Foer days late to the most important story of all time

So here's something I'd wanted to write about for a Jewish publication, but was very much beaten to the punch, which... I'd sort of figured would happen, because, I mean, this story. It's now yesterday's news, but the personal Weblog is yesterday's genre.

What follows, to be clear, is not the article that might have been. Rather, it's the free-from-constraints WWPD version. This is the very definition of my beat, in a way that no other story past or present possibly could be.

Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer. By now we all know this much: He got the byline, she the pantsless fashion spread in that T Magazine story from over the weekend. It was kind of like that Margot Robbie profile, except, I think, much worse. With the Robbie one, I'd thought it was a bit silly that the standard feminist complaint was that this woman famous primarily for being gorgeous wasn't being asked more intellectual or substantive questions. After all, isn't a better feminist complaint why the women in magazines being asked questions, period, tend to be ones about whom the salient (known) facts are such things as "26," "blonde," "sufficiently good at acting," and "looks good in a bathing suit"? Meanwhile... yes, Portman is beautiful (ahem, understatement), but the reason she's being profiled is because she directed a highbrow foreign film. (Clarification UPDATE: the *profile* is a pretentious/flirtatious musing on Jewish identity and alternate side of the street parking regulations that has been aggregated and parodied all over the place at this point.) But we're still in the world of male-gaze female pantslessness.

The Foer-Portman article, though, presented itself as more sophisticated. This is even alluded to in the profile, which isn't a profile but a back-and-forth email exchange (but intended for publication) between two colleague-type friends (and more on that in a moment). At one point Foer writes (and note that this needs to be specified in a piece given only his byline, ahem): "[...] we weren’t going to be in the same place for long enough to allow for a traditional profile — me observing you at the farmer’s market, etc., which would have felt ridiculous, anyway [...]" Ridiculous why? Because they already knew each other, or because standard-issue celebrity profiling is for peasants?

And then there's the gossip angle, which is too fascinating, and which sheds light on a reason, other than logistics, why the profile may have had to be via email, rather than at the café where the starlet orders and picks at the proverbial cheeseburger (but not real one, in this case, because of the famous vegetarianism of the parties in question).

Anyway. I read Foer's recent short story in the New Yorker. And it was... fine. But it was also a predictable return to that thing in Jewish literature where "Jew" equals a Jewish man; where penises and that ever-fascinating-to-men question about them (cut or uncut?) is the metaphor; and where female characters couldn't possibly play into any of the psychodrama. Not to be all, Philip Roth did it and did it better and so did Arnon Grunberg so why bother, but... Roth and Grunberg did it better, and even if I weren't a Jewish woman myself, I'd be ready for stories about Jewishness that weren't entirely about the concerns of - to use an of-the-moment but in this case entirely needed specification - cisgender men.

Portman, meanwhile, is the subject of longtime fascination here at WWPD. If you're a petite, dark-haired, pale-skinned Jewish woman who's read at least one book not assigned in school, and who has at any point in her life given off that vibe that says, 'Please, men of a certain type, write me pretentious emails' (a vibe that is, let it be known, entirely consistent with "RBF" in day-to-day interactions), you are that type. (There are plenty of us; allow me to shed all intellectual credibility and note that we're what Patti Stanger refers to as "spinners.") But as much as I am that type, I'm also not that. I'm not about to be hired to be the face of a perfume, or to pose in a thousand-dollar sweater and little else. Which is a way of saying that yes it annoys me, as a feminist, that she's pantsless and not given a byline, and yes it gets to me that Jewish literature is to this day such a (kosher-) sausage-fest. But there's also the whole thing of how Natalie Portman is Natalie Portman and I am not.

Character

It's always good to know you've had an impact on the world. Mine thus far consists, in part of course, of being cited on a college-admissions-coaching website. One with the optimistic name, "The Ivy Coach," located in the snow-heap that is De Blasio's neglected Upper East Side.

Anyway! The people who will get your child into HarvardYalePrinceton appear to have missed that my objection to holistic admissions was based on the argument that colleges can't actually make them. Not shouldn't - can't. "What on earth is wrong with judging personality and character?," asks the Coach. Nothing - but how on that same earth could people who only have access to admissions materials - and that may include notes from an interview - do anything of the kind?

But then it gets interesting. Their defense of holistic admissions centers on... the Unabomber. "Some admissions officer(s) at Harvard mistakenly judged the character of Ted Kaczynski and offered him admission to their university." The post is illustrated with a photo of Kaczynski in handcuffs. College should judge character, I *think* the argument goes, because if not, they'll get Unabombers. Or even if so, they may misjudge (or, like, fail to predict the behavior of an applicant many years after graduation), but they should still try. After all, ever since the Unabomber, Harvard's stock has plummeted, right? But really - how could schools spot future Unabombers? Wouldn't this mean going down a potentially dangerous path of stigmatizing those with certain mental illnesses or radical political viewpoints? Was the Unabomber's issue really one of character?

(The post goes on to make a comparison with dating - the very comparison that most demonstrates the problem of "holistic" in an admissions context. "If you don’t feel it, you just don’t feel it. It’s that simple." Yes, on a date. But what does an admissions committee "feel"?)

What does it say, though, that an Upper East Side tutoring firm is so devoted to holistic? For one thing, it suggests that holistic is - as I've suspected - more about benefitting the academically-mediocre children of the rich than it is about serving as a cover for quota-based affirmative action, or recognizing achievement in the face of obstacles. It could also be that for a place like this to get customers, it needs students (parents) to believe that anything's possible. That your child - who you, of course, think is special - is special, and will be recognized as such by any college that gets to know them.

The airing of self-directed grievances

Noreen Malone said it best: "Before you ask people about resolutions tonight, consider whether you'd ever ask them to list the things they hate most about themselves."

I'd considered writing another resolutions post, given that last year's went if anything better than I'd hoped. (Except the pasta thing. I don't function well without DeCecco.) But where to begin? Do I want to announce my goals, or my flaws? To what end?

In the age of constant online image-crafting, posting a resolutions list is extra-fraught. Too much candor and you're either admitting something that's a liability (do you want your boss to know that you procrastinate? do you want potential dates to know that underneath your clothes, you have a tremendous if well-camouflaged gut you plan on addressing in 2014?) or just boring everybody. In 2014, you plan to work out/eat more vegetables/floss daily? Wonderful, but of interest to you and you alone (unless the non-flossing had gotten out of control).

It's tough to hit the right balance - not too humblebrag or overly sincere, nothing that suggests you're already this perfect being who can merely strive for further perfection. But also nothing that announces any genuine problems with you as you currently exist. It's like the college essay - you need to tell the truth about yourself, but not really. Resolutions are self-centered... except when they're not, which can be narcissistic in its own way. If you resolve to be kinder to others or start composting or whatever, that's, again, awkward to announce. Like everyone else, I want all that is professional, personal, aesthetic-about-my-person to improve in the new year. I'll leave it at that.

