obama himself was part of this partisan creep ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Senate decorum is made for “historic moments,” and there was much of it
on display in the vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor as the first Latina
Supreme Court Justice: the wooden benches, Robert Byrd being wheeled
out of the hospital for this special occasion. But none of it could
cover up the very modern and petty reality of the partisan split. Only
nine Republicans voted for her. Compare that with Ruth Bader Ginsburg
who, only 16 years ago, was confirmed by a 96-3 vote ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, at Double X.)
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Alice Sebold’s juggernaut bestseller The Lovely Bones is getting a big-screen adaptation courtesy of Peter Jackson, who directed the even more massive Lord of the Rings
trilogy. The film—about the spirit (ghost? soul?) of a young girl who
watches her family try to solve the mystery of her murder—doesn’t come
out until December, but the trailer has just been released. It looks fantastical, creepy, and awesome ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Are the rest of you as horrifyingly riveted by the Diane Schuler story
as I am? This monstrous woman put her son and daughter and three nieces
in the car, downed the equivalent of 10 shots of Vodka (she was
probably just pouring the bottle into her mouth), got stoned on pot,
then took them all for a wild, 60-mile ride that ended with her driving
the wrong way on a New York freeway, killing everyone but her son ... (Read more in Double X.)
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KJ, you asked for health care reform’s poster girls. This week a few have emerged. Our own Sarah Wildman was called to testify on the Hill about her health insurance nightmare during her pregnancy. And Regina Holliday, a Washington neighbor, is featured today in the Washington Post.
Her husband died of kidney cancer seven weeks ago on the day the Senate
took up health care reform. He couldn’t afford health insurance, so he
never got the tests that would have detected the cancer early. She and
her two young sons are about to lose their own coverage. Holliday is
now painting a 20-foot-high mural of her husband on his deathbed, near
a bookstore I pass almost every day ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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Daniel Edwards—the celebrity-obsessed sculptor who has already blessed the world with Britney Spears giving birth on a bearskin rug and Suri Cruise’s bronzed poop—has just announced his latest work: A statue of Angelina Jolie,
enthroned, majestically nude, and suckling a baby at each breast like
it ain’t no thang. Weird? Sick? Magnificent? I can’t really tell ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
It looks like the war on terror might not reshape just how Americans fight overseas, but also how academics fight in the classroom. Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy has been writing about the influx of vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan into Middle Eastern studies programs in the United States. Lynch's remarks hint at a fear among some academics that this new wave of presumably pro-government, pro-gun students might shift international studies departments to the right ... (Read more in Double X.)
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This New York Times article
about men being raped in the Congo is one of the most unsettling I've
read in a long while. This one scene alone should linger in your mind
for days ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Did anyone who watched Laura Ling and Euna Lee’s arrival in Burbank this morning not
cry? Though the reunion of Lee and her daughter, Hannah, was the
bigtime tearjerker, for all the obvious, poignant,
mommy-daughter-love-runs-deep reasons, there was another quieter moment
that had me dripping tears into my cheerios ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:
KJ, the Democrats may not have a poster child for health care reform, but they are getting a public enemy. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Sen. Arlen Specter got shouted down by anti-health care reform protesters at an embarrassing town hall meeting Sunday ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Wow, that might be the fastest Bill Clinton has ever picked up two women... (Read more in Double X.)
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For Laura Ling and Euna Lee, the two journalists held in North Korea
since March, the nightmare is apparently over: The Hermit Kingdom’s
state-run news agency has announced that the two have been pardoned and will be released.
Now that they’re free, I hope that Ling and Lee will talk frankly
about their experiences in North Korea. To save face in the
international community, Kim Jong-Il’s kingdom almost assuredly housed
the imprisoned pair in far better conditions than most “free” North
Koreans experience, and they would have been allowed to come in contact
with only the most ideologically pure guards and representatives of the
government. But Ling and Lee can surely at least give us some
information about what the people they came in contact with were like,
what sort of knowledge they had about America and the world at large,
whether anyone demonstrated any warmth toward them. Some reports have
indicated that North Koreans are beginning to understand more about the
world thanks to pirated South Korean soap operas and other smuggled
goods—did they see any indication of this? ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Here's what I heard about one proposed health care bill last week: It's
"sausage". It's Soylent Green. "Page 16" outlaws my current health
plan. Here's what I didn't hear: How it helps anybody who doesn't have
health insurance get some. What health care reform needs is a poster
child ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)
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I’ll admit my bias up front: My father is a New York City cab driver, and has been for 35 years. That could be him in that stock photo on the cover of today’s scolding New York Times story, for all I know. The story chastises cabbies for ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Peggy Orenstein had an essay in the New York Times Magazine this weekend on the lack of female superheroes, and what that means for little girls. Orenstein’s 6-year-old daughter has called feh on Disney princesses (“All Sleeping Beauty ever does is sleep,” says the wise little one), and surprises her mother by asking for a Wonder Woman lunchbox for her birthday. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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In this summer's Meryl Streep vehicle, Julie and Julia, Streep plays TV chef Julia Child. Of Child's "acutely libidinous" marriage, Streep told the New York Times,
"I don’t know why everybody is so surprised ... I guess people don’t
attach sexuality to people who look like their parents." But the people
who are their parents will probably be pretty excited to see their
relationships getting some silver screen time for once. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Skip Gates' daughter, Elizabeth Gates, wrote for the Daily Beast about attending the so-called Beer Summit at
the White House. Rather than furthering a discussion about race
relations, the only responses have been about gender relations:
specifically, calling Elizabeth catty for remarking on Sgt. Crowley’s daughter's green eyeliner. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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When I was a girl, children who bore their mother’s surname were
typically considered legally “illegitimate.” Now that science can
settle paternity, questions of authenticity, legitimacy and
matrimonially-linked inheritances have thankfully faded from the social
consciousness. Jessica’s comment about hyphenated surnames though, and Kerry’s post
on “matrilineal cults” both made me think about the historically recent
phenomenon of couples who, for reasons of their own, assign their
children the mother’s last name.
Although many of my contemporaries in their 20’s had become Mrs.
Somebody, by the time I married in 1985, brides had begun to routinely
retain their own last names with, typically, future children carrying
the husbands’. By then, at 35, I had no interest in changing my
cognomen to Grady. I had grown into my Goldstein name and we were
inseparable.
Surprisingly, my 13-year-old daughter, though she would have been
happy to remain fatherless, changed her family name from Goldstein to
Grady. ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Did the Washington Post break a rule of web publishing by
taking down, without explanation, a video of Dana Milbank and Chris
Cillizza in which Milbank suggested "Mad Bitch" beer as a good choice
for Hillary? The link looks like it's dead. Here too. ... (Read more in Double X.)