Character-building, character-limits

Given the longstanding WWPD fixation on scrappiness oneupmanship, I am, like Flavia, fascinated by the "first seven jobs" hashtag. My take on the hashtag - already known, I suppose, to my avid Twitter follower(s) - is that the whole thing's a bit... misleading? Prone to error by omission?

The gist of the exercise was - as Oliver Burkeman suggested - for people who are now prominent or at least successful to reveal the tremendous self-made climb it took for them to get where they are. As in, who'd have thought, little Jimmy who used to be a lifeguard is now a journalist/director/professor! Who indeed.

But the structure of it - the listing, context-free, of seven jobs, all within the 140-character Twitter limit - doesn't leave room for explanation. Nothing about how long the jobs were for; how they were gotten; whether they were needed (or about 'building character'); what age; etc., etc. The result is that the having-of-jobs - of jobs that would be, if held full-time by a 40-year-old, blue-collar - sounds scrappy. Never mind that having jobs in one's youth may indicate... privilege. Not always - anyone working full-time during college, as a 19-year-old, merits all the scrappiness points - but often. What certainly does suggest at least present-day comfort is the implicit tone - specifically, that there's no fear in anyone's list-presentation of ever having to return to any of those lines of work, because that?, that was ages ago, and trajectories go just the one way: up.

But this isn't about privilege, exactly, but rather meritocratic oneupmanship. It's about showing how impressive you are by explicitly juxtaposing where you are now with where you once were. And there can be good fun in that - I'm not above that behavior, not averse to pointing out, where appropriate, that I've gotten to (thus far) the book deal and manuscript stage of the book-publishing process not through connections, but through copious blogging, then freelancing, much of this time also spent teaching. I totally get the appeal - especially if you're someone others might assume caught certain specific breaks that you did not - of pointing out that you had to work for it.

The question, though, is who can't come up with a nice list of seven first jobs? Presumably, the thinking is (no, this isn't scientific) the actual rich people, who went instead from unpaid internships and/or grad programs straight to white-collar work. But wait! Rich kids aren't (generally) the ones taking unpaid internships! Once you stop and look at what the profile is for a successful, grown-up professional, it starts to seem not surprising in the least that those with impressive jobs and achievements today worked a variety of less-glamorous jobs an eternity ago.

So who is this eternally-glamorous person-of-straw against whom we the list-providers are implicitly comparing ourselves? My grand theory of all this goes as follows: In certain situations (media and academia Twitter come to mind), due to stratification and income inequality and so forth, the 'poor' kids are actually middle or upper middle class. I say this both because I've read those articles and because I was that kid. I could scrappiness-one-up classmates whose parents paid their rent after college, but - despite campus jobs that I got to put on my list, thank you very much - I was far from financially independent during college. There are people who don't ever work; they tend to be very poor and thus excluded, structurally, from the workforce, or very rich and busy providing entertaining friends-of-friends Facebook content via photos of their Floridian perma-vacations. And it's that latter group who are inspiring this batch of exuberant resentment.

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.

Stories of the weekend

-The buried lede here is that looks matter in dating, for men and women alike. (As in, nearly all people, regardless of gender, eliminate most of the human population on the basis of looks alone, before even considering such things as personality, kindness, accomplishments, etc. - "looks matter" doesn't mean looks can typically cancel out deficiencies in other areas.) So it's kind of amusing to see comments along the lines of, 'duh, men are visual creatures.' This would be a relevant point to make if Tinder involved women's photos and men's CVs, but, as I understand it, it does not.

-Pretty much everything I could possibly say about the Hollaback! video controversy is on WWPD already in one way or another, but the most relevant post is probably this one. Other repeating-myself points include the fact that street harassment is - as some seem to get - about power. (Thus why a plain-looking 14-year-old girl may find herself bothered far more often than a reasonably attractive 20-year-old woman.) I also continue to think the feminist focus on catcalls is... a bit like the feminist focus on issues like how young and thin fashion models tend to be. These are absolutely real problems, but they're also photogenic ones. Along with the more productive awareness-raising they accomplish, they provoke something that might be called concern-ogling. Depending how the coverage plays out, it can end up reinforcing the idea that to be female is to be young, beautiful, and the recipient of a continuous, admiring male gaze.

-Spot-on.

What lurks beyond the bagel shop

Lawrenceville, which I previously knew as the boarding school next to the so-so bagel shop we'd go to before discovering the far superior one in the Montgomery shopping center, is apparently more than just a bagel-adjacent landmark. It's also the most expensive high school in the nation. And - I learned from Jezebel and Twitter - it's the site of the race-and-privilege scandal of the moment. The student body president - black, female, and gay - had to step down after taking to the Instagram to make fun of the douchier elements of the white, male, and straight student population. If I had a thesis-driven sort of argument to make about this, I'd pitch and fast. As it stands, too scattered for that. So:

-This part of NJ is maybe not the least racist place ever. Even I, someone female and paler than most, have seen firsthand how young black men are questioned by the police, how black men of all ages are avoided and hassled on the train. If this is what I'm seeing, I'd imagine there's more I'm not seeing. There's also preppy culture, which is hard to explain, but which goes beyond whatever's experienced at any particular private school or college in the area. It's so white that even white people notice the whiteness. Friends even whiter than I am (being, as regular readers know, pale but ethnic) have pointed this out.

-Private schools are weird. They can end up this odd mix of rich white kids (getting in through the usual rich-white-person channels) and poor non-white kids (getting in through some mix of intellect, hard work, and having adults around devoted to their education), in some kind of tremendous exaggeration of society at large. As in, "white" becomes associated with wealth, "black" with poverty, in a way that far exceeds the situation at a regular public school. (From Buzzfeed: "Lawrenceville students say racial and class divides — which frequently work in tandem because minority students often come to boarding schools through scholarship organizations [...]." So it went at my private elementary-and-middle school in New York.) The numbers may say "diversity," but the reality can be something more complicated.

-The specific black, female student at the center of the controversy, the student-body president who had to step down after mocking douche-bro classmates on Instagram, was not on scholarship. Commenter Pronetolaughter, if you're reading, this begins to get at how "privilege" as a term can fail where "racism" succeeds at conveying a problem. As the half of the internet that's already weighed in on this has noted, if you're at an elite high school that costs $53k a year, certainly if you're not there on scholarship, you have just a touch of unearned advantage. As in, you're richer and probably better-connected than most. But! That doesn't mean you're not also the victim of some other sort of oppression - in this case, racism. Confederate flags, insistence that she didn't really win the election, and other racist incidents cited in the Buzzfeed piece suggest that the young woman in question had good reason to be fed up.

-But oh, social media! It's bad judgment - if entirely age-appropriate bad judgment - to have an Instagram mocking your classmates, particularly if you want to lead your classmates. Back in the day, the mocking of entitled douche-bro classmates happened, sure, but in private. Buzzfeed reports that this wasn't even the student's first blip of this nature - she'd already been in trouble for pot photos (real, and forwarded by someone trying to sabotage her) and racist tweets (invented by someone trying to sabotage her). If someone's out to get you - perhaps because you're a black lesbian in a position of power in a traditionalist environment? - then you, whoever you are, certainly if you're high school aged, have probably left incriminating dribs and drabs all over the internet and even if you have not, they can be created.