So I'm not announcing any resolutions for 2014. I will instead announce that the first read of 2014 is Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. 2014 is thus off to a not-so-good start in the avoidance-of-cultural-consumption-I-find-overly-familiar department. This is (thus far - haven't finished it yet) a book about a Jewish woman from New York who gets married and goes with her husband to a part of the U.S. where one needs a car (she can't drive), and to Heidelberg. Heidelberg! Who is, knows she must be, a writer, but ends up in a literature PhD program in New York, as one does. And there I was, thinking this was a 1970s feminist classic I really ought to have read, not some kind of semi-autobiography published ten years before I was born. What I'm trying to say is, I'm currently taking recommendations for novels set somewhere I'll find unfamiliar. Nineteenth-century France, for obvious reasons, doesn't count.

Tiny children's furniture

I just finished Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. I will now spoil its plot.

Reviews I've seen since finishing it - and what I vaguely recall the buzz being about the book when it came out - call the protagonists (three 30-year-old friends who'd met at Brown) "privileged," which is true in some respects, but isn't entirely useful or accurate. They're something, but there might be a better way to put it. Two - Danielle and Julius - are middle-class Midwesterners settled in tiny apartments in New York. Julius is barely scraping by (a freelance writer supporting himself by temping, struggling to keep up appearances), while Danielle's a TV producer doing a bit better but not much. The third, Marina, is a definitive child of privilege - think a Dunham alter ego, played instead by Natalie Portman - but is stuck in her childhood, regressing to the mean and procrastinating on a book about - drumroll please - children's dress. (Is that topic perfect, or overkill?) The eternal-child thing, again, it's very Lena Dunham.

Longwinded paragraph short, yes, this is an overrepresentation-of-literary-types-in-New-York novel, but there's not all that much advantage going around. By all means, be annoyed that this got published and your account of watching rabbits from out the window in NJ did not. (Will Bisou's novel ever get published?) But let's be clear why we're meant to be annoyed by its very existence.

We get a bunch of perspectives (and any novelist capable of jumping around various gender/age/sexual-orientation categories is, if nothing else, good), but we're implicitly supposed to identify with Danielle, hard-working, from Ohio, plain-but-not-that-plain, as opposed to the beautiful, spoiled Marina. In a neat twist, the Jewish woman is the sensible Midwesterner, the WASP the native-New-Yorker of intellectual-clout heritage, the daddy's-little-princess. So that's something.

Marina's thing is that after so many years, she's still sitting on her dissertation-I-mean-book-project. There's some line about how her father thought the project was a charming one for a 23-year-old but pathetic for a 30-year-old. Let the dissertator who has not thought this about herself cast the first day-old Bagel Bob's bagel. And, eh, I suspect many who've slogged through humanities dissertations will end up identifying more with Marina than with the sensible, effortlessly-professionally-successful Danielle. Even those of us who are not, like Marina, the beautiful offspring of famous people.

Certain things, some more important than others, don't add up: Why do all these American characters use "fancy" for "like"? Why does Marina, if she's the daughter of a big-deal Upper West Side intellectual, think it's a big deal to have that life situation? Isn't this just her normal, as it goes for all of us with respect to our childhoods, unless ours were radically different from those of our peers? As in, why wouldn't someone like this have a whole bunch of childhood friends from similar families? If she's this socialite who'd once worked at Vogue, why would she have just the two friends, neither of whom are from remotely that background? Marina seems to view her own upbringing from the perspective of an outside observer. This is because we're never really outside Danielle's head, to the point that it would have perhaps been better if this had been more straightforwardly Danielle's perspective we were getting (in first person?). And why does Danielle, if she so fancies Ludovic, introduce him to - and ask him to hire! - her stunning friend? These are behaviors that could be explained/alluded to, but aren't.

Also: why Julius? He's in many ways a more interesting character than the rest, and provides just about all the demographic diversity, but when we meet him, he's on the cusp of having next to nothing to do with the rest of the plot. (A plot revolving around him might have been more fun.) A gay male friend once close to the two female protagonists, whose function in the novel appears to be primarily to provide a sublet for Marina's visiting cousin.

And I now see I haven't even gotten into what the story's about. Namely Danielle having an affair with Marina's father, out of some kind of revenge or who knows. And Marina marrying a man just like her father. And Marina's cousin Bootie showing up and Bildungsromanning his way into all kinds of trouble. Bootie and Marina were in some abstract sense switched at birth - she'd have been happier with a small-scale, small-town life, and is oppressed by the expectation that she write a book and be an intellectual, whereas Bootie wants nothing more than that life and is your classic literary small-town boy dreaming of bigger things. And of course the 9/11 angle. You know it's coming, so Marina's "September" wedding couldn't feel more ominous.

The navigation of Zabars

Some posts here really just exist because I saw something that so perfectly fit one of the preexisting tags. Between (on "Navigating Zabars") "You have to start with the olives, go to the nut section, the fish counter. They have the best, freshest fish, produced by the most skilled artisans. I watch them. The sculpture work is phenomenal to me — the joy of watching a nova being cut by these artisans," and "The TV stays off for months at a time. I barely know how to turn it on," I think the necessity is clear enough in this case.

Eating, reading

-Consider this Social Qs dilemma:

When picking up takeout food at a restaurant, and being presented with the credit card bill, I leave the tip field blank, on the theory that no service was provided. Am I correct, or should I consider a minimal offering?
Jon, Montclair, N.J. 

You are correct, but why not consider a teensy tip anyway? Restaurant folk work hard for the money, as Donna Summer crooned. True, no one’s ferried your plate back and forth to the kitchen, or whisked away your crumbs. Still, someone had to package your food and get it ready in time. So maybe a buck or two is in order, if you like the joint and feel like being sweet.

This is a new one. Isn't the reason you tip in a restaurant not that restaurant work is hard (it is, but so are thousands of other jobs that don't get tips; the adage about how everyone ought to work in food service so as not to be bratty as a patron refers to people who had it easy their whole lives, not to retail or factory workers on a night out), but that restaurant workers get paid below minimum wage, with the expectation of tips, making it so that bad service, unless criminally so, gets 15%? If the person packaging your food is not in that category, why tip that individual (or, for all we know, the owner of the restaurant - why do we even think the tip goes to the food-packager?) and not your cashier at the supermarket, or the factory staff behind your frozen dinner?

If Jon has a guilty conscience and money to spare, so be it, I'm sure whoever receives the $2 won't complain. But the issue more seems to be that this is an ambiguous norm. I'm frequently in groups in which I'm the only American, and am constantly getting asked about how one is supposed to tip. And I'm forced to explain that I, a native of both this country and this region, have no idea. Restaurants between 15% and 20%, drinks at a bar get a dollar each, unless it's one of those $20-cocktail establishments, where evidently you're meant to tip as you would at a restaurant, but I don't know what actually goes on. I don't know why the fish shop in Chelsea Market has a tip jar, or what's supposed to justify tip jars in coffee places without seating, or in places whose "decor" consists primarily of signs admonishing you to bus your own table.

