22 and no husband? Try harder.

David Brooks thinks professional women should have kids sooner rather than later, and writes that "it might make more sense to go to college, make a greater effort to marry early and have children." Brooks suggests some practical ways in which the government might make it easier for women to do this--"means-tested tax credits or tuition credits to stay-at-home parents"--but this idea that individual women need to "make a greater effort to marry early" is more than a bit disturbing. What does this mean exactly--so what if you're not so into that dude you've been unenthusiastically dating for the past couple weeks, just go for it, there's a 70% chance that if you don't, you'll end up childless and full of regrets? (I'm 21 and unmarried, childless, even--yikes! Better get moving on that.)

It's certainly possible that "70 percent of [childless, over-40] women regret that they have no kids." But the information missing here, aside from the role men are supposed to play in all of this, is what percentage of women in the previous generation regretted not having had careers. To claim that childless women feel not just regret but "a profound, soul-encompassing sadness" and that women who do nothing career-wise till 40 will feel somehow fulfilled just doesn't ring true.

Happiness is a warm cappuccino

Harvard now has a "fun czar" and the Harvard blogosphere is on the case. Here at Chicago, we're supposed to assume that everyone--including, no, especially, Harvard students--is having more fun than we are, though personally, I'm skeptical.

Our administration tried to bring us some fun a few years back, before I came here, though, so I can't say whether things are more fun here now than they once were. But I do know that attempts to make this place more fun tend to get folks pretty angry--the addition of a Starbucks to our campus bookstore caused one alum to write a letter to the U of C Magazine, saying, "Starbucks' foamy milk and fancy flavors are simply clutter that, I suspect, interfere with the kind of sharp-minded analysis for which U of C denizens are justly famed." I can see complaining about Ratner (huge new gym), or even Bartlett (huge new dining hall), but foamy milk? It's not as if drinking cappuccinos and thinking critically are mutually exclusive. In fact, I believe I've had assignments that could only be completed with the aid of an espresso-based beverage of one kind or another...

If it weren't for carbs, all Brazilians would be supermodels

Brazilians are getting bigger, and the Times has the beach photos to prove it. As things go that can happen to a person on a waterfront these days, being heavy isn't so bad. But the Times has some sensationalist pictures of women in very skimpy bikins who, while large, are unremarkably so. Not sure what the story is--did anyone really think that, just because some supermodels come from Brazil, along with a waxing technique of which the waiflike Gwyneth Paltrow is allegedly a fan, that all other Brazilians have the same build?

But the NYT piece starts to be fun when it gets all Atkins-y: "In addition to incorporating increasing amounts of fatty, processed foods in recent years, the Brazilian diet is also unusually heavy in starches and other carbohydrates." Compared to which other cuisine--Italian? Middle Eastern? Those evil carbs have been finding their way into pita and pasta since long before the low-carb revolution. If a diet is not high in carbohydrates, it is by definition high in either fat or protein, and since meat will be the end of us, and fat, well, makes you fat, then why is a predominately-carboydrate diet so bad? (And spare me the "good carbs vs. bad carbs"--we all know that that's a myth, and did I mention that the brownies at Fox and Obel are delicious?) But seriously, there's no BocaBurgerstan, where everyone's been on some special, super-virtuous, vegan version of the South Beach Diet since prehistoric times. All traditional cuisines would, if eaten in modern developed-country portions, make a person overweight.

Why is Maureen Dowd still single?

I'd consider marrying her, if I swung that way. But I don't, not that it matters, since on the scale of things I'm not especially high-powered, and the problem is apparently that powerful women cannot find equally powerful spouses. I still think that the "problem" may just be that professional women aren't interested in getting husbands, so it's not so much that they're being punished for their successes as that they don't see staying single as failing. Also, when you get to the really high levels of any profession, there's a limited number of equals available to either men or women. If you're Maureen Dowd, New York Times columnist, who's your male counterpart (professionally, not politically)? David Brooks? He's married, I believe, which doesn't leave too many possibilities.

Another thing worth considering is that, if this trend is for real, it's doing wonders for social mobility. Say there are two well-off professionals, a man and a woman. The man marries and has children with his maid/secretary/personal trainer, and the professional woman, whose brilliance turns off men, is a single mother to some children of her own. The children of both professionals get to be born into comfortable homes, and, while they get either a bitter mother or a sexist father, they nevertheless get opportunities that children of non-professionals often lack.

I'm dreaming of a white...Passover?

