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Not long ago, I became obsessed with a book of poems by Thomas James, called Letters to a Stranger. The poems were brilliant and uncanny, magical and beguiling. They were also out-of-print. I read them in a kind of samizdat xerox passed around by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. They did not exist in book form, as I recall, because no one could find James' relatives in order to get permission to publish the poems. Just last year, these poems were finally published, and an underground classic became available in print.
I mention this because James's book is a type of "orphaned" book that Google is claiming it would one day have had the right to publish, had James's relatives never been found. At least, that's what this post over at BoingBoing says. The back story is this: As you may remember, many writers were happy when the Author's Guild and Google finally reached a settlement over Google Book Search, which authors had claimed infringed upon their rights. (See here for more.) But as the BoingBoing post notes, the settlement has a funny loophole: It apparently allows for Google to take over rights of books whose authors have died, disappeared, or can't be found. As I understand it, in the past the rights to some of these books would have returned to the public domain; now they will go to...Google. The brilliant Lewis Hyde is protesting here.
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I was happy for both the editor and the journalism graduate in Emily's story of a freelance assignment in the profession they both love. It emerged after her chronicle of the tough job market for newly-hatched graduate students, just as their fields are contracting. Since they are young, at least these earnest potential leaders have time to ride out the bad economy. Megan McArdle writes today on the Atlantic's website that workers over 55 who lose their jobs usually do not get rehired, ever. White collar workers, such as executives and journalists, whose salaries are inflated by years of seniority, find the experience they bring to a job, though useful, is no longer cost-effective for their organizations. The resulting layoffs and buyouts have rendered many able baby boomers unemployable way before their children's educations are fully paid for. These men and women of a certain age must use their well-learned skills to reinvent their professional identities just when they were hoping to coast into retirement. I know the kids will be ok. They are resilient, sharp and still free of the expenses of a family. The older workers need to be more resourceful as their specialized knowledge gets rebooted and rebottled. They won't have the jobs they expected to have, but they can still think for a living. Fortunately, as we mature we learn to adapt. As much as I want to see the next generation of leaders find platforms for their strong ideas and their wondrous inventions, I am eager to see what last best contributions the b-generation will offer the commonwealth before they take their elderly parents' places at the condo pool.
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Lindsay Lohan has an eHarmony spoof ad up at Funny
Or Die, which New York's Jessica Pressler rightly credits as performing "the awesome feat of getting you to
re-like" the busty redhead in spite of the mess she has become—or rather,
because she is so self-aware of said mess. Deadpanning to the camera, Lindsay
describes herself to potential blind dates: "I'm a workaholic, a shopaholic,
and, according to the state of California, an alcoholic, as well as a threat
to all security guards if they work at hotels." Oh Lindsay. You make a
total disaster look so good.
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I love the fact that the word teabagging has dipped its way into the cable news lexicon. For those of you who are fortunate enough not to know the original meaning of teabagging, you won't find it in a regular dictionary, and I will not retype it here, but if you are curious, you can find several definitions at UrbanDictionary.com. Be forewarned: Make sure you are not eating or drinking when you read it.
The term fell into our mouths more than a month ago, when the Republicans decided they were going to protest Obama's tax policies by symbolically re-enacting events from the Boston Tea Party. Now there are several planned protests taking place across the country, and to report on them, newscasters, commentators, and cable show hosts have been forced to take in this mouthful of a word.
I've heard it from Jon Stewart, David Shuster (sitting in for Keith Olbermann), and a poor blushing Rachel Maddow.
Of course, this is how our language evolves, and in this case, how an "unacceptable" word becomes an "acceptable" one. But, in the meantime, we are allowed to giggle a little, aren't we?
And it gave me an idea. The Republican Party, which has been foundering since even before the election of President Barack Obama as it struggles to find new leadership, new direction, new ideas, a new identity, and new members, should maybe start with a new nickname. The could easily shed the "Party of No" label if they began to refer to themselves as "the U.S. Teabagging Party." Catchy, right? Sounds like a ball to me.
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I hesitate to publish this, because both Dr. Laura Schlessinger and the "mommy wars" are media-driven phenoms that don't deserve any more attention. But I feel it's my public duty to step in, lest any poor unsuspecting mother fall for the trap. Dr. Laura has a new book out, In Praise of Stay-At-Home Moms, which she was flacking last week on the Today Show. In it, she argues that mommies should be with their children and "my heart goes out" to women who can't be. She offers herself as an example, discussing her difficulty getting pregnant and her heroic attempts to work only while her son was asleep.
So now for the fact-checking. Thanks to a 1998 Vanity Fair profile and an unauthorized biography, Schlessinger's hagiography is only credible to readers whose servers are down. She got pregnant only after leaving her first husband, and then having an affair with a married man, and then having another affair with Lew Bishop, a married father of three, whom she lured away from his own family. Getting pregnant was difficult because she'd had a tubal ligation and had to have it reversed. After her son was born, she claims she woke up every morning at 5 a.m. to do research, then cheerfully toted him around the neighborhood, then left for work at 9 p.m. when he was asleep. This is possible, I suppose, but the "cheerful" part is dubious. Also, did we mention that Lew quit his job to be her manager, and worked at home?
