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There was always something transparently cynical about Obama’s lofty
promise to “go after employers” instead of undocumented workers
themselves, as if making it impossible for immigrants to find decent
jobs were something other than persecution. But why, in the search for
someone of whom to make an example, would the Obama administration
decide on American Apparel? If you’re trying to convince us
that you’re “protecting immigrants from exploitation,” wouldn’t it be
more intelligent to go after a place that doesn’t specifically market
itself as a socially conscious “anti-sweatshop”?
A place that doesn’t provide healthcare benefits and pay well over
minimum wage? Or offer free English classes? Why not, I don't know,
find a factory that doesn't provide its workers with free bikes and
on-site bike mechanics? There are plenty of sketchy, example-ready
slaughterhouses here in the Midwest, and you can bet they don’t provide
their undocumented workers with in-factory massages....(Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post by Elizabeth Wurtzel:
There is a complicated old joke, not worth telling, but to partially paraphrase the punch line: The difference between heaven and hell is that in hell, the Swiss are the lovers and the French run everything, and in heaven, the French are the lovers and the Swiss run everything.
Obviously, this conclusion has been thrown into question by the botched Polanski pick-up, proving that the Swiss are not really the best stewards of swift order and that the French have some very odd ideas about the art of love, or whatever you want to call it. The joke does not make mention of the United States, but I have a suggestion: In heaven, the Americans are the keepers of justice, and in hell, the Americans are ... the keepers of justice. Because if you are hauled into court in this country, as the Polanski brouhaha displays, it is both the best of times and the worst of times ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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There's a CNN article today about increasingly popular iPhone apps that track sex offenders and other convicts. The story starts off with Tracy Rodriguez, a mother in Houston, who uses her iPhone to get "information revealing the sex offenders who live within a 10-mile radius of where her children practice sports or watch movies." Apparently this mom feels that the app makes her make more informed choices, and she checks it several times daily. I thought this was just a punch line in the movie Knocked Up, not an actual trend ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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From where I sit, Nina, I wasn’t at all surprised by the new homeless American girl doll. For the last few years, “homeless” has been the catch-all term for the less fortunate in American schools. Since preschool, my kids have been asked by various teachers about how they can “help the homeless.” Many of them live in neighborhoods where street people are nonexistent, so they understand the term only in its most literal sense, of “in between real estate deals.” I saved the answers my son’s preschool class gave to the question of how to help the homeless ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Erika Kawalek:
Last week, a law was introduced in France’s National Assembly that, if passed, would force advertisers and magazine editors to print disclaimers on images of women that had been digitally altered. Although I am weary of any law that limits the implements in the artists’ toolbox, I rather like what the inevitable “rawer photography” would mean for the aesthetics of ads and magazine editorials ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:
Marina Zenovich’s documentary on the 1977 Roman Polanski rape case (Roman Polanski: Wanted & Desired) is about to become an oft-cited source in the contentious debate about Polanski’s 32-years-removed arrest
that went down in Switzerland over the weekend. In it, Zenovich makes
the fair argument that the judge overseeing the Polanski case was
biased from the get-go—he’s depicted as a celebrity-obsessed,
press-provoking joke of a judge whose No.1 concern was his own image.
This portrait probably has some truth to it; there was eventually a
successful motion to remove him from the case and even the victim has
said that the ensuing media shitstorm ruined her adolescense.
But the rest of the documentary is a gross overwrought defense of
Polanski ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Emma Gilbey Keller, editor of DoubleX's Your Comeback blog:
It strikes me that today’s military moms bear some resemblance to
the medical moms of yesterday. Both doctors and soldiers choose intense
schedules that pit saving lives against time away from the lives of
their children. Both make huge sacrifices but can benefit from a
significant financial payoff. Both continue to struggle for flexibility
and recognition in a traditionally paternalistic system. The battles
fought by mothers who were doctors 10 or 20 years ago sound remarkably
similar to the professional struggles of those who serve in the armed
forces now.
Yet the difference is obvious and stark. If ever there was an
example that choice means giving rather than taking, it can be seen in
the mothers in the military who are prepared to die for their country.