But the takeout tip seems especially odd. Isn't tipping in a restaurant part of the theater of a night out, a tradition that's as much about an exchange of funds between customer and server as a show being put on for the other patrons? Isn't that what allowed for the new trend of people tipping a dollar or more bills in coffee shops, places where the staff are paid at least minimum wage, and where the drinks themselves are priced such that these are nearly 100% tips on each beverage? Tipping on delivery, especially in places where someone likely biked through horrendous traffic if not weather to get you your food, and where there's an expectation of tips, makes perfect sense. But I'd always assumed that the tip option at pick-up was because there's just one receipt form restaurants use, whether for takeout or restaurant service, and they have no particular incentive to remove the option. Whatever the case, I'll just add this to the list of reasons I prefer to cook at home.

-Yet another entry into the genre of parents (mothers) airing their kids' (sons') dirty laundry on the Internet. My own guess here is that the kid isn't reading because his reading is something observed and celebrated by his mother. Both of those elements make reading undesirable. The latter, obviously, because many (most?) kids don't want to do as they're told; if mom was anti-reading, this kid would probably be further along in the Rougon-Macquart cycle than I am. The former because the very point of reading-as-escapism is escapism. If mom is breathing down the kid's neck, reading over his shoulder, experiencing every sentence alongside him, even if her goal isn't to censor his literary consumption, his own imagination is less fraught. Or maybe the kid is simply growing up in the age of the Daily Mail Online, or maybe he likes staring at a wall.

"Not gay bars, Ma. Zabar's."*

Every so often, I have to go to the Zabar's cheese department. Forces beyond my control compel it. When it was something I theoretically had access to, as in, when I lived a bus or subway ride away from it, I don't think I properly appreciated it. Now, it's a quasi-religious pilgrimage, involving hours upon hours of transportation, and not really justifiable unless I'm in the city for some other reason. It's far enough from where I usually need/want to go in NY that it basically means throwing up my hands and accepting that I will be that woman carrying cheese across state lines, devoting an entire afternoon to figuring out how many jumbo containers of Amora mustard can be comfortably carried on the subway, two trains, and a 30-minute nature walk. (The answer, I've learned the hard way, is one, if I intend to carry - sorry, shlep - back anything else as well.)

On some level, I realize this is a waste of precious time in the city, and that even if I now live in the woods, there is a comparable establishment a mere 40-minute bike ride away. But the prices are significantly higher, and more to the point, there isn't that sense of infinite possibility, just a carefully-curated cheese selection and a bunch of relocated Europeans who can't believe their luck, finding this in a New Jersey strip mall. (There are, however, at both establishments, agitated local women several times my age and strength, prepared to shove.) For a place that's famous, touristy, and gourmet, the prices in the cheese section of Zabar's (if not the rest of the store) are startlingly low. A kid in a candy shop, except not a kid (in the frank words of my grandmother's cleaning woman earlier in the day, "28 is not young"), and while there is indeed candy just past the cheese, it just seems redundant.

I restrained myself, shopping-wise, insofar as I didn't get the $7.29 tiny piece of aged goat cheese (Chabichou, and it looked amazing), or didn't, in that I ended up with three different kinds of cheese, making that a grand total of eight varieties currently in the cheese drawer. Already had: Mozzarella (for pizza, doesn't count!), Pecorino, Ricotta Salata, the smallest possible but still embarrassingly pricey wedge of Humboldt Fog, Passendale. Now added: Valdeon (a Spanish blue cheese I'd never tried before), Camembert, and smoked mozzarella bocconcini. These, concerned reader(s), are not the entire contents of my kitchen. There are also fruits and vegetables (fresh, frozen, and in the case of more tomatoes than is reasonable, canned), as well as pantries full of pasta and dried legumes. But the cheese collection is by far the most impressive, so much so that it almost seems as if I should be hosting an academic reception, as opposed to merely stuffing my face. But it's a truly impressive array. Where's my Into The Gloss?

*Apologies to "The Nanny."

Fake America vs. Slightly More Authentic America UPDATED, TWICE!

Are you sitting down? Because you're about to have your mind blown: it seems that Slate writer Jessica Grose... recently got married. And she has thoughts on What it All Means that she has generously offered to share with us, we the people who don't know her personally.*

If the NYT is less than sensitive to small "flyover" towns, Grose's op-ed today in the paper offers up a crude and clichéd portrait of New York as well as its suburbs. The suburbs are kinda-sorta nature-y! The city is filled with spoiled rich kids! (For the record, I was tormented one summer at camp by spoiled suburban kids, who fixated on the fact that my clothing didn't match, and that I had not brought along a hairdryer - we were eight! The takeaway here is that there will always be richer and brattier kids then yourself at summer camp, and they will find a way to make what is no doubt a well-earned break for your parents a miserable month for you.)

Her main objection to raising kids in the city, let it be known, is that it might mean having to take a stroller on the subway. Given that she had not long ago written about her intense pre-wedding arm workout, it might strike us as odd that she would not be able to take triplets on the JMZ, tossing the stroller down the stairs with her pinky finger.

We're to believe that her parents raised her in the suburbs for the following reason: "They had spent three years as interns and residents in hospitals in the South Bronx, taking care of patients with gunshot wounds and reviving heroin addicts." Hmm. Presumably two doctors might be able to raise a kid in a kind of urban environment at a great remove from the South Bronx? I'm afraid I don't really understand having this conversation without bringing class into it - if you're at a certain threshold where you'd genuinely be safer/more upwardly mobile with what your income could get you school- and real-estate-wise in a suburb, that's a valid concern, but otherwise? How could someone be simultaneously concerned about raising "brats" and schlepping a stroller on the subway? Aren't these the concerns of two different people, leading two utterly different lives?

The piece continues:

"In the suburbs of my childhood, packs of fourth graders walked home from elementary school without adult supervision, playing tag in the park along the way."

I suppose I only started going to and from school unsupervised in fifth grade - city kids have it tough. I guess we didn't play tag on the (MTA) bus, though. I feel like I never had a childhood!

"Adolescence involved training runs with my field hockey team down Main Street, where I often saw someone I knew; largely innocent keg parties in the woods; and, above all, the joy of driving a car down an empty, half-paved road with the windows open on a late June day. You can’t do any of these things in New York City."

The driving, point taken, but my high school track team ran up and down the Hudson River path, and I'm not sure what's so radically different when it comes to high school parties if the beer consumption occurs in apartments when parents are away, and is served in individual bottles rather than kegs. If anything, the whole we-didn't-drive-around bit makes it not only "largely innocent" when city kids get together, but almost entirely non-fatal. And! And! As free and wonderful as it must be to be 16 and driving around on your own, from what I hear it's kind of miserable to live in a must-drive place when you're still too young to do so and thus must get driven, or if your parents won't get/lend you a car. From 14 on, I could pretty much go wherever the MTA would take me, as long as I called home and didn't stay out too late.