-The Jezebels are arguing about reverse racism - is it a thing? The usual argument - that you can't be racist against a group with more power in society than you have - is mostly right, but not entirely. For example: anti-Semites believe Jews to be more powerful than they are. That's how that form of racism works. For another example: one group may have more power than another in society at large, but not in, say, a particular community. It doesn't seem impossible that the only white kid at a high school would have a tough time. But yes, in usual situations, it holds. And here, I suppose I'm not entirely sure why this is being cited as an example of anti-white anything. What this young woman was mocking was a subculture, not a race. Is the idea that a white person mocking a black subculture would come across as racist? Perhaps, but this is exactly where the power-imbalance thing enters into it. No one thinks all white people are douchey lacrosse players (with all due respect to non-douchey lacrosse players), whereas conflation of minority groups with equivalent subcultures is definitely a thing. (I guarantee that every American Jewish woman has, whether she knows it or not, been called a JAP, no matter how hippie-dippie her routine.) But more to the point, she was making fun of white people who fly Confederate flags, in the North at that. Regardless of where one stands on it being possible or not to be racist against white people, I don't think you can be racist for mocking certain white people's racism.

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.

Urban artists, suburban moms

-Saw the Léger exhibit in Philadelphia. OK, not before a great deal of hemming and hawing ($25 a person!), and a fair amount of panicked driving (the whole bit between exiting the highway and parking near the museum), but still. Glad to have seen it! I like how many/most of the works look (as you can see, I was trained as an art historian), but I also enjoyed the whole rah-rah-cities mood, of the exhibit, but also, it seems, of Léger himself. When I think of the interwar years, I usually think of fear of modernity, with all the sinister things that often implied in those days.

As usually happens when I go to this sort of exhibit, I end up far too drawn to the works of some artist other than the one the show is actually about. In this case, El Lissitzky.

(One day, I'll be able to go to Philadelphia without including a trip to Artisan Boulanger Patissier. Or not. Could a branch maybe open in Princeton? I'd settle for New York. Lucky, lucky Philadelphians.)

-I know I should read the book reviewed here, and I suspect I'll have a different take than the reviewer.

-Arne Duncan's now-notorious "white suburban moms" observation is the latest entry into what I had called "feminism's 'white lady' problem," although it extends beyond feminism. What happens is, remarks/reactions that would otherwise read as straightforwardly misogynist are somehow cleared of that charge once "white" is brought in as a modifier. Then all of a sudden, bashing women seems progressive. It's not women who are vapid and entitled, just white women. As if society's most privileged aren't white men, but their female counterparts.

Because there's a strong case to be made that anti-white "racism" isn't even a thing, given society's power structures, it's easy enough to see nothing wrong with "white lady"-talk. After all, it's not a marginalized group being demeaned, is it? When in fact the problem with "white lady" comments isn't 'anti-white racism', but rather the way that 'white' functions in this context as a cover for anti-woman bigotry. That whole thing where women aren't assertive enough? This ends up being assertiveness-shaming. Not good for white women, but also not good for women generally.

A Fisher in a barrel

The time has come to start revising Madame la Dissertation. (Not that that's how you say it in French. That's just what she's called.) I have two pitchers in the fridge: one of cold-brewed iced coffee, and one of matcha iced tea. Both homemade and delicious. And I'm digging around looking for diet Coke, because a task of this nature requires the hard stuff.

So let us turn away from my own undercaffeinated/underaspartamed state, and towards the wider world.

This Jezebel post calling out the white privilege of Abigail Fisher is making the rounds. (Not the first "open letter" to Fisher making that point, let it be known.) And... there are fish, you see, and sometimes they're collected in barrels. (Pickled herring? Why are they in a barrel?) If one wishes to shoot one of these fish, one does not need to be a particularly skilled marksperson. I mean, if you're going to make a federal case of something literally...

Normally, when there's an internet-wide pile-on against someone whose crime is being mediocre given whichever advantages, I have some sympathy, because man, that has to sting. There's often a sense - barring, even, any expression of entitlement, let alone federal-case-level entitlement - that those who have whichever advantages and don't excel are somehow terrible people who should be ashamed of themselves. When the reality might be that the face obstacles, all right, but they're things like not being that gifted academically, or not actually caring whether they get into an elite college. And the comments about Fisher's looks (not so much at Jezebel as on the entire rest of the internet), please. Would she have been more entitled to a slot at UT had she been more Olivia Wilde-esque? (Are her PR people keeping her less glam and be-eyeliner'd than she might be because it conveys an image of a serious scholar?)

But is Fisher really oblivious to her whiteness? (Also, is she instigating all of this, or merely consenting to have it instigated on her behalf? She was mighty young when all of this started.) This is one of these things where, whatever you think of the broader issue she represents, her story seems tailor-made to bring about this exact kind of outrage. If she'd been in the top 10% of her high school class, problem solved. It just seems like, if there's any white person around who's gotten an earful already about how whiteness puts her at an advantage, it's Fisher. And it's not a message she cares to receive. Of all people, she just doesn't strike me as someone who cares if her privilege is showing.

Fiction is better, Part V

A 21-year-old woman in the UK, Tamara Roper, recently arrived home from college, wrote a letter to her parents, explaining that she's a grown-up. Wrote it for the Guardian, though, and the newspaper opened this up for comments.

And... I'm glad that the summer I spent back home after graduating from college and before getting a job-and-apartment is not one I'd captured for all eternity. It's a stressful time for everybody. For parents, because they're used to their kid being out of the house, and what if their kid never gets a job? For the kid too, though, because they've gotten used to living as an adult, and then must face the harsh reality that without the means to pay rent and living expenses (the massively self-sufficient, who not only worked during school but fully supported themselves, may well not move back home), it was all kind of a fake adulthood, after all.

Everyone reverts to the old ways - the parents to the parents of an eight-year-old, and the 20-something "child" to the 13-year-old who resents being treated like an eight-year-old. Adult children in this situation - and if I felt this in 2-3 months, I'd imagine it only gets more pronounced - know they're a burden, and that they should be all serenity, gratitude, and helpfulness. But there's something about that situation that brings out the inner entitled adolescent.

And then comes the thud of a realization (at least if you live in NYC and move in certain circles) that many of the 'independent self-sufficient adults' to whom you're comparing yourself are just people whose parents are paying their rent. (Insert "Girls" reference here.) But then you're the brat for having moved back home after graduation, and not directly into an apartment of your own. Gah! Did I mention that all of this is about 2-3 months, several years ago?

Anyway, if you begin with the reactions to this other young woman's letter, you'd think the letter consisted of diva-like demands that the fridge be stocked with her favorites, the house cleared when she wishes to entertain. You'd think it was a letter to her parents requesting they raise her allowance so she can buy the Louboutins she's had her eye on.

Instead, it's an intended-as-humorous description of the experiences she's had as a student that have made her a different person (well, brought her to a different life stage) than she was when she last lived at home. She expresses her own intent not to be a petulant sulking brat, and asks that in exchange, they not preemptively treat her as one.

Between the lines, it's clear she's embarrassed about her situation. She doesn't spell out the financial details (or really much in the way of biographical details - this isn't quite overshare), only that she wishes she could contribute "more" (suggesting she is contributing some), and that she'll do her best not to run up utility bills. "I hate having to ask you for lifts," she writes, which might sound entitled, and might be just that, depending the level of chauffeuring we're talking. But it sounds like it's an area without much public transportation, and asking for lifts is plenty less entitled than asking for a car.