Schlessinger famously estranged from her entire family and tends to throw shoes at colleagues who displease her. Here she dredges that up again, with this lovely portrait of her mother:
I knew for sure that I was definitely not going to become like my perpetually angry, frustrated mother, who always behaved as though being a wife and mother were tantamount to self-immolation even though neither my dad nor circumstances ever kept her from doing whatever she wanted to do.
Very classy. As for her actual argument, it's barely worth engaging with. As her mother's example proves, some people should stay at home and others shouldn't.
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Communicating with boys is the theme of the day in the New York Times, which has a front-page article on how market researchers are communing with young guys to help Disney carve out a boys' entertainment niche, as well as the Science section column on how pediatricians tackle the sex talk with boys. Like you, Jessica, I like the basically egalitarian core of the message the doctors urge, which is an emphasis on respect and consideration; that strikes me as right, and something kids (especially teenagers) of both genders can't hear enough about. And I was surprised that the subtext of the Hollywood story seemed to be gender convergence, too. Forget the Girlz vs. Boyz approach to marketing, apparently. Expert "boy-whisperers" like Disney's Kelly Peña have discovered that boys aren't so into the stark winner-loser paradigm after all, and the no-girls-allowed ethos seems to be out.
But also like you, Jessica, I have my doubts about the adult presumption that all this communication is, or even should be, quite as open and revealing as it's cracked up to be. I'm dubious about the doctors' claims that if adults are at ease, the conversations about sex won't be awkward—and I wonder if it's a service to parents to suggest they can expect that. I'd say the Talk is easier to conduct with respect and consideration—qualities parents should model, after all—if adults aren't envisaging lots of cozy sharing and caring.
And based on the other Times article, I'd say the market researchers are kidding themselves if they think they've established great rapport with boys, whom I'd credit with doing a great job of keeping their own counsel in the face of those who want to snare them into endless show-based merchandizing. Certainly Disney's probing hasn't produced much in the way of insights: Show the underside of skateboards in movies, use check marks not Xs (which remind boys of bad grades). The boys aren't talking much, and it's not clear the adults are listening very well when they do. Disney seems to have concluded boys want "fun with a purpose," though the rare comment offered by a kid in the story did not exactly confirm that. The boy helpfully defined a popular boy pastime—to "crash"—for the nice, nosy lady. "After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing."
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In response to my piece about grad school grads who who are suffering in the recession, I heard from Sam Eifling, who works at ESPN.com's outdoor web site. He said, "Today I read your piece about the value of advanced educations in a piss-poor hiring climate. The bit about the Mizzou j-school grad working at Applebee's sent a cold wind up my back. Do you still have that kid Sam's e-mail address? I'm thinking I might be able to throw him some freelance work."
And so, of course, I connected Sam to the j-school grad, whose name is also Sam, and who wrote back to say he'd already emailed Sam the editor. Then from that Sam, this morning, "the lad seems eager: 'Any kind of work that doesn't involve bringing people extra vats of ranch is fairly appealing to me.' I hope I can get him freelancing for me. I mean, if you can't throw a raft to a writer who's basically living your nightmare, what's the point in being an editor?"
Indeed. My hero.
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A guest post from contributor Linda Hirshman:
In response to my Slate essay "Crazy Choices, Crazy Love,"
Hilary Bok, a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins (hilzoy to bloggers), generated
many words on why
women stay with abusers and why
I should not have even asked the question. Less
articulate opponents invoke her posts as evidence of the error of my ways. Instead,
she demonstrates how important it is to ask the question and how easily the
discussion becomes derailed.As to why women stay, Bok offered 1) the story of her own
abuse and 2) her experience working in a shelter. Individual stories eventually
add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what
is supposed to be a political conversation. If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we
need to resist this rhetorical move. It
would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known
intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere. How can I say, he never laid
a hand on you, what are you talking about? But other than evoking sympathy, her
story actually makes my point perfectly.
He screamed at her once; the second time, she packed her bags. In
explaining why she left, she says, among other things, "I'm a feminist."
Mining her shelter years for more data, Bok suggests that
being attacked by a lover is so shocking it deprives you of your capacity for
judgment. Utterly unexpected and incomprehensible, it's like having the car
turn into an elephant, she explains. The imagery is compelling, until one remembers
that from the Farah Fawcett movie, The
Burning Bed ,to Rihanna's swollen face on the internet, everyone on this
planet has been exposed to evidence that "lovers" can attack. The many comments
about my essay also reflect how much warning attackers often give and how many
victims come from backgrounds of abuse. Why, of all human experience, can women
not learn of the reality of domestic violence from what they see, read and
sometimes live through?
