Antler America vs. Drag Queen America

Last weekend I was walking around Michigan Ave. and I noticed a number of adult women wearing antlers. Red fabric antlers, it looked like. And some other women, also fully grown, had snowflakes painted on their faces. I must say I was stunned. What did this mean? Why antlers? Are they dressing as reindeer? Is this normal? In NYC, where eccentrics are tolerated and even celebrated, these antlers just wouldn't fly. So today I asked my friend Aaron, who's from suburban Indiana, whether he'd ever heard of such a thing. Apparently he has. While not everyone outside of NYC wears antlers to denote the arrival of the Christmas season, it's evidently not unheard-of.

I realized that the intolerant scoffing I did upon seeing these antler-sporting women was precisely the reaction Blue America expects from Red Americans who come across those who challenge societal gender norms in a very obvious, outlandish way. In other words, antler-wearers are Red America's drag queens. I feel that I've come to a greater understanding of what pundits term "red" and "blue," "urban" and "exurban"--somehow "antler America" and "drag queen America" provides a much more vivid picture of what's being discussed, and shows more clearly just how difficult it is for Americans to understand those from different parts of the country.

"The long and winding road"

That seems to be the trouble with the paper I'm writing, my last assignment of the quarter--it's going well, but it is, at this very moment, longer than it should be and, yes, maybe a little winding. I'm completely fascinated by the topic, and keep coming up with different angles I need to cover, books I need to read and thus cite, and, as should be obvious by the volume of writing that can be found below, I have something of a tendency to write a lot. So expect blogging not so much to be light (I will, after all, be at a computer for much of the next few days) but expect it to be incoherent and possibly Dreyfus Affair-themed, and maybe, just maybe, in franglais. To give a sense of the, ahem, length issues,* I am trying to keep the paper at a page count closer to the French legal drinking age than the American one.

*I attribute the fact that typing "length issues" cracks me up to my current state of sleepiness, and not to my general maturity level.

What Would Number 18 Do?

I'm with Reihan on this: The super-nurturing, "character-based" high school sounds like a hellish thing, indeed. Reihan describes a scene at such a place, then notes, in reference to a kid basically let off the hook for not doing his homework, "My 11th grade self would have been forced, rest assured, to bust a cap, or, at the very least, bust a move."

Having attended 11th grade at the same understanding, caring high school as Mr. Salam, I'd say he is correct in stating that he'd have been forced to bust...something...had he not done his work. My own most vivid memory of 11th grade was being called "Number 18" for the entire first semester, by a physics teacher who decided it was simpler to call all 34 students by number than to do anything quite so nurturing as make an attempt at learning our names. (One unfortunate girl got to be called "Number 2," and my date to Junior Prom was a nice young man named "Number 11.")

The number system utilized by Mr. Robinson, absurd as it seemed at the time, was great in that, while other teachers spent hours taking attendance, struggling to pronounce names coming from just about every country in the world, then sighing with relief when reaching a "Joe Smith," Robinson could remain blissfully unaware of which of his students were native-born Americans and which weren't (let alone which were girls and which were boys) when grading assignments. Sort of a more innocuous way to reach the goal of French schools' religious-symbol ban.

High school students should be treated like nothing but a number--how else can meritocracy work if the young are not forced to prove themselves? At the private school I attended until high school, an attempt was made at making sure that, if a student cried "I don't get it!" or if her family decided to take their vacation during the schoolyear, everything would be OK, not to worry. No one was a number; each girl was a set of circumstances and difficulties that had to be taken into account when teachers holistically assessed her abilities. I preferred being Number 18.

In defence of city kids

Rarely does an op-ed truly offend me. But David Brooks, in "The New Red-Diaper Babies," boy, has he done it. He tells of the new exurban family, with plenty of money, plenty of kids, and none of the crassness or debauchery NYC kids are exposed to. He implies throughout the piece that parents who choose to raise a large number of kids in the exurbs somehow care more about their children, that the lack of anything else going on means that their focus is primarily on their children, unlike those horrible city parents who are more interested in doing lavish things like seeing movies at the Film Forum than in "try[ing] to shepherd their kids through supermarket checkouts lined with screaming Cosmo or Maxim cover lines."

They [exurban parents] are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling.

OK, yes, I'm offended by Brooks' premise, which is that the more kids a person has, and the fewer non-parenting activities the person has going on, the more he or she cares about being a parent. I am an only child, and growing up was exposed to sophisticated movies (including one I remember seeing when I was little, at an Israeli film festival, in which an actor playing Ben Yehuda coughed up blood, turning his white wine red. Left quite an impression.), some restaurant dining, and, yes, some foreign travel. Does the fact that my parents chose to spend money on these things and did not have four more children mean that they were uninterested in being parents? Some parents value exposing their children to obscure films, restaurants, and, when possible, other countries--their interest in these things does not have to come at the expense of their children.

The people who are having big families are explicitly rejecting materialistic incentives and hyperindividualism. It costs a middle-class family upward of $200,000 to raise a child. These people are saying money and ambition will not be their gods.