The minutiae of their domestic tribulations pale in comparison to this
greatest what if: What if they don’t come home and their kids are left motherless? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Apparently, I'm one of the few people who read Penelope Trunk's now
infamous tweet ("I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank
goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an
abortion in Wisconsin.") who wasn't even remotely bothered by it. I
found it to be an elegant instance of the power of Twitter and the way
people have learned to pack so much information into 140 characters. We
as a culture applaud men who come up with choice quotes to describe
death, courage, and war, but if a woman employs brevity to express
relief at a miscarriage, suddenly there's an outcry against the dangers
of getting to the point ... (Read the rest of this post and related posts in DoubleX.)
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If you watched any of the trailers for Ang Lee's recent Taking Woodstock, you'd think that the '60s were a gentle-hearted, kooky time filled with benign cross-dressing and bad haircuts. There has been a thorough pop cultural rewriting of the '60s, which in reality was a time of national chaos, violence, and upheaval—the center was not holding, as Joan Didion said at the time. Two news stories dominating headlines today—about Woodstock-era rock star John Phillips raping his own daughter Mackenzie, and about the death of Manson follower Susan Atkins—remind us that it wasn't all folk songs and love-ins ... (Read more in Double X.)
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This week on the DoubleX gabfest, Hanna, Margaret Talbot, and I talked about the studies showing that female happiness among secular, educated women has declined since the advent of feminism. Hanna mentioned an experiment she and Jess are embarking on. It's simple but radical: They're not complaining. And they're tracking whether that makes them happier. More on that from them soon. In the meantime, a listener wrote in with another strategy ... (Read more in Double X.)
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A post from Double X writer Bonnie Rochman:
Call me egotistical, but I’m not lining up behind the well-wishers cheering on Carolyn Savage,
the Ohio woman who, in the process of undergoing IVF, was mistakenly
implanted with another couple's embryo. She decided to carry the baby
to term and just passed the 35-week mark ... (Read more in Double X.)
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CNN’s morning show did a segment on this new breast-cancer PSA that’s making the rounds on Break.com and YouTube ... (Read more in Double X.)
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By Amanda Marcotte
In today's utterly-unsurprising-but-still-necessary news, the Guttmacher Institute has released a report detailing how women living in households making less than $75,000 a year are responding to the recession by losing the desire to have a baby anytime in the near future. (PDF of the report here.) To be specific, 44 percent of the women surveyed indicated that they wanted to reduce or delay their childbearing in response to the recession. Unfortunately, the lowered desire to get pregnant doesn't necessarily translate to better contraception use for women. In many cases, in fact, economic hard times make it all the much easier to get pregnant on accident ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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If all this talk about the 70th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz has you thinking, “Gee, I wonder what would happen if Dorothy Gale were a corn-fed nymphomaniac with deviant tendencies,” have I got the graphic novel for you.
The mammoth, landmark Lost Girls—first published as a pricey three-volume set in 2006 and finally released in an affordable single volume this summer—is the product of 16 years of collaboration between comics legend Alan Moore (writer of Watchmen) and artist Melinda Gebbie ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Guest post by Sarah Elizabeth Richards, the author of "The Clock Ticker's Reprieve," a narrative account of how egg freezing affected the lives of five women, to be published by Simon & Schuster in summer 2010.
In response to my article about Rielle Hunter's chances of having a baby at 43, a reader asks how researchers determine a woman’s chances of becoming pregnant each month, especially when they don’t know when or how frequently she is having intercourse. Since a woman is only fertile about three days a month, the stat assumes she’s had sex during this window ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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On Instapundit, the indomitable Glenn Reynolds says that by not
publishing the name of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who falsely
cried gang rape, I'm "protecting a perpetrator." Why shield the identity of a woman who sent four men to jail based on a story she then recanted? Let me explain ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A few weeks back, when Emily pointed out this disturbing David Grann New Yorker article
on a wrongful execution Texas, it occurred to me that I didn’t see it
as a piece about the death penalty. I read it instead as a piece about
the terrifying commonality with which prosecutors rely on soi-disant
“experts” who prefer self-aggrandizing mysticism to verifiable science.
