Dear Tim,
I hate to suggest a boring comity, but I agree with you entirely about yesterday’s Spielberg encomium. My appreciation for the Observer story had nothing to do with his merits as a filmmaker, or vice-versa. (And I’m not going to go into the question of why you left out of your praise that Richard Dreyfess/Holly Hunter tearjerker-remake where he’s a pilot and then she’s a pilot and then he’s an angel. You know you love it, but I’ll never tell.)
Michael Specter gives us an interesting tour, in today’s New York Times, of Europe’s population bust. There’s not a single country in Europe where people are having children at the “replacement rate,” not even countries like Sweden and France that have the most lavish parental benefits on the face of the earth. The story is best on interviews attempting to explain the dearth of babies, which range from Gallic shrugs to the perception, by one Italian lawyer, that “Children cost more than they used to,” what with the need for foreign languages and nannies. (Actually, Specter says, the Italians’ problem is more driven by the fact that women, working in ever-greater numbers outside the home, are still expected to work overtime coddling their men. He argues that Bologna, with the most-educated women of any city in Italy and the low fertility rate of 0.8 children per woman, is Ground Zero of the population bust.) It’s possible to come away from the story feeling that European yuppies make American yuppies look like the salt of the earth.
The Washington Post has a good story on the front about the growth of Amazon.com. Best bit: the fact that founder Jeff Bezos, now worth a couple of billion on paper, lives in a tiny rented apartment and drives a Honda Accord. Take heed, all you who have doubled the price of Amazon stock in the past five weeks. What does he know that you don’t?
We’re big Amazon.com fans in this house. They’re fast, they’re cheap, they upgraded us to automatic express delivery at no extra charge once they had recognized the nature of our addiction; they even sent me a nice thermal coffee cup. And what can I say about the one-click button, which allows us to order a book the second it comes up on the screen, without providing address and credit card number all over again?
However, the point that David Streitfeld makes in the Post is that others (notably Barnes & Noble) are going to imitate Amazon, and the only thing that may keep Amazon ahead of the game is selling itself to advertisers. Or more accurately, selling us to advertisers. All those bells and whistles that allow them to suggest books to anyone who selects a particular title (If you liked that, Marjorie C. Williams, you’ll like…) have so far mostly been Amazon’s own sales tools; in the future, they’re far more likely to be driven by advertiser bucks.
Finally, we have light sentences, of 30 and 24 months, for the “privileged teens” who murdered their baby in a Delaware motel. I’m trying not to bristle at the fact that she got six months more than he did, but I’m not completely succeeding. In real life, I know, he who sings first to the prosecutor gets the rewards for it. And supposedly Brian Peterson repeatedly urged Amy Grossberg to tell her parents she was pregnant, and later to go to the hospital. (His attorneys also introduced, as exculpatory, the suggestion that he had urged Amy to have an abortion. I think you don’t have to be a Lifer to find this reasoning startling.) No one knows who inflicted the head injuries of which the baby died; but it was Peterson who drove them to the motel, who wrapped it in a trash bag and left it in an outdoor trash can. Why, if he was so concerned, didn’t he alert anyone or challenge his girlfriend’s insistence on secrecy? “It’s not my body, it’s her body,” Peterson told his lawyer. Ah, the many uses of respect.
Respectfully,
Marjorie