Um, how? Why are the couples raising one- or two-child families in places like Manhattan necessarily money-hungry and wildly ambitious? Can't it be that parents who themselves value the cultural resources and diversity of the city want to raise their children in an enviroment they consider optimal? My parents both grew up taking public transportation and going to large public high schools in the city, and, having done the same myself, it gives us a connection through shared experience that we would not have had my parents picked up and moved to one of Brooks' beloved exurbs.

I take Brooks' point, though, that few people can afford to raise 5-child families in Manhattan. But Brooks seems to be discussing those who could presumably afford to raise one or two kids in the city but prefer to raise larger families elsewhere, noting that "when people get money, one of the first things they do is use it to try to protect their children from bad influences." Yet, for some parents, life in an exurb would constitute a "bad influence," and those parents spend their money accordingly. Furthermore, living in the city is expensive, but it is also cheap. I never once thought to ask my parents for a car--they don't have one, either. This "restaurant dining" Brooks scoffs at include trips to Chinatown for meals that cost less than one would spend at an exurban Denny's. People choose how they spend their money depending on what they value, and those who value living in a place like Manhattan will almost always have to make certain sacrifices.

Like most Americans, they wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles while still preserving the family institutions that are under threat. What they cherish, like most Americans, is the self-sacrificial love shown by parents. People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.

Sorry, but all I can say is, gag me. This "like most Americans" phrase, repeated again and again, suggests that there's an evil minority of Americans, living in liberal urban centers, who don't give a damn about self-sacrificial love for their children. Brooks' exurbians may "wonder how we can be tolerant of diverse lifestyles," but city kids take the subway, don't ponder it, but ride it, don't theorize about gay marriage, but have classmates with openly gay parents, and learn not to tolerate diverse lifestyles but to love living in a city where choosing your own path is encouraged.

In celebrating the couples who choose to steer clear of the scary city and all of its crude ambition, Brooks is showing the scary, anti-cosmopolitan side of conservatism, surprising, coming from the liberals' favorite conservative. It's fair to say that not everyone can or wishes to live in upscale, liberal urban enclaves, but to imply that those who choose to raise their children in such an enviroment are somehow more selfish and worse parents is unnecessary, untrue, and mean-spirited.

"I make, like, enviroments with food"--Agathe Snow, a "very political" artist

Enough arguing with social conservatives of the Jonathan Last variety. Time to take down absurdities on the other end of the political spectrum:

New York magazine has a relatively new segment, "The Look Book," in which they profile an interesting-looking person spotted somewhere on the street in the city. (Time Out also has such a feature.) This week, the magazine profiles Agathe Snow, an artist:

What kind of artist are you?

I make, like, environments with food. I make food, I deliver it. I move from people’s houses to galleries and museums with food.

But you’re not a chef or a caterer?

It’s like this: I live on the Lower East Side, and I just came back from Amsterdam, where I did this thing at De Appel Museum—an ode to Kurt Cobain. It was a collaboration with some Japanese artists. They were doing music and projections, so I made food. Oh, I was also wearing a wedding dress. I had white lilies and candles everywhere, so it was an environment. It’s called “Feed the Troops.”

How did you come up with that name?
I have a lot of really amazing people around me, an army of the creative and beautiful, the super-talented and strong. I also design clothes...

What kind of clothes do you design?

It’s very casual stuff, men and women. We dye and treat T-shirts, and I make all the artwork. There are ponchos and capes. There are dresses.
How would you describe your overall aesthetic? I’m like a modern-day gypsy. It’s just a moving and all-inclusive thing. And it’s very political.

Political how?

Well, right now, I’m kind of freaked out about the whole Bush story. I realized while I was in Amsterdam that he had been elected, so I did a lot of political stuff. I made Saddam Hussein and Osama shirts that are punk-inspired. It’s all a collage, basically. I think his reelection will just create an underground movement that will be more fun, and I will get inspired...

She's "freaked out about the whole Bush story" so she's making Saddam Hussein and Osama shirts that are "punk-inspired." Um, OK. This is, to be fair, a woman whose job is to "make, like, environments with food"--a job with an implied trust fund or other external source of income, no doubt, but also one that doesn't suggest any particular political awareness. If Bush's reelection means an underground movement of Osama-punk-shirt creators and food-enviroment constructors is about to emerge, then yes, I definitely wish Kerry had won.

While on the subject of the sexualization of young girls...

The New Yorker, always interested in discovering new talent, has an incredibly unfunny piece by Woody Allen.* It's a transcript of "the Disney trial," and it goes something like this:

Counsel: Will the witness please state his name.
Witness: Mickey Mouse.
C: Please tell the court your occupation.
W: Animated rodent.
C: Were you friendly with Michael Eisner?
W: I wouldn’t say friendly—we had dinner together a number of times. Once he and his wife had Minnie and me to their house.
C: Did you ever discuss business with him?
W: I was present at a breakfast between Mr. Eisner, Roy Disney, Pluto, and Goofy.

And so on.

As I said, not remotely funny. The joke--treating the familiar Disney characters as in-the-flesh celebrities--gets old before it even gets started. I like Sleeper and Bananas, even parts of Annie Hall, and don't wish to begrudge Allen his place among the select few who can probably send their toilet paper to the New Yorker and get it published. But that doesn't make his latest attempt at humor any better.

