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A guest post from DoubleX intern Danny Townsend:
In the New York Times last week, Joanne Lipman declared that women's progress has stalled because "we've focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes." She tells one story with a precise tally: "In my time as an editor," she writes, "many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I'll tell you. Exactly ... zero." Reluctance to ask for a raise is, in Lipman's eyes, a problem of the prevalence of trying to be a "passive 'good girl'" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Jodi Kantor’s wonderful and voyeuristic reported treatise on the Obama marriage runs in the New York Times Magazine
this weekend. It’s absolutely worth the time to delve into the personal
insights (and funny audio!) Kantor squeezes out of interviews with
friends and associates of the Obamas, many of whom are now co-workers
of the world-famous couple. My favorite: senior adviser Valerie Jarrett
channeling a frazzled, midnight-grocery-shopping Barack, on the phone
with a put-out Michelle, chanting “‘I’ll make it work,’… “ ‘We can make
it work. I’ll do more’” ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Were any of you uncomfortable as I was seeing the photo
of Hillary Clinton in Pakistan wearing a scarf over her hair? I know
given the magnitude of what she has to deal with there, that this a
small, possibly trivial issue. But on the other hand, whenever I see an
American female official (and this has been true of Democrats and
Republicans) in a Muslim country with her head covered, I feel that
this is not sending a message of respect for their values but failing
to take an opportunity to show ours ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
With Halloween falling on a Saturday night this year, slumber parties
and post-trick-or-treating festivities are bound to fill living rooms
across the country. Nothing goes better with a bag of Halloween candy
than a scary movie—but which one? Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween
and the Halloween offerings from the Nick/Noggin crew are easy choices
for younger kids, and teens will pick their own. But I’m hosting a pack
of 8-year-olds who think they’re ready to be scared. I polled my DoubleX
colleagues looking for starter-scary flicks and we came up with 10
movies that will give middle-graders just the right dose of Halloween ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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This week, I am attending the trial of Raymond Merrill Jessop, a member
of a polygamous Mormon sect in West Texas, accused of sexually
assaulting a child. You will no doubt remember the photos from 2008 of
Texas Rangers storming the compound and carting off hundreds of
children, from toddlers to teenagers. Since then, the members of
Yearning for Zion have allowed select photographers onto the compound to capture innocent moments
– feeding babies, slicing bananas and being generally wholesome, as a
way to win over public opinion. Today, the trial created another
opportunity to contemplate the power of images to manufacture a truth ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Jodi's piece made me think that Michelle has her footing as a First
Lady who can handle the constricted role without being defined by it. Rebecca Traister and I went back and forth last November about whether Michelle was letting herself be "momm-ified,"
in Rebecca's phrasing. I held out then for Michelle's feminist cred.
And I do think that when your husband is president, the rules are
different. Yes, your power comes from him. But you have so much of it!
Michelle impresses me in this new NYT interview by showing us how well she recognizes the tension ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
When Mexico City decriminalized abortion in 2007, pro-choicers took it
as a sign of great things to come, possibly including a nationwide
liberalizing of abortion laws. Unfortunately, as Mary Cuddehe reports in the Atlantic,
the Catholic Church and general sexist establishment reacted with
outrage and doubled down on the war against women who want to control
when they have children. Since then, 14 Mexican states have passed laws
defining personhood as starting at conception, with some even going so
far as to ban IUDs while they were at it. The result is that women have
been going to jail for obtaining illegal abortions ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
Congressional committee hearings are usually the domain of dark-suited men speaking in carefully-modulated tones. So Gay Culverhouse,
who showed up to a House Judiciary Committee meeting in an
unapologetically purple suit and spoke with both intelligence and
anger, was startling. Culverhouse, a former president of the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers, wasn’t a breath of fresh air; she was a bracing gust of
wind as she outlined the ways in which (in her view) the NFL abuses and
then abandons its players ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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I grew up in a household in which the normal mode of verbal interaction
started at banshee and escalated to supersonic, so I was interested in
the New York Times piece “Shouting is the New Spanking” that KJ wrote about last week.
The article says that yelling at children is becoming as socially
unacceptable as whacking them. I agree that regular shouting is
ineffective and counterproductive. Just think of your reaction when
you’re in public and you see a parent screaming at a kid. Even if you
don’t know what the offense was that set off mom or dad, you recoil at
seeing an adult so out-of-control. And the yelling just leaves an
aftermath of gloom and resentment over the whole family ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Top law firms report having few or no women on their list of the top 10 "rainmakers."
Fifteen years out of law school and a veteran of big-firm life, I asked
former classmates and colleagues why women don't bring in the bucks.
Should I be surprised that the answers turned out to reflect their own
gender divide?
Men, while offering a nod to the idea that perhaps women led more
balanced lives (proper rainmaking behavior is a 24/7 job: If you've
seen Ari Gold on Entourage,
you've seen somebody making it rain), seemed inclined to put the new
statistic (from a study the National Association of Women Lawyers and reported on Law.com) in the category of "change that hasn't filtered up yet" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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The ban on travel to Cuba was as pointless seven years ago as it is
today, but somewhere in the interim, a significant number of
Cuban-Americans turned against it.