While he amasses bogus “evidence” of a man’s arson, a fire investigator
in Grann’s piece sets himself up as a mysterious medium through which
the fire speaks. And now the man he helped convict is dead ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Lloyd Grove interviews conservative rabblerouser Michelle Malkin
for the Daily Beast and is surprised to find that she is "vulnerable"
and gets upset when she gets death threats from readers. I would
imagine that Malkin herself would object to the framing of this
article: She's an intentional provocateur who can dish it out as well
as she can take it. So why does Grove need to paint her as a delicate
widdle girl? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Emily, I agree that modern women don't really want a Don Draper,
but at least he's a way better fantasy than fellow affair-havers Mark
Sanford and now John Edwards. First, Sanford had that lame Appalachian
Trail excuse and the even more embarrassing press conference. In a New York Times article over the weekend,
it was revealed that Edwards promised mistress Rielle Hunter that he
would "marry her in a rooftop ceremony in New York with an appearance
by the Dave Matthews Band." What is wrong with our chronically
unstylish philandering politicians? ... (Read the rest of this post, or the full thread, in DoubleX.)
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A week and some change after President Barack Obama's widely praised
speech to Congress on health care reform, Michelle Obama is making it a
double feature. By overtly bringing the first lady into the contentious
policy debate, the White House is upping the ante—but with a smart bet.
The FLOTUS, as a former administrator at the University of Chicago
hospitals, knows her way around the U.S. health care delivery system
just as well her Democratic predecessor, Hillary Clinton. The strategy, as told to Politico's Nia Hederson, is to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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If you’re a woman, then the cause to legalize marijuana wants you. Most activists working with the Marijuana Policy Project are men, Laura Greenback writes in High Times.
But they want to change that. So Greenback is doing some soul searching
about why women aren’t gunning for ganja. She offers the theory that
women “feel the pressure to be seen as strong workers and perfect
mothers, so we shy away from getting behind something our coworkers and
PTA members might see as ‘out there’ ” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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In an essay from Your Comeback earlier this week, Melba Simons Brown wrote about how losing her husband strengthened her faith. If a major life event has altered your religiosity, Emma Gilbey Keller wants to hear from you at emma@thecomebackbook.com.
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A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:
This is perhaps the least surprising finding of social science to date: "Rates
of births to teenage mothers are strongly predicted by conservative
religious beliefs, even after controlling for differences in income and
rates of abortion." In 2008 the larger public got a taste of what
watchers of the social conservative movement have known for a long
time, which is that they've quietly started to celebrate teenage
motherhood. When
Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston were trotted out as American heroes for
the Big Knock-Up during the Republican National Convention, that was a
wink and a nod to this growing enthusiasm in the Christian right ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:
If the police are right, and Ray Clark killed Annie Le over a power struggle in their shared lab,
then that means that the narrative that the media initially plugged
this story into doesn't quite fit the circumstances. A pretty, petite
woman about to be married who disappears? We're all conditioned to
think of sex crimes, instead of workplace violence. That said, it's not completely accurate to assume that because this act
of violence began as a power struggle at work doesn't mean that gender
doesn't play a role in it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Some 20-somethings take their relationship advice from friends, some from Cosmo. Me, I like it straight from middle-aged veterans of the Bush Administration. That’s why I’m listening very closely when Michael Gerson tells me I’m living in “a relational wasteland,” a “hormone filled-gap” between adolescence and marriage ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Remind me again why one people between the ages of 18 and 25 don’t have health insurance? Oh, right, because “they are going to live forever and therefore have no use for doctors.” Or so says Tim Noah in this Slate piece griping about how young people might actually catch a break under Sen. Max Baucus’ newly-revealed reform plan.
Noah joins a chorus of other distinguished voices (Mark Steyn,
anyone?) who have claimed—always without evidence, as far as I can
tell—that 20-somethings believe they are immortal. Apparently there is
middle ground on the subject of health care reform, and it consists of
deriding young people for being such careless fools ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This week, DoubleX is launching a new blog called The Desire Lab: Exploring Sex and Passion. The blog is designed to be one part confession, one part research, and we need your help. It will be moderated by Daniel Bergner, who wrote this fabulous New York Times Magazine story, “What Do Women Want?” Learning from the experiences of individual women and the experiments of scientists, he is now turning the article into a book.