*Not to hard to guess where Allen would weigh in on the debate over the sexualization of young girls...He actually cast Portman in Everyone Says I Love You, but, if I remember correctly, had the decency not to cast her as the Allen-character's love interest.

Male beauty, underappreciated in the politico-blogosphere

My response to Ross Douthat's response to my response to his link (confused yet?) is up at The American Scene.

(It disturbs me that my post on the gorgeous Peter Sarsgaard got so much less response than one on Natalie Portman. I fear that the politico-blogosphere may appreciate female more than male beauty, and intend to do my part to even things out.)

Failures of socialized medicine?

A question sent to "The Ethicist":

When I inquired at a clinic about a test for herpes simplex 2, the doctor asked why I'd want to know, since even condoms would not provide 100 percent protection against transmitting it. ''What are you going to do with the knowledge?'' he asked rhetorically. He said he was newly divorced and back on the dating scene and would not want to know whether he had the disease. What do you think?

T.G.W., Vancouver

Vancouver, eh? I wonder what Canadian sexpert Sue Johanson would make of this.

Thai noodles, a worthy goal

[Disclaimer: I am more than a bit jealous of the actress, who is not only lusted after by men worldwide, but whose Judaica collection and astrophysics ability far exceed my own. I saw her once on the street in NYC, and she is very, very tiny, somewhere between my size (moderately tiny) and the size of a miniature dachshund, and, yes, very pretty and well-dressed, but not unusually so for the neighborhood. Once over Thanksgiving break, I was sitting with my mother in the living room, and I said "I wish I were Natalie Portman." My (slender, lest something else be implied) mother responded, gesturing to the Thai noodles she was eating, "I wish I had a whole vat of these," which struck me as the most brilliant response possible.]

Like Will, I saw Garden State, though I saw it in the Garden State itself a few months ago, with two veritable Garden State residents. Beautiful as Portman may be, I'm more oriented toward admiring those of the Peter Sarsgaard gender. Sadly, though Sarsgaard himself was in the film, he looked only so-so, and Zach Braff, the male lead, reminded me of a sub-par Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore. I have nothing profound to say about Garden State, but I agree with Will that it's a not-terrible movie in which Portman is in no way pedophile-fodder. And I'm glad to see that Will and Matt Yglesias are as confused by Jonathan Last's article as I am.

Outdated jdate

It seems many non-Jews are now signing up for jdate, the online Jewish singles' site. Predictably, the gentile women want stable, reliable men with good jobs, possibly ones who, despite what their presense on jdate suggests, actually prefer non-Jewish women (one woman puts in her profile that she wishes to be someone's "shiksa"), and the gentile men want well-put-together, assertive women. Mensches and JAPs, in other, more dated, words.

All I can say is, how creepy. It makes sense that, like any group, Jews would attract their share of ethnic fetishists or people who swallow whole every positive stereotype they hear them. But jdate is supposed to connect actual people, of an actual religious heritage, not provide women statistically more likely to wear nice clothes or men statistically more likely to be professionals.

People sign up for jdate, I'd imagine, because they want to meet fellow Jews in order to have Jewish families. Sure, the idea is to meet people to date, but in the context of jdate, that means people to try out as possible marriage partners. That non-Jews' profiles get responses at all is a testament to the desperation of people on any singles' site--that a person happens not to actually be Jewish isn't so different than if he turned out to be much older, shorter, or fatter than he'd claimed.

Jdate should be for those either already Jewish or interested in converting. I wouldn't say that this should be enforced, but I would say it's how things ought to be. The reason jdate exists is that it can be difficult for Jews, even those without much trouble finding dates, to find ones within the faith, especially if they're living in places without many other Jews. This makes jdate quite different from generic singles' sites which just exist to increase people's overall number of possibilities.

What's unsettling, though, is how much the Style section piece reveals to what extent stereotypes of pushy Jewish women and push-over (but wealthy) Jewish men still exist in the public consciousness.

The Weekly Standard vs. Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman, she of the massive Judaica collection and, if the latest Elle piece is to be believed, an interest in astrophysics, is apparently "patient zero in our culture's latest epidemic of pedophilia chic."

In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last makes that tried-and-true conservative claim: we are living in the most debauched times. Ever. And look, look how disgusting our times really are! Let's examine, one by one, how disgusting things have become. And by "things" I mean pretty young things, gorgeous, nubile...though of course morally reprehensible...but oh-so-alluring, young, attractive girls.

I remember a segment on Fox a couple years ago in which Bill O'Reilly held forth on the horrible, horrible fact that a porno was being filmed in college dorms. Of course all the while there was this gleam in his eye--it was clear that his feeling about these barely-legal amateur porn stars was anything but revulsion...

