Thursday, July 02, 2009 - Posts
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A guest post from Linda Hirshman:
With a cover story by working mother scourge Caitlin Flanagan, next week’s Time Magazine takes the occasion of South Carolina
Governor Mark Sanford’s staggeringly banal adultery to tell America that
“Marriage Matters.”
Why does marriage matter? Not of course because of the harm to the
deer-in-the-headlights brigade—Silda Wall Spitzer, Jenny Sanford, etc. That
would put Flanagan on the side of the adult females.
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Marriage matters, because single parent families are bad for children, the
only people who count ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica,
my husband and I have been married for 15 years. Last weekend, we drove from
Maryland to New Jersey and during the many hours of crawling in traffic we wrote
a rap song together about the Delaware Toll Plaza. We stay up too late talking
to each other. We hold hands at the movies. Since we're in our fifties,sure
we've talked about who's going to get to pull each other's plug—but eventually
being able to do this honor is not why we're together. So do not despair that
marriage is an enterprise devoted to raising children, fighting over litterbox
scooping duties, and holding the horror of fidelity over each other's heads ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Speaking of being bummed out, I felt oddly blue after reading Mimi Swartz’s excellent
piece in The Daily Beast about empty-nesters in the Obama administration.
Swartz, who also writes
for Double X about being
an empty nester herself, talks about (and to) White House senior adviser
Valerie Jarrett, and also offers up WH Social Secretary Desiree Rogers and First
Lady Chief of Staff Susan Sher, among others, as collective proof that
professional life isn't over for women—in some ways it's just beginning—when
their kids leave for college. This may well be true, and it's striking to see so
many redoubtable women in positions of power. I admit to a keen fascination with
Jarrett and Rogers, who live in the same apartment building on the Georgetown
canalfront and who I like to think of as popping into each other's apartments,
like the cast of Seinfeld, or Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda, borrowing
clothes and gossiping ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Yes, I understand that Internet surveys are hopeless, and yes, I understand that
448,000 lonely hearts do not a random sample make, but still I ask: What is the
deal with this
OK Cupid map of debauchery by state?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.) Read More... -->
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It's been a rough couple of weeks for marriage. First, Sandra Tsing Loh came out
swinging against the
institution in the Atlantic (and we discussed it ad
nauseam), and simultaneously Mark Sanford and
John Ensign and the Gosselins paraded their broken relationships in front of the
nation. In Time, Caitlin Flanagan takes up for long-lasting unions in
an essay called "Why
Marriage Matters." Flanagan's defense of marriage can be boiled down to: The
reasons to get married are to raise children and not die alone ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Carte Noire, a British coffee brand, has a new online video campaign directed
smack at cubicle-dwelling, former English majors (i.e., me). Every week, a
hottie actor of the Anglo persuasion reads a love scene from a new or classic
novel. Here's Dominic West—Jimmy McNulty of The Wire—reading the scene from Pride
and Prejudice in which Mr. Darcy declares his love for Elizabeth
Bennet ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Good news to wake up to: New Delhi's highest court has decriminalized
homosexuality—for New Delhians, at least.
The law overturns Section 377 of India's penal code, a colonial-era statute
that prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man,
woman or animal" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Sara, you said that childhood stardom
was such a destructive force for Michael Jackson, and you were right. But
the current issue of Vanity Fair has a cover
story on Heath Ledger that shows for a sensitive adult, stardom ain't all
its cracked up to be, either. This isn't a new idea: That's why "the price of
fame" is such a cliched phrase. But Peter Biskind's story of the Ledger demise
is particularly heart-stomping, since Heath was so young, so talented, and being
a movie star really did ruin every aspect of his life ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Palin is back among us not only as a God-loving runner (is that a strange shot with the flag, or what?) but also as a
hard-charging mama bear. In Todd Purdham's Vanity Fair profile, which
Dayo and Jess
dissected earlier this week, are new tidbits about Troopergate, Palin's
corrupt-seeming axing of Walt Monegan, who was Alaska's head of the Department
of Public Safety. My favorite: Twelve days before he was fired, Monegan sent
Palin an e-mail telling her that a state legislator had reported that she'd been
seen driving with her baby Trig not in an "approved car seat" ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Emily,
I agree with you that Jenny Sanford should stop talking to the media. When a
husband describes his affair with another woman not as a regrettable
indiscretion but as “a love story” and refers to said woman as his “soul mate” and to his wife as someone he’s trying to fall back
in love with, does it not beg the question: Why is Jenny Sanford trying to save
her marriage?... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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