Anyway, as someone who grew up right smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, I have had to contend my entire life with people explaining that the city's no place to raise a child, that it's basically child abuse to procreate in an urban environment. When it's like, aside from the rather crucial detail that I never learned how to drive (which, FWIW, many - most? - of my high school classmates did, even if virtually none had cars of their own), I think I turned out OK. And, because I grew up with no particular experience of them, I'm more likely to get excited (field trip!) than to roll my eyes when I get to go to a strip mall or a big-box store.

*I probably write about this writer's writing too much. I should note that I have nothing against the writer herself personally, don't know her personally, and must on some level appreciate/identify with what she writes, or I wouldn't come back to it. As a rule I try to reserve my snark for those who are a) super-established public-figure-type writers, with platforms far greater than my own, as opposed to random bloggers, and b) if possible, although I guess this unlike the former might be unintentional, people of roughly my own demographics, as opposed to people who, if I were to single them out, it might risk offending some greater constituency. See also: my responses over the years Jane Brody's "Personal Health" column.

UPDATE 1:

Holy moly, someone actually makes the "almost borders on child abuse" claim, like for real. It's really not anything like child abuse to grow up without ever coming in contact with a tadpole. (Although we did dissect frogs at my high school.) And, dude (or dudette), if you're creeped out by "10-year-olds who eat sushi," you're not good country folk but a xenophobe.

UPDATE 2:

This I'd just meant to add to the post earlier: If Grose conflates different and seemingly mutually exclusive objections to city-kids - the fact that it's expensive to be comfortable in a city, and the chance that one's kids will be rich and snooty - so too do some city kids themselves, as kids or looking back fondly on their urban upbringings. You did not grow up amidst "diversity" if your only glimpses of the area beyond 57th-to-96th 5th-to-Lexington were on drives to your country house. If you're rich enough, you can raise city kids who basically never see the city.

Organic yoga arugula Park Slope strollers

It's obviously only a matter of time until the NYT allows comments - and comments there shall be - on this Styles article that hits, oh, just about every possible Styles mark: coastal, upper-middle-class, well-educated, blah blah, couples who divorce, in an era when only the plebs are supposed to do that. Bad parenting, in this post-post-post-"Mad Men"-era society! Where there were Styles clichés left out, author Carrie Bradshaw - no, Pamela Paul - threw them back in, adding "yoga" and "organic" for good measure. Oh, and of course, those profiled come across on a superficial level as saints, but between the lines as privileged fools. You know what? I don't believe there's a "Pamela Paul." I think this was some excellent work on the part of the paper's Style Article Generator.

Anyway, I've taken the bait. (Maybe I'm homesick, who knows. No Park Slope parenting in Paris. Still very much try-not-to-drop-the-cigarette-ashes-onto-the-head-of-the-kid-in-the-stroller in these parts.) So:

-Obviously, you don't know the personal business of the other playgroup parents, so yoga moms, fine, should not be so judgey of the few among them who divorce. Maybe there was nastiness behind the organic-sustainable curtains that you don't know about, and the split really did have to happen. But even if not, even if the parents divorced for no good reason, for god's sake be civil with acquaintances.

-But maybe it is reasonable that people are judgey about divorce when there are young kids involved, in a way that would not have been as reasonable back in the day. It's not just about peer marriage vs. traditional gender roles, as Paul suggests. It's about choice of spouse. If you felt you had to marry in order to have sex, or if there was no effective birth control when you were young and single, then there's a heck of a lot better of a chance that you ended up with someone you were never that thrilled about to begin with. If you go into marriage knowing what else is out there, knowing, even, that you've been happy living with your future spouse for years already, then perhaps it is more embarrassing to divorce, all things equal, than if things don't work out between you and the guy who took you to the soda shop a few times before your wedding.

-The divorced parents quoted say a variant of, 'It's like they think it's bad parenting to divorce when your kids are young.' And the author is on their side. "[S]plitting up with tender, vulnerable children in the mix is seen as a parental infraction." At which point I'm like, yes, all things equal, it is bad parenting to divorce not long after having kids. Divorce should absolutely remain legal, and is sometimes unavoidable - again, with individual cases, best to avoid pronouncements about the avoidability or not of their divorces, exception being if they choose to brag about their infidelity in the Vows, in which case judge away. But without speaking to any individuals' situations, yes, all things equal, it is a nice gesture to your young children to stay with your spouse, if at all possible. Nicer, even, than remembering to get the organic carrot purée from the Co-op.

-"A common belief is that if the divorce is done properly, the children benefit more from the separation than from living in a family with a compromised marriage." Common among... recently divorced parents interviewed for this article. I know, I know, why look for Science in a place like this.

-But wait. Is the article about divorced parents? No, it's about Mommy Wars. How's this for a nice parenthetical? "(Indeed, according to many divorced men, now more involved in their children’s lives than their predecessors, they do not feel the same level of scrutiny.)" Indeed, maybe cutting a few of the superfluous mentions of organic milk would have made room to unpack the gender dynamics of this in the article's three pages.

-Requisite Dan Savage worship: While I think Savage is a bit too optimistic, if we want to call it that, about how easily the typical straight (or gay!) couple might set up an open relationship, while I think he greatly exaggerates the extent to which couples even want such relationships (skewed, perhaps, by political scandals, and by the fact that it's those not happy in their relationships, or who want affirmation in their non-monogamy, who call him), he does have a point about how, if it's a choice between splitting up a family and negotiating some kind of not-quite-monogamous set-up, the latter probably has its advantages.

Moving on up, moving on down

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the Amy Chua-fest was about regression to the mean, aka the fact that sometimes kids with all the privilege in the world still don't get into the Ivies. We-as-a-society are accustomed to discussions of how unfair it is that smart and hard-working kids without all the privilege in the world are held back, but we're not sure what to make of the reverse phenomenon.

This is a problem, of course, primarily for the kids in question and their parents, parents who believe in social mobility through education, who are themselves its beneficiaries, but who now have to contend with the fact that their children, however wonderful, are not certified wonderful by the relevant authorities.

Chua's contribution, "Chua" defined as an amalgam of the phenomenon as understood by those who did and did not read the whole thing, was to say a) that it's OK to want certified-wonderful offspring, and b) that amorphous, milieu-propelled, 'privilege' alone is not enough to get them there. Oh, and c) that, absent the kind of obstacles that the kids we generally think of as less privileged (more specifically, children of immigrant families) experience, young people have no drive to succeed, so if you want your privileged kids to stay that way, you have to create an artificial atmosphere of absence-of-privilege. Not just stuff like, no designer handbags in 8th grade, but more like, if you get a B, you will starve to death in the gutter. Basically, Chua's innovation was rethinking the concept of privilege, both in terms of declaring it acceptable to perpetuate hard-won high-status, and in terms of pointing out that we-as-a-society overestimate the extent to which simply having educated and well-off parents guarantees class maintenance across generations. To put it another way, aka to repeat myself, we're used to thinking of social mobility in terms of its inadequacy as a way of propelling people upward; she's reminding us that it functions decently well in propelling some downward.