Daniel, the author of three award-winning books of journalism, will
regularly ask a question inspired by the current explorations of sex
researchers and by your contributions. We invite you to send him
candid, thorough answers to xxdesirelab@gmail.com. It may feel strange to type out things you’ve never shared with anyone. But try it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from guest blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Hanna, I see what you're saying about how Joe Wilson is in the mainstream of South Carolina white culture,
but that doesn't strike me as a reason to shy away from drawing the
conclusion that he's a racist. If anything, that just seems to be more
evidence that he is a racist. Whether we like
to admit this about our fellow Americans or not, there are large parts
of the country where the mainstream white culture is overtly racist. As
a white person living in a red state, I'm sick of pretending that this
doesn't create plenty of occasions where conservatives will say the
most hair-curling racist things when they think they're out of the
earshot of anyone who will confront them on it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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David Brooks alerts us
to the fact that a congressman said something rude at a presidential
speech, and a musician interrupted an awards show. “This isn’t the
death of the West,” he reassures us. Good to know! But what is it? Why,
it’s the death of all that is good and humble in this world, and the
subsequent rise of “expressive individualism.” At some point between
1945 and today, we have crossed “a sort of narcissism line.”
I’d like to know more about this line. Did we all walk across it together? Were we too self-obsessed to notice? ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Social networking sites have always been a little bit about voyeurism, maybe more so than about networking. I joined Facebook in its earliest days, in the spring of 2004, as a freshman in college. No one using it then realized that it was going to be a Silicon Valley juggernaut; we were delighted for an easy way to find out more about that dreamy upperclassman on the crew team who, sigh, also listed existentialism as an interest.
A term quickly evolved for these embarassing bouts of recon work on a love interest or even just someone who'd idly grabbed our attention: "Facebook-stalking," a process that got much more fruitful once pictures were added ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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One knows all's fair in love and war—unless you toss health care into the mix. Under the prevailing practices of American health insurers, getting punched by a lover makes you a liability. Ryan Grim has the details:
Under the cold logic of the insurance industry, it makes perfect sense: If you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you're more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure.
In human terms, it's a second punishment for a victim of domestic violence ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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I'm not as down on this season of Mad Men as Matt, though I agree that Don as well-behaved husband is sadly ho-hum (and therein lies a whole treatise on marriage that I don't want to read). And Matt, you're right that the race/gender messaging is more didactic and less surprising than in sparkly Season One. But I'm finding bits of the messaging moving and real. This week's episode was mostly drifty and even boring (for me, those dream sequences were beyond saving, despite Julia's valiant effort). But Peggy's failed bid to convince Don to pay her what she's worth made me sit up. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which Peggy referred to (a thrill for the lapsed lawyer in me) absolutely should be her weapon ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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A post from DoubleX writer Erica Kawalek:
Although I'll be covering "homeless fashion" in my Schmatta Week dispatches this week—literally, I am interviewing homeless people—I just wanted to briefly comment on Guy Trebay's article, "Aware of the Homeless?" published in Saturday's New York Times. It summarizes the recent series of homeless-themed fashion coverage—most notably, the 28-page spread in September's W in which models are outfitted in paper bag dresses and sleep on benches, as well as a portrait of a "homeless-looking" man that appeared on the popular street fashion blog The Sartorialist.
Besides being tasteless and base, this got me wondering: How well can we judge a person's socioeconomic status from their appearance? I think the "homeless chic" trend is an acknowledgment of a new turbulence in this arena ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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For those of us who missed yesterday's epic Whitney Houston-Oprah Winfrey interview, Jezebel has put together a priceless highlight reel. We learn lots of sordid things about Houston's drug habits—watch her educate Winfrey on the finer points of freebasing here—and there are plenty of sad, sad details about her complicated relationship with Bobby Brown. It's not quite the glorious comeback I and other singing-into-our-hairbrushes devotees of The Voice might have hoped for: Just hearing that ravaged rasp makes me want to cry a little and then go listen to "I Wanna Dance With Somebody." But I'm happy to root for a (formerly?) insanely talented woman who's clawing her way back to some kind of normalcy ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
A couple of years ago, my very right-wing stepfather was giving me a ride from the airport, and he told me something I would have never thought he'd outright admit: He'd watched a documentary on TV that referenced a study that showed the inverse relationship between ethnic diversity and social welfare programs. "It seems," he mused, "that those little European nations with high taxes where everyone's on the dole are that way because everyone looks the same."