Does Roper come across as young? Yes. There's the old adage about how protesting that one is a grown-up is the quickest way to seem childish. And it does seem kind of adolescent to not want to tell your parents, or anyone you may be living with, the bare-bones details about your evening plans. And the bit about it being culture shock to return to "suburbia," sure, it does seem a bit like, what, should her parents have moved to a hipper area so she'd feel more at ease? It's not, in other words, that the letter can't be read as immature and entitled. It's just that the overall impression it gives is of a young adult with a certain (dark) sense of humor about what's bound do be an awkward situation.

But oh, the commenters. They have never seen such entitlement. Roper should be on her hands and knees thanking her parents for their hospitality. She should be grateful her parents remain married to each other. That they care about her enough to ask where she's going at night. Some people don't have loving, caring parents who even could welcome them back home. How about that!

And, I don't know. A line here and there about gratitude might have helped placate the commenters, but  it would have detracted from the precise experience the letter conveys. An adult who returns home after X years of real independence will get that this is their parents' - or parent's - place. But if you're a student who's just graduated, you only know this place as home, and you've never known anything else as such. If you're 14, it doesn't occur to you to be grateful for the roof over your head, except in some abstract way that one may be grateful not to be homeless. You feel entitled to being housed by your parents because you are entitled to this. I remember it taking a moment to sink in, at 21, that I was in someone else's home, and not my own. Which is, again, why I'm glad I never thought to write up my feelings in that moment for a mass audience.

Unpaid internships and downward mobility

So I have at long last read Ross Perlin's Intern Nation. What took me so long? Part of it was grad school's way of preventing me from keeping up with new non-fiction. Part was simply that Perlin, who I think says in the book he began researching the topic in 2008 (the book itself only came out last year), is not the one who alerted me to this issue. I was complaining about entry-level internships in 2006, for Gothamist which, I might add, allowed me to submit that post for exposure, but there was never any talk of compensation. I'm not sure it would have even occurred to me to ask (even though I knew the editor from school! what was I thinking?), which is its own sinkhole of a conversation.

But back to Perlin: I didn't have that uh-oh-what-if-someone-had-this-idea-before-I-did panic that can get me to a book or article ASAP. I didn't feel that I'd stepped on his turf, as it were. (Nor, of course, do I think he stepped on mine - ever since there have been unpaid internships, there have been people noting that this is perhaps not terribly fair. And slavery was abolished before any of us were born.) But I want to write more on this, and must get whatever education on it there is.

So Intern Nation is clearly the reference for this topic. Stats, yes, but also the full scope of the issue: the law (and with the lawsuits these days, that's important as background), the international scene, and the classification of burger-flipping jobs as "internships."

Its greatest strength - apart from collecting all that material in one place - is that it shouts from the rooftops that much - not all, but much - that's called an "internship" is a complete joke: "Bosses" in no position to offer you paid work or useful training, who aren't anything more than individuals wanting free personal assistance (Perlin of course references the "Kramerica" episode of "Seinfeld"), or who don't even know you're there (and alerting them to your presence would be too uppity and entitled) and thus can't give you a reference.

The pervasive belief that "internship" means something that leads to white-collar work leads young people and their parents to sacrifice in order to make this happen, yet to what end?

Which is what I still can't figure out after reading the book. Are unpaid interns on this separate and tough-to-exit track, amassing qualifications for ever-snazzier... unpaid internships, but self-defining as people not suited for compensated work? Do employers with actual jobs on offer - the ones who, as has been much-remarked-upon, demand three years' experience for entry-level - actually consider unpaid internships "experience"? Reports there are mixed.

It does start to look like a lot of unpaid internships exist in fields where you don't need them to get an entry-level job. And from Perlin's research, it kind of does look like connections can often get the fancier young people a never-ending series of internships but not a paying job. As in, just because there are unpaid hotel-housekeeping internships (thanks Moebius Stripper!) doesn't mean the field of hotel housekeeping has closed off to those who go straight to applying for jobs.

From what I've seen - including in Perlin's own book! - it seems entirely possible that unpaid internships are if anything an engine of downward social mobility, sending certain children of rich or middle-class families onto a dead-end track, yet not driving the entire economy to a halt, so clearly someone's working for pay.

The one counterargument I find (somewhat) persuasive is that they tilt certain fields (several of which were already that way, though) towards the rich. Regular journalism: not always thus. Government work: probably also not always thus. With both of these, a socioeconomic shift really is a big deal, and needs to be among the central arguments against unpaid internships. But fashion magazines? Art galleries? Publishing? Non-profits?

What could be happening - and commenter Fourtinefork may want to weigh in - is that the "trust-fund job" is something to which those from middle-class homes now aspire to - and the traditional "pin-money" jobs are now ones women (and some men) who fully expect to be self-supporting now take - but the Golden Age when one could support one's self on these incomes never was. There's a big difference between unpaid and underpaid in terms of self-worth, but maybe less so in terms of upward mobility.

Meet - or not - the parents

The child-free should not tell parents what to do. Fair enough, if we allow for exceptions.

The Guardian just published this incredible whopper of a(n incredibly common) parental complaint: a mom distraught that her daughter is not as brainy as she is. Naturally, she blames the girl's father, and clings to the idea that this is not academic mediocrity but a disorder of some kind. Same old, same old, with one detail: the author? "Anonymous." As it should be. The daughter, should she grow up and learn to read, will Google herself, perhaps her mother as well if her mother's a writer. Better for this not to come up.

Meanwhile, the bad-parenting debate reaches a new level with this discussion about whether we may fault the Boston bombers' parents for their descent into terrorism. Will Saletan correctly notes that these parents are mighty unappealing. The shoplifting's a curious detail, but the father's ability, in so few words, to insult the United States on account of this country's not condoning domestic violence, well, it would have been Borat-esque if it weren't just so depressing. When criminals like this are siblings, one does wonder if they were brought up right, and in a case like this, the more we learn, the more the answer seems a definitive not-so-much.

On the other hand, isn't this asking a bit much? Both "boys" were adults. 26-year-olds are definitely grown-ups, probably even in the Lena Dunham universe, and all the more so if they're married-with-kids. Are we to be equally suspicious of dude's wife? And parents are notoriously blind to their kids' not-so-ideal behavior (except when, like Anonymous, they're not). Go to any thread about health and The Youth, and you're likely to find parents insisting that their kids would never go near alcohol/tobacco/sex/whatever. Children, including adult children, are angels. If parents have trouble imagining their kids being normal, how exactly are they supposed to wrap their heads around a crime like this? And it seems altogether irrelevant that some broigus uncle (and oh, does this scenario ever define broigosity!) thinks the kids are/were bad seeds. Not that the uncle's wrong - he's of course 100% right - but if there's pre-existing estrangement, he's not really comparable to non-estranged (but plenty strange) parents. So it doesn't work to say that some relatives caught on, while the parents themselves did not.

I don't

-"I Don't Feel Entitled, I Feel Guilty" is an interesting (bleak!) essay, but everything you need to know is right there in the title. If you can't point to any broad, structural reason why you're not making a zillion dollars a year doing something fabulous (and note that the author is employed, and not trying to make it as a hipster), it's on you. Whereas if there are structural reasons, it might just be you, but it might be something else. The timeless disadvantage to advantage.

-"I DON'T want to buy a food magazine with a model on the cover."