You can have a white Christmas, you can have your next year in Jerusalem, but can you combine the two? Apparently--in this week's Hebrew Circle movie, Passover Fever, a family in Israel gets together for that holiday and one of the small children announces, early on in the film, that the following day it will snow. And, not to spoil the plot or anything, but despite it being Israel in springtime, snow falls as predicted. I've never heard of anyone caring whether it snowed on Passover (though in Chicago it probably will, regardless.) I wonder if an Israeli audience would immediately make the connection between the little kid's odd fantasy and the one shared by American Christian children at Christmastime. At the end of the movie, as the whole family looks on in wonder at the falling flakes, all I could think was, "It's a Festivus miracle!"

Jane Brody fails to deliver, and other, unrelated, news

Former Broadviewian Will Baude responds to my post at UChiBLOGo on Randel's visit to that most distinguished of dormitories.

Jane Brody had the audacity to write a "Personal Health" column without so much as mentioning herself, her family, or her friends.

Matthew Yglesias wonders why a conservative blogger thinks the ACLU is a Jewish organization. Thing is, the conservative blogger he quotes only appears convinced that the organization is run by Jews. But Matt's point holds: From an anti-Semitic perspective, a Jewish-run but technically areligious organization is far more suspect than is an openly Jewish one, and even institutions not actually run by Jews make just as good targets as ones that are--who cares that the ACLU is really just the American Civil Liberties Union, without a cabal of Jews directing the action (or, to be fair to all, that the Bush administration is run primarily by non-Jews)? Even if the ACLU were an explicitly Christian organization, an anti-ACLU anti-Semite would accuse the organization of being under the covert control of Jews. Another possibility: Maybe the dude just got ADL and ACLU confused. Sure, he mentions both, but to make his point, he feels he must provide a list. He knows he doesn't like either, is typing quickly, and mixes things up. This is much like what Rashid Khalidi did during his interview with New York Magazine--when enumerating what he perceives of as being largely Jewish suburbs of NYC, he included Long Island City in the list. Long Island City is not a posh suburb but is in fact a part of NYC itself, in Queens, one of the so-called outer boroughs, but is fairly close to Manhattan. Long Island City is nothing like Scarsdale, I've never heard it referred to as being a particular feeder neighborhood to Columbia, but Khalidi presumably thought "Long Island" and "City" and thought, "Jews!"

1:30 AM Wednesday means...

a) Astrophysics-related panic-attack

b) New Dining section online with mouthwateringly delicious-looking vegetarian Japanese food that compares favorably to the matzo (not so seasonal, I realize) and diet Coke that is my pathetic excuse for studying-related late-night snacking

c) Time for another diet Coke

d) Time to get back to the astrophysics

e) All of the above

Don't worry! It's not a Jewish thing!

10 PM, the uptown 6, around 23rd Street. A woman recognizes the guy sitting next to me and dashes up to him. She is like all googly-eyed with PURE JOY. He seems pretty uninterested.

"Hey!" she says.

"What's up?" he asks.

"I just got out of Kabbalah class."

"Uh? Kabbahwa?"

The woman is incredulous. Frankly, so am I. I mean, isn't in Kabbalah everywhere nowadays? There are like five thousand Kabbalah centers in NY. Ashton? Demi? Madonna? Roseanne?

"Kabbalah...it's like a spiritual thing," she explains and then lets her hands fly. "It's like, people think it's a Jewish mysticism thing but it's not. It's not really Jewish at all. I don't know why people think it is Jewish. It's just spiritual."

Kabbalah is pretty sketchy. But I think it's also pretty attached to a lot of Jewish ideas more than anything else. Maybe the woman meant you don't have to be Jewish to do it? I mean, that's true. She just seemed so perky and cute underneath her perky little beret and then it's like, "hello, I'm crazy."

Whatever...clearly there are crazy people lurking beneath berets everywhere.

My last word on primping, at least for now:

Here is my response, in the Chicago Maroon, to the anti-beauty piece in Slate, to the frat article in the NYT Magazine, and to a bizarre opinion piece in the Chicago Weekly (not online) that commentor Maureen pointed me to, in which a female U of C student unfairly attributes her own extensive primping rituals (as well as her own distaste for geeky boys) to the entire female population of the University.