In a 2002 poll, 46 percent of Cuban-Americans said they wanted the
restriction lifted. According to a September survey, 59 percent said
the same. This is especially striking because in April of 2009,
Cuban-Americans won the right to visit family members with relatively
few restrictions; it's the rest of us who still have to deal with a
blanket ban.* The poll's sample size is not large, and the margin of
error is a full five points, so the swing may not be as great as it
appears. Still, the future belongs to the would-be tourist; when you
exclude the 65-and-over set, the percentage of people who support a
change of policy shoots up to 62 ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
A few months back, the New York Times ran an alternately fascinating and creepy story about
Japanese men who were in love with their life-size anime plush dolls,
and shamelessly took them everywhere—to the beach, to karaoke (perhaps
singing Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll”?), to the all-you-can-eat salad bar.
Today, Boing Boing touches on another bizarre Japanese dating trend,
this one two-dimensional: a video game girlfriend ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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It’s been a whole day since I first read Jason Whitlock’s Foxsports.com column defending ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, who was fired from the network after having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.
Whitlock’s main point is that “[a] little off-the-books nookie should
not infringe on man's ability to discuss bats and balls in October.”
I’m going to set aside the obvious fact that a job at ESPN is a
privilege, not a right, and if an employee does something to embarrass
the network, of course he can be fired ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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About Obama's hoops game for boys, reader Matt DeBord writes:
One thing that's been overlooked is how spectacularly, epically terrifying it is for most men to be asked to play any kind of sport with the boss. Sometimes if you're really, really good—like if you played golf in college or something—they want to have you around as a kind of permanent pro-am staffer ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Last night’s bizarro Halloween-themed Mad Men episode showed the nudity we’ve all been waiting for since Betts got a hold of her husband’s Pandora’s box: a glorious disrobing of Don Draper's decades-long, self-perpetuated costume. (SPOILER ALERT!) ... (Read the rest of this article at DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I'm a fan of using kooky incidents as a jumping point to ponder the Big Questions of Our Time, but Frank Rich's half-hearted defense of Balloon Boy's dad Richard Heene counts as an overt abuse of the form, on many levels. I simply cannot accept Heene as Rich paints him, a man ground down by our economy and striving for the perceived payoffs of fame to the point of the evil misuse of his family ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
My kids still love the Baby Einstein videos. If I popped one in now, even the 8-year-old would sit down and watch the pretty toys spin to the music. When it was over, none of them would be any smarter, and if you thought they would be, I'd say you should get a clue. Disney—rather surprisingly—says you should get a refund ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Linda Hirshman:
The really elite women opt out at almost the same rate as the poor and uneducated ones. So the "over $100,000" slice beloved of the opt-out debunkers isolates the most working of all the women surveyed. Hardly the material for mythmaking ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Last summer, we adopted a little girl who'd been fostered by a deeply
evangelical couple, "called" to minister to children in China. I'm more
accustomed to mocking the faithful than to thanking them, and I'm not
good at hypocrisy. I picked up The Case for God looking for a reason to change ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX Staff:
DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: A recent Census report refutes the idea that large numbers of women are quitting successful careers to become stay-at-home moms ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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In the past week, the Today Show has done lengthy segments on
two women scorned: Ali Wise, the former Dolce & Gabbana flack who
hacked into her ex-boyfriend's voice mail account, and the even more psychotic former ESPN production assistant Brooke Hundley,
who harrassed the wife and children of her ex-lover, ESPN analyst Steve
Phillips. Both the tales had sexy, new-media twists, Wise with her
voice-mail hacking and Hundley because she bothered Phillips's son on
Facebook ... (Read more on DoubleX.)
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Natasha Vargas-Cooper delves into the universe of Twlight
fan-fiction, where Bella and Edward generally exchange more than
longing looks. We get some heavy breathing and if not bodice-ripping,
definitely thong-ripping ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Karina Longworth:
Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and
Willem Dafoe as a couple grieving the death of an infant son who
tumbled to his death while mommy and daddy were having hot sex, has been piously lambasted as "misogynist" by male critics ever since it premiered
at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Before I had a chance to see it, a
male reporter for a major newspaper told me that "no woman" could
possibly enjoy the film.
What can I say? I enjoyed Antichrist. I guess this makes me less of a woman? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
My jaw fell to the floor reading this story.