Thus an "Into The Gloss" commenter sums up the problem - well, one - with a new (and much-hyped) magazine "about women and food," called "Cherry Bombe." The concept appears to be, well, glossiness. Models pretending to eat. Fashion insiders (Garance Doré among them) and what they (ostensibly) eat. A "Spring's Best Cookbooks" section recommending Gwynnie's now-notorious tome in which she apparently reveals that she's allergic to foods that make you fat. Farm-to-table meets luminizer makeup accurately applied. 

And it all seems like a lot of good, decadent fun, until you get to the part where the magazine's founders are asking for donations. Not just subscriptions. Not investments. Donations, as if this were some kind of charitable or at least for-profit but scrappy enterprise. The word they themselves use on the Kickstarter page is "indie." The cover model - yes, cover model - is a woman you might know as a Victoria's Secret "Angel," which might beg the question, alternative to what? But, if it were in front of me, I'd read it.

-Speaking of reading material, commenter Moebius Stripper reminded me of a book denouncing locavorism, one whose co-author I'd heard interviewed by a skeptical Leonard Lopate. The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet, by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu. And, I read it, but I confess to some skimming when it got very technical. The writing style, or maybe the subject matter, keeps reminding me of reading-comprehension exercises on standardized tests. I feel as though I'm going to need to fill out a scantron sheet about emissions and rice yields. But because I'm not entirely sure any book on this topic wouldn't make me feel that way, I'm prepared to declare the problem mine, not the authors'. (Those with what must be a stronger caffeine source than I have have provided a helpful point-by-point counterargument, which is in turn countered by one of the co-authors in the comments there.)

In any case, it's an important argument that will lose a lot of readers when it meanders from contrarian to conservative. If the point were simply that local food isn't necessarily any better for the environment or whichever social-justice concerns, then, fair enough. But there's a lot of economic liberalism, some climate-change agnosticism. If the point is that libertarian climate-change skeptics shouldn't be locavores, well, presumably they aren't to begin with.

The book was strongest when it made the point that projecting the aesthetic preferences of certain wealthy urbanites onto the global food system may not pan out. This might seem intuitive. Even in the prosperous West, even if one is prepared to overspend on groceries, even if one lives somewhere sufficiently coastal-elite, "local" ends up being, in effect, a garnish, not a lifestyle. I was at the local "farmers' market" recently - a room on the first floor of the public library. There were these small bunches of ramps - just the leaves, perhaps to conserve the bulbs - and they cost $3. That's not dinner. Same with foraging. From what I understand, it would be a time-intensive way to add some interesting herbs to a dish 99.99% of whose bulk and calories come from normal, store-bought ingredients. So policies that suggest bringing local eating to all - or retaining it where it's the subsistence norm despite what people might want - do raise the quesiton of where that food would come from.

Let me put it this way: I have never actually met a locavore. People who shop at farmers' markets and sign up for CSAs, sure, lots. But people who exclusively eat food from nearby, even just in summer? Not once.

The book was weakest when it failed to address, in language accessible to non-experts, why subsidies aren't currently shifting things away from local. Also when it claimed that farmers'-market food is not any better-quality, or possibly worse, than the supermarket variety. Even going as far as to claim that local strawberries taste no better than ones hauled in from California. It of course depends which market - not all are as regulated as the NYC Greenmarkets. But the real-deal local food, in peak season, is that much better. But even if it were not, fetishization of vegetables is one way to get people to eat vegetables. Thinking of them as a delicacy rather than a chore has its positives.

Meanwhile, there are such strong criticisms of the locavore movement that never make an appearance. The authors object to Japan being referred to as "parasitic" for its reliance on agricultural imports, and praise multiethnic cuisine options, but never mention that there's something sinister and xenophobic about some back-to-the-farm ideology. I'm not saying they needed to go all Liberal Fascism - it's for the best that they did not - but some acknowledgment of the racist undercurrents of agri-romanticism would have been interesting.

Less controversial, less debatable: they might have spent some time discussing the fact that the big proponents of local eating tend to be high-profile food writers who not only eat out all the time, but get to jet around and eat "seasonally" in whichever climate they feel like writing about that week. They're not subsisting on turnips all winter long. Or that ever since "local" became a marketing device, there's greenwashing with "local" flavor. They get at this a bit, with farmers'-market fraudulence, but it goes so much further. A "farm-to-table" restaurant is effectively one that, season-permitting, garnishes normal food with something grown on a rooftop nearby. And the thing where restaurants list which farm some ingredient came from - assuming it's even accurate, what percentage of a dish comes from a farm? Point being, even if locavorism is the way to go, consumers might be content with things that give the appearance of being local, but aren't. Which... might actually be fine by these authors, and thus might be a critique for another book.

The millionth thing you've read about Lena Dunham and privilege

The new "Sex and the City," in case you missed that.

Lena Dunham explains it all. Not as in explains it all to us - that too - but her mere existence now represents an entire conversation about class, young-people-today, body-image, etc., etc. There's Dunham, looking at us as we read on Jezebel about how we can read in The Nation about the difference between broke and poor. I promise I have thoughts on this as well (and the short version is, it's gotten very popular these days to define as "broke" a great many people who are poor), but for the mean time, Lena Dunham. Or a Dunham alter ego? It hardly matters - her immediately recognizable face announces Privilege, summons fury, yes, but a very particular kind of fury, namely YPIS. Someone on Twitter called "the Frenemy" put it best: "Lena Dunham only won because her dad is a Golden Globe."

So what is she, then? A decadent anti-hero? A George Costanza for our times, who represents the worst in all of us, our worst fears? (That a wide-ranging commentariat has seen us naked and isn't impressed, and that we come across as entitled.) Given that the near-entirety of mainstream show business is white people with family connections, we might also ask why someone whose connections aren't even in show business, and who, while white, lacks the specific kind of whiteness-privileged possessed by Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Kate Hudson, and whichever other famous-daughters-of-famous-people, namely fitting the most conventional beauty standards possible... why such an individual inspires such YPIS. Is the problem that Dunham presents herself as ordinary? Is it somehow offensive to audiences that she doesn't acknowledge her native-New-Yorker privilege by getting her hair done at Bergdorf's? Why is she, of all performer-creators, the one asked and asked again to step aside on behalf of someone more deserving?

I might take this even further, and consider how critiques of systematic unfairness often end up punishing relatively powerful intermediaries rather than those in the positions of greatest power. This happens with NYC schools - however valid both questions may be to investigate, it's much easier to ask why elite public schools are predominantly (lower-?) middle-class and Asian than to ask why private schools serve wealthy white families. Similarly, someone like Dunham, whose status is more precarious, who frankly wasn't born into stardom, just posher circumstances than most, is easier to pick on than someone like Kate Hudson. (Paltrow, with her lifestyle-empress aspirations, is another matter.) And yes, I do get the sense that people consider it unfair that a young woman got so successful so fast for reasons other than her physical desirability. (Not that she's undesirable, just that her talent/self-promotional ability seems more the issue.) There's this sense that there's a natural order of things - of course rich white kids go to the actual fanciest schools, and of course the pretty daughters of movie stars are box-office sensations. These things we just accept. But when someone shakes things up from the middle, or upper-middle, there we can unleash whichever populist outrage.

The above are most decidedly not my fully-formed thoughts on this. But if my musings inspire musings of your own, comment away.