The rest, as I see it, is secondary. The 'Asian vs. Western' bit; the question of whether one can, in fact, get a good education at a school that isn't Harvard (was this ever in doubt? was 'a good education' ever the issue?); whether 'success' means Harvard or Stanford and Berkeley too; how to foster a child's creativity or individuality or whatever... none of this is what made Chua's... phenomenon any different. Which is why Caitlin Flanagan has, I think, missed its significance. The "good mothers" she postulates hover in this on-the-one-hand, on-the-other sphere of wanting their children to Find Themselves, yet to end up at Ivies all the same. There is this paradox, fine, but the paradox that matters is the broader one: they want the Ivies to be meritocracies, but they want to make sure their own offspring get ahead.

Meanwhile, Flavia's suggestion, that parents encourage their kids along the way, but not in any definitive direction, "then see who your child is, and what she can do, and recalibrate," strikes me as altogether reasonable, but fails to address the anxieties that drove the wave of Chua-fixation. (Not that Flavia claims to be addressing Chua-fixation.) Chuaism is about making sure your children remain in the same class, about pushing them beyond what's needed to be in that class, just to be extra sure, and in order to make sure they do the same with their kids. It's not about producing children who are, god forbid, well-suited to the work they end up doing.

I, for one, think Flaviaism is more reasonable - why focus on class maintenance, when having wealthy offspring is no guarantee they'll be amazing let alone nearby when you're old? Unless you believe in an afterlife during which you'll be able to bask in the glory of your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren's i-banking careers, when it ends, it ends. But if you're losing sleep over the possibility that future beings with your DNA will worry about where the next meal is coming from, you're better off advocating for more socialism - or better yet, moving to a country where that's a done deal - than banking on your descendants being smarter, luckier, and more hard-working than most. Sort of like, as I've also said before, if your number one concern in life is that your offspring marry fellow Jews, you're better off moving to Israel than exerting pressure on them as individuals, when it could well be that they'll obey, but their kids won't.

But Chuaism isn't about reasonable. It isn't about looking at what it's supposed to matter if in 2150, people with your last name are lawyers or janitors. It's about taking whatever twinge of paternal angst compels parents to find it mildly tragic when their children, however happy, fail to be certified as wonderful, and rather than suppressing it, as is reasonable, making that the focal point of parenting.

In reluctant defense of (reading the book of) Amy Chua

PG and I have, like everyone else, been having a debate about Amy Chua's book. Since neither of us has read it (in its entirety, at least), I was beginning to think we'd discussed it from almost every possible other angle, and thus reached a dead end.

Not so! Yesterday I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club on Chua (which, incidentally, I recommend to even those considering reading the book - it's not as if there are "spoilers" at this point - but which made me more curious to read the book), and judging by the response of some intelligent people who apparently read it cover to cover... PG and I were both right. One of the participants said the coverage misses the third half (UPDATE not half, part - thanks for noticing this to my own mother, yes I catch the irony given the topic of this post) of the book, and they all agreed that the buzz =/= what's actually in the book. Points for PG. However, one (possibly the same) participant also pointed out that the way she can tell that the people holding forth on the book haven't read it is that they actually leave out some of the more outrageous things in it (the relationship with the permissive Jewish relatives, esp mother-in-law, apparently). Rather than making just them more sympathetic to Chua, reading the whole darn thing made the participants unsympathetic in new ways as well. And it doesn't appear that consuming the this-is-not-a-parenting-guide disclaimer, or the entire "narrative arc" culminating in an I-was-wrong, makes a reader not take away from the book that they should maybe question their own lax parenting style. (One participant mentions making her son practice the drums longer, and taking a more active role in her son's - another son's? - swimming lessons.) But at least someone at Slate thinks the book was a success as a memoir (they all agree it's a memoir), so PG, you win this round. If I were pre-enlightenment Amy Chua's daughter, I'd be punished accordingly for taking second place.

What I thought was most compelling in the podcast, that hasn't come up much in the discussion overall, was the question of what it means for someone who's essentially a mainstream, high-achieving, well-connected, elite American to adopt what is essentially an immigrant attitude to parenting. In other words, that this isn't a memoir about immigrant parenting or elite parenting, but about the unusual choice of elite parents (or one elite mother, if only for a time) to create an artificial sense for their children that the world will end if they don't get all A's. This interests me on a personal level both as someone raised in a family that's perpetuated some "immigrant" ways (though nothing as out-there as the WSJ excerpt) well beyond any actual immigrant generation, and as someone who for entirely particular reasons rarely experiences a moment of bourgeois everything-will-be-OK. (Yes, I opted for humanities grad school, but when I started, it was with plans B, C, and D in the back of my mind, never anything about how I could take some time off to find myself if it didn't work out.)

On a general level, though, what matters is the question of regression to the mean, something I alluded to in my first post on this, but that seemed more central after hearing the Slate folks discuss. One of the participants phrased it as, Chua didn't need to go the immigrant-parent route, because her children already had all the privileges that come with being the children of two Yale law profs/public intellectuals, in a milieu of immense intellectual and not insubstantial material advantage. But that's not how it works! Privilege of this nature does not guarantee one's children will be successful, only that if they're not, this is highly embarrassing for everyone involved - the parents who believe in meritocracy who must now confront that their children are not so great after all, and the children who've been schooled in how unjust of a society we're living in, who know they have it good, and who've still failed to make anything of themselves. If Chua hadn't cracked the metaphorical whip (or literal? why I do need to read the thing...) maybe her daughters would be trying to find creative ways not to let on how successful their parents were, so as not to attract unfavorable comparisons.

The draw of the book, then, is precisely the fact that even the most successful "Western" parents can't rely on good schools and their general educatedness if they want their children doing at least as well as they did. That it is the end of the world, in its way, if generation after generation slides in the US News and World Report ranking of its alma mater. Chua's originality is in finding a way to address this that isn't coming out and saying, damned if my kid doesn't go to Harvard. No, it's about having a work ethic, about things that are only fun when you've worked at them, about honoring immigrant forbearers or Asian traditions or who knows. Whatever it is, it's not crass, it's not about brand names. She's offering an alternative to the multiple-intelligences, well-roundedness excuses parents give (and provide themselves) for their kids' academic mediocrity, a respectable way to subtly make sure your children don't go to their safety schools. She's telling them not necessarily that it's possible to make every child an academic success, but that it's OK to care not only if one's child is happy, but if the family's place in a certain elite is secure for one more generation.

Amy Chua Amy Chua Amy Chua UPDATED

The NYT is on the case. Judith Warner, Room for Debate, Motherlode, Fashion & Style. This woman, who will teach you how to raise show poodles, is everywhere. This is her moment! How kind of her to agree, "between what she called a '24/7' effort to 'clarify some misunderstandings,'" to give a phone interview to the Times. As though that wasn't a key part of said effort. Anyway.