Three years ago, a young black woman named Heather Ellis was shopping
with her cousin in a Missouri Wal-Mart. As I’ve done more than once in
my life, Ellis and her cousin split up into two different checkout
lines to see which would go fastest. When her cousin’s line started
moving quickly, she joined him. The clerk accused Ellis of cutting in
line, an argument ignited, security was called, and lo and behold
Ellis, a pre-med honor student, now faces up to 15 years in prison on
charges of disturbing the peace, trespassing, and assaulting a police
officer. ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
More than half of adult women are mothers. It's not a lifestyle. It's
not a trend. It's just one of those things—you know, continuation of
the species and all that. A biological urge complicated by societal
factors that has been, not incidentally, the subject of great art and
literature over the past few centuries. Into that pantheon comes Motherhood: The Movie, promoted by a trailer full of worn tropes and painful moments. Want to silence Uma Thurman, the ruthless killer bride of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2? Stick a binkie in her mouth. Motherhood, the Great Infantilizer. How did we come to this? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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America is caught up in a frenzy of Heene-Hatred. So angry are we at
the perpetrator of last week’s balloon-boy hoax, we pour out our wrath
on him, his wife, cable news, reality shows, and every aspect of our celebrity-worshipping culture that rewards parents for exploiting their kids.
We pledge to clean up the reality-show kid frenzy. To better regulate
the exploitation of children on TV. To avoid speaking the name Heene
out loud. To shun Kate and Jon and Octomom (at least until next
season). And how do we express all of this outrage and contempt and
disgust? In our Facebook posts, tweets, angry blog entries, and media
appearances.
I am not here to defend Richard Heene, who clearly feels that
reality television represents the very pinnacle of all human
achievement. (Watch him here on his second run at ABC’s Wife Swap where, at 2:52, he calls being voted back onto Wife Swap
“the best thing that has ever happened in our lives. Seriously.”) This
man has a problem, and his willingness to co-opt his entire family into
his quest for TV fame is tragic ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A Post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
It's easy to pity tech geeks for having to live with the stereotype
that they're undersexed, sexist, tone deaf, and mean-spirited. Easy to
pity them until you see that geeks are their own worst enemy when it
comes to upholding this stereotype. The latest tech world sexism
scandal—involving Yahoo-sponsored lap dances at a conference—inspired Gawker to compile a list
of some of the most recent sexism scandals in the tech world. Why on
earth does the world of high tech create so many occasions for its
ugliest members to send signals that indicate that they think that men
are for thinking and women are for shutting up and stripping? (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans.
Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass always had polysexual tendencies in Cecily von Ziegesar’s YA book series, but it took the WB until the third season to indulge us just a simple kiss with a man. But when it finally happened last night, it was splendid. It was swift, it was sexy, it was, most importantly, not a big deal ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A guest post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck.
“Poor kid” is right, Emily. The Heenes are not only spectacularly bad parents, but they might soon become inmates
in Colorado state prison. In the span of one short weekend, the Balloon
Boy drama has turned out to be just that—an elaborate one-act
theatrical work put on by the Heene Family Players, staged on
television stations and computer screens across the country. We now
know that the Heenes' ordeal was just one more attention-grabbing stunt
in what appears to be an agonizingly protracted audition for a
TLC-style reality television show—the last act in a series of questionable parenting moves ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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The news of the hour is a new vote in Afghanistan.
This is good news for Peter Galbraith, a United Nations representative
in Afghanistan who had been fired from the U.N. team for blasting
Afghanistan's “tainted vote” in public. This new Washington- and Kabul-sanctioned runoff election, to be held on Nov. 7, may well delay an official White House announcement on more troop levels for “the good war.” But when discussing the Afghan crisis, which Daily Show co-creator Liz Winstead has taken to calling “Noplanistan”—the plight of women in the feudal, fractured, straight-dangerous nation should spring to mind ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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I’m more of an etiquette snob than self-proclaimed etiquette expert Anna Post. Or so it seemed at yesterday’s “Mobile Etiquette Tea,” where she and Intel’s Dr. Geneveive Bell discussed what’s socially acceptable use of cell phones, smart phones, lap tops, and e-mail.
Over finger sandwiches and a tower of cupcakes at the Russian Tea
Room, a woman posed a hypothetical for Anna, the granddaughter of Emily
Post: Who is ruder, the person jabbering away on her cell phone on the
bus while everyone around her grows increasingly annoyed, or the
annoyed seatmates who spent 10 minutes rolling their eyes and
harrumphing and generally trying to make it passive aggressively clear
to her that she should shut up? Anna said that, as with someone who
spills red wine all over a dinner table, the proper way to deal with
the “accidental offender” is to keep your annoyance to yourself so the
situation can be smoothed over as quickly as possible ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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I’m glad you found some redeeming bits of wisdom in “The Shriver Report,”
Amanda, because I find the whole thing cringe-inducing in a
post-recovery-balloon-boy sort of way. It’s not just that it’s some
kind Maria Shriver vanity project masquerading as a progress report on
less notable women. (Or maybe a progress report masquerading as a
vanity project? Hard to tell, but do check out Shriver’s blurb of her own report,
complete with headshot.) And it’s not just meaning-challenged
banalities like “the torch is being passed ... to a new gender.” It’s
that the report, ostensibly aimed at women, is so smothered in
saccharine anecdote that I can’t even locate the data. I’m sure it’s
there. I just lost the energy to look for it somewhere between “the
battle of the sexes is over“ and “the footprint of today’s American
worker is as likely to be a heel as a boot.“ (Women don’t wear boots?