Coffee politics

Remember the young woman so privileged she was applying for food stamps? The detail readers honed in on was the $1.50 coffee-shop coffee the author mentions drinking at the top of the piece. Search the page for "coffee" and you see the rage in the comments. There's a whole genre of condescending financial advice geared at The Youth, telling them that coffee out adds up. Why is it always coffee? Let's unpack that one author's cup of coffee's significance, and that of coffee and class more generally, setting aside the question of where coffee itself comes from and that whole set of labor concerns:

-Telling a broke middle-class person to give up lattes is, as we established in this thread, very much like telling a legitimately-poor one to exchange fast-food for lentils. It's ignoring that this purchase is a pleasure as well as a convenience. And you just get the sense that part of the tsk-tsking does come from the fact that advice-givers are uncomfortable with whichever caste enjoying themselves, or having the audacity to believe their time has value.

-Britta brought this up in the earlier thread, but it also bears repeating: Debt changes everything. As does parental assistance. And the economy is such that you can perfectly well be college-educated, employed in an office-job, and not earning enough to live on in your locale. If you're starting from negative $, it's less obvious what 'living within your means' means than if you're budgeting a salary. Does it mean not a cent other than what's needed to maintain your nutritional requirements and look reasonable at a job interview?

-No one needs coffee. Yet coffee isn't bad for you, either. That might make us think it would seem less decadent than the obvious comparisons (alcohol, tobacco, non-diet soda), but if anything, that coffee's only sinful in its gratuitousness makes it the most appealing target for anti-decadence crusaders. There's this kind of noble, respectable quality to actual self-destruction, like you're a devil-may-care libertarian relic of the hard-living days. (Maybe less so with jumbo soda, but even there there's the nanny-state concern.) That whichever self-destructive products cost money is secondary. But there's nothing hardcore and stick-it-to-the-man about foamy espresso drinks.

-Someone who thinks $1.50 coffee is cheap probably comes from a wealthy family, or at least not a truly destitute one. A coffee at a coffee shop will, in my experience, nowadays cost $2 in posher areas, far more in a restaurant, but maybe still less from a cart/deli, and definitely much less at home. A couple relevant facts about YPIS: 1) a speaker who identifies as privileged, who acknowledges privilege, basically invites accusations of privilege, and 2) one easy route to a quick YPIS is to hear someone refer to X as 'not that expensive,' and to be like, dude, if you think X isn't absolutely the most expensive thing ever, your privilege is showing.

-The classic job of the otherwise-unemployable humanities BA is barista. We associate coffee shops with underachieving middle-class white kids, friends' children who by all accounts should have real office-jobs by now. This (see footnote here) helps explain why baristas make at least minimum wage and still get these odd sympathy/solidarity tips. But it also tells us part of why coffee, that fueler of productivity, is seen as a slacker beverage. If you're on the coffee shop and not headed to the office, that changes everything.

-The fetishization of coffee exemplifies the food thing. Something ordinary is now artisanal, and vastly more expensive. And the food thing is what's wrong with young people today.

-Someone who can hardly afford $1.50 for coffee - brace yourselves for this - is actually not doing so great financially. I would go so far as to say that if you are a college-educated, coffee-drinking adult and weighing the pros and cons of this purchase for reasons other than whatever joy you get from thrift, this is indicative of a larger problem, one that coffee-or-not won't solve. While privilege is multifaceted, and includes race, able-bodiedness, level of education, and intangibles like which class you come across as, it would seem, if we take our liberal-arts-grad hats off for a moment, that someone out of school who's scraping together a buck fifty for a coffee is not privileged. Maybe even really, really not privileged.

-What readers are reacting to, the ones who are horrified that an unemployed person would spend $1.50 in a coffee shop, is that the indulgence in question is so painfully middle-class. It's a future-oriented indulgence that won't impair your ability to mesh with a white-collar office environment. But there's also the schadenfreude, the element of watching the mighty tumble, or simply regression to the mean. As in, look at her, with her middle-class trappings, thinking she's so fancy all the while not being able to afford groceries. And it's also just so depressing, if you're unemployable, and your great pleasure is this thing intended to make office-workers more productive on too little sleep.

Still against "holistic"

To new readers, to readers not as tuned into the inner workings of my mind as I am: When I say I'm not a fan of "holistic" in college admissions, I don't mean that I oppose affirmative action, using race or class. That I'm fine with. No, what I mean is this notion that colleges accept or reject not an application, but a person. It's supposed to sound better not to be thought of as a number, a mere faceless sum of your test scores, GPA, and whichever other qualities. But if you're rejected as a person, that just has to sting more than if you're turned down as an applicant to a particular college.*

All of this is my longwinded prelude to the latest from Michael Winerip, a journalist who will have you know that some of his offspring were/are mediocre students, and who finds a way to work that in whenever at all possible. The piece opens with a bit about what a wonderful person its author is, a professional writer, helping the neighbors' kids with their college essays. And I suppose this is a credit to Winerip as a writer, because he almost has you convinced that he's doing something pro-social-justice. Don't write about your fancy vacations, he advises these kids. Write about the little things in life! What matters isn't what you have, but who you are!

Which sounds nice and all, until you infer that the people Winerip is offering a boost to are those who need it least. Expanding the audience for his advice from his wealthy neighbors to NYT readers is maybe a slight improvement, but still hardly the height of altruism. Do the children of NYT-reading parents need an edge?

But set aside the problematic nature of Winerip's own project. What do we make of the content of his advice? I suspect he does correctly describe the formula - what it is colleges want to see. And what they want to see is evidence of who you are as a person. In other words, what they want is confessional writing. They want memoir. The college essay, I suppose, is where dirty-laundry writing meets holistic. What, then, of the kid who isn't comfortable sharing, or sharing in this context? Maybe something tragic or merely embarrassing happened, and the kid doesn't want to tell this story to perfect strangers on an admissions committee? Or maybe there's a fine story there, but it's about the parents' divorce, and the parents (as they so often do) are reading essays? Why do we need to teach young kids (who already have too much of this message) that nothing is private?

I see why an essay of some sort is necessary in gauging whether someone is prepared for college-level work, and why the content of essays could be useful in finding some applications to toss (a guy writing in about how he loves torturing ants, say) and which to give a leg up (although an unverified sob story... still, a lot can be read between the lines.) But maybe the topic could be something like, 'why do you want to go to college?' or 'why this college?' and not a call to confess.

* Why do we have "holistic"? So many reasons. There's the sinister one - well-roundedness as the legacy of anti-Semitic discrimination. There's also the fact that nowadays everyone needs to first have this general degree before specializing (via grad school, internships, etc.), so you're applying to a school not as a pre-law but as a human being. And, of course, there's the desire on the part of those who run colleges to make the process seem fair and painstaking, to make every applicant feel as if he was given proper consideration. You still need to pay for each application, right? I guess it's thought that 17-year-olds' sense of justice will be shaken if they're judged via algorithm. As for whether anyone other than yours truly sees the downside to "holistic" I've just expressed, I have no idea.

Whaddya get?

Miss Self-Important has included me in the category of "everyone who's anyone," which is flattering. But she's also included me in the list of people across the political spectrum who oppose meritocracy, and... I don't oppose meritocracy.* I'm not sure which reforms would best get it functioning properly, but as an ideal, I prefer it to the alternatives.

Meritocracy fails when we care more about grades and test scores (which predict achievement) than accomplishments. But it also fails when we try and assess the "accomplishments" of high school juniors. It fails when all it does is replicates generations of elites, when children of doctors and lawyers do better than equally-talented-and-hard-working children of Kmart cashiers. When, in other words, it creates the illusion of far more social mobility than exists, thereby getting hopes up in vain.

