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So mom, we have a daughter who writes a revenge piece, a son who
unfriends you, and what do you do? Well, of course, at 56, you adopt
two Ethiopian girls!
Now I understand that adoption and fostering are unequivocally God’s
work. And in all such acts of charity there is a balance between glory
to others and glory to self, a subject much studied by places like the
Templeton Foundation. That said, when a particular good work becomes
trendy—Save Mumia, Feed the World, or, lately, Adopt a Child from an
Exotic Country—that balance is likely to be off ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Dear Sarah,
I’ve written about my mixed feelings for you since you joined the
McCain ticket. I’ve always liked your energy and your toughness. I
liked that you rose from small-town mayor to the national stage. The
Katie Couric interview? That bizarre whirlwind tour-slash-photo op
where you met all the foreign leaders? Not so much. I won’t go through
the laundry list of my ups and downs here. Not enough time ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, James Franco ‘breaks his silence" about what on earth he’s been doing on General Hospital
for the past few weeks. He confirms that his appearance on the soap is,
as was predicted, performance art—or, at least, it was intended to be ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX and Washington Post Magazine contributors:
For me, women's colleges are something I associate with feminism
past—grandma's nostalgic recollections, Mary McCarthy's scorn. I know
they are supposed to be provide a safe haven for women, free of
flirting, free of social pressure, free of the need to primp and preen.
And I'm sure that's true for many women. But my only personal
experience of the all-women's institution are Condé Nast-style women's
magazine offices, and they are the least relaxing, most competitive
places I've ever spent time in ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer KJ Dell'Antonia:
I wrote this delicate and thoughtful response to Amy, much of which is below. But I really wanted to let go of the politically correct dance I was doing and shout, along with commenter Jewellya:
Maybe it's time to change course. If you're a college-educated, driven
woman who puts a lot of pressure on herself and you're putting all your
energy into being a self-described stay-at-home-mom—AND you're unhappy,
maybe the problem isn't your marriage or your city. Maybe you're just
freakin' bored, and freaking out ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
I can't tell if the Mikulski amendment covers contraception from the
first news reports, but it's clear to me that the anti-choice lobby
fears that it does. Of course, you have to speak right-wing-nut-ese to
see this. The LifeNews article simply expresses concern that the bill
will mandate abortion coverage, which is a ridiculous fear on its face.
Ridiculous if you assume that by "abortion," LifeNews means
abortion—ending a pregnancy through drugs or surgery. But often in
anti-choice literature, "abortion" is treated as a catch-all phrase
that means both abortion and hormonal contraception, and nonhormonal
contraception is considered a form of Abortion Lite, because any kind
of fertility control encourages the "abortion/contraception mentality" ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Sexting paranoia has bubbled up again, with news of 13-year-old Hope Witsell,
who hanged herself after she was tortured by her peers for sending a
nude photo to a boy she liked. Certainly, this is a cautionary tale for
teen girls looking to woo lunkheaded boys. But I still don't understand
how it's different from old-fashioned bullying. It's the same awful
teen behavior, just in a different medium. I could not find statistics
that said that teen suicide has markedly increased since cell phones
came into wide use among the under-18 set, nor could I find evidence
that bullying was on the rise overall ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Veronica Belmont:
The holidays have leapt upon us once again, and that means your digital
camera is going to get a workout. It doesn’t matter if you’re a casual
photographer with a small point-and-shoot or a major shutterbug with
the latest dSLR: You need a good way to store and back up your images
for safekeeping. Plus, since HD pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino HD
are topping many wish lists this year, you also need to consider where
you’re going to put all that video content after you upload the good
bits to YouTube. What’s the point of taking pictures and movies if in
10 years you can’t look back at Aunt Gretchen’s eggnog-buzz-induced
dance moves or the kids’ sugar-buzz-induced unwrapping frenzy? ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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After our debate on this site about Sandra Tsing Loh's Atlantic piece about her liberating divorce and Christina Nehring's book about the death of passion in the modern marriage, I kept waiting for someone to write about the other side. Now Elizabeth Weil has finally done it in her upcoming New York Times Magazine story,
taking us deep inside her relatively happy, companionate union. This is
a truly fascinating piece about what you discover when you put a
perfectly good thing through the test ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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Hanna,
given that he’s one of the most famous people in the world, Tiger
really has guarded his privacy better than most public figures, so he
actually does have some standing to invoke that privacy now that it’s
come out he had a mistress, two mistresses, three mistresses—all of
whom work in the nightclub industry and all of whom apparently took a
photograph of Angelina Jolie to their plastic surgeons and said, “That
nose, those lips, and also throw in a set of DD breast implants.”
However, since the girlfriend revelations of once-squeaky-clean Tiger
have now reached critical mass and he is having thermonuclear bimbo
eruptions, whether he wants or deserves privacy, he has to face that
it’s gone ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
Oh, hey! Great news! There’s a new predator-type female in town, this one created by Spencer Morgan of the New York Observer. Welcome the cheetah:
a young woman, fresh out of a relationship, on the prowl to take
advantage of helpless, drunk, out-of-her-league men. She's the girl who
stays for two games at the sports bar, not to watch football, natch,
but to feast on juicy man tidbits. The cheetah is described
nonsensically in the title as the “cougar’s younger cousin,” though
later in the piece Morgan disowns the comparison, writing that the
cheetah’s “hunting methods and psychology bear no resemblance to the
cougar.” And that’s just the beginning—the article is full of
comparisons and leaps that don’t make any sense. Welcome to the world
of bogus trend pieces! Hop aboard! Let’s take a ride through this murky
tale ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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The Girl Scout Research Institute has a new report out on the
beliefs of school-age children and teenagers, and according to the
press release, they've found that, "American teenagers are apt to make
sound ethical and responsible decisions on a range of issues from
smoking and drinking to premarital sex than they were just a generation
ago." Certainly it is good that 62 percent of youths surveyed said they
would not cheat on a test, compared with 48 percent from the 1989 survey.