Confession

I've already wimped out on boycott #2--a morning class in Cobb makes a stop for coffee at the Divinity School coffeeshop pretty much a given,* though, to be fair, the bad odors don't really become an issue until the new lunch food arrives--and I noticed a second sign, joining the old sign that tells customers not to take too many paper napkins. The new sign explains that your life will still be a mess even if you take a lot of napkins. Will this convince wasteful U of Cers to take only as many napkins as we need, or will it simply cause us to immediately think of whatever aspect of our lives is currently stressing us out? Seeing the sign immediately reminded me of my half-written, half-memorized to-do list, formed at the beginning of the quarter but still marinating, like ten-day-old Pad See Eww in the Div School fridge.* (I should add that I have no recollection whatsoever of whether or not I took any napkins.)

*I do not know for a fact that the Thai food in the fridge there is ten days old, though I'll admit that I was a bit put off last quarter by a less-than-enthusiastic Health Department report near the entrance to the coffeeshop. Clearly not too put off to return many, many times, but put off, all the same.

**Yes, Cobb also has a (basement, ick) coffeeshop. Why not just go there? Two reasons: It's a bit too hipster for my tastes (read: I am intimidated) and their coffee isn't as good (read: I am a coffee snob, even when it comes to rushed weekday breakfast). Yeah, fine, it's mostly the first reason. That said, the confession officially comes to an end.

Lincoln navigator

Andrew Sullivan writes: "If America's greatest president was gay, it must play a part in the current discussion of gay equality in America."

If America's greatest president was gay, then said president would have to have been one of the more recent ones (i.e. not Lincoln) since "gay" wasn't around in Lincoln's time (Thanks to Nick for this info., btw.). Moreover, as I've noted before, even if Lincoln was, to use timeless terms, into guys, that still doesn't have any particular implications for gay equality in America today. Lincoln may have liked men, but he was not an activist for other likeminded men, and as far as I know was never interested in marrying any of the men with whom he was close. Last month I also wrote that "contemporary Republican opponents of gay marriage and gay rights would, if they agreed that Lincoln was attracted to men, call this attraction a flaw, a weakness possessed by an otherwise remarkably strong man. I can't imagine an effect of, 'If Lincoln was gay, then gays are great,' resulting from the revelation." I stand by this. Lincoln's role in shaping this nation's history may well have steered us on the right path in terms of equality in general, but his possible sexual attraction to men is neither here nor there, and I'm saying this not as a Weekly Standard, anti-gay-marriage type (the group Sullivan accuses of trying to hide the truth about Lincoln) but as someone who strongly supports gay marriage and equal rights for gays in all other institutions as well.

"...kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City."

This week's New York Magazine really has it in for young New York Jews. First, there's the exposé on how rich kids in NYC sometimes get obscene amounts of money from their parents. The only useful information in this article is that the amount of pocket money a kid has often has nothing to do with his parents' income, but we all knew this anyway. Do we really need to know that Jonathan Lebowitz, 14, watches what he spends, but if he really wants something, buys it? (Wow, he's stingy and rich! What a find!) Then there's Rashid Khalidi being interviewed on the subject of "Columbia University's Jewish Problem." To be fair, NY doesn't seem to swallow whole what Khalidi says, but still...

“Most kids who come to Columbia come from environments where almost everything they’ve ever thought was shared by everybody around them,” he says. “And this is not true, incidentally, of Arab-Americans, who know that the ideas spouted by the major newspapers, television stations, and politicians are completely at odds with everything they know to be true. Whereas kids from, I don’t know, Teaneck. Or Scarsdale. Or Levittown. Or Long Island City. Many of them have never been exposed to a dissonant idea, a different idea, as far as the Middle East is concerned. And so you have a situation where it’s going to be problematic.”

He swings around to his computer, starts surfing the university Website. “We’re not in an environment where Jewish students, as they were in the history of the Ivy League, are discriminated against,” he says. Indeed, the university Hillel estimates that roughly a quarter of Columbia’s undergraduates, or about 2,000 students, are Jewish. “Have you looked at the Hillel Website here?” Khalidi asks. “It blew my mind!” He finds it, starts to scroll. “Look at this. They have ten, twelve paid employees.” (Well, at least seven, and five rabbinic interns.)

Yikes! Nothing worse than going through years of rigorous academic training only to be stuck teaching Jewish kids from the NYC suburbs. Had Khalidi stayed put, he'd still be teaching kids from, I don't know, Chicago suburbs, some of whom are probably Jewish, but "Scarsdale" just has that special ring to it...