I didn't know how to respond, since I thought he was smart enough to see that this has personal implications—that he and everyone he knows that are opposed to social welfare spending might be, you know ... racist ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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A post from DoubleX writer Julia Felsenthal:
Many of the parents and teachers described in the New York Times article about letting your kids walk to school alone seem to be misdirecting their watchdog inclinations. Our communities have become vigilant about monitoring and admonishing “negligent” parents for letting their kids escort themselves to school. But shouldn’t that energy be going toward watching out for the kids themselves?
I walked to and from school every day from the time I was 8 until I graduated from high school, usually alone. It was a mile’s walk through a nice residential neighborhood in downtown Chicago. Most kids at my school got a ride. I griped about walking when the weather was terrible, but I appreciated the time by myself and the sense of freedom I had. One spring day when I was 13, I was mugged by three older boys from a nearby high school. They held me up at knife-point, emptied out my backpack, frisked me, and ran off when they realized I had nothing but (really) dirty gym clothes to offer them. I sobbed the rest of the way home ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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A guest post from my friend Matt Labash, a writer at The Weekly Standard, about this season of Mad Men:
The show is falling apart dramatically. There are two problems, the
way I see it. 1) It's getting all message-y. 2) Not enough Roger
Sterling ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Serena Williams' outburst over a foot fault call in her U.S. Open
semifinal is making me think again about the summer's big confrontation
between a star and an official—Harvard
professor Henry Louis Gates' run-in with Cambridge cop James Crowley.
The crucial difference is that this time, we have the videotape. I'm
not suggesting that if we had the tape of Gates and Crowley, we'd see
Gates acting like Serena did. My point is that because we know the
facts this time, we're not getting stuck in a feedback loop of
assumptions about race and class ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from law student and former Slate intern Morgan Smith:
This Forbes article, which recently whipped through my Facebook feed, is the latest iteration of the lame defense that is often marshaled on behalf of women’s colleges. The lead character in these
articles is familiar. She was a timid smart girl fearful of speaking up
in high school, ridiculed by classmates as a lesbian or feminist for
her choice of all-female higher education. Then she is transformed by
the powers of the single-sex classroom into a poised, successful adult ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Alissa Torres lived down the block from me on 9/11. We were working on
being acquaintances. We were meant to turn into friends. Her husband
worked in the wrong tall building; he died, mine didn't. There might be budding friendships that could survive that—but ours wasn't one of them ... (Read more in Double X.)
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Amen, Emily, the “lurking discomfort, in some kitchens out there, with having an African-American president,” that you speak of is no longer lurking, and it certainly has moved out of the kitchen and into the open. And it’s getting full-throated endorsement and encouragement from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, and all the other Obama-haters out there ... (Read the rest of this post, and other posts in this thread, in DoubleX.)
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I am addicted to a new subgenre of memoir, namely memoirs by grown men
who were diagnosed with some form of Asperger’s syndrome as adults. The
latest is Parallel Play: Growing up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, by Tim Page, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic at the Washington Post. This is a beautiful book with heartbreaking images from a misunderstood childhood ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I want to echo Hanna’s sense of ambivalence about Caster Semanya, the South African runner who may have to stop competing against those deemed unambiguously female. It does seem like gender ambiguity is among the few natural advantages that violate our sense of equity in competition. Maybe it’s not quite fair that Semanya’s opponents will be up against someone with a genetic advantage. But Lance Armstrong’s heart happens to be 1/3 bigger than the average male heart. Is this fair to the regularly-heart-sized guys up against him? ... (Read the rest of this post, and the whole thread, in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonio:
Unicef is rightly celebrating new figures on child mortality—down
below nine million a year for the first time in two decades. That's
10,000 fewer deaths a day, says director Ann Venemen, and that's the
number that got the press—but when I heard it, all I could think was
that if "10,000 fewer" is the good news, what's the bad? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This is a guest post by crime novelist Laura Lippman, in response to the Dahlia Lithwick's fabulous attempt in Slate to write a chick-lit novel in less than a month.