But the newest criticism of meritocracy - or maybe not so new - is that meritocratic elites are simply the worst. Why the worst? Because they have all the same power as elites ever did, but they, unlike earlier elites, a) see themselves as ordinary folks and thus don't own up to their privilege, and b) believe that the system that got them where they are is entirely fair, entirely just, and therefore that they deserve their power. They, you know, merit it. (See also, from the New Yorker denunciation of billionaires who don't heart Obama, "America’s super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry.")

I don't find this critique all that convincing, because even if social mobility isn't 100% - and it's not - there's a huge difference between privilege passed down effortlessly and panicking, tutoring, etc. All this helicoptering is of course about preserving status across generations, but that ought to tell us that preservation is not a given. This gets us back into luck vs. privilege territory - one can be lucky in life, but if one was not born with privilege, one is arguably not privileged, just rich/lucky/etc. Also: it's not as if members of hereditary elites don't feel entitled to their status.

There's an older criticism of meritocracy, though: that meritocratic elites are illegitimate. Not in broken meritocracies, but in functioning ones. Those making this criticism tend to be - or to identify with, however implausibly - members of some older elite. It's a pro-aristocratic impulse, in other words, that finds all that UMC fuss about tutoring and prep courses to be crass and grasping.

The pro-aristocratic critique of meritocracy is plenty old, but has shifted in form: These days, it disguises itself as progressive. As in: if you want to complain about a system in which Asians - it used to be Jews - are "overrepresented," you can present this as being about underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos, even if your real concern is that Asians are taking the place at the top from white people,** that the culture at whichever institution you hold dear isn't what it was in some Golden Age. Or maybe it always posed as progressive - back in the day, this would have been about the honest worker vs. the nouveau-riche. Anyway.

So my preference for meritocracy was challenged recently, when the Stuyvesant cheating scandal*** reminded me of the near-ubiquity of cheating at the high school, and of the Scantron-covered dark side of meritocracy. It's a high school famous, above all else, for being a meritocracy, or as much of one as possible. (It's free to attend, admission is by test only so connections don't count, etc.) The existence of prep courses (which not everyone who gets in even uses, and which cost a tiny fraction of tuition at a private school) garners as much rage as it does precisely because the expectation is that the school is pure, Platonic-ideal meritocracy. Those who want the cheating scandal to be about entitled brats who feel above the law will be disappointed. Stuyvesant is meritocracy in its shabby, unvarnished state: there’s no pretense of a nurturing environment that reaches out to the student as a human being. Not much pretense of learning for learning’s sake, even if learning occurs despite this. And not, it seems, much integrity. If Stuyvesant=meritocracy, it's not looking good.

The level of cheating - 80%, they say? - is not new. I - class of 2001, so pre-smartphone - remember having the sense that I was among the few who didn't cheat, and that I was screwing myself over grade-wise by having the qualms I did. That I didn't cheat was in part about my own coming-from-privilege-ness - I didn't need to strive to enter the upper-middle class, just to stay put, which meant going to class and doing homework but not OMG-Harvard-or-the-gutter panic mode. I did a team sport because College, but never bothered to join the honor society, if I even qualified for it. I could afford, as it were, to find the kids hollering "whaddya get?" tacky. But I also thought - and continue to think- cheating is just plain wrong. Caring intensely about grades is understandable, but cheating crosses a line.

The article about the scandal vividly brought back those four years, and left me wondering if I'd maybe my professed fondness for my high school comes from having conveniently forgotten what it was actually like, day-to-day, to attend.

But what is the broader message to take from this? There’s a part of me that really appreciated the no-frills approach, and that found this kind of meritocracy refreshing, after being at a school where some kids' parents had donated millions, and where maybe this didn't not impact how patient teachers were with them if they were not as quick as all that. (The parents' own merit may have gotten them where they were, but once it's your kids, it's privilege.)

A lot of what's used instead of, or to disguise, meritocracy is either silly or hypocritical - see "holistic" college admissions, which are meant to sound gentle, but which nevertheless leave ever-more kids sobbing into their thin envelopes, knowing that not their applications but they, as people, didn't make the cut. Meanwhile, 'learning for learning's sake' sounds nice, but is often used snobbishly to mean learning with no regard for the social-mobility potential of education, i.e. as a way of favoring kids from privileged backgrounds, and of ignoring the very legitimate desire for a higher income on the part of kids who are, say, the first in their families to go to college. I had a teacher in high school who would only write letters of recommendation for kids who wanted to go to college "to learn, not to make money," I paraphrase or maybe even quote directly, it's been a while. On the one hand, I saw what she meant, but on the other, it seemed even at the time something unfair to ask of kids who were commuting in from one-bedrooms in Queens that they were sharing with their extended families. And what does this even mean, going to college to make money after? If your family is poor, it might well mean graduating and becoming... a NYC public school teacher.

And - and this is less about social class - there's a sense in which kids aren't the best judges of their own educations. Stuvyesant's no-frills approach maybe isn't one that is going to appeal to that many kids as they're actually experiencing it. A well-written but somewhat misguided 2010 op-ed in the Stuyvesant newspaper demands more "critical thinking," less regurgitation of facts. It's interesting that some students see their cheating as a form of noble resistance against rote memorization, and I’m sure there’s busy-work, but I do wonder what happens when these kids get to medical school, law school, or even - yup - French literature grad school, and are required to absorb and analyze huge amounts of material, because this is what makes for professional competence. (Evidently the most cheating occurs in foreign-language classes. Well, as a foreign-language instructor, I'm curious to know what this new pedagogical approach is that engages students critical-thinking skills, but doesn't ever require them to go after class, sit down, and memorize the conjugations of être.)

In other words, sugar-coating the educational experience, pretending it's all about intellectual enrichment and not competition or material gain, isn't ideal. But there's a point at which grade-obsession drowns out everything else - ethics, but also, you know, interesting conversation. Why, if attending this school might well decrease an individual's shot at getting into a good college, if the teachers aren't unusually good or the classes unusually small, does anyone even attend this high school? Isn't the point that you're supposed to get something out of being with a bunch of clever kids? Shouldn't the collaboration be over something more useful (and ethical!) than cheating on math homework?

But I don't think the cheating comes out of the meritocratic nature of the place. Nor do I even think the problem is the just-a-number approach to teaching. No, it's something much more basic, and much easier to fix: rather than giving out letter grades, every grade is out of 100 and to the hundredths place. The stress from this makes a good chunk of the school not merely grade-obsessed but insane. And, while grades/GPAs do tell you something about a student, the difference between two A students is negligible, merit-wise, a difference in how each one's social-studies teacher happened to grade. I'm no great fan of "holistic," but if the Ivies had to choose between two A students from Stuyvesant on the basis of something other than which one had who had a 95.23 (this, as I recall, meant Brown) vs. 97.45 (the euphemistic triumvirate), or even just went and picked one of the names out of a hat, that might not be the absolute end of the world.

*The post she links to, which I called "The referendum on meritocracy," wasn't me providing such a referendum, but rather a description of what I believed was the unifying theme of the two national political conventions. Both sides both embraced and rejected meritocracy, but in different ways. The RNC had "we built that," but the case for Romney was basically, here's a 1950s sitcom patrician you can trust, a born leader who never was or will be distracted by petty concerns like the fact that a dollar tip is now expected in coffee shops, and shoe repair - just the soles and heels! - has gone up to $65. Romney's privilege is - at least according to his wife's final remarks - his main selling point. At the DNC, meanwhile, we were repeatedly reminded that self-made is a myth... by the absolute most impressive self-made individuals that could possibly be assembled.