But back to Last's article--called, get this, "Live. Young. Girls"--in which he tries to convince Standard readers, a group which no doubt contains a few heterosexual men with conventional sexual desires, that he finds Portman--as well as the Olson twins, Britney Spears, and the young Brooke Shields--utterly revolting, a sign of the degradation of our culture:

"[Portman] was 15 in Ted Demme's Beautiful Girls, where she played a middle-school student trying to seduce the 30-something Timothy Hutton. Shortly thereafter, Portman became a cultural icon, the object of dirty grins and knowing winks. And after Natalie, the deluge. There was Britney Spears's underage school-girl act. The celebrated website devoted to a countdown to the Olsen twins' 18th birthday. And then the crowning moment: Vanity Fair's Youngest Hollywood issue, which displayed on its cover nine under-aged vixens in various states of get-up-and-go, along with a headline proclaiming: 'It's TOTALLY Raining Teens: And it's, like, so a major moment in pop culture.' Even the dirty taboo of Blue Lagoon lust is a thing of the past; today we celebrate the sexualization of young girls. Thanks, Natalie."

Was that a sarcastic "Thanks, Natalie," or do I detect just the slightest bit of sincerity?

At last, Last concludes: "The moronic beauty of youth is everywhere around us now, celebrated, coveted, and objectified in ways that would make Mae West blush. With Closer, Natalie Portman is finally all grown up. Even so, her sad legacy lives on."

So sad is Portman's legacy that Last felt compelled, out of pity, to see many of her movies, just to do the Standard readers the great service of letting them know how truly unpleasant she is, just to save them the trouble of having to see those films themselves.

Via The American Scene

Financial support and admiration for the chaste

There's a fabulous episode of "Seinfeld" in which it is revealed that abstinence causes men to become brilliant (George Costanza all of a sudden wants to discuss "the atom") and women to become idiots (Elaine stares gleefully and applauds at a display of spinning car tires).

Abstinence-only education, though, sounds like it's failing to teach that important lesson, but is teaching a few other, more dubious ones: "One course says women need 'financial support' and men crave 'admiration.'" But don't we all both need financial support and crave admiration? Regardless, I don't see how women's supposed need for financial support, presumably in this case from a man, and men's supposed craving for admiration, presumably in this case from a woman, are supposed to have anything to do with abstinence.

Let's say a woman wants money and becomes a prostitute. She will receive her much-needed financial support, while the man who pays her will, in a certain, sleazy sense, receive admiration, or at least feigned admiration. No abstinence there.

On a less extreme level, suppose a woman, in search of this "financial support" and waiting for a future husband to provide it, refuses to have sex until marriage. Aside from the fact that this may well turn off some suitors, let's say she does, in the end, get married. Assuming she gets married at, say, 25, in this model, she's been without real financial support (which can only, of course, come from a man) since leaving high school.*

If the abstinence-only folks are calling this "financial support vs. admiration" thing human nature, then how exactly will abstinence provide women and men with what they need and crave?

*Another thing I'm not sure about with abstinence-only education: is the idea to abstain while in high school or until marriage? One sounds a whole lot more feasible (though still, of course, not all that feasible) than the other.

Diet Coke: How to know when to stop

How much diet Coke is too much diet Coke? Three cans in one day? Six? As addictions go, it's relatively harmless, but maybe a bit disgusting when it reaches the point that the day ends and only the hidden cameras in Ex Libris (if Ex Libris has hidden cameras--hope not) know how many you've had.

(Canadian blogger Alex Bellefleur would say one can is too much, but he's presumably something of a radical on these matters.)

Finals Week (which, at Chicago, lasts approximately 10 of the 11 weeks of the quarter) brings out the worst in people. Whatever your vices are normally--overconsumption of soda; overconsumption of just about anything; a tendency to whine, a tendency to play the same song, very loudly, on a loop, for all your neighbors to hear--you are forced to take them to an extreme. That's just how it is, how it always was, and how it always will be.

Blog-life meets real-life

Tonight was senior night at the Pub, and an acquaintance stopped by and referred to me--to my face--as "whatwouldphoebedo-dot-blogspot-dot-com."

Smile, Muffie, or I'll Potter your Aston! [UPDATED]

Curious as to whatever came of your NYC private school or boarding school classmates? Finding the faces on Friendster insufficiently exfoliated? Just up for looking at pictures of the well-groomed? Then check out David Patrick Columbia's New York Social Diary, which is both hilarious and strangely addictive. So many possible games to play, with "Who had what done?" being the most obvious. The fact that minorities are almost completely absent gives one the sense that these pictures are of socialites from another time; that minorities are present at all--and that the whole thing is on the Internet--reminds one that it is, in fact, 2004.

Look through the "party pictures" for 15 minutes and I guarantee you'll have a pretty clear sense of what Proust was talking about when he went on and on about those silly Guermantes.

UPDATE

This cannot be serious.

Italy, where contraception and crucifixes abound

Ian Fisher notes in the NYT that "in Italy, the European nation where religion and state have mingled most, the disagreements are somehow less bitter and absolute than in the United States," and that "paradoxically, Italy has in many ways less religious zeal than the United States, where the lines between church and state are much more sharply drawn, but where personal religious conviction can be stronger."

Fisher attributes the difference in national attitudes toward religion to Italians' laid-back approach to faith, pointing out that, while they are fine with abortion and contraception, "Crucifixes may hang in public schools, but without the heavy political overtones that come with displays of, say, the Ten Commandments in public places in America." He also notes that Italians are used to seeing "the church as a fallible institution, stripped over the centuries of much of its mystery."