Boots don’t have heels?) ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Erica Kawalek:
It’s a gloomy, retrospective day for fashion.
The Wall Street Journal reports
that a meeting was to have taken place today between French Prime
Minister Francois Fillon and a group of government advisers, luxury
titans, and master craftsmen. The purpose? To discuss subsidies that
might save feathermakers, milliners, embroiderers, and dressmakers from
extinction. (To witness some of these artisans at work, check out the
documentary Signé Chanel.)
The French luxury sector has been hard-hit by the recession, the
article explains: This year, business has dipped 30 percent. The fear
is that the recession could kill off the remaining 115 businesses that
cater exclusively to the high-end fashion and haute couture industries.
But it’s not just luxury fashion workers who are at risk ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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When I first read about the pregnant Arizona woman
whose hospital stopped performing VBACs, prompting her to plan to drive
350 miles to Phoenix to a hospital that would allow her to deliver her
baby vaginally, I sympathized. I wouldn’t have made the same choice,
but I sympathized.
Now, though, the Daily Beast reports
that the woman painted minivan to say “Page Hospital, enter my body
without permission ... Sounds like rape to me.” She’s not alone in her
sentiment. The mom at birthtruth.org has an essay titled “8 years
later” in which she talks about her “grief” over her C-section and
reprints a poem from a mom who discusses her “mourning” over hers.
Birthcut.com is full of C-section horror stories. The Daily Beast’s
Danielle Friedman writes: “Women who feel violated by the notion or
experience of a C-section often feel misunderstood—family and friends
can’t grasp why they can’t just get over it and move on" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Hanna, I think you’re exactly right that Where The Wild Things Are is alternately too boring and too scary for kids.
And as counterintuitive as it might sound to say about a beautifully
shot movie featuring overly emotional, jeering, violent, hybrid beasts
who bicker, build forts, and knock holes in trees, I think it just
might be a failure of imagination as well.
If Wild Things existed in a cultural universe that was not
saturated with twee, quirk, and thirtysomething ennui—if, in other
words, it existed in a universe where the McSweeney’s
aesthetic was fringe—this movie might be fresh. Even as it is, the
decision to make the wild things neurotic, angsty, misbehaving, and
nitpicky initially plays like a surprising choice. When we
first come upon the monsters, arguing in the forest, it’s jarring that
they sound like unhappy versions of the teenagers from Dazed & Confused. Whatever you imagined the wild things to be like when reading the original, this wasn’t it ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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From the same Chicago schools system that saw 16-year-old Derrion Albert bludgeoned to death, another troubling story:
It is a Chicago public school full of energy and spirit.
It has about 800 girls, and 115 of them have something in common –
something you might find disturbing. ...
All those young ladies are moms or moms-to-be at Paul Robeson High
School. It's not a school for young mothers, it's a neighborhood
school. And all of the pregnancies have happened, despite prevention
talk.
If you want to know why, the people closest to the situation say there's no simple explanation.
Chicago Public Schools says it does not track the overall number of teen moms in the district. But Robeson Principal Gerald Morrow knows the count at his school in Englewood ... To put it in perspective, their school pictures would fill roughly six pages of their high school year book.
Why is it happening at Robeson?
Good bloody question. We've all heard about the same thing happening in the white, working-class enclave of Glouscester, Mass. This state of affairs seems a far cry from the infamous Grease scene wherein the drive-in crowd plays telephone with the news that "Rizzo's got a bun in the oven." At Robeson, no one seems to care that over a hundred young women are now raising children alone (the write-up barely mentions any male co-conspirators or caretakers). Even the article's author seems careful to hedge on whether one "might" find the pregnancy epidemic "disturbing" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
Within the seething morass of second guesses and good intentions that
is the mind of a parent, there shines one beckoning truth: that
everything is your fault. When your kids are late, you're the driver.
When they're hungry, you're without snacks. When they're quarantined in
China, you put them on the plane. And when that single truth paralyzes
all others, what you need most is
company. And this is why I'm glad that Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon, as the New York Times Style section put it on Sunday, "write it all down" ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:
It’s official. Levi Johnston is posing for Playgirl next month.