**The irony being that in this country, "aristocrats" are just the recent-ish offspring of meritocratic elites.

***Secondary takeaway from the article: sounds like Stuyvesant may have an opening for a French teacher. I'm not not interested.

The referendum on meritocracy

Watched some of last night’s DNC, fell asleep post-Michelle (who had just proven herself capable of being president as well as supermodel-in-chief, as well as someone who could totally have been Meryl Streep if she'd gone that direction, but remember, folks, she’s just a mom!), typing this in Word offline on the train... more biking, trains, teaching, more figuring out my students' newfangled online workbook, and have yet to read any DNC commentary, so if what follows was everyone’s assessment, either I’ll notice later or you’ll tell me in the comments.

******

David Brooks set up this idea, and Ross Douthat applied it to Romney specifically: meritocracy sounds just, but is unjust in its real-life application. More to the point, whether or not in the abstract, this new way of choosing leaders is fair, it hasn’t come through with results. The winners of this contest – whether up from bootstraps or merely the children of professionals inculcated with great work ethics – may be more morally entitled to their status than were the WASP elites that preceded them, but they’re not necessarily proving to be any better at leadership. The banks! Jobs! Whatta mess! 

Thus, as Douthat noted, why all the tunafish-nonsense detracted from the message. It’s clear that Romney’s life hasn’t been one of privilege in the Paris Hilton (or, more accurately, heir-or-heiress-who-never-had-the-get-up-and-go-to-seek-publicity) sense, of lounging about. But – as the Daily Show take on this showed so elegantly – Romney’s case for having “built” his own success is, given his family of origin, implausible.

Which brings us to last night. I first tuned in when a gay Jewish entrepreneur gave a speech in which he mentioned not only Americans of different religions, but also non-believers. Woohoo! Then at one point or another the pizza I was making for dinner split in two while still raw, in the oven. Waa! Then a woman appeared onstage who, as PG in her usual spot-on waynotes, won the scrappiness competition hands-down, being quite literally scrapsof her former self, having lost both legs (and an arm?) in battle. A woman of color, even. I mention the pizza, of course, for waambulence reasons. What have I, limbs intact, got to complain about? Yet, in the moment, complain I did.

The theme of non-complaining continued into Michelle Obama’s turn. Her speech… I was in awe. She managed to be on one level the sweet, unthreatening just-a-mom, the devoted wife, the stunning First Lady (great early-1960s makeup, I so approve), and on another, to offer up a really harsh counter-argument to Ann Romney. There was the tale of Michelle’s father – conveniently revealing how a worse case of the very condition Ann suffers from goes for someone without access to the best medical care or the option of not working outside the home. (Too sneaky, or brilliant? Discuss.) There was a reference to how they value “truth” – take that, Paul Ryan! Mitt and Ann used to eat pasta? Well, Barack and Michelle had student loans. Facts like these you can’t argue with. The Obamas came from so much less, and are that much more personally impressive. You can, however, argue about what to make of that. You can't really get around that this makes their case for scrappiness more honest than Ann Romney's DIY table. But is scrappy what the people want?

As an Obama supporter, I hope this works. I'm endlessly impressed by the Obamas, and more to the point, on almost all the issues, I prefer the Democratic agenda. (My Zionism is not a far-right one, my leftiness of the center variety, meaning I don't find the party too conservative, and I'm a big ol' social liberal, so a Democrat I shall be.) But I fear that there’s a part of the scrappiness message that could turn off some voters, namely those who either started off with more than they did, ended up with less, or both. Those who have it tough and do sometimes complain about it. Those who work, yes, but not that hard.

Even though the Republicans have this bootstraps message, there's a sense in which, if you believe in meritocracy, they're not the obvious choice. Republicans don't really care if someone's privilege is showing, because if they're self-made, they built it, and if they're not, well, their parents or grandparents did, and at least the government in no way contributed a drop.

On more sleep, and with less of my brain wrapped around the concept of online homework, I suspect I'd have more (or less but better) to add. In the mean time, you the commenters, have at it.

Media, elites UPDATED (and link fixed)

Via Ned Resnikoff, a fascinating, depressing, tale of journalism today. Alexandra Kimball hits all the key points, really, including why an aspiring writer might end up in a PhD program for financial reasons. Long story short: entry-level is no longer paid, making actual office jobs at publications the financial equivalent of what 'trying to make it as a writer' while staring at a wall in one's garret/mingling with one's fellow decadent aristocrats used to be. This is important to keep in mind, because it's easy to think of "writer" as a job like "actor," one that's always been a long shot. When, back in the day, that may have been true of poets, novelists, that sort of thing, but journalism was an actual career path, perhaps even a way to pay the bills while trying to make it as a writer. It could be - and this is my own guess - that now that journalism's taken a confessional turn, and most-read might be something about parenting a child with body-image issues, not reporting on Afghanistan or Medicare, "journalism" gets lumped in with other forms of writing for which one needs no particular qualification other than the ability to write well and to know the right people. More thoughts on this later, maybe, but back to the article...

Kimball, who grew up working-class and graduated with debt, decided to really pursue a career as a writer already well into adulthood, upon getting an inheritance. She uses this to conclude that privilege is what allows a young person to pursue a career in journalism, which is understandable but ultimately misleading. An unanticipated, no-strings-attached inheritance is quite different from dependence on one's parents as an older adolescent and adult child - what "privilege" usually refers to in this context. A kid who wasn't handed everything (but wasn't massively underprivileged, either) might well be more likely to succeed, in journalism or anywhere else, than someone who feels entitled to income from some other source than his or her own work. There are individual cases where a lack of debt and a bit of post-college parental support provide the launching pad for a creative career, but too much of that sort of thing can be a real motivation-killer. It's not that the rich don't get richer - they do - but that they do so when they teach their kids how to do as they did but more so. Go-forth-and-find-yourself approaches may be what bring us the rare (or not?) examples of regression to the mean.

Kimball repeats the conventional wisdom about journalism these days: that unpaid internships make the field inaccessible to all but the wealthy, and that this is just one more example of privilege doing its thing. But I'm still not sure what unpaid internships provide those "privileged" enough to take them. Most obviously, do they lead to paid work? Work that pays enough to live on (and $15k in New York at age 40 doesn't count)? Unless whichever outside source of income that allows you to work unpaid for six months (i.e. family money) will also provide for you for the rest of your life, this is something to consider. Kimball sensibly enough does not provide us with a spreadsheet of her finances, but it's tough to see how, with a modest inheritance, she'd now be free from the constraints of a field where salaries take a good long while to hit $30k.

As for "media elitism," which is where Kimball leaves us, as Palin-ish as it rings, there is something to be said for that interpretation. If the only people with influence (and here, we're talking political, not fashion, journalism) are those who can afford to work for nothing, that's absolutely going to impact the stories that get reported. And this matters even if most unpaid interns get nowhere paid-work-wise in the field. They're still writing articles and so forth, still contributing, still tilting things in a certain direction.

UPDATE

There exists, in this world, a listing for an unpaid internship that would be ideal for an "aspiring personal assistant." Dream big, kids.