Dear Dahlia,
Welcome to the world of fiction writing. And while I know you have
already offended some writers with your blithe assumption that you can
write a chick-lit/mommy-lit book in a month, you might well be able to
do it. But there are a couple of things you need to know ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Emily, I cringed last night when I saw the clip of Joe Wilson screaming
“You lie!” during Obama’s speech. I’m on the record as thinking it was
silly for people to pull their kids out of class rather than listen to
Obama’s back-to-school speech. But do you really think the vitriol that
Obama faces is worse than what President Bush faced? Insulting the
president reached national-pastime status not long after Dec. 12, 2000,
when President Bush was finally declared the winner of the 2000
election. (Not that it wasn’t a growth industry during the Clinton
administration.) ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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It has been reported that Caster Semenya is a "hermaphrodite."
The South African runner thoroughly dominated her opponents in recent
races, and because of her masculine appearance, she was forced to
submit to a battery of gender tests. According to the Times of London,
"the 18-year-old had internal testes and no womb or ovaries." They also
note that the situation is delicate for the athletic association brass
because of Semenya's high profile. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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I had been avoiding this paper
on collusion and price-fixing in the fertility industry because I
feared it would send me into a Joe-Wilsonesque fit of rage. But Robin
Marantz Henig’s solid DoubleX piece on state laws banning compensation for ova got me thinking about the issue, so I sallied forth and read the thing. At least it woke me up this morning. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Emily, Justice Scalia made a lot of hay in yesterday’s campaign finance case
out of the fact that when it came to regulating campaign contributions
by corporations, “Congress has a self-interest," and would have
necessarily crafted rules to favor incumbents. I was trying to figure
out why that felt so very déjà-vu-ish to me until a reader wrote in to
remind me that Scalia made precisely the same point last spring in the Voting Rights Act case. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Everyone seems to agree that it was bad for South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson to yell "You lie!" at the president last night during the health care speech. Gail Collins calls it "not a good plan,"
New York Democrat Joseph Crowley called it "outrageous," and Rahm
Emanuel said: "No president has ever been treated like that. Ever."
That's when I started to get suspicious. Rahm Emanuael? The man known
to fit three "fucks" in a sentence, outraged by "lie"? The president
himself said his opponents "lie" not seconds before, and it's much more
unusual for a president to use that word than for some back-bench
congressman. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Today's rant: I am fuming over the new Smart Choices food label, which the NYT reported on here.
It's a label from most of the big food companies—not the FDA or any
other part of the government—that converts Froot Loops, first among
other Dumb Choices, into a supposedly healthy food. I mean, really,
this is crazy: A serving of Froot Loops has 12 grams of sugar, and
sugar is 41 percent of its weight. The response from the academic who
has somehow agreed to chair the Smart Choices board, Eileen T. Kennedy,
dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts,
is that at least parents will know when they get to the supermarket
that Froot Loops is a better choice for their kids' breakfast than
doughnuts. Why should we ever set the bar that low? ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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Obama was back in campaign form tonight—fighting back, and dead
serious about it. And there were notes of his inaugural address, when
he called on Americans by invoking “the character of the country” and
our sense of responsibility. And the president soared, in that lovely
ode to Teddy Kennedy at the end, which you’re right, Hanna, went straight for liberals’ hearts.
But on the specifics, on the substance, I heard more tacking to the
center than love for the left. Obama promised that people who don’t
have employer-based coverage, or Medicaid or Medicare, will be able to
buy affordable coverage on an exchange. But then he finessed the public
option. He nodded to its value, but he also said it was only a means to
an end. He will not insist on it. He’ll leave it for another day. Maybe
four years from now.
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One of the many things I adore about H Plus,
the transhumanist magazine, is its penchant for asking questions I
would not have thought to ask. For instance: "Is there sex in the
posthuman or singularitarian future?" ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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A guest post from Jessica Arons, Director of the Women’s Health & Rights Program at the Center for American Progress.
Women have everything to gain if meaningful health care reform succeeds and everything to lose if it fails. Why? Because the current system discriminates against women in numerous ways. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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On the heels of Caitlin Mostacella's insightful post
on double standards and warped cultural values when it comes to female
athletes, here's some beauty news on Caster Semenya to curl your teeth (via Broadsheet):
The 18-year-old appears on the cover of You
magazine with her cheeks rouged, lips glossed and nails painted.