It seems there's a greater reason why America and Italy differ on these issues, why Americans are touchier about public religious displays: Italy, unlike America, has one traditional religion--Roman Catholic--whereas America has many. In Italy, for the most part, there are two options, the Church and secularity, with shades of gray possible between the two, whereas in America, there's no one Church, just a wide, wide array of religious groupings, all trying to at once make their voices heard and be let alone to do what they'd like, each one battling secularity within its own community. In Italy, Catholicism is part of the culture, and a crucifix probably looks as familiar and innocuous to most Italians as the McDonalds or Starbucks insignias look to most Americans, meaning that a few may find it objectionable, but most wouldn't even notice its presence. The line between church and state is so strongly drawn in the U.S. because this is traditionally a country where religious zeal of all kinds is to flourish, and where any church-state mixing means that some religions are being favored over others, something that seems problematic to many Americans but may seem less so to many Italians.

Fisher makes Italy sound very appealing from a liberal perspective--it's a country, he explains, where only the compassionate aspects of religion are highlighted--striving for peace and helping the poor--and where individual liberty is placed above religious doctrine. But I'd imagine it would be hard to replicate this balance in a nation without an implicit state religion.

Mysterious bloggers tell all

My post on the Greta Garbo-esque political bloggers has generated a great deal of response. Notably, Reihan Salam calls me "incomparable" but then suggest that he is, in fact, comparable, comparing his own life to that of Patrick Swayze's characters in various movies. The only Swayze character I'm familiar with is the one that corrupts (sorry, enlightens) "Baby" at a Catskills resort in "Dirty Dancing." Not sure if that was one of the Swayze films Reihan had in mind.

Black holes

In astrophysics-for-poets, we're currently studying black holes. I picture a black hole as being something not that you couldn't get out of, but that you could only get out of if you got more than 50% of the answers right on your phy-sci homework, sort of an Oedipus-meets-the-Sphinx scenario, but with phy-sci. I suppose this says something about why I'm more on the poet than the astrophysicist end of things...But to be fair, these black holes do sound pretty cool--pulling in and obliterating all, even light, that's near them--and, with enough caffeine (black coffee?), I just might understand what they're made of (if, in fact, they're made of anything), hopefully in time for the final.

Jane Brody was constipated

She said it first, not me:

"I remember all too well the agony of postsurgical starvation: nearly five days elapsed after my Caesarean section when the hospital refused to give me anything but ice chips. All the while I was trying to nurse two big babies with nothing but an intravenous glucose solution to sustain me. But the nurses held firm. I had not yet passed gas or had a bowel movement," writes Brody, clearly incapable of discussing her proported subject--the dubious need for fasting before and after surgery--without giving a detailed, very detailed, account of her own, um, experiences.

(As usual with Brody, there's the oh-so-enlightening quote from a doctor: "'Medicine has changed substantially in the last 15 years,' Dr. Michael L. Pearl, a gynecological oncologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, said.")

I understand that the Times wishes to cover "Personal Health," but this is a bit too personal. There has to be some way to cover health topics that falls between the New England Journal of Medicine and South Park.

"Behavior that could be considered normal"

The Health section of the NYT has branched off from Jane Brody and her finger-wagging and has a piece on a diagnosis called "eating disorder not otherwise specified." This disorder--which encompasses any unusual eating habits, from binging to purging to just one or just the other, as well as not-quite-anorexia levels of eating very little, as well as extreme pickiness--sounds horribly unpleasant, but is a diagnosis that could probably be accurately given to about 90% of women and girls on the Upper East Side.

"Experts working on Diagnostic and Statistical Manual panels must ask how close the condition is to behavior that could be considered normal. For binge eating disorder, for instance, they must ask: When is such behavior a true psychiatric condition, and when is it the kind of thing that almost everyone engages in every Thanksgiving?"

But what of the semi-starvation that so many NYC women, Times readers surely among them, undergo year in and year out, simply to distiguish themselves from, I don't know, tourists? Those they consider lower class? Their husband's previous wives? Who can say. But the enviroment in certain parts of the city encourages not just being slender but being as close to emaciated as one can get and still produce offspring to dress in Baby Ralph Lauren and send to the hot nursery school of the moment. In other words, on the Upper East Side, the bizarre eating habits that hover on the edge of true eating disorders, that sometimes place a well-pedicured toe over that line, are most definitely examples of "behavior that could be considered normal."

So what is to be done? Should psychiatrists come to the neighborhood in droves, making diagnoses left and right? Well, that already happens, no doubt. But until the women of the neighborhood cease to look upon as overweight any woman who exceeds a size 0, there's really not much to look for in the way of progress.

The person behind the blogger

There's an interesting post at Crescat about what blogs do and don't tell you about the blogger's actual life. Will refutes an accusation that he spends all his time drinking and calling out to the internet for board-game buddies, noting that he also reads, drinks tea with a friend, listens to classical music, and talks to his girlfriend. Essentially, Will is saying that he is busier, more socially capable, and, perhaps most importantly, more sober, than some had inferred after reading his last few posts.

(A reader of this blog might deduce that I spend an inordinate amount of time combing the streets of NYC and Chicago for dogs to photograph, that I think a lot about France, Jews, and French Jews, and that I have a crush on the actor Peter Sarsgaard. All true.)