But I found the results of the premarital-sex question troubling. 33
percent of seventh to 12th graders said they would wait until marriage
to have sex, up from 24 percent in 1989.
It's troubling news because the teens who say they will wait until
marriage will beat themselves up when they inevitably fall short of
that goal ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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As Ann points out on Feministing, it's dispiriting to read this new investigation of campus sexual assult
by Kristen Lombardi for the Center for Public Integrity. We're supposed
to be past the time when universities are indifferent to women's
reports of assault, or actively discourage them from going to the
police or bringing disciplinary charges, or force them to keep the
proceedings secret if they do. And yet clearly we're not. This gibes
with my own reporting for a story for the Yale Alumni Magazine
several years ago (which I can't link to because it's not online). The
question of what's rape or gray rape or date rape remains a confusing
one for the women who experience these things and all the variations on
them. But women who come forward should not find themselves blocked by
their schools, and that is what is still happening, far more often than
we'd like to think, Lombardi's reporting shows ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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I was watching the Today Show (again!) this morning, and Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira were teasing a segment with Meredith Baxter Birney, the former matriarch of Family Ties.
"Meredith Baxter Birney has a SECRET," they kept saying ominously, and
I thought she either had a previously undisclosed meth addiction or was
dying of some rare disease. What a relief it was that she just turned
out to be a (her words) "late-in-life" lesbian. This expression is already a meme of sorts, and ABC News wrote an article about it earlier this year: women in their late middle age leaving their husbands for other women.
But naming them "late-in-life lesbians" seems awfully reductive, especially when you recall the epic New York Times Magazine article about female desire that DoubleX contributor Daniel Bergner wrote back in January ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).
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So Tiger's car crash will cost him $164,
plus whatever millions he has had to pay for such fine lawyering. The
state troopers say they will stop going after his medical records, and
that "no one involved has made any claims of domestic violence." Of
course, in Florida no one has to make any claims of domestic violence
for domestic violence to be charged, as I wrote in my story yesterday.
The state police just have to have "probable cause" of domestic
violence. Which takes us back to those medical records.
If those records show wounds consistent with a bash on the head with
a golf club, we have probable cause of domestic violence. Without them,
we have only Tiger's word that his wife was a rescue angel at the scene
of the crash. In the meantime, a new mistress,
aptly named "Grubbs," aptly a cocktail waitress, and aptly in
possession of some racy texts, has surfaced. Which makes option one—the
bash in the head by the jealous wife story—the more likely one, no?
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While I was covering Mike Huckabee for a profile
in 2008, people kept insisting that he wasn’t your “typical
politician.” This was true in some ways. He was terrible at raising
money. As governor he took positions with no conceivable political
payoff; he supported the funding of college aid for the children of
undocumented immigrants, for example, a position not terribly popular
among mainstream Republicans in the recent past. He spoke against a
"revenge-based corrections system.” He commuted prison sentences and weathered
the ensuing scandal. Little of this idiosyncrasy survived when Huckabee
began to aim for the White House, but it had been there when the stakes
were lower ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
For the MJ lover in your family—My DNA Fragrance,
a Los Angeles company that seems to exists mainly to translate the DNA
of the rich and famous and deceased into scents for the rest of us
mortals to wear, has derived a perfume based on Michael Jackson’s DNA.
Using a follicle of his hair.
Creepy? Absolutely! But kind of fascinating at the same time? I think so! The perfume, dubbed M,
is available to order now. For a hefty $60, one gets 3 ounces of the
absolutely “unique” Jackson juice packaged in a bottle resembling the
late singer’s torso ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Last year my former Jezebel colleague Moe Tkacik picked up on a new and
horrifying development in the way that tabloids discuss women's bodies:
Somewhere along the line," pregnant" turned into merely "fat."
In an insane-o hybrid of baby and skinny fetishization, famous women
are encouraged to gestate, but God forbid they stop working out. I was
reminded of Moe's savvy observation when I saw this headline on People's
Web site about Padma Lakshmi: "Padma Lakshmi Doesn't Mind Baring the
Baby Weight." And what's inside gets worse. "One of the reasons I think
I've gained weight pretty quickly during my pregnancy is that I'm not
exercising as much as I do normally ... I can't. I'm feeling tired, and
I have this business to run," Padma explains ... as if anyone needs to
give an explanation for putting on weight while pregnant ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Amanda Marcotte:
Jess, if Gen Y is indeed less pro-choice than prior generations,
it shows that there's a dark underbelly to the generation that's been
applauded as more tolerant and diversity-oriented than any other.
They're also rumored to be the generation of bicycle helmets and
overscheduling—kids who grew up in an environment that implied that one
could wipe out all risk—and that kind of attitude explains why they
would have developed contempt for anyone who does draw the short stick.
What older generations might see as a reasonable amount of risk, Gen Y
might see as nothing but carelessness ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Jess, there's another dismaying element of the hand-wringing in the pro-choice movement
over Stupak and declining suport among twentysomethings and the greying
of the menopausal militia. It's that acknowledging the complicated
emotions that some women have about their own abortions may be hurting
the pro-choice side. I hate to make this point, because I've helped make the case for a while now that feminists need to own the regret and confusion that some (not all) women feel after the procedure. But Jennifer Senior does a great job
talking to abortion counselors who are very much aware of all the
emotional wrinkles. Then she poses "a very real and terrible dilemma
for those of us who are pro-choice: Engage these questions and you play
into the hands of the pro-life movement; refuse to engage in them and
you risk living in a political vaccuum." Exactly ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)