A question for David Brooks:

Isn't a meritocratic elite different from a hereditary elite, in that the leaders of today can't be assured that they'll be the leaders of tomorrow, let alone that their grandchildren will be? Having "a stewardship mentality," knowing you're "privileged," these things don't work in a society where elite status is precarious. Noblesse oblige rests on the confidence that one is, in fact, noblesse. A society with (some) social mobility is one in which there will always be anxiety among those at the top, who know they're in no way entitled to that position.

Teacup violins

I think the NYT heard me claim that I wasn't going to read any more of its lifestyle articles beginning Jan. 1, and decided to do whatever the newspaper equivalent is of when tobacco companies increase the dose of nicotine to keep addicts from abandoning ship. They are providing these bloggable delights that I mustmustmust read and respond to. Resolutions, alas. I have until the 31st.

First, there is the couple that decided to turn its wedding into a celebration of every trendy do-gooder variant of smug. My mind, it explodes. They hate stuff! They sell t-shirts! Sample quote: "During the reception, Mr. Friedlander asked his guests to please recycle their cups, 'because we’re really in a serious situation with climate change.'" Those writing novels set in present-day yuppie NY milieus are now kicking themselves because they did not come up with this line. It's also a "Styles Style" first, in that the journalist actually lets on what she thinks of the people she's covering.

Next, the paper actually asked readers to provide their thoughts on issues at the intersection of dog breeds and Manhattan real estate. Maybe readers would have opinions on this? Maybe! Opinions such as:

-It's imprisonment to have a dog in any apartment of any size, any breed.
-Dogs experience "horror and humiliation" if forced to defecate on cement.
-It's dog abuse to have dogs without 300 acres for them to roam on.
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because rescue! (Never mind that there are breed-specific rescues.)
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because there are so many wonderful pit bulls in NY shelters.
-Dog breeds are like races, and to make distinctions among them is racist.
-If you have a preference re: dog breed, you should instead get a cat.

My own take is that, while I still don't understand the logistics of initially housebreaking a dog in a high-rise (everything we read explained that you need to scoop your puppy up and outside quickly in that initially stage, which we did, and now she's housebroken), I'm not sure how living outside the city would be better for a dog. Yes, it's a problem to leave a dog alone all day in an apartment, but are dogs left alone all day in a house or yard so much happier? The yard solves the "bathroom" question, but doesn't mean there are other dogs to play with, or that there's anything much to do, or that the owner's around.

If anything, suburban owners probably feel that because their dogs get enough "outside" time, they don't need specific exercise or socialization. Dogs in the city can go to dog runs, meet lots of dogs and people, have quick and easy access to emergency (and routine) vets, dog sitters/walkers/day care/grooming, etc. And yes, I'm aware that actually owning/leasing/something a car would make the suburbs more manageable, and if all goes according to plan, soon, but the convenience of city life seems like a good thing for dogs as well as for people. I know that the muck through which I walk Bisou is meant to be "good for dogs," but I kind of think she'd prefer things in the city, with better access to croissants and Uniqlo. Or am I projecting?

Finally, there's the requisite cue-the-tiny-violins discussion of privilege. What, in this "Occupy" age, should rich parents tell their kids? This from, of course, the parenting blog. And just as every post with the word "dog" in it leads to scolding about rescues, here it's a predictable enough response about how rich people should really be giving to charity, as if there's some reason to believe that the rich people in question are not already doing so.

The official WWPD assessment: It would seem the answer depends on the age of the kid, etc., but that what would need to be explained is that "rich" means two separate things. One is intangible, cultural, educational, etc. privilege, which is there for rich kids virtually whichever choices their parents make, simply by virtue of raising kids in wealthy surroundings. The other is the question of whether the child is wealthy, as in whether the child has much of the freedom that comes from having money to spend. For adults, one big perk of having lots of money is, it can be spent on this, that, the other. A child from a super-rich home, with a minimal allowance or (in less quaint terms) no credit card might have all the cultural privilege, but doesn't have the independence that comes from actually, personally, having access to money.

Of course how much money a family has available matters, but among the population not experiencing genuine need, it doesn't matter as much as one might think. There are plenty of kids with the "wrong" jeans because their well-off parents don't want to be buying $100 jeans for their kids (b/c of the values that promotes, b/c it seems like a waste, etc.), and plenty of kids in the "right" ones as a result of their parents' sacrifices with that particular goal in mind. (Growing up, the kid in my class who had the toughest time of it, clothing-wise, was from a very wealthy family, and her parents no doubt spent gobs on her clothes, but made her wear those little-girl smocked dresses when everyone else was wearing flannel in emulation of Kurt Cobain. What "privilege" that must have been for her.)

And, unless a family is so rich, and is 100% confident about passing along that wealth to the kids, it would seem that there's a danger in passing along an idea of noblesse oblige, "we" are so very very lucky, let's give thanks, blah blah, when the kid could perfectly well grow up and not have these advantages, and needing to do such radical things as clean his own bathroom and check what things cost at the supermarket. Nothing will change the fact that a kid grew up rich, but any number of things can happen later in life. I mean, when a kid from a wealthy home gets a typical teenager job, this is in part to "build character" and to make him less of an ass to food-service workers in the future, but it's also giving him life skills should he need to be at the mercy of bosses in not-glamorous situations in the future. Social mobility isn't the well-oiled machine it ought to be, but it's not entirely non-existent, and cuts both ways.

So I suppose I don't think it's being refreshingly honest to tell a child how rich "he" is, when the relevant fact is how rich his parents are. Which is still a very relevant fact in terms of his life experience, but which isn't the same as his being rich.

"Bad news"

I went to what's probably the nation's best-known math-and-science high school, went to college "where fun comes to die," and am now living in a tiny, closed-off community primarily for mathematicians and scientists. I have been to numerous "apartment parties" where I was one of very few guests or the only guest. I have pained many an interlocutor by forcing them into ten seconds of small talk. So of course when Arts and Letters Daily linked, I read this Nature article about science-types and the autism spectrum (pull quote, from a scientist: "'I do think that when these geeks marry each other, that's bad news for the offspring.'") with interest.

Most of the time, when one thinks about the high-achieving couple's offspring, one thinks about regression to the mean. Or in layman's terms, the possibility that two former supernerds will produce a popular, well-adjusted B or C student. Amy Chua did her part to make it socially acceptable for parents to treat this outcome as one to be avoided at all costs, perhaps by trying to create a striving-immigrant atmosphere right there in your own UMC native-born household; the more typical writing on the subject is a thinly-veiled lament, a parent saying how wonderful it is to have a kid who's so athletic and outgoing, but who, alas, will never go Ivy.

But one does also think about another possibility, one that also may result in no-Ivy-for-junior, but that's a great deal more upsetting, namely that the kid will inherit an extra dose of awkward, minus whichever talents might lead to success as a computer-programmer or whatever. I'll confess that it does not take Borat's cousin to tell me that this possibility exists (see above), but it stands to reason that this of all issues is one that someone would be looking into quantitatively.

I have precisely one million thoughts on this (watch as I reveal my humanities-person-ness in my use of numbers), but the one I'll put in this post is that I wonder how much of the propagation of spectruminess (or whichever medically-recognized subset thereof) goes not through two-math-person couples, but through mothers who seem neurotypical and have no diagnosis otherwise but are... grown-up Darias, basically, who over the course of their lives have learned not to seem all that out-there. I have a zillion tons of anecdata, but nothing, alas, quantitative.