Monday, May 18, 2009 - Posts
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Surely it’s auspicious that the weekend after Double X launched, a filly won the second leg of the Triple Crown—the Preakness Stakes—for the first time since 1924. That’s right: a girl by the name of Rachel Alexandra—a girl’s name if there ever was one—held off all the boys, including... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Regarding President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, I pretty much agree with Hanna that he said all the right things about abortion. I especially related to his anecdote
about the Christian doctor who wrote Obama to complain that his
campaign Web site referred to all pro-lifers as right-wing idealogues.
I’m about as pragmatic as you can get and still be a pro-lifer, so I’m
right with the president on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The striking jump in the new Gallup poll of people defining themselves
as pro-life—7 percentage points in one year, for a total of 51
percent—doesn't explain itself. You may be right, Hanna, that scientific advances or a truly deep shift in attitude aren't the rationale,
given that the breakdown didn't change when Gallup pinned people down
further by asking them if they think abortion should always, sometimes,
or never be legal. But the words "pro-life" and "pro-choice" have long
been... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Did anyone catch Anna Wintour's interview with Morley Safer on last night? (Side note: I like the way this YouTube teaser's headline makes it sound like Anna Wintour is, in fact, the Secretary of Defense. This seems like a sensible foreign policy move to me.) Despite the frisson of excitement that came with actually seeing and
hearing Wintour speak—she lives! she lives!—the interview was mostly a
puff piece. However, there was one moment... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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More and more frequently, movie trailers
are better than the movies they're promoting. As they've become
increasingly adept at short-handing a feature-length plot, and
increasingly unconcerned about revealing all the elements of said plot,
they play like accelerated shorts, complete with a story arc and
emotional climax, ruining plot twists and funny-the-first-time-you
hear-them jokes. They're trailers for people who hate surprises.
David Edelstein, in his New York review of the new Terminator film (aka, the film where Christian Bale lost his shit), demurs from revealing... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Caryn James:
With stylish women flaunting recessionista chic and Michelle Obama
embracing her modest roots—“my parents were working class people,” she
repeats in speeches—it may seem like a timely advance that a flurry of
independent films (in theaters and on DVD) are depicting those
forgotten heroines, working-class women. In Wendy and Lucy, a deglamorized Michelle Williams lives out of her car while driving to Alaska in search of a job. There’s Frozen River, with Melissa Leo in her Oscar-nominated role as a trailer-park single mom, and Julia, with Tilda Swinton playing a downwardly spiraling alcoholic.
These movies are unsentimental and wonderfully realistic on the
surface, but take a closer look: why is every one of these heroines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse.
She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise
to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope
that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd
say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.
How is Obama going to close Guantanamo in eight months when his lawyers just asked... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In case you haven't heard, magazines are dying right and left. Who
knows which one will be next? One day, that may be the sound of Anna
Wintour's head rolling across the floor. Not unlike the adult movie
industry, which thought it was so ahead of the curve,
technologically-speaking, that it neglected to jump on the Internet
bandwagon until its product had gotten away from them and it was far,
far too late, magazines and newspapers have failed to exploit the Web
to their advantage. Now, they're suffering for it.
No one will ever say so of Nick Knight, the British fashion photographer who created SHOWStudio.com, a website dedicated to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Does the idea of a candy bar with pink girlie wrapping, a sexualized
name, and a marketing promo urging women to "pleasure yourself" by
eating said candy bar seem annoying as hell to anyone else?
When I heard this piece on NPR yesterday about the new Fling candy bar,
also known as a chocolate finger, I thought it was a joke. When I
realized it was a real news story, it made me so mad that the only
finger I thought about was the middle finger I'd like to give to the person who came up with the idea. I so hope... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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