I have not, I confess, combed through all of this. Doing so - comments included! - will be my reward for getting through a substantial to-do list after arriving in Paris. But I did appreciate this, from Warner: "simply by marrying a Jew, and not a Chinese man, she [Amy Chua, remember her?] worries that she is 'letting down 4,000 years of civilization.'"

Given how much emphasis many American Jews place on intermarriage as a Jewish issue, as though Jews are the only ones whose culture is worth honoring, and as though any non-Jewish partner is by definition a hearty Protestant Nebraskan or a New England WASP, or at any rate, an unhyphenated American, because really, isn't the world divided between Jews and the whites who inspire Ralph Lauren?, it's amusing to be presented with the other side of a scenario that we all know exists: minority-minority intermarriage.

UPDATE

How is an American Jewish mother that much more "Western" than an Asian-American one? I had more thoughts on this before a heck of a trip, and so will maybe muse on this later, but didn't intend to take the post down, just to update.

A helping hand

If grad students had any money, I suspect there'd be a huge market for dissertation helpers. (As it stands, it's more likely that we find ourselves employed as homework helpers.) And how true, Gawker commenter, there's no way to read "homework helper" as anything but "hamburger helper."

Meritocracy, mediocrity

The story of meritocracy usually goes as follows: the brilliant but not especially well-born prove themselves in school and end up successful. They, in turn, meet spouses in the course of their elite educations, producing a new generation even higher-IQ, even more well-rounded, than the previous. Soon enough, there are only the few rare ascents - the elite has become self-perpetuating, "school" just a mask. The Charles Murray argument: "The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both." And, more to the point: "An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent [...] An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens."

What Murray ignores is that regression to the mean applies plenty to an elite formed through education. In a meritocracy, even a not-fully-successful one such as ours, all the test-prep in the world doesn't guarantee results, even for a kid whose genes and history of being read to at bedtime ought to make him a Rhodes Scholar. This is something today's elites know full well anecdotally, but it's a shameful secret. Highly educated, socially-awkward parents often produce socially-adept but academically apathetic offspring. See this Motherlode post. See anything Michael Winerip has written about his twin sons. See also any reference to how it's "honorable" to have a particular blue-collar job. I mean, it is honorable to do anything productive, but when someone's going out of their way to call a particular job "honorable," it's a safe bet someone with a white-collar career is either being patronizing or, if referring to their own kid, wistful.

Because if you believe society is unjust, and you've been screwed over by fact of birth, that your own kids aren't clerking for the Supreme Court justice of your choice, or able to pull a B+ in pre-algebra, is just something to accept. But if you believe meritocracy is a fair system - and if you've benefitted from it, whatever you say about test-score bias or the system's various imperfections, you probably, on some level, do - the idea that your own children have failed at school is evidence that they have failed at life. Even if a particular beneficiary of meritocracy is extremely committed to fighting the system's flaws, the fact remains that their own children have had all the benefits a person can have in a meritocracy. Add to this the fact that "holistic" college admissions claim to judge students as people, rather than as applicants, and that Yale rejection leaves no room for doubt.

Meritocracy makes ascents extra-visible and descents too dreadful to admit. This is why those who have done no better or perhaps worse than their parents have to create revisionist histories of their own childhoods, to compare themselves to the slightly-more-privileged. But mostly, we just don't hear from the lighthearted, popular offspring of the super-serious. They're not writing introspective articles in the New York Times. They're not publishing novels. (The novel about mediocrity is inevitably written by someone whose bio lists awards, previous novels published. Sure, they never turned out to be the lawyer their parents had hoped for, but their "slacking" was of the sort that pays off.) The shame of their situation, combined with their lack of writing skills, keeps them from telling their story. We hear lots - as well we should - about the external factors preventing worthy students from making it to four-year colleges. But the fact that we don't hear about the set who've had every meritocratic advantage, yet who can't make it off the couch. (I distinguish this set from those who've had every financial advantage - if your family really is that wealthy, they'll buy the school a wing and you'll remain fancy and schmancy regardless.)

This interests me on some level because, despite having well-educated parents, I wasn't really a school person until 12th grade. Like the clichéd former awkward kid who never quite sees himself as the not-awkward adult he became, I do still see myself as kind of eh in the intellectual department, despite proven non-ineptitude in a literature PhD program. (Not an earth-shattering achievement, but the sort of thing that makes it tougher to claim utter academic hopelessness.) But mostly, I'm still harping on the Murray article. How can the "New Elite" be self-perpetuating if so many of its children can barely make it to college? Do I just happen to know of a lot of isolated cases of great ascents and descents, when 99.99999% of people are in precisely the same fields as their parents?

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Charles Murray points out that today's elites marry in, perpetuating their elite elitism. "Three examples lifted from last Sunday's Times: a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA) married a consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MPP). [Two more of the same idea follow.]"

The marriage part of his argument* bears a striking resemblance to (bear with me) an aspect of my dissertation. Early-nineteenth-century French Jews were faulted for marrying other Jews, as opposed to marrying 'the French.' But who were the French? Wasn't "France" just a big conglomeration of endogamous groups, groups that spoke their own languages, lived in their own worlds? Was there on the one hand a free-floating, marry-anyone majority, and on the other, the Jews, an insular, marry-in minority? If other groups - ethno-cultural, professional, regional, linguistic - were also marrying in, how was in-marriage a trait specific to Jews, proof of a unique xenophobia? Might it be that those whose chief complaint against the Jews was that they refused to marry out (ahem, Napoleon) were just accusing them of behaving like everyone else?

Back to the contemporary 'merica example. Who are the Real Americans, with whom the Ivy grads won't consider so much as a dinner date? (Reihan Salam had mentioned on Twitter he'd be addressing the question of who Murray's Americans are, and I'll add a link to that here if he does and I figure out where.) Are non-elites this homogeneous class, with Nascar fans in Kentucky marrying with residents of Chicago's South Side? And (thank you, Gawker) what about immigrants? Are they part of the monolith that is Non-Fancy-Pants America? Or does the inherent cosmopolitanness of having been to more than one country, spoken at least a few words of more than one language, make them elites, no matter how little education or money they have to their unpronounceable names. (As if "Maltz" were my family's real Old-World name.) If America is a set of insular-ish groups, how is it any more surprising that a Harvard-educated banker isn't marrying a factory worker, than it is that that factory worker isn't marrying an undocumented nanny?

Or, to put it in simpler terms, you can't blame the cheerleaders for only dating football players if the goths only date goths, the stoners only date stoners, and the preps only date preps.