Bok also tries to explain why I should not be asking (and
implying) that women should leave their abusers.
Philosophers usually don't argue against asking questions,
so, Bok argues instead that I didn't ask the question right. I implied that women
are natural victims, and I was just using battered women as a battering ram against
"choice" feminism. If there's one take-away message in my piece, it's that women are not natural victims. Which means there
must be a way to reduce or arrest battering. Silent sheltering and waiting isn't
enough—that leaves between 600,000 and 2,000,000 women battered right now. If that prescription is all
feminism has to offer, I am certainly blaming . . . us. But it's not. As Debra
Dickerson brilliantly put it in her
piece at Mother Jones, asking is
in the long tradition of feminist awareness. "Have we forgotten how many millennia of consciousness-raising it's taken to
acknowledge the domestic violence, first, exists and second, is wrong? Feminism
is a roadmap . . .[It's] leaving a man who makes you weak in the knees. When he
isn't hitting you."
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Sarah Palin attracts national scandal so effortlessly, it starts to look as if she does it on purpose. Courtesy of Max Blumenthal at the Daily Beast, here’s a little background on her pick for state Attorney General, Wayne Anthony Ross. Some of these claims are disputed, but Ross has allegedly called homosexuals “degenerates” and is rumored to have said in a 1991 speech to a fathers' rights group, “If a guy can’t rape his wife, who’s he gonna rape?” and “There wouldn't be an issue with domestic violence if women would learn to keep their mouths shut."
What's undisputed is that Ross has a voluminous collection of writings, frequently penned in the key of Limbaugh. He opposes, among other things, animal rights activists, environmentalists, legalizing marijuana, allowing Alaska natives to maintain their lifestyles, and abortion. He supports guns, fathers' rights, anti-government militias, and has defended a college student who created an “art project” featuring "a hooded and robed stick figure of a KKK member, bearing a cross in one hand and a flag in the other." Lauding the artist’s “courage” Ross then berated the African American student who objected to the work: “It might have been more fun to see Ms. [-----] try to remove the display. Then she could have been arrested and her future as a student of the university could have been resolved through the university disciplinary proceedings.”
Remember back in October when Gov. Palin couldn’t recall a single Supreme Court decision with which she disagreed, other than Roe v. Wade? Probably not a surprise, then, that her pick for the state AG says “his big remaining task on Earth is to help stop abortion, a practice he sums up as ‘killing kids.' ''I feel I have a good relationship with the good Lord (but) if I could overturn Roe v. Wade, I figure I got my ticket.”
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A truly astounding series of German condom advertisements are making the rounds this morning—each features a sketch of a sperm made to look like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden or Mao Zedong. Their not so subtle message being, "Better wrap it up... unless you want to bring evil into the world!" The ads are arresting and hilarious, but the self-flagellation inherent in them strikes me as being distinctly German: I can't imagine many American dudes susceptible to the suggestion that their sperm wear swastikas, or, to use a more purely American parallel, KKK outfits. (Obviously, their sperm have 90 mile an hour fastballs, good looks and a working familiarity with the art of the deal). It's a dark take on procreation, informed by an everyday awareness that people can go really, really bad. Of course, people can go good as well, and I almost expect to see these images re-purposed for an anti-condom or pro-life campaign, with sperm made to look like Jesus, Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr.
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The New York Times health section must have been reading my mind: They answered the question I asked last week, "Is the Teen Sex Talk Different for Sons and Daughters?" with an article and a blog post today. According to pediatrician Perri Klass, M.D., the way you should talk to your adolescent sons about sex is both the same and different from the way you might speak to your daughters. While it's important to teach both boys and girls basic tenets of politeness, Klass writes that, as a pediatrician and a mother of boys, "I acknowledge
that for their own protection, boys need to understand that there are
people—male and female—who will see them as potential predators,
and judge them automatically at fault in any ambiguous situation."
However, Klass notes that a little respect (as Aretha says) goes a long way. Klass quotes Dr. Lee M. Sanders, another pediatrician who takes care of teen boys, about how he approaches the subject of sex: "We’ll talk about respect, about whether they feel they are respected
in their own families, the respect they have for their mothers, the
respect they see other men paying to their own mothers or sisters—do
you think that applies to other girls that you meet?"
Tara Parker-Pope's related blog post opens up the question to commenters, and in the peanut gallery Alex Lickerman, M.D., argues, "If the adults participating in the conversation are comfortable talking
about sex, the child will be as well. We’re the ones who make children
nervous about this topic. Before having this discussion maybe we should
examine just how comfortable we are or aren’t with our own sexuality." As someone who was a teen not so long ago, I disagree with Lickerman—my parents weren't awkward when talking to me about sex at all, and yet I was still mortified—but I want to hear from the moms out there, especially the moms of sons: Do you speak to your sons and daughters differently about these issues?