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If you're a great web developer who loves Slate and Double X, we want to talk to you. We're looking to hire a senior-level web software engineer for Double X ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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How sad that Summer Stiers,
the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was
profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine,
has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health
where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her
many medical maladies.
One of my daughter's favorite shows is Mystery Diagnosis, which presents the story of someone with strange symptoms who goes for years without being able to get a diagnosis ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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If ever you think you have too much to do or you’re fretting about your “work/life” balance, peek into the life of Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur activist
who did or didn’t set off the latest protests against the Han Chinese.
She started off as a laundress and somehow became the Uighur
community’s most successful business person by importing steel from
Kazakhstan ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Whew Willa, you offer some tricky psychoanalysis here.
None of us can say what the Jacksons were thinking on that stage with
Paris, or what they were trying to project to the YouTube audience.
What we can safely say is that despite being a dysfunctional family,
they are clearly a family in grief. I think it’s unfair to try to
interpret their intentions. Would it have been better, or more
believable, if they had not embraced Paris and just stood off to the
side and whispered to her to suck it up? Is it really that implausible
that with Michael now gone they would want to surround his children in
a protective cocoon? ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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From my many years of writing about evangelicals, I often get e-mails
from conservative Christian sites. One I got yesterday labeled:
“WARNING: Protect Your Children” caught my eye. Bands of child
molesters? Gay teachers? More abortions? No, worse. Sacha Baron Cohen.
The e-mail is a classic in the genre of scold while titillate ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Last night I listened to a member of the U.S. Coast Guard narrate the
experience of intercepting a boat full of Haitians trying to reach
American soil. The worst part, he said, was that the immigrants thought
they’d found “the welcome wagon.” The Coast Guard was enthusiastically
invited onto the boat before they burned it and repatriated its
passengers ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):
The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine,
made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her
perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a
wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what
was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed;
she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia
while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had
frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye,
and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued;
her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31 ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Our own Emily has a fantastic and revealing Q & A with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg up on the New York Times
website today. Their conversation ranges from Roe v. Wade to summer
camp in the Adirondacks to Savana Redding to losing her shoe under the
bench ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica, I saw nothing cruel or exploitative
about allowing Paris Jackson to speak about her dad and I’m inclined to
believe the Jackson family didn’t force her to do so. According to
several news reports, Janet Jackson was slated to speak but let Paris
speak instead because she wanted to say something about her father. I
watched the whole thing and found the memorial to be tasteful and
well-executed, not the bizarre spectacle you describe ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Margaret Johnson:
Sam, your post on Gen Y's educational entitlement
sounded eerily like a schpeel that plays through my mind every morning.
As you know, I am a grad student getting a master's degree in your
field. Government and private loans, check; no more earning potential
with my degree than without it, check; denial—not really. I went back
to school last fall for a specific purpose: to make up for what I, one
of those Gen Y strivers, didn't get out of my supposedly idyllic
undergraduate education ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Obama 2012 watchers are all aflutter over yesterday’s news that the president’s approval rating in bellwether swing state Ohio has dipped to just 49%, down from 62% in May ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Sorry Dana, but I’m with Jess on Paris. The contrasts contained in the moment of her speech, to be really eloquent about it, freaked me the eff out. Here’s a young girl, a daughter, having a genuine, raw moment of grief
and she’s surrounded by a bunch of… actors. Her authenticity was
matched in pitch only by the performativeness in the people surrounding
her ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Jessica, though there were plenty of things to be creeped out by during the Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday, for me Paris Jackson’s short and tearful tribute to her father didn’t number among them. In fact (along with Brooke Shields’ speech and Jermaine Jackson’s
vocally unsure but heartbreaking performance of “Smile”), Paris'
appearance struck me as one of the day’s few uncreepy moments ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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So. That happened.
The bizarre spectacle of Michael Jackson's funeral was everywhere
yesterday, and the most talked-about moment was when Michael's
daughter, Paris Jackson, went up on stage and told the world,
"Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever
imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much." Her Aunt Janet
softly urged her forward and said, "speak up." Though I don't doubt
Paris's emotion was genuine, the thing felt creepily staged ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I read Liza’s summary of Mimi Swarz’s take on mature women in the most powerful workplace in the world with some interest. After all, I’d previously written on the preponderance of single women in the Obama White House,
lamenting the fact that a bold-face name like Melody Barnes put off
marriage for years, in order to run policy in an administration poised
to overhaul health care, energy action, and the economy ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Am I losing it, or does Sarah Palin have a point? I mean, when she says
that if she'd remained in office, she wouldn't have accomplished
anything because state business would have been tied up in the many
ethical charges against her? That strikes me as a hard kernel truth in
the middle of the sea of bullshit Palin is wading in (today, literally,
by giving TV interviews while out catching fish).
Palin is right that she became a different kind of politician when
McCain has picked her as vice president. Maybe that's because ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Has J. Crew pushed the boundaries of their symbiotic Obama relationship a little too far? Politico posted an item
disclosing a press release the retailer sent to reporters yesterday,
advertising the fact that Sasha and Malia Obama have been spotted out
and about in J. Crew wares. Specifically, if you must know ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Perfect kids are more likely to murder you in your sleep. At least,
that's according to horror flicks that fall into the "evil kid genre,"
inaugurated by 1956's The Bad Seed. Other warning signs: ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I agree with you, Jess, that the poor job and internship prospects for today’s college students are more about the underperforming economy than an over-supply of participation trophies,
or any other Gen-Y generalizations on which people like to pin such
trends. But I disagree that Gen-Yers’ (that is to say, “our”)
entitlement is purely economy-driven. Following your theory, that sense
of privilege should diminish with the foundering economy. That would
mean that our peers, many of whom are getting laid off or fear they
soon will be, should right about now be tossing aside dreams of jobs
that let us save the world and stay intellectually stimulated all day
every day—all while wearing jeans and working from home when we feel
like it!—and settling for whatever jobs we can get. Instead, we’re
going to grad school.
The idea that young people choose to weather tough economic times in
the safety of university libraries is nothing new. What’s different
this time around is the opportunity costs that we Gen-Yers are all but
ignoring when we choose the post-bac path. Education is expensive—much
more so that it was for our parents, having gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades. The federal income-based repayment plan that kicked in this month underscores how bad the student loan trap has gotten. People are rejoicing over ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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We learned today that Rita Wilson is prepping an HBO series based on Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer-winner about a girl named Callie who grows up to become a man named Cal. In a bit of fortuitous timing, Salon has posted an interview with professor Gerald N. Callahan, author of Between XX and XY, a new book about intersex people.
Intersex people are born neither male nor female; the descriptor is "an umbrella term that includes people with a tremendous number of genetic conditions, from those born with an extra X chromosome to those with overdeveloped adrenal glands."
There are lots of interesting nuggets here—for example, Callahan's description of biological sex as a spectrum, not a binary system. (Hence the piece's title, "We're all intersex.") That's a concept that many of us are comfortable with vis-a-vis gender identity, but applying that framework ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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