I don't even know where to begin, but begin I must. First off, why does Columbia being a quarter Jewish,* attracting kids from the area around the school, and having a 12-person Hillel staff blow Khalidi's mind? It's a large university in New York. It's like saying, what's with all these rural Midwestern kids filling up UChicago classes, some of them having never met an openly gay person or attended a sample sale? Khalidi sounds as though he misses the quotas which kept Jews from appearing at places like Columbia in such dreadfully high numbers. (What? Of course he doesn't miss quotas! I do apologize for being such a Zionist imperialist and assuming that was the implication...)

And how about Khalidi's assertion that Jewish (or euphemistic, "Levittown") kids, unlike Arab-Americans, are used to having everything they believe be continuously reaffirmed by what they encounter in mainstream media? If his implication is that these students are pro-Israel, then which media outlet is responsible for not challenging those beliefs? The New York Times? NPR? And last I checked, the demographic Khalidi has it in for tends to vote Democrat, so these kids can't possibly be nodding along to Bill O'Reilly on Fox News. And which politicians? Was Howard Dean's decision to sport a keffiyeh a mere ploy to make Arab-Americans forget that he was actually being controlled by his Jewish wife, who only pretends to be a doctor? The better (and serious) question: What planet is Khalidi living on?

*Then, there's the problem of how exactly could a campus Hillel know the number of Jews at a school (and should it even be counting in the first place)? My last name and home address were apparently enough information our Hillel at Chicago needed to put me on its email list, which I found myself on before even considering whether or not I wished to sign up. Ideally, though, Hillel could count its own members, but could leave be those Jews (or suspected Jews) who didn't wish to join the organization. The figure Khalidi's balking at may just be Hillel's count of every last Columbia student with a "gold" or a "berg" in his name.

Too good to be true?

The front page of the NYT essentially guarantees world peace:

"Mahmoud Abbas, who opposes continuing violence against Israel, declared victory tonight in the election for a new president of the Palestinian Authority after two exit polls showed him winning by a large margin."

"To cries of 'God is great!' in Arabic and 'Hallelujah!' the Islamic government of Sudan signed a peace agreement on Sunday with a Christian rebel group in the south that called for an end to one of Africa's fiercest and longest-running civil wars."

Now, once we get AIDS and natural disasters in check, we can be not just a city or a nation but a species of Jane Brody-readers, watching our cholesterol and overhearing amusing things on the bus. Here's hoping. Seriously.

Boycotts

I've never really had an opportunity to boycott anything. When I first got to Chicago, prior to the Iraq war, the big student movement was to boycott Taco Bell, which at that point had a branch on campus. For all I know, it still does. I never eat at Taco Bell anyway, so I never looked into whether I had to make a special point of avoiding it. Then, there's the anti-SUV movement, which I could claim I'm supporting by either walking or taking public transportation, but the truth is I've never owned a car, never even driven a car (though that should hopefully be remedied soon--it's tough being a NYer!), so my not owning an SUV has absolutely zilch to do with the environment or with fear of dependence on foreign oil.

But as my time in college comes to an end, I feel that I've missed out from a crucial college experience. So I've decided to boycott the following, though I'll freely admit that by "boycott" I mean avoid if possible, and that I'm unlikely to last more than a few days.

1. The Hyde Park Co-op: The local supermarket chain here is has the worst aspects of an inner-city grocery store and of an upscale, gourmet one. Everything, especially produce, is expensive, even by NYC standards, little is reliably fresh (in either sense of the term), and the theoretically enticing array of imported or exotic ingredients ends up being still more rotten (and obviously still more pricey) than the rest that the place has to offer. Apples and mass-produced Camembert--cut into either, and you're apt to find the very same shade of brown. Eggs--hard to go wrong there, right? Hardly--Eric and I once made a huge vat of spaetzle, only to notice a slightly funny, no, very funny, smell and aftertaste. So my plan is, using some combination of trips to Whole Foods, Walgreens, Fox and Obel, "normal" Chicago supermarkets, and stops at the dining halls, I'll be able to avoid the conveniently-located but dreadful Co-op for the rest of my time in Chicago.
2. All U of C coffeeshops located in basements: It's nice, in the winter, to leave the cold and go into a warm place that serves coffee. But warm quickly transitions into stuffy, and the mixing of aromas emanating from pad thai, hummus, pizza, coffee, and shower-phobic students can be unbearable in underground rooms with no ventilation. And now that I'm shopping at Whole Foods all the time (see #1) I should probably be bringing lunch, anyway.
3. All movie theaters other than DOC: Every night, right here on campus, you can pay $4 and see a cool movie. No food is allowed in the theater, and I happen to detest the smell of artificial butter, so this suits me just fine. Now, going downtown costs $4 round-trip plus $10 for the movie itself, and the movies tend to be less interesting, and regardless, will be shown at DOC soon after they come out in regular theaters. So, yeah, it's DOC for me from now on, or until I decide I absolutely must see something playing at the Music Box..