Though whether he’s showing his johnston or not is still to be
revealed. What is clear is that Levi, in his attempts to milk his
sudden fame for all it’s worth, has fashioned himself into some kind of
ironic representative of failed conservative ideals. (His ad for pistachios riffs about “using protection.”) The only thing is the joke’s not so funny ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress have released a report
about women and work that manages both to be interesting and not at all
surprising. The report perfectly captures Americans' contradictory
attitudes about women working: We're fans of the money women bring in,
but we don't show a strong willingness to make the necessary
adjustments at home so that women's unpaid labor isn't as necessary ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Manohla Dargis
said the movie “startles and charms and delights.” The book is
fantastic. It was cold and rainy all weekend. So I took my children, of
course, and was startled to discover a heavy divorce drama that
alternately terrified and bored. There are many sublime and original
moments in the movie. But overall, the experience is like being trapped
in an est session from the 1970’s, with lots of people yelling and
haranguing one pitiful little boy, and family breakdown (and Jim
Nelson) looming in the background. Needless to say, it was barely
appropriate for kids ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I didn't want to believe that Thursday's helium balloon TV drama was
fake when all the signs pointed that way last week. But now the
evidence of a balloon boy hoax has
been confirmed by the sheriff who stuck up for Richard and Mayumi
Heenes' story, who says now that the Heenes planned the stunt in a
bid for a reality show of their own ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
I’m all confused about which age group is supposed to be the
Entitlement Generation. I thought it was mine; after all, I’m always
hearing my elders snark about how today’s twentysomethings never
graduate in four years, won’t submit to cubicle culture, and can’t get out of our parents’ basements. But it looks more and more like seniors are trying to strip us of our title ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Poor Ariel. She’s got the lusty red hair, but it’s tough to make the cover of Playboy
without hot legs. (They’re required for more than just running,
dancing, it seems.) She, and many equally deserving characters, were
beat to the honor of being the first animated Playboy cover girl by none other than Marge Simpson, who poses coyly on the front of the November issue ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Meghan McCain, I was so wrong about you. Just a little more than a year ago, during her father’s failed campaign for president, I wrote a piece for Slate about how McCain had learned to cannily manipulate her very blond public image to its full advantage while still maintaining a modicum of privacy. I even called her shrewd. That was before she joined Twitter ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer Greg Beato:
It didn’t take long for the Lingerie Football League to live up to the
low expectations of its critics. All spring long, LFL personnel had
been promising serious hard-hitting action among skilled players who
just happened to be sexy women. But in early September, when the
Chicago Bliss kicked off the season against the Miami Caliente, the
highlight was a new contribution to gridiron strategy: stripping the
passer. “Our QB, Anonka Dixon, had her bra top ripped off,” Caliente
running back Michelle Stevens exclaimed in a postgame interview.
“Three girls from Chicago jumped on her after the play was already over
and shredded her top to pieces. There she sat, topless on the field,
and for no other reason than she is an unbelievable player and a huge
threat to Chicago’s defense, they wanted to take her out of the game” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer Hans Eisenbeis:
Taylor Swift is the biggest thing since I stopped caring what the next big thing is. I might never have noticed except that my 11-year-old daughter has now officially schooled me. Phoebe is an exceptionally sheltered child. Her mother is an ex-punk-rocker-turned-strident-Waldorfie. We forbade any screen time—no TV, no computers, and certainly no iPod.This is ironic, since pop culture literally paid our mortgage for many years back when I was a music critic in the post-Nirvana '90s. As I recall, music started to suck about the time I became a father, and I’d happily traded in my backstage pass. In my new role, I saw how messed up our culture is by age fetishism: Adults want to be kids and kids want to be adults, no one is ever happy where they’re at, and the media plays a huge part in this game ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
A little disappointment is inherent in parenting. Suzie doesn't inherit
her hockey-forward mom's stick skills; Johnny lacks Dad's engineering
bent. But a few women (and they all seem to be women) are disappointed
enough that Johnny isn't Suzie to spend thousands of dollars and endure
IVF, abortions, and even a divorce to produce the little girl of their
dreams (who, I suspect, had better damn well like pink) ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The live footage of that helium balloon gliding over Colorado
is the most peaceful and terrifying sight I’ve ever seen. It looks like
some kind of silver jellyfish—pulsing and alive. It looks like a scene
from a 1970s sci-fi movie. It would be beautiful, if not for the kid
trapped inside, no doubt crouched and terrified. This is not Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, after all. Every few seconds, the balloon seems to tip dangerously ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Andrew Sullivan careens very close to revelation
about the anti-choice movement today, asking, "What are the odds that
the Christianists are prepared to do the one thing that would actually
reduce abortions dramatically: guarantee free contraception as part of
a public option." Answer: somewhere between zilch and nada. The
Christianist movement that brought you abstinence-only education
doesn't feel much better about contraception than they do abortion ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Gmail has introduced another experiment in protecting e-mailers from themselves. First there was protection against late-night drunken e-mailing
you may later regret, in which, between certain hours of the night, you
must prove your sobriety by answering math questions before your e-mail
goes out. (Not sure how Gmail could help the DoubleX staff, documented daytime drinkers.) ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:
Breaking news ladies: Cougars are oh-so-real. Yep, science has proved
it. In fact, the word “cougar” is basically a scientific term now.
Thanks, science! ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Like the word genius, the word hero is overused. But I think the term is fitting for former New York Times reporter Nan Robertson, who died yesterday at the age of 83. Not only was she a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, she overcame alcoholism, the death of her second husband, and the loss of end joints of all her fingers (though not her thumbs) after a bout of toxic shock syndrome.