The thing with these political-law-academic blogs is that they don't promise to tell anything about the blogger's personal life. In other words, just because there's no mention of a spouse or significant other doesn't mean that none exists, no mention of a job doesn't mean that the blogger is unemployed, and no mention of specific professors doesn't mean that a student is uninterested in his or her classes.

The lack of information provided by blogs thus forces the (bored, procrastinating) reader to make some inferences about the life of the blogger. Since all but the most self-deprecating of bloggers neglect to post about, say, having spent the past few hours moping or watching a crappy t.v. show, this part of the blogger's life is almost always left out, making the blog-person sound more productive than the real-person. But, at the same time, we know, by definition, that the blogger is, well, blogging, so any assertions by a blogger that he or she is in fact a jet-setting socialite without a minute to spare ought not to be taken too seriously.

The Cheese Stands Alone

That's the name of a cheese shop in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, an area I've been meaning to check out, but will now definitely have to visit. Getting to this place from Hyde Park without a car will surely be a day-long commitment, but I'm thinking it could be worth it.

Meatpacking district 

In my natural habitat 

Dog spa 

Sidling up to the bar 

Reflections on post-Thanksgiving shopping

Why does American Apparel sell "organic" thongs, and who's the intended audience? ("Girls Gone Wild," the New England liberal arts school edition?)

Why do all pictures accompanying news stories of post-Thanksgiving shoppers show only the most grotesque and disheveled of the bargain-hunters? Sure, a horde of people entering a mall at 5 in the morning in search of bargains are unlikely to all be clones of Nan Kempner, but I seriously think a special effort is taken by photographers to shoot only those who not only are bolting into a mall early in the morning, but look like they're the sort of people who'd do that.

What was so wrong with the pair of hot pink stretch-cords I tried on at Find Outlet? I was informed by my two trusty (and stylish) shopping companions that they were horribly unflattering, that they pulled in all the wrong places, but to me they looked fabulous. Could it have been skinny mirrors?

Faith and bat-bites

"Jeanna, of Fond du Lac, was bitten by a bat at a church service on Sept. 12. She did not visit a doctor and so was not vaccinated, as is standard medical practice for such an exposure....Her father, John Giese, said he was grateful to the doctors and their novel treatment, but added that prayer had made the crucial difference."

Of course, if Jeanna hadn't been praying in the first place, the bat wouldn't have bitten her.

Natalie Portman: The biggest...Judaica collection of any Elle cover model

Damn, I was totally going to post on that, but Molly beat me to it.

The Elle profile of Natalie Portman doesn't shy away from the actress's Judaism, and Molly has the scoop:

"Portman invited the writer to her house, where he notes he begins by noticing her large book collection 'neatly arranged by subject - poetry, theater, pyschology, Judaica and so on.' As if, everyone has a collection of Judaica literature. Hello, I went to Jewish school for twelve years and I don't even have a Judaica section. I also don't have a library or even bookshelves, but that's not really the point."

Free association Thanksgiving

I'm thankful, at a most basic level, that my plane finally got in, and that, earlier in the day, I fully (hopefully) completed a confusing (for me, at least) phy-sci lab report.

I'm also excited to see that my post is up at the University of Chicago Magazine's blog, on the Latke-Hamentach debate. Best part of the debate: Prof. Harold Pollack asserting that Philip Roth, though a U of C alum, is banned from the campus ever since he wrote an erotic novel in which Golda Meir and Allan Bloom have an affair.

The best way to pass time on an endlessly delayed flight, I've discovered, is bringing along two things to read, one serious and one less so, and saving the serious reading for the stable middle part of the flight and the silly reading for the nervewrecking takeoff and landing. (My picks for the evening were Bernard Lazare's Le Fumier de Job and a copy of Elle.)

And finally, why does tomato juice seem so appetizing on airplanes but not under other circumstances?

A University of Chicagoan Empire?

In the latest Maroon, Ashley White-Stern informs the University of Chicago community "that we live in a distrustful, colonial social order. Our colonial status is ensured by the distrust between temporary settlers (that’s us, the students) as a precious set of imported individuals, and the native “other” (often called community members), the dark peoples, savage and unknown."

White-Stern puts the U of C into a no-win situation: If the University is situated in the South Side of Chicago, and it reaches out to the community, then it's just trying to compensate for social inequalities, and is thus a colonial entity of the worst kind. But if the U of C decided, fine, compensation is no good, screw the community, let's just build a wall and be done with it, would that be preferable? Or perhaps, in the interests of not constantly forcing the otherwise vibrant South Side to confront the privileged brats of the U of C, maybe the school should pick up and move out to rural Minnesota or Vermont and let the South Side remain untainted. Since of course there's nothing remotely offensive or colonialist about a bunch of rich kids, never forced to meet anyone unlike themselves, spending four years learning how to be good liberals.

White-Stern continues: "In order to finally begin to amend the terrible racist legacies of the exclusion, criminalization, and marginalization of the black folks who live around the University, we must know that part of living in the warm folds of privilege entails the very ability to turn a blind eye to hypocrisy and segregation."