Wes Anderson, uber-hipster

This really ruins it all for me. Yes, of course, I've long read reports on Wes Anderson's ironically-worn old-man shoes and his vintage-clothing-deconstructing girlfriend, designer and Chloe Sevigny pal Tara Subkoff. And fair enough, I found The Royal Tenenbaums to be overdone visually, with the red track suits and the Gwyneth used as stand-ins for any larger point to the film. But when I first saw Rushmore in the theaters, in 10th grade, I had never heard of hipsters, and if they existed, they hadn't yet made it to Stuyvesant. (The cool older kids were still ravers.)

If I saw Rushmore for the first time now, I doubt it would move me as it did then, not because the dialogue would seem dated or dull, nor because you have to be 15 to get the most out of it, though the latter is certainly possible. No, I'd take one look at Max Fischer's vintage ski-jacket and geek-chic glasses and roll my eyes. While the plot suggests that Max dresses this way because he is poor, in retrospect it's just so convenient, his being a scholarship student at a prep-school just gives Anderson a plausible way to put his protagonist into hipster garb. The clothes in the movie, which seemed when I first saw it to give the whole film a unique mood, would now seem like an unnecessary distraction from the story.

I hope N+1 magazine is right, that hipsters as we know them are waning. Because how else will future generations watch Rushmore and actually enjoy it?

Via The American Scene.

Northwestern frat boys: Get 'em while they're sober.

"Freshmen girls: Get 'em while they're skinny," reads the back of a shirt on bulky Northwestern fraternity president Theo Michels, photographed for a NYT Magazine piece on newly-dry frats. Argh! This is an argument for "levelling up" if I ever saw one. If he (and presumably his brothers as well--can't imagine he silk-screened a single shirt just for himself) wants his girls skinny, then maybe he should abandon not only beer (his is one of the newly-dry frats) but also non-diet soda.

The article's author, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a former member of a now-dry Northwestern frat, refers to having been derisively referred to by frat brothers as a "skinny dude" but he notes that he is gay, so clearly his slender build wasn't the result of a feminist move to put as much effort into his own appearance as he was expecting from women he wished to date. Nope, a way to insult rival frat brothers is to call them "''a bunch of pretty-boy fags from Long Island'" (Long Island?! Who knew Northwestern students had even heard of Long Island?) While frat brothers might not like their boys "pretty," plenty of girls do, but they'd probably have better luck down here in Hyde Park, where looking like a stereotypical frat boy is generally discouraged, and where t-shirts declare not that female students are too fat, but that we are not as cute as squirrels, which is preferable if only because it's too silly to be taken seriously.

What struck me most in this article was the apparent obsession frat boys have with freshman girls. As a senior girl, I must respond. What is supposed to happen when women pass age 19? Is it just the alleged weight gain (for students eating in UChicago dining halls, it probably tends to be weight loss--perhaps they've got better food in the dining halls up in Evanston), or is it more the loss of naivete, without which no girl would want anything to do with guys who wear such cretinous t-shirts, especially now that alcohol can no longer be relied on by frats to impair girls' judgment?

Fresh Direct

Just got back from Julius Meinl, perhaps the most wonderful place in Chicago. It's a Viennese coffeehouse whose NYC equivalent would probably be the somewhat more posh cafe in the Neue Gallerie. I basically went all out--got something called frittaten soup, which had noodle-type things made of some kind of crepe--whatever it was, it was delicious--plus a walnut and goat cheese salad, apple strudel, and a cappuccino. This might not be all-out by Chicago standards, as neither steak nor deep-dish nor cheesecake were involved, but anything multi-course, i.e. not just pasta or cereal, strikes me somehow decadent.

I realize as I write this that I am terrible at describing food. OK, that's not exactly true--I'm pretty good at describing bad or disappointing food. I nearly broke down once several years ago in a cafe when a sandwich I'd ordered and was very much looking forward to turned out to be nothing but two sad, cold pieces of sliced brown bread with slimy strips of overcooked zucchini between them. I could give in-depth accounts of this, of a "hamburger" I bit into at a barbeque in Germany that most certainly was not a hamburger (white, gristly, and almost certainly from a pig snout), and of similar bad-food experiences. But I couldn't explain why the soup I had tonight was good, it just was.