Instead of her yellow-and-green tracksuit, she dons a sleek black dress
that covers up her washboard abs; gold jewelry, not sweat, drips from
her neck; and her cornrows are combed out into a bouncy coiffure. The
South African glossy declares in a headline: "Wow, Look at Caster Now!"
Also: "Athletics star Caster Semenya as you’ve never seen her
before—transformed by YOU from powergirl to glamour girl." ... (Read more at DoubleX)
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It looks like President Obama managed to deliver a speech to (some of) the nation’s schoolchildren without mentioning health care (unless you count the advice to wash your hands) or otherwise touting the benefits of socialism. I hope that we can all heave a big sigh of relief and get on with more important things. Because that would be better than what happened back in 1991, when the first President Bush gave a similar address to the nation’s kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Willa, Melrose Place seems utterly redundant to me now. Its
great innovation was, as I recall, to make TV watching cool again.
Before Melrose Place, TV was in a sitcom stupor, a vast wasteland of
cinematic junk suitable only for children and old ladies. Then suddenly
Melrose Place came around, and my post-college friends were
gathering in batches weekly to watch what was really just a daytime
soap that happened to air at night ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Should you doubt that Melrose Place has a unique purchase on
the hearts of longtime television watchers, I direct you to the
following positive reviews: “It’s as fresh as yesterday’s daisy,” “It's
still not good, mind you, but it's more honest and enthusiastic about
its badness, you know?” and “[It’s] operating at the same level of
glorious mind gunk as its predecessor.“ No, really, those are all
positive reviews. The new Melrose Place is exactly as bad as the old Melrose Place, and in the special 2+2=5 hours that occur after a long day of work, that’s entertainment ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This is a guest post from sportswriter Caitlin Moscatello:
Pink. It’s the color of “pretty” things—lipstick, frosted cupcakes.
It’s also the shade female athletes have historically avoided—until
this week's U.S. Open, where Serena and Venus Williams appeared all in
pink. It’s hard to ignore the contrast between the Williams sisters’
shade of choice and the vulgar scrutiny they’ve endured for being
muscular and female—and perhaps, muscular, female, and black ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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If you fear leaving your career briefly to raise a family, reading Emma Gilibey Keller's The Comeback: Seven Stories of Women who Went from Career to Family and Back Again, just out in paperback, will soothe your anxieties and inspire your return ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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What's at stake in Citizens United v. FEC: Would turning on
the spigot of campaign donations by corporations and unions make
politics fairer, or dirtier and more laden by the burden of quid pro
quo? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Haleh Esfandiari, who was a citizen of both the United States and Iran, was arrested while visiting Tehran and accused of plotting to overthrow the regime. She was put in jail for four months, at the age of 67, and survived thanks to her amazing discipline. But her book My Prison, My Home is far more than a prison thriller ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I wonder what it means that most every review I’ve read of Amreeka, a film that premiered at Sundance and opens in L.A. and New York tonight, makes use of the word “gentle” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Don't you want find out about how Betty will handle her increasingly senile dad? What about Carla's emerging role and the way Mad Men deals with race? And what if Peggy stands up this week and says: "I'm Peggy Olson and I'd like some LSD!"? We're going to be tweeting Mad Men Sunday night and we hope you're there to talk about it with us ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I find the uproar over Obama's approaching back-to-school address
to be pretty silly. The speech, which schools are being encouraged to
air on Tuesday, is meant to keep kids from dropping out. Sounds
innocuous enough, but Obama opponents are using the opportunity to
compare him to Saddam Hussein. The reason this is all so absurd is
because I was in fourth grade when President Bush the first made a
similar speech, and I remember finding the speech both boring and
confusing ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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If you have a spare hanky, squeeze out a few tears for Alberto Gonzales. The man's foibles are the subject of a joke opera, The Gonzales Contata, at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, which has a website that announces, "In protest of male domination of American politics, the genders of the performers have been reversed in relations to the characters they portray." I'm sure Gonzales always wanted to see himself in women's studies drag ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Not only did this dress by Ra'mon win the challenge on Project Runway last night, but the three lady judges said it was the one they were most likely to wear. Wear to what? A county fair vegetable competition? An Earth Day parade? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Michelle Cottle at the New Republic argues that the first couple are now stuck with the PDA, because the public expects it. Like Groundhog Day, only it's date night happening over and over, no escape ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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We are, it seems, the only species who has this protracted
adolescence—even apes get to dodge it. Is this the excuse we've all
been looking for to justify our collective obsession with teen culture? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Add this to the health care death panel debate. In 1936, long before
the creation of the National Health Service, King George V was euthanized by his physician (with a speedball!), and the fatal shot was timed so that the death could be announced the next morning in The Times.