What I love best about Robertson is that one of her biggest triumphs was sticking it to the man ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics (read Ruth Marcus’ insightful column about women “firsts”) was not trained as an economist but a political scientist. She joins the ranks of Nobel economic laureates whose backgrounds are in different disciplines. An economics blog post discusses how the field is being upended by people who don’t believe markets (and humans) always behave rationally, which means economic activity cannot be plotted and predicted with mathematical precision. These new economists, such as Ostrom, are teasing apart how and why humans actually act, because it turns out humans are not simply machines for self-maximizing behavior. The question I always had for economists who believed we were is: Have you ever interacted with any other humans besides economists? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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To the DoubleX commenters who were outraged with Lucinda’s “Friend or Foe” column from Monday, and who don’t feel mollified by this morning’s apology: I see where you’re coming from. When I first read Lucinda’s response to the girl who says someone “slipped [her] a mickey” at a concert and then was ditched by her friends, I gave Lucinda the benefit of the doubt. I’ve talked to her before; I like her; I didn’t want to believe she’d be quite this flip about such a troubling tale.
So I reasoned that Lucinda, who is older than you’d think by her impeccable skin, just didn’t know what “slipped me a mickey” meant. It was this line, I thought, that revealed her ignorance:
Yes, overnights at the E.R. are the opposite of fun. So are disastrous drug trips. (I had one in my twenties, which pretty much sealed my fate as an illegal-substance ninny.)
This was not a disastrous drug trip. This was someone being drugged. To conflate the two is to imply that a woman getting drugged at a bar is as responsible for that outcome as one who willingly sneaks into a bathroom stall to snort a line. That couldn’t be what Lucinda meant, right? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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In the wake of Elinor Ostrom’s surprise Nobel win, unemployed economists are really turning on the charm. Check out the seething bitterness on this message board for job-seeking econ geeks. Ostrom isn’t one of their studly quant jock heroes, so these boys have decided that she’s just a P.C., feminist-friendly token of a pick. My favorite comment: “This is the problem with Affirmative Action. Last time a woman tried to go to the moon, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after the launch.” And not only does she lack the virile, rugged masculinity we all associate with working economists, she doesn’t even call herself an economist! She’s a politicial scientist—just the kind of hedging you’d expect from a woman ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post by DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
It's increasingly clear that for many in the fashion world, there are two kinds of women: those about to die from starvation, and fat women. There's been a disturbing denouement to the controversy over Ralph Lauren's overzealous Photoshopping that led to a picture in which a model's hips were narrower than her head: The model in question, Filippa Hamilton, was fired for being "overweight." It took me a while to find a good, nonaltered picture of Hamilton so you can judge for yourself, but it seems to me that if you can call that woman "fat," it might actually be time for psychiatric intervention for your delusions ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post by DoubleX writer Lucinda Rosenfeld:
Dear Commenters,
I’m sorry I offended so many people with my response to “Drugged” (Friend or Foe, October 12 ’09). Reading through the comments this evening—as I tried to make sense of the outpouring of fury—I was struck by how many readers seemed to be hearing echoes of date rape or sexual abuse in “Drugged’s” story. I have to admit, I did not think of that at the time. There is no evidence in her letter that she was a victim of a sex crime. And I believe that if she had been, or thought she had been, she would have alluded to it in the letter. All we know is that something she drank caused her to pass out. Moreover, had I believed for a second that she’d been assaulted, I would have responded in an entirely different manner ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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School is where we send our children not only to learn—reading, writing, arithemetic—but also, one would hope, to think. It’s hard to see how kids are supposed to do that, though, when they go to schools where the grown-ups appear incapable of engaging in any form of critical thought or useful decision-making ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Ever wonder who deserves the blame—or praise—for unleashing Gossip Girl upon the world? Next week’s issue of The New Yorker has the answer: Alloy Entertainment, the juggernaut of young adult fiction. Alloy’s not only responsible for the Gossip Girl series, but also its clones The A-List (Gossip Girl moves to Los Angeles), The Clique (Gossip Girl goes back in time and winds up in middle school), and The Insiders (Gossip Girl gets a sex change)—as well as series like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and the best-selling murder mysteries Pretty Little Liars ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
There’s always been something a little obnoxious about French Vogue’s attention-pleading “artistic” endeavors. Two years ago, the September issue featured some devil-worshipping size zeros drawing blood crosses on goats and last April’s rebellious motherhood spread unsurprisingly had the mom-o-sphere’s collective panties in a bunch. So what was left on the roster to draw gasps this month? Blackface, obviously ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The real root of the vampire trend, according to Stephen Marche at Esquire, is that straight women want to have sex with gay guys. It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not buying it ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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It was reported over the weekend that Obama’s speech at the United Nations describing his dream of a nuclear-free world helped clinch his Nobel Peace prize. Many have observed that while Obama’s words and sentiments are noble, the accomplishments that go along with earning a Nobel are lacking. However, I find his dream itself disturbing ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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With the announcement this morning that Indiana University's Elinor Ostrom had won the Nobel Prize in Economics—the first women to do so in the prize's 40-year-history—the tally of 2009 women laureates rises to five. Since the program began in 1901, only 40 women total have won Nobels. Ostrom doesn't cut quite as striking a figure as DoubleX's new office style icon, Herta Mueller, but this photo fills my Monday-deadened heart with happiness ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Amanda Marcotte:
Jessica, your observation about the probation officer's report highlights the fatal flaw in Michael Cieply's argument:
Polanski's case was more about 70s attitudes about forcible rape than
about 70s attitudes towards sex with teenage girls. What Cieply
discovers in investigating the soft hand the media and law enforcement
took with Polanski is that rape wasn't taken seriously as a crime in
the '70s, at least if the rapist knew his victim. That's what all those
feminists taking back the night were protesting! ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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The New York Times quotes extensively from the September 1977 probation officer's report about Roman Polanski.
