The Harvard of Harvards

-Frank Bruni has some words of comfort for college applicants/their parents. It doesn't matter where a kid goes to college! How liberating! Except Exhibit A is a kid who didn't do so great in college admissions, but ended up in euphemistic Boston for post-college studies. It doesn't matter where you go to college, because there's always Harvard grad school! Which does kind of cut against the prestige-rejection message. It's a bit like the narrative that tells young women they shouldn't worry about anything so generic as finding a husband, and should focus instead on their own careers and interests... until they reach 30, at which point ideally the independent spirit they cultivated in their 20s will have succeeded in that ultimate of end goals, snagging a man.

-Assorted feminism-and-contrarianism links: Elizabeth Nolan Brown praises Laura Kipnis's defense of faculty-student romance. Katha Pollitt takes the now-controversial stance that abortion should be presented as a women's issue. (Controversial, that is, not because the would-be father might want a say, but because not everyone who's biologically female identifies as a woman.) And Ann Friedman rejects the joyful-self-expression-through-clothes approach of Women In Clothes.

-Speaking of clothes: When an admired dress turns out to be well over $300, only available in Japan, and sold out, one approach would be to scour eBay and whatever the advanced version of that sort of research is, and to find the place where the very same dress can be bought, and for much less money. I made a gesture or two in that direction, but realized early on that this was a dead end, or, rather, that the investigation necessary to make it otherwise wasn't worthwhile. (If only I had the same level of commitment to this that Ilana's mother has for knockoff handbags.) But I've been keeping an eye out for dresses that might resemble The Dress, at least in spirit. And oddly enough, this, once on, produced a similar effect. Or I see how it might, with proper styling. That, or it's a potato sack. I haven't cut the tag just yet. The same trip to the mothership also yielded a mid-length skirt of the kind that - according to Instagram and my now-fading memory of the place - is favored by many chic women in Japan. If today ever gets past the vacuuming-and-taxes-in-pajamas stage, perhaps a performance of femininity along these lines is in order.