Tuesday, May 26, 2009 - Posts
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A friend of mine just directed my attention to the cover of the most recent J. Crew catalog... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Accepting Obama's nomination to replace Justice Souter on the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor said:
I hope that as the Senate and American people learn more about me,
they will see that I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with
extraordinary opportunities and experiences.
Set aside the choice to describe her childhood—growing up with diabetes
in a poor, single-family household—as having been "blessed with
extraordinary opportunities." What troubles me is the plea from a woman
just nominated to fill one of the most powerful, demanding,
intellectually challenging positions in the nation to be viewed as
"ordinary"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, Hanna: To me, Sotomayor's speech
is most interesting for its embrace of a way of thinking about identity
politics that seems almost mystical in nature: She stresses the
experiential over the rational. In beginning the speech with
descriptions of the Puerto Rican food she loves, she emphasizes the
ways in which we're the products of hundreds of years of culture and
genetics; she lavishes attention on a particular "Puerto Rican" way of
loving and living to suggest how old and deep our identities are. This
is identity politics, yes, but it's bound up with a sensual, visceral
sense of the texture of life that I don't usually hear in the language
of judges... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Emily, you pull out the critical quote from Sotomayor's speech:
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life."
This quote does not go down easy. As Stuart Taylor pointed out last week, what if Samuel Alito
had said: "I would hope that a white male with the richness of his
traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a
Latina woman who hasn't lived that life." We would chuck him over to
some Idaho compound, no?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Can this marriage be saved? Yes, it can—through letters. Check out yesterday’s Op Ed in the Times by a military wife facing marital strains, who turned to an old-fashioned remedy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Here in XX-ville, we've long been fascinated by American Girl,
the upscale doll company—excuse me, "premiere lifestyle brand"—that
sells morals and history lessons alongside its hundred-dollar dolls
(and their similarly expensive pinafores, trestle tables, chifferobes,
and other painstakingly detailed accouterments). The New York Times ran an article this weekend about Rebecca Rubin, the newest American Girl,
which (who?) goes on sale this Sunday. The piece describes the years of
work and research that went into creating Rebecca—not just so that
she'd be historically accurate, but also so that she'd be culturally
sensitive. For example: Since "Jewish" is a religious category and not
a racial one, what should a Jewish doll look like?... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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It's rare for a prominent public official to confront identity politics head on, as Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor did in this 2002 speech at the University of California, Berkeley. She says, "Who am I? I am a "Newyorkrican." For those of you on the West Coast who do not know what that term means: I am a born and bred New Yorker of Puerto Rican-born parents who came to the states during World War II." She talks about what that means in terms of her upbringing—eating "mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir—rice, beans and pork," singing merengue, watching Spanish comedy films, playing with her cousins at her grandmother's house. She mentions that she speaks Spanish while carefully noting that her brother does not, and that this is not a necessary ingredient of Latino identity.
Then Sotomayor grapples with how being a Latina makes a difference in her judging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan wasn't the only person who missed Sarah Connor. Terminator Salvation lost the weekend's box office war to another sequel, Night at The Museum.
There's surely some "in this economy" fauxrgument to be made explaining
this outcome (ITE people want family friendly fare, not dark tales
about the world's end), but I think Terminator's problem is more basic, a structural flaw, a storytelling 101 screw-up.
Apocalypse narratives—movies, books, TV about the end of the
world—can be divided into two groups: stopping the apocalypse
narratives and surviving the apocalypse narratives... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The eternally awesomely grouchy Copyranter points to a provocative ad campaign
from the Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The pair of
arresting images features a "woman" as a) a punching bag and b) a slab
of meathook-hung carrion. The accompanying copy reads: "IT'S NOT
ACCEPTABLE TO TREAT A WOMAN LIKE ONE." Copyranter wonders: "Like what?
A woman?"
The ads are akin to PETA's shock-happy petsploitation ads... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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"Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?" Scientific American asked in September. The answer provided was pretty much "yes." Over at the New York Times,
my friend Tim Lee explains why this question—and the division it
implies, of a privacy-rich pre-social networking past, and a
voyeuristic dystopic present—is hopelessly muddled.
"People are used to dividing the world into broadcast media
(television, newspapers) and point-to-point communication (the
telephone, face-to-face communication)," he explains. Concerned
onlookers tend to put social networking sites in the first category, as
if everyone were sharing their status updates via a major television
network rather than with a vetted group of confidants. Newspapers and
television do not allow you the luxury of selecting your audience,
individual by individual; Facebook does.
In Tim's telling, social networking sites represent the advancement
of Internet-related privacy rather than its demise... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
Philip Gourevitch’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times adds
another compelling argument to the ones I’ve been making recently about
why releasing more photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan is
a bad idea. Obama first supported the release of the latest batch of
photos but subsequently changed his mind, saying
that the pictures in question are associated with “closed
investigations” in which the perpetrators have already been identified
and sanctioned, and that they “would not add any additional benefit” to
our understanding of detainee treatment in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gourevitch, who has written a book about the soldiers who took many of the photos at Abu Ghraib, rightly notes that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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