The report is appallingly sympathetic towards Polanski, describing his
rape of Samantha Gailey as "spontaneous and an exercise of poor
judgment by the defendant" and placing the some of the blame back on Gailey and her mom. But the most upsetting part of the report is the part that excuses
Polanski's behavior because he's a creative genius and an immigrant ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:
I disregarded the bad reviews and saw Couples Retreat
this weekend, mostly because I have a sort of inexplicable faith in the
comedy prowess of Vince Vaughn. As expected, it didn’t offer much
beyond the Hollywood-happy obvious for the coupled characters who take
to a relationship-building resort for a week of joint therapy, yoga,
and quasi-illogical trust-building activities (you’ve seen the stripping-down scene on the beach in the preview, right?) to work on their endangered marriages. In fact, the only thing that did prove surprising about Couples Retreat was the terribly boring, compulsory brand of monogamy the movie offered up at the end ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Is precociousness always a put on? Or is it possible that some
precocious kids, while certainly not as worldly as they seem to be, are
as mature as they seem to be? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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So, Mark Penn writes in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal
that “heyday of the soccer mom is passing.” Darn. Here we are just
completing our first season of soccer, and already I’m uncool. Or so I
thought until I actually read the article. What we have here is what my
Slate colleague Jack Shafer would call a “bogus trend story” ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I feel embarrassed for my fellow journalist class that it’s already
become the counterintuitive position to say that our president deserved
the Nobel Peace Prize. I woke up to the collective “Huh?” in my inbox:
He hasn’t done anything yet. He’s a trophy collector.
A prodigy who disappoints. But come on! Can’t the first African
American president, who is working hard to reverse eight years of a
destroyed American reputation, collect this essentially meaningless
prize? Yasser Arafat won the thing for God’s sake. How important can it
be? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Here's a regular statistic, and then a shocking one: Every month, a
large percentage of the world's adult population menstruates. But in
emerging markets, that group can scarcely afford the protection. Women
worldwide are no longer exiled to tents and deemed "unclean"—but
according to the She28 Campaign, a fledgling advocacy group, many
thousands are still forced to exit their daily lives and livelihoods
during their monthly periods ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post by Katharine Mieszkowski:
A decade ago, going public meant frothy tech IPOs. Now, it's what
private school kids do when their parents can no longer pay their
tuition. Private school enrollments are down everywhere, from Washington D.C. to Tennessee to California, while requests for financial aid are up. Yet recessionary budget cuts have hit many public schools hard, forcing them to lay off teachers (which increases class size), scale back instruction in art, music and theater, and even shorten the school year. Given the cutbacks, public school parents who can afford it may consider sending their kids to private schools.
Are you thinking of transferring your child from private school to
public? Or from public to private? Have you already done so recently?
Why? ...(Read more in DoubleX.)
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If the blood clots and stroke risks don’t scare you off the pill,
maybe this will: Women taking oral contraceptives are less attractive
to the opposite sex and less likely to pick a good mate, according to a
roundup of studies on the pill, published in this month's Trends in Ecology and Evolution, that Sarah Kliff at Newsweek reported on today.
When a woman is ovulating, her hormonal fluctuations affect her
“facial appearance, her vocal pitch, even body odor,” Kliff writes.
“And during ovulation, those changes increase a woman's attractiveness
because they indicate fertility.” Hardly as dramatic as the potential
side effect that terrified many of my friends when we started going on
the pill: rapid weight gain. But apparently men—who, so the legend
goes, don’t even notice a new outfit or restyled hair (or is that just
my dad?)—pick up on these shifts, as shown in a study in the roundup
that found that lap dancers make higher tips when they’re ovulating ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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According to the FBI, reported rapes are at a 20-year low. 89,000 women
reported being raped in 2008, down from a high of 109,062 in 1992.
While the data is not available yet for 2009, this is a pretty hefty
drop. The USA Today article about these new findings
attributes the drop to the use of DNA to catch rapists, who are often
repeat offenders, and also to anti-rape public awareness campaigns in
the '70s and '80s ... (Read more in DoubleX)
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By DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Yesterday, the Today show featured a segment on a new trend for the modern day radical bride: trashing the dress. According to the clip,
the cooler brides among us are destroying their wedding dresses
post-ceremony, whether through a paintball fight or a four-wheeler ride
across swampy grounds, as a form of creative self-expression.