The one thing all good good-food writing has in common, it seems, is that ingredients are described as "fresh." I mean, even dining hall slop is probably fresh, since where would they store all the stuff long enough for it to go bad? But adding "fresh" to a description of a meal suggests a farm nearby, a lack of refrigerator-taste, in short, a better-than-average meal, conveying tastiness to those who could not possibly know if a meal was actually good, but in a more subtle and thus more convincing way than just saying, as I said of the soup I had tonight, that it was "delicious." Ever watched Martha Stewart's old cooking show? Everything she tossed into a bowl or threw into a blender was "fresh." Over at Crescat, Waddling Thunder recounts cooking scrambled eggs: "Seeing that my local supermarket produced some good looking Mitake mushrooms, I fried them in high fat European butter, and then slowly le[t] my fresh eggs cook on a low, gentle heat." What, then, made his eggs "fresh"? Does he own a hen? According to health guru Jane Brody, eggs can be kept for a "month or so" past their expiration date. "Fresh" can either mean from a nearby farm or not-yet-spoiled, and unless a farm is mentioned, I assume the latter definition is the one being used. So technically eggs are still fresh when they are two months old. Which means that there's not much we can really say about Mr. Thunder's eggs other than that they were not yet ready to be trashed. But when reading his description of scrambled eggs with mushrooms, I for an instant forgot that I don't like mushrooms and am no great fan of scrambled eggs. Because, after all, "fresh" sounds good, and, as one of Patsy's dippy fashion-magazine co-workers on Absolutely Fabulous said of a complex description of a new wrinkle-removing cream, "it's forcing me to believe it."

Fiddler and the City, or was it Sex on the Roof?

Pogroms and Manolos, shtetl life and simulated orgasms, are all one and the same. Or so thinks Julie Salamon, in this painfully dumb NYT piece on movie ratings.

Before my son turned 8, he had watched "The Matrix" numerous times on videocassette before he moved on to "The Lord of the Rings." The former is rated R (restricted, under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian), the latter PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned, some material not appropriate for children under 13).

So it didn't occur to me that the unassailable, G-rated choice I took home for a family movie night would terrorize him. The culprit? "Fiddler on the Roof." As the Cossacks rode into town to torment the Jews celebrating Tevye's daughter's wedding, my son ran from the room yelling, "What kind of parents would show a scary movie like this to a little kid?"

What kind of parents indeed? The kind whose 14-year-old daughter and her girlfriends were found in front of our television giggling happily at "Sex and the City" in its unexpurgated form on HBO.

Um, what? Sorry, but Cossacks really did ride into town to torment Jews, and if this particular eight-year-old can't handle "Fiddler on the Roof" then why ever even try to tell him about the Holocaust? Or the U.S. history of slavery? (Both of these, incidentally, are things I certainly had an understanding of by age eight, as I'd imagine is the case for many eight-year-olds.) How can allowing 14-year-olds to waste time watching a show in which 30-ish women buy expensive shoes and sleep around be put in the same parental-laxity category as allowing an eight-year-old to gain some small sense that mankind has had its share of tragedies?

Personally, I would have no problem with an eight-year-old seeing "Fiddler" or with 14-year-olds seeing "Sex and the City," (and would personally rather spend an afternoon watching the latter) provided their parents had given them some explanation of what's being depicted, not right before watching, but in general: eight-year-olds should know something about, if not pogroms, then at least war, oppression, and conflict in general, and 14-year-olds should know something about sex, if only so that they know what it is that they shouldn't be doing yet. But the potential problems with "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Sex and the City" are not remotely comparable.

The problem with "Sex and the City" is that it's mindless entertainment, with bits of clever dialogue, but mostly (in the eyes of all but feminist or post-feminist critics, who read far more into it) a show about pretty people in pretty clothing doing fun things like going out and, of course, having sex. No 14-year-old is likely to be upset by it. A single 35-year-old with no Manolos and no sex life, now that sort of person might be upset by the show, but 14-year-olds, who discuss more graphic things amongst themselves than are mentioned on the show, are unlikely to be anything but bored by Carrie's dating woes. The problem with "Fiddler," on the other hand, is that it forces the viewer to confront certain historical realities (well, a fictional interpretation of certain historical realities) that would, like all upsetting facts of history, be especially disturbing to a child with no prior knowledge of them. A parent whose eight-year-old loses it while watching "Fiddler" should take the opportunity to give the kid some age-appropriate (but not sugar-coated) explanation of how things actually went down in the shtetl. A parent whose kid laughs while watching "Sex and the City" should sit tight, but then after a while, urge the kid to shut the TV and go do her homework.