This is so glaringly false, I'm not sure how to respond, but I'll try. The University of Chicago's location makes its students--liberal and conservative alike--far more aware of the racial and economic divisions of this country than are students at small-town liberal arts schools, where students can explore their sexuality and various substances in peace. But just because the U of C finds itself near the site of social injustice or evidence thereof doesn't mean that it's the University itself that's the cause. I'd be the first to agree that Chicago is a frighteningly segregated city, but why, exactly, should an institution that brings diversity to the South Side, that puts a great deal of effort into its own community's racial diversity, be considered part of the problem? As an artificially-created diverse community, the U of C may be about as close to large-scale integration as can be found in the city of Chicago.

The University of Chicago has had a historically difficult relationship with its neighbors, but the U of C is also one of the few top universities in the nation never to have racially discriminated in its own admissions policies, so, when schools like Princeton took on affirmative action, it was to remedy its own past discriminatory practices, whereas when Chicago took on affirmative action policies, it was to remedy societal, not University-rooted, prejudice. Striving to make Chicago and the South Side more tolerant (and, ideally, less bleak) is a continual process, and one that the University does its part in contributing to.

It would have been great if White-Stern had thought to provide some ways in which the University could do more. But she set out simply to make a silly accusation that the U of C is a colony of the South Side and to make it clear that, whatever the school does, it won't be good enough. Of course, she's right that nothing the University does will "fix" Chicago. But there has to be a way of stating that without calling the institution itself a racist and imperialistic endeavor.

Humbling

How did they have the time to do all this? What were they not doing? Sleeping? Watching t.v.? Drinking? Staring at walls in their bedrooms for hours on end? I know one of the U of C's newest Rhodes Scholars, Andy Kim, and he's always seemed like a really cool guy, not just cool as in a nice person, but cool as in hip. Sort of depressing that a person could be that successful, that impressive, and yet not even come across as geeky.

Reading the descriptions of what the latest Rhodes Scholars have accomplished in their 20-odd years forces the reader of about the same age to evaluate what he or she has accomplished in his or her own. This impulse ought to be avoided, or at least I plan on avoiding it, at least until I finish this physical sciences lab.

Not the whole story

I wish to join David Adesnik of OxBlog in congratulating City College for its sudden success at producing Rhodes Scholars. Adesnik notes that his own father went to City College; my grandfather went there, and my father went to Brooklyn College, so I am somewhat familiar with the history of the NYC public colleges.

Which is why something seemed off to me about the way Adesnik describes the role that City College has played in this nation's history:

"For my father, as well as for countless other children of working-class immigrants from Eastern Europe, City College occupies a mythic place in American life. The College is an institution that opened its doors to those didn't have the financial resources or social connections necessary for admission to the Ivy League. Nonetheless, the intellectual standards for admission to the College were almost impossibly high because there was so much talent waiting to be discovered among the new Americans of New York, Eastern European or otherwise. As a result, City College became known as 'The Harvard of the Proletariat'."

All true, but with a key detail missing. In referring to "children of working-class immigrants from Eastern Europe" and to those who "didn't have the financial resources or social connections necessary for admission to the Ivy League," Adesnik makes the City College story a generic one of class struggle, the American Dream, or what have you, when the reason those of Adesnik's father's generation and the one before it were going to City and not Harvard had something to do with money and class, but also something to do with quotas. There were quotas keeping the number of Jews low at many top universities (not at Chicago, though). City College's place in Jewish-American history was recently noted in the recent NYT article about current, non-Jewish City College students' interest in Jewish studies. So, in a sense, City College was made great as an indirect result of other schools' discriminatory policies.

I can't quite figure out why Adesnik made this omission. Would mentioning that so many of the striving working-class students in question happened to be Jewish have been too controversial, would it have otherwise ruined a charming tale of wholesome meritocracy? Would it have implied that Adesnik was attributing the success of City College to the fact that so many of its students were Jewish? I'm not suggesting Adesnik should have written a post brimming with Jewish-American pride, but explaining the reputation of City College and leaving that fact out is like telling someone the history of Howard University and never mentioning that it's a traditionally black university. It strikes me as weirder to leave out such a detail than to include it, at any rate.

Fewer Pills will mean more abortions, or, Pro-lifers' inability to choose their battles

Andrew Sullivan's been posting letters about the latest hot topic in the world of social conservatism: making it legal for a pro-life doctor or phamacist not to distribute the birth control pill.

Here's what I don't understand: it's the person who's refusing to provide the pill, not necessarily the woman demanding it, who's pro-life, so seemingly many women refused the pill will go on to get pregnant and will then have abortions. Wouldn't it be better, from a pro-life perspective (or from any perspective, really) for women to take the pill than to have more abortions? Any woman reluctant or unwilling to have an abortion but not ready to start a family should think twice before relying on just condoms or--oh dear--Natural Family Planning, to prevent pregnancy. And any pro-lifer who is also personally against birth control might want to think about whether there is, from a pro-life perspective, a lesser of two evils.

Sullivan makes a misguided remark about how, had his mother been on the pill, he would never have been born: "I have a particular fondness for Natural Family Planning, since I am one its unintended consequences. My mother read the calendar the wrong way and - voila! Or as my mom put it to me: 'You[r] sister was an accident; but you were a mistake.' Awww."