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By Lauren Bans
Oh, MTV. The meaningless acronym channel that killed Daria in favor of Date My Mom has latched onto the 1985 Michael Fox classic Teen Wolf. The film that taught us all about the joys and compromises of male puberty is in the hands of the network that made "Speidi" a household name. Happy Wednesday!
Yeah, I know, it makes sense. Just not to my heart. Mythological creatures are in, particularly the blood-sucking variety. ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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In a blockbuster New Yorker piece this week,
David Grann persuasively demonstrates that in 2004, Texas executed an
innocent man, Cameron Todd Willingham. It is chilling reading. Whatever
you think about the death penalty, you can't want it to misfire. So how
did we get here, to a legal regime in which a junk-science arson
investigation was never questioned by indifferent defense lawyers, as
Grann portrays them, nor by unsympathetic judges, parole board members,
and Texas Governor Rick Perrry's office? ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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The juicy bits from Levi Johnston's article in Vanity Fair are now online. The most talked-about excerpt is sure to be that Sarah Palin wanted to keep Bristol's pregnancy a secret ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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By now you've already heard: based on the thunderous applause for the three-inch photograph of plus-size model Lizzi Miller on p.194 of September's Glamour, the magazine is now going to feature naked plus-size models in the November issue. I don't see this as progress ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Questioning the seriousness of food allergies is the definition of a thankless task. And so I've pretty much stopped brattily griping about peanut-free classrooms. But this piece in Slate by Meredith Broussard, about the conflicts of interest in the work of the non-profit Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, got me feeling manipulated again ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from guest blogger Lauren Bans:
Dahlia,
you're right. We shouldn't be surprised that a ridiculously bigoted
thesis came from a man whose record reflects those very views. And
neither should McDonnell be surprised that his thesis is now a campaign
issue. He's the one who told the Washington Post about its existence ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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My first thought upon hearing about Robert McDonnell’s moronic 1989 thesis
was that it ought to be ignored. We all go through regrettably earnest
periods in our teens and twenties; it’s unkind to judge other people by
the feeble intellectual output of their past selves. And McDonnell says
he ought to be judged by his legislative record, which also appears to
be crazy, so nothing much changes if we grant him this ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Hanna, I too have been fascinated by the dustup over recent news reports of Virginia’s gubernatorial hopeful, Bob McDonnell, but I am even more fascinated that it surprises us ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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One of the political phenomena I enjoy the most is when Virginia Republicans from the evangelical wing try to repackage themselves for higher office. Robert McDonnell, candidate for governor, was doing a passable job until this week, when his 1989 master’s thesis was discovered ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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This is a guest post from Katie Roiphe, responding to the various critics of her recent DoubleX essay, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic."
I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that credit for the interesting
brouhaha surrounding my last piece belongs to the inventive subtitle
writer, and not to me. I am, however, a little surprised that people
would be so blinded by a flashy subtitle that they would not be able to
read the substance of the piece itself ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from guest blogger Lauren Bans:
The media, it’s not doing so well. Maybe you’ve heard? Judging from the number of B-list celebs who snagged highly sought-after media jobs this week, it seems like the favored editorial solution to such trying times may be: Don’t merely write about undeserving famous people, hire them to work for you ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The always-interesting Melissa Gira Grant here introduces us to new terminology
recently encountered at a panel discussion among self-described “male
feminists." A panelist told her his organization doesn't like the term
“sex worker.” They much prefer “women used by prostitution". Because you know what really empowers women? Exclusive use of the passive voice ... (Read more in DoubleX.)