You know you're at the U of C when...

...you're at a (relatively) wild party, and someone in the clump of people you're dancing in announces that he's moving from Republican to libertarian.

Things I've just discovered that I should have long ago

• Winter boots
• iTunes
• The doughnuts at the Smart Museum Cafe
• The clementines at Whole Foods
• The hours before noon (OK, had once known about them, but vacation made me forget.)
• The mistake that is getting off the Blue Line at Grand if you're trying to get to Michigan Ave.

Yay!

Looks like my campaign to make male beauty as respected as female beauty is going better than I'd thought. Finally, somebody arrived at this blog by Googling "Peter Sarsgaard nude," rather than Googling to find pictures of Natalie Portman in a similar state.

When earnest political-correctness means better bathrooms

It happens more often than you'd think. Well, twice, and once was on television. On Seinfeld, George Costanza joins toy-manufacturer Play Now and, pretending to be disabled, gets himself a large and elegant private bathroom. I thought of George today as I entered the "single-user" facility on the fourth floor of the Reg. The new bathroom is a result of the campaign to make the transgendered feel comfortable on campus. Well, I'm by no means transgendered, but I sure was comfortable--the place is huge, with relatively flattering mirrors, a long bench, and one locked door, rather than a series of stalls. Well, as I was looking in the mirror, primping in a stereotypically feminine, Kipnis-angering sort of a way, noticing that my hair is significantly redder than I'd thought it was...I began to wonder whether I was doing something unethical by choosing the single-user over the multi-user ladies' room a few feet away. What if a transgendered person, in the middle of doing research in the 4th floor stacks, really had to go, but couldn't, because some dippy girl was in the single-user, seeing if her eyeliner was smudged?

Rather than write in to the Ethicist, I'm going to defer to my knowledgeable readers. Any thoughts?

Feminism means primping for all

Over at Slate, Laura Kipnis argues that women who care about their looks are fundamentally anti-feminist, because femininity and caring about one's appearance are part of a heterosexist system that keeps women down. Reihan Salam has a good critique of Kipnis's piece, pointing out that femininity mustn't always be defined in self-conscious-adolescent terms.

There's another problem with Kipnis's argument: Given that no society has ever been without beauty standards (though the standards themselves obviously vary), it's hard to picture any contemporary political movement being able to eradicate the deeply human urge to tweeze, diet, tattoo, bleach hair, implant silicone, or receive Japanese hair-straighening treatments. Since looks are always going to matter, why not make them matter to all? (Though she admits that men, too, have their "bodily anxieties," Kipnis sees looks-consciousness as inextricably linked to women trying to look good for men.)

It's a myth that women do not care about men's looks. Sure, male attractiveness is valued less by society than female ("arm candy" generally refers to women) but individual women, all things being equal, and often even with all things being unequal, will pick the better-looking man, for their own pleasure, not for any particular rise in status. So, rather than resolving to stop asking for coffee drinks with skim milk and putting on mascara, feminists who care about their own looks should demand equal primping and dieting on the part of men. Must men wear makeup? Only if it looks good on them, but that's not often the case. (Then again, too much makeup looks silly on women, too.) Must men get nose jobs and facelifts? No, and neither should women, those things are disgusting, dangerous, and tend to make people look worse. Must men stay slim and fit? It's only fair, if they expect women to do the same.

Also in Slate is a piece by Matt Feeney that poses the question, "Why are fat sitcom husbands paired with great-looking wives?" Feeney's answer? It's a male fantasy, but also has women nodding along and saying, "'Yes, I'm supercompetent and I even look great, despite all the crap I have to deal with, and, yes, that's my husband over there, the fat, useless one scratching his nuts.'" Feeney does not suggest that good-looking female characters are supposed to be finding these unattractive male characters sexy. On the contrary, the men on these shows are portrayed as "repellant sexual partners." So, to repeat, women care about male attractiveness, but feel that it would be too much to ask to demand attractive men. While it may be unrealistic to expect women to start demanding that men take better care of themselves, it's far more reasonable than Kipnis's suggestion that looks should cease to matter entirely. And, at the very least, a woman who demands equal attention to looks from a man is no less a feminist than is one who refuses to care about how she looks.