One
bride, still donning her untouched white satiny number, tells the
camera that weddings are so “formal and traditional,” so not her,
right before she and her husband dirty up their matrimonial garb in the
desert dust. The photographer shooting them points out that it’s "a
more creative way to express yourself ... in a way you can’t on your
wedding day." And that’s when I got really irritated.
If being a prim, dressed-to-the-nines bride isn’t your “thing,” so
to speak, why even have a formal wedding and spend gajillions of
dollars on some silky fluff you’re just going to turn around and
destroy? If there's anything worse in my mind than rampant wedding
consumerism, it's intentionally wasteful wedding consumerism ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post by DoubleX writer Erica Kawalek:
Lindsay Lohan launched her debut collection as artistic director of
Ungaro on Sunday. As soon as the last model existed the runway, snobby
editors stormed out the door. Lohan was in tears. That the clothes
would be widely panned was no surprise, of course. WWD called the collection "an embarrassment," "cheesy and dated" with an "overworked" heart motif. Style.com
said the show quickly “devolved into a bad joke of a fashion show, one
with questionable color combinations, ‘bad eighties’ draped silk
jackets and drop-crotch pants, old-fashioned and ill-judged fur stoles,
and, yes, tasteless sequin pasties.”
The looks were inelegant, off-trend, and styled with about as much je ne sais quois
as a drunk teen let loose inside a Forever 21. But you know what? I
loved this fashion show, and I think that it was a genius
move—promotional and otherwise—by Ungaro CEO Mounir Moufarrige ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Sharon Lerner:
Of course abortion and birth control
have a large role in bringing down our fertility rate in America, as
they have elsewhere. (I have spent much of the past decade-and-a-half
writing about both.) But there is no need to be reductive; this is not
an either/or issue. There are many factors contributing to the decline
in fertility, including both the ability to control when and whether to
become mothers and the policies that affect mothers’ quality of life ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
The British Psychological Society just posed a question to leading
psychologists: Even with all your expertise, what's the one nagging
thing you still don't understand about yourself? The best answers
out the experts for falling into the very human traps they write about
so often. If you're an avid reader of the psycho-literary self-help
book, what's the one thing you do even though you know why you do it
(and why you shouldn't) ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig:
When I was in college, I did what every aspiring journalist did back
then, in the dark ages of the 1970s—I would research and write an
article, type it out on my portable electric typewriter, put it in an
envelope, lick a stamp, and mail it off to a glossy magazine in hopes
of getting it published. How quaint every step of that process seems
now, right down to the stamp. Writer’s Market was
my bible, a fat directory I’d leaf through to get editors’ names and
addresses for the magazines in which I longed to appear. Oh, to have my
words printed on the pages of Esquire, the Atlantic, Saturday Review, or that pinnacle of sophistication and beautiful prose, the sanctified New Yorker ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Slate's incredibly thorough and compelling Mad Men TV Club has a question I'd like to pose to the Mad Men-watching DoubleXers out there: Was Pete's interlude with the German au pair rape, or was it consensual? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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DoubleX is starting a new partnership with the Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Are your female doctors more empathetic than your male doctors? (Read responses from the DoubleX staff here, and join the conversation by following DoubleX on Twitter.)
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As every sentient being knows by now, a recent(ish) analysis by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that American women are increasingly bummed. Last week in a much-discussed article on DoubleX, Sharon Lerner blamed our mood
on lack of paid maternity leave, childcare, flexible work options, and
the like. Commenters seem inclined to agree; I’m not so sure ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Your Comeback editor and writer Emma Gilbey Keller is co-hosting a
discussion with Park Slope Parents in Brooklyn on Monday, Oct. 5. We'll
be talking about women leaving from and returning to the workplace. Are
you thinking about switching careers? Are you coming back after taking
time off to raise children? Are you mulling over leaving your job?
We'll discuss it all. Please join us! Here are the details ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I
've been obsessed with WASP culture for as long as I can remember. Maybe it was because I watched too many Whit Stillman movies at an impressionable age, or maybe it's because I visited too many homes of gilded age robber barons on historical field trips. More likely it's because I was raised in a town that was restricted to non-WASPs until the '60s, and they were my best friends and early crushes. In any event, I was looking forward to reading Tad Friend's Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor, because I thought it would reveal the inner workings of a group I've long observed from the outside ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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David Letterman’s confession last night that he has slept with women he works with was a perfect window into the twisted psyche of the comic. (Read Troy Patterson’s excellent close reading here.) This is why women don’t want to stay married to comedians (the subject of Judd Apatow’s Funny People). They can’t break form, even in what should be the most shattering and intimate of moments. Even as Letterman is changing our view of him forever he is exactly himself, with his deadpan delivery and self-mockery. There is hardly a moment when you’re totally sure whether he’s joking or not ... (Read more in DoubleX.)