Tuesday, June 23, 2009 - Posts
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From the AP write-up of the newly released Nixon tapes:
Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Ask and ye shall receive. Just yesterday, some of us here at Double X were waxing nostalgic for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and lo: Today, Salon book critic Laura Miller offers a run-down of "urban fantasy" novels whose heroines would make our dear, departed, demon-killing California girl proud... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Early in the first episode of NYC Prep, Bravo’s new, Gossip Girl-inspired reality show about New York City high school students that starts tonight, PC, the self-styled Chuck Bass
of the bunch, says to the camera, “In New York City, money flows like
the wind.” It was at this, the moment of the overly knowing, slightly
off metaphor, that I realized it was going to be impossible for me to
hate him. Try as he and the five other teenagers featured on the show
might—and God they try—there is no talk of money, sex, or power, no
uncanny preciousness, no shopper at Barneys, no address on the Upper
East Side, no limo rides, and ultimately no reality show that can turn
these kids into adults. Despite their best efforts, and all of their
privileges, they are in a high school state of mind.
Take, for example, Camille, a senior at tony all-girls school
Nightgale-Bamford, who asserts about her own future: “I will go to
Harvard. Then I will be the business head of a genetics firm. And then
at 40 I will have a husband and two kids.” This is delivered with the
frightening intensity we have come to expect from Blair Waldorf, and is
not, exactly, typical of the average 17-year-old. And yet, it is still
wholly laughable. Check back in a few years, Camille, after life has
gotten in the way.
Even more of the series is taken up with genuinely unprecocious high
school antics, just enacted on the glamorous streets of New York City.
Taylor, a 16-year-old who attends, gasp, public school tells her mother that...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context,
by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama
or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the
protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many
years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil
rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely
unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the
presence of so many women on the streets matters:
For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their separation on last night's much-hyped episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8.
This surprised no one, as tales of Jon sweatily cavorting with coeds
and Kate's utter nastiness have been littering the tabloids for months.
What did surprise me is that the Gosselins will be doing what Sandra
Tsing Loh is doing with her kids: instead of just having Jon or Kate
move out, the couple's 8 children will remain in their Pennsylvania mcmansion, while the parents switch off living there.
In her post describing Tsing Loh's set up, Liza already pointed out the major cracks in this scenario, like what happens if...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Erika Kawalek:
Rarely is the public let in on how clothes actually get made—the
gritty world of sourcing, manufacturing, cross-ocean container
shipping, distribution and slick marketing that goes into supplying
that perpetually regenerating stock of textile novelties we call
fashion.
That may change. On June 7, the New York Times ran a story about the new barcode sticker called GS1 DataBars.
DataBars store information that is useful to retailers, the kind of
tidings that are meaningless to shoppers: inventory stats and sales
data. I marveled at the possibilities of an enhanced version. What if
we could...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video”
yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that
I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after
being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean
that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More
subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the
world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body.
I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this
(Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it
haunted me all last night.
Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness
the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps
because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to
transform it. Ironically...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday;
this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were
in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As
Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.
I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for
me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives
untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to
imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context;
far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the
family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here
the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more
fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the
Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in
Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who
acknowledge the conversation to be insular... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Yes, Dana,
you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian
woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff
movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has
absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This
isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening,
frantic look at a woman dying in the street.
But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here.
We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus
and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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