I don't think it would be too reassuring to a pregnant 19-year-old who'd been refused the pill, and who'd used the oh-so-reliable rhythm method instead, that her baby just might grow up to be an esteemed political commentator.

(So is the answer, in Sullivan's view, to only have sex when one is at a point in one's life at which sex could reasonably, happily lead to the birth of a child? If that's how he sees things, then where does that leave him and his boyfriend?)

Parental Advisory: Excessive Whining

For reasons I can't quite figure out, the latest Rufus Wainwright album comes with a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" warning. Sure, there's some gender-bending (Rufus sings of having been just a girl, and the album cover depicts Rufus as some kind of fairytale heroine), some themes that might offend the religious (a "gay messiah" makes an appearance), but, as far as bad words, I only noticed one "cum" and one "fuck," both of which are nearly obscured by the increased whininess of Rufus's voice, compared with how he sounded on earlier albums.

Is Rufus himself, by virtue of being gay and flamboyantly so, the reason for the warning? I spent a lot of time listening to Rufus's first album during 10th grade, and I can safely say that listening to Rufus in no way led to any high school debauchery, as far as I was concerned.

The main problem with the album is that his whininess, which once seemed to convey heartbreak and despair, now feels overly dramatic and forced. Or maybe Rufus hasn't gotten worse, but my music taste has changed since I was 15.

Narcissism

Read my latest Maroon column, "Roth book misused to mourn election."

In it, I argue that the Bush administration isn't fascist, and, furthermore, that Philip Roth did not imply as much in The Plot Against America.

The meat-and-curry metaphor was, in my opinion, a poorly-chosen one

It appears that the NYT values diversity in theory, but aesthetically is still stuck on Northern Europe as the ideal.

In the "City" section this Sunday, there's a special focus on immigrants in NYC, accompanied (online, at least) by a picture of a multiracial, lesbian, Jamaican immigrant with a large Afro. The entire section celebrates the continual cycles of the struggles and joys of immigration to the city, and makes a point in including immigrants of a wide range of races and nationalities.

Then, moving along to this Sunday's "Sophisticated Traveler", one learns where one can go if one wishes to escape the wonderful but apparently less-than-beautiful diversity of New York: Copenhagen.

"Style in clothing reminds me of the original impulse behind adding curry to food: you only need to do it if the meat isn't good. And Copenhageners really don't need style at all. They'd look good if they were dressed like baseball infields during rain delays," writes Ken Chowder, adding, "But, of course, Copenhageners do have style."

What exactly is Chowder getting at here? In what part of the world are people stylish because they are naturally ugly? I don't want to read too much into this, but it appears that Chowder is asserting that Danes are naturally (read: racially) beautiful. (The meat-and-curry metaphor was, in my opinion, a poorly-chosen one.) Chowder also refers to "cool beauty" as being one of "the classical Nordic virtues" and seems to be referring to people as much as to architecture or landscape.

I'm sure that plenty of Danes are beautiful, and I do not wish to disparage those whose last names contain two consecutive "A"s. But no race or nation has a monopoly on beauty, and, while individuals are free to have aesthetic preferences based on whatever happens to turn them on, be it blondness, dark eyes, or tribal scar-patterns, a diversity-loving paper like the Times really shouldn't be printing pieces that embrace the idea of an objective, aesthetic, racial beauty ideal, and one that happens to evoke less-than-enlightened times.

Bagel blogging

Yay! 

For the curious, this is the reason I trek* out to Fox and Obel: an almost New York bagel.

*I believe any trip made for the purposes of procuring a New York-style bagel, or really any bagel, for that matter, is technically a "shlep."

Not terrorism, just Chicago's annual November fireworks display

I headed downtown for the usual weekend Fox and Obel trip with a couple friends this evening, and, much to our surprise, all of Michigan Avenue, right below Wacker and further north on Michigan, was packed with families, all just sort of generally congregated, we had no clue why. There didn't appear to be a parade, and there were far too many people for them to have just been stragglers hanging around after an earlier parade. Our bus had been a bit rerouted, not going as far north as usual, which ought to have tipped us off that something was up, but, absentminded U of C students all, we didn't worry about it too much.

Cops were directing people to turn away from Michigan, by the Chicago River, so we started obediently walking east by the river, when suddenly we heard these horrible, loud, explosion-like sounds coming from very nearby. Crowds, a major American city, and loud explosions--bad news, I thought, so I covered my ears with my hands and started walking quickly, at times running. Then I looked over to the river and saw that, from some kind of platform in the water, a whole bunch of fireworks were being set off. Why fireworks, on November 20, and why so scarily close to where people walk around? (Clearly this is my punishment for reading the NYT and not the Chicago Tribune--if I read the local paper, then I might have known more what we'd be in for this evening.)

Turns out many Chicagoans view these loud fireworks in the middle of November as a positive, uplifting event, one worthy of staying out late for with dogs and small children, and are apparently not all convinced, as I was, that any loud, unexpected explosions in the middle of crowds in the middle of a city are to be avoided.

Magnificent Mile Lights Festival

And then there was light. And it was noisy as hell.