People pair off within the socio-cultural-economic-linguistic-etc.-etc. limitations. All people, not just arugula-munching yoga-mat-carriers. To suggest that there's something nefarious - or particular to the present - about the Vows couples is bizarre. Don't like elites? Fine. Think there's too much of an income disparity? Suggest higher taxes for the rich. (Is this what Murray's suggesting?) But who exactly are fancy-pantses going to marry if not people they meet in the course of their fancy-pants formative years? Basically, Murray, sympathetic to those who'd have tea at their parties, has it in for the librul elites. He needs things to criticize them for, and since not watching "Oprah" isn't enough, he adds to their list of crimes their tendency to act like all other groups at all times ever.

But wait! Something has changed, but I can't quite put my finger on it... Oh oh, I know! The merging of impressive resumes is only possible when there are women with impressive resumes. (Unless the three examples Murray cites are of gay male couples, in which case we're talking about a different set of new opportunities.) Is this nostalgia for a Golden Age when brilliant men married their pretty secretaries? The only way graduates from highly selective colleges are going to stop marrying one another is if one sex simply doesn't go to college. Give it time - soon the men will stop at 10th grade, and babies of sensible levels of brains and looks can be born once again.

But yes, it's significant, it's progress, that being female or non-white and being an elite are no longer mutually exclusive. The "meritocracy" is flawed and not even close to 100% meritocratic, but the fact that massive segments of the population aren't by definition ineligible is an achievement, enough of one that any nostalgia for the elites of yesteryear deserves suspicion. (And yes, I know for what work the author is famous.)

* This was kind of a where-to-begin article. Consider the above to be my post on it, and what's below to be a disorganized array of other objections:

-The change Murray refers to at the beginning of the article isn't that the Tea Partiers insult elites, whereas David Brooks gently mocked the "bobos." It's that the Tea Party is a movement. This is organized anti-elitism. This is a bit like what one learns in Jewish Studies 101 - that sure, Jews were hated for economic and ethnic reasons prior to the 1880s, but it didn't count as anti-Semitism until there was a political force backing up the occasional pamphlet or armchair bigot. I make this comparison not to say that Tea Party anti-elitism is anti-Semitism, but to point out where Murray's gone wrong. The difference with Tea Party grumblings about elites is that it's politicized. Brooks musing about Restoration Hardware, this was Brooks contemplating fancy-pants-types who buy antique-looking doorknobs or whatever. Political only in the broadest sense of all mentions of class being political. 

-Murray picks a few examples of cultural divide - romance novels, yoga - but ignores the huge overlap brought about by something called "pop culture." If the name "Lindsay Lohan" doesn't bring to mind the word "rehab," you're not just an elite. You're part of some micro-elite that has managed to shield itself from the world outside a massive, dusty, home library. But once you reach that level of seclusion, you're more likely to be home-schooling in the woods somewhere than, I don't know, a graduate of UPenn. I'm not talking about when a politician who's gone from New England boarding school to the Ivy League suddenly pretends to care where to get the best corn dogs in Nebraska. I'm taking about highly educated types who read Perez Hilton, not to connect with the masses, but to find out which jeggings Lohan wore for her latest trial.

-A rotary phone? What what?

There so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn't count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don't count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn't count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian.

Murray's use of "quintessentially American" reveals his bias. Once we start getting into which activities or situations count as "real American," we're in Palin country. Is it particularly American to live below the poverty line, or in a small town? As in, are other countries all big cities and comfortable living, and if so, what's anyone doing here? And what does it even mean that the elite class is not a version of America in miniature? Why would it be? And (and we've come full circle) why are we supposed to be surprised if the experiences of any small minority of Americans differ from that of the majority?

Things start to look very circular. Yes, elites are elite, college graduates have attended college. Yes, yes, we all know that living in Bushwick in grad school isn't the same as living in East New York for 30 years. But this whole "doesn't count" business is kind of pointless. If the problem is that elites aren't living in small towns or the inner city, yet under certain circumstances they are living in these places, why are we not counting those circumstances? (Sure, college students leave after 4-6 years, but the profs stick around.) If elites were living in small towns working as gas-station attendants, or at fast-food joints in the inner city, they wouldn't be elites. If a fancy-pants lawyer is living in the inner city, the neighborhood in question is gentrifying, thanks to the lawyer and her lawyer-friends. The mere presence of elites changes environments, summons organic grocers and Lululemons.

-As always in these discussions: where's the cutoff for "elite"? Harvard or nothing? College vs. high school? What about the overeducated hovering around the poverty line? (You're broke, not poor, if you're in debt to attend Yale Law School, but what about Medieval Knitting PhD students at Obscure U?) What about the rich and red-state? What about... oh, this has gone on too long.

"Welcome to a taste of Paris"

Need a new system for getting photos here, but this show poodle at a Columbus Ave. street fair was the highlight of my day. I'm considering devoting this blog exclusively to action shots of lap dogs.

Class and snobbery

Prudie's response to letter-writer #1 would make perfect sense - perfect! - had the letter-writer said that, on account of his possible future inlaws being Catholic and lower-middle-class, he figured they'd be rabid anti-Semites. In that case, yes, he's being a snob. Or if not a snob, just incredibly sheltered. If the guy has never left a liberal-well-educated-culturally-Jewish sphere, his assumption that upon leaving the bubble, he'll encounter pogroms would be, if not reasonable, attributable more to ignorance than snobbery.

But! He is telling Prudie that they, as in, this particular family, have "a penchant for saying alarmingly inappropriate things about Jews and other minorities in my presence." He's not judging families like this one, but a specific set of real-life people. This is not prejudgment. It's judgment, plain and simple.

Why, then, does he bring up the difference in class? My guess would be that the man was raised in the age of "your privilege is showing" and wants to make it clear that he respects, from a distance if not in his own family, the right to say things that it is their own cultural tradition to express. Now, one might argue his ignorance is showing - one hears at least as much anti-Jewish venting from well-educated types. Or that he's being patronizing. But if he's mentioning class at all, it's to explain why he puts up with their comments in the first place.

Meanwhile, there's a glaringly obvious answer Prudie missed: the guy is jumping the gun. He doesn't mention how long or how seriously he's been dating the child-of-a-bigoted-home, nor how old either of them are. Something about the importance he places on their families' attitudes, his choice of "beautiful" as the trait he's most drawn to in his girlfriend, and the fact that he doesn't seem to have dated much, makes me think they're both very young. It doesn't seem from the letter that this is a couple about to get married. I'm picturing a boy of about 19, projecting and overanalyzing and otherwise using a college relationship (because college is where Young People of Different Backgrounds Meet For the First Time) to think through all the possibilities his life might have in store for him. If a young woman had written the letter, Prudie might have pointed out that she was thinking too far ahead, as women are wont to do. But young men are also guilty of this behavior.

