Maybe I'm out of it, but I was unaware that parents now want girls, not boys. That's the buried lede in Ruth Shalit Barrett's mildly horrifying

: 

Seventyone percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter. ...[snip] ... "The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return," founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said.
 
What’s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. ...[snip] 
 
"The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls," says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. "They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one." Girls, in other words, are boys plus . They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl café . What’s not to like?  [E.A.]

Others link the yearning to women’s belief that they’ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. ... 

Girls are boys plus? That's one way to look at it. I don't quite believe this trend (though some of my Westside yuppie friends confirm it). It seems to me men still have a lot of advantages, the lack of a mommy track being only the most obvious. But if true a) it would be an extraordinary example of relative changes in earning power affecting fairly basic and millenia-old socio-cultural preferences with startling rapidity--another victory for Vulgar Marxism ; b)   I see profitable arbitrage possibilities for Match.com 's Chinese web service. ... Note to Maureen Dowd: Easy holiday column!  Would be great to get your perspective! ... 2:29 P.M.

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Don't Look Now: James Carville and Stanley Greenberg often  don't promote the polls that are bad for Dems , charges Brian Faughnan--and now there's another one  just sitting on their website , unhyped, showing that fully 45% of likely voters describe themselves as "conservative." ... Carville and Greenberg even had a hot news peg they could have used--Lou Dobbs pulling 6% in a race against Obama, Romney and Nader. ... Obama gets 45%, Romney 38% ...  P.S.: Better that they adjust the hype rather than adjust the polling. ...  3:02 P.M.

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Cenk Uygur's web TV show  has 450,000 viewers ? More than Morning Joe' s daily audience? If true, that's impressive. ... 3:02 P.M.

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