All over the place

-I fully approve of Helen's post about restaurants that use "Market" in the name, and was especially amused by the inclusion of a dingy pizza place down the street from my office, about as far from rustic as you can get. I'd go further than she does and say that the problem's not just in the names, but in the trend of restaurants acting as though the mere fact that they serve food made from fresh ingredients ought to be celebrated. Ideally, this would be assumed at anywhere but McDonalds, but at any rate, the inclusion of a word like "market" in the restaurant name (or of the names of the farms the ingredients come from on the menu) only makes patrons all the more aware of dishes not tasting quite as fresh as ideal. My only slight difference of opinion is about Markt - the name sounds market-like to anglophone ears, but according to my translator means both "market" and "town square" in Dutch, and so might be about farmstands but could also be something along the lines of "Union Square Café".

-Commenter Matt hates bangs. This slideshow may make him change his mind.

-I've been semi-following the anti-NYC-centrism discussion (see here, here, here) and am half-wary of responding, for fear of contributing to the problem, what with the inevitability of my commenting from the standpoint of someone from and currently living in that city. But only half, so here goes, in list form because I'm feeling just that articulate:

1) My first reaction was to think, oh no, not this again, and that we were once again witnessing a Palinesque anti-coastal-elites populist-xenophobic mood. Because the city - as in, urban areas, not just New York - represents diversity, etc., etc. But it turns out the issue really is, why does NYC get so much more attention than other major US cities. Which is a different issue entirely from urban-versus-rural.

2) Or is it? We've certainly moved past the era when in polite society a person could be referred to discreetly as 'so very New York' and this was a way of saying, 'ugh, Jews.' But to many, New York still represents the foreign, the dangerous, the not-really-American, so even if the targets have (partially) shifted, there's a certain continuity in anti-NY discourse. (And yes, whenever I read anything about an entity that might be confused with Jews and how they "dominate American media, finance, and letters," the light bulb goes off, but again, I think Conor really does mean New York and not just one ethno-religious subset thereof.)

3) But! New York "tyranny" is very real, and very much experienced even by New Yorkers, the very people for whom it's natural to think more about this place than elsewhere. As Amber correctly notes, this is most egregious in sitcom settings and on TV more generally. As offensive as the overrepresentation of the city may be to the rest of the country, it's awfully irritating to those who do live here. There's the apartment-size issue, but also the fact that anything approximating a typical life in this city can't be depicted, because it wouldn't be relatable. (I blathered on about this in Amber's comments and so will shift slightly...). So it's not just that upper-middle-class white TV characters said to live in NY don't correctly represent upper-middle-class white New Yorkers. It's also that the city's so often presented as only consisting not merely of this already-specific demographic, but of, well, socialites, celebrities, investment bankers, and other not-so-relatable demographics. Yes, such people live here, but so, too, do people with less glamorous lives, in worlds less prone to narcissism. (Are grad students prone to narcissism? Sure, but of a different, non-location-specific, kind.)

4) Speaking of narcissism, on a personal note, I find it kind of bizarre that I still live in New York. People I meet often assume I returned because four years of Chicago had taught me I couldn't live anywhere else, but the fact of the matter is that this only exists in New York. I'm here, odd as it may seem, because of the Dreyfus Affair; Uniqlo's just a plus. Which is lucky, because the likelihood I'll still live here after grad school is slim indeed.

To be a female New York Jew in the age of Kagan

Much has been made about the overrepresentation of New Yorkers and Jews on the Supreme Court. And now Kagan! It's fairly self-explanatory how overrepresentation negatively impacts the underrepresented. But what of those who are part of that very same demographic? We must feel kind of awesome now, right? Yes and no.

So Kagan, in brief: Upper West Side to Hunter for high school. Me: Upper East, Stuyvesant. We're practically twins! Except not so much. The similarity in background does not make me feel as though positions of immense power are at my fingertips. It does the following things:

-It reminds me of how much privilege comes from simply having the luck to be born at a place thought by many, for better or worse, to be the center of everything, to a community that might be much-hated but that traditionally encourages being a good student. (I could go on re: assimilation, blah blah, Jews aren't so studious these days, and the same will come soon enough of every 'model immigrant' group in this country. But these things take generations, and for now there's still a lot of my kind excelling in these realms.)

-It makes me hyper-aware of how little I've done with a background of what is apparently the ultimate in privilege (daughter of a gastroenterologist, no less!). What have I done with my life? Am I doing what I can to work that geographically-, Semitically- and gastrointestinally-derived privilege to the fullest? No one's debating my interpretation of the Constitution or resemblance to Kevin Arnold.

-It reminds me how demographic groups always look more homogeneous from the outside. As in, coming from a similar background allows me not so much to identify with Kagan as to be able to imagine just the kind of student she was, and where she would have fit into the general scheme of things. As an academic late bloomer (it happens), I have trouble identifying with the straight-A student. And no doubt within the always-an-A-student community, there's sufficient diversity that for one reason or another, even there, Kagan appears part of a specific mini-demographic as well.

Local adventures

Just now, after croissants and a mostly-failed trip to the by-then-picked-over Tribeca farmers' market, Jo and I came upon a massive book sale to benefit the Stuyvesant robotics team. They had these amazing shirts that said 'Stuyvesant Robotics', but the books were more promising still. I had my choice between not one but two books on Flemish painting, and ended up with one on the Ghent altarpiece, along with one on German-Jewish history, one on Vienna, some novel, who knows what else between the two of us, but one of the tote bags destined for Whole Foods ended up fully out of commission.

My old drafting ("CAD" for those in the know) teacher was among those helping the not at all geeky team-members sell the books. I took advantage of the fact that I went to an enormous high school where I looked like just about all the other non-East Asian girls and so did not acknowledge this when interacting with him. But it was really Jo who had the interaction - the teacher overheard him saying something about a physics book and got very excited, urging him to buy a set of Physics I and II. I feared where this might go if Jo revealed anything about his profession, but luckily he did as well, so that was that.

It was soon after that point that we came upon a rather odd choice for a school book fair, particularly in a cultural climate where Halloween costumes deemed too scary are prohibited: Mein Kampf, in English, but with the title left in its recognizable form. Hmm. I wondered what might compel someone to decide, you know what, today's the day I'm going to donate my copy of Mein Kampf to charity, and what better charity than the Stuyvesant robotics team? Did an intellectual Upper West Side parent decide enough was enough and that he needed more room for his Roth? (Or not. There was also, unsurprisingly, a Portnoy's Complaint.) Did an alum leave it to the robotics team in his will? Someone's name was carefully written in the front, but it seemed like a not-so-recent original purchase. I was all set to just place the book next to a copy of some book about the Third Reich, but we sort of decided maybe the people selling the books should know this was one in the pile, not to demand that they censor, but to leave it up to the people selling the books to decide if this was one they wanted. Jo mentioned it to a teacher I did not, thankfully, recognize, and he moved it back into a box. I'm 80% sure he knew why we were pointing this book out to him, but my memory of social studies classes made me think we'd be better off with someone old enough to possibly remember World War II than with a student.

Something about the combination of high school teachers and my adult life, of the robotics team, the Greenmarket, and Mein Kampf, made the whole thing feel very much like an odd dream I could very well have had. Only our now-overstuffed bookcases bear witness to its reality.