Academy, Modernity, Matrimony

My latest post, on the University Theater auditions, is up at UChiBLOGo. I'm posting there, too, on things of interest to the greater UChicago community, i.e. not on my trips to the zoo or on Theodor Herzl's overbearing mother. For that, stick with WWPD, but I urge you to check out UChiBLOGo as well...

I left The Jew in the Modern World in NYC. And no, this is not me using strange terms to describe one of my relatives back home. It's a book, one that I needed for a class before and that, as it happens, I need for a class I'm taking now, and my mother said she doesn't see it in my room where I'd thought it was. Being the clever Jew in the modern world that I am, I found that they had it in Harper...

Quick response to this article that Dylan linked to: How can it be concluded that, if a high IQ makes a man more likely to marry and a woman less likely, then "[a] high IQ is a hindrance for women wanting to get married while it is an asset for men"? It may well be the case that, of the high-IQ women wanting to get married, their IQ is no hindrance whatsoever, but rather that fewer high-IQ women wish to get married in the first place. Couldn't it be that intelligent men correctly assume they'll lead better lives if married while intelligent women, also correctly, assume they'll be better off staying single? It's not that intelligence is a turn-off to men, but that intelligent women have more to lose professionally by marrying and having kids than do intelligent men. The implication of there being all these desperate-but-brilliant single women, being passed over for ditzes, might be somewhat inaccurate.

Oatmeal

You have to wonder about the paper of record's readership when its second-most-emailed article is this piece on why it's better to slow-cook oatmeal than to make the instant variety. (And no, Jane Brody is not the piece's author. The far less irritating Marian Burros is.) How many people could possibly care to read about hot cereal? Think of all the implied e-recipients of this article--what do they think when they check their email and see that someone has forwarded them a polemic against microwaving oatmeal? Is this such a hot-button issue? Burros notes that one in five Americans eat oatmeal--I'm guessing the figure is more like 9 out of 10 for NYT readers, or else what would explain the buzz around this article?

(By calling this post "Oatmeal," will I now get hits from the hordes who, it seems, spent their time searching the Internet for oatmeal-related information? I certainly hope so.)

The Answer:

Herzl. Commenter and occasional co-blogger Nick (sort of) won, though he cheated and used Google. The passage comes from A. Hertzberg's The Zionist Idea.

First-ever WWPD quiz

The following was said of which well-known Jewish (or half-Jewish) intellectual:

"His mother, who adored him and remained...the dominant influence on his personal life, raised him to dream of himself as meant for great things."

Was it...

a) Philip Roth,
b) Marcel Proust,
c) Theodor Herzl, or
d) "That guy" in your philosophy class.

Please place your bets in the comments to this post.

Quarter 2, Week 1, Day 1

Student morale seems low this winter. In one of my classes, the kid sitting next to me fell asleep. In another, the kid sitting in front of me played a card game on his computer. And this is college, not law school, so there's no need to have computers in class to begin with...

I'd been planning on improving my own morale, between classes, with one of the campus bookstore Starbucks's Mocha Monday specials, but, while the special still exists, it's now more expensive than it had been in previous years, and the bookstore cafe itself is being renovated, so there's no place to sit down. This led me to Classics Cafe, also a nice spot for a mocha. But I was wearing the silly green boots and felt out of place, what with all the tweed. That, and I didn't have any of my books for the quarter yet, so I had nothing to pretend to study...

But I had the happy realization this morning that, even pre-coffee, I'm not as bad at tennis as I'd imagined I'd be, and by not as bad I mean only moderately bad. I hit the ball quite reliably, but it's sort of where the ball ends up that's the problem...

One year ago this month...

It's the one-year anniversary of UChiBLOGo, the official blog of the University of Chicago Magazine. The post I'm linking to, in turn, links back to the first-ever UChiBLOGo post, in which I recount the pastry-addiction I developed in Paris (one that, luckily, could not be sustained in relatively pastry-free Hyde Park).

Unpacking [UPDATED]

I spend a great deal of time comparing NYC with Chicago, with the former almost always being praised in favor of the latter. But today, something different: Certain areas of both cities are just about indistiguishable. I was in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a couple times over break, and spent this evening in Wicker Park, here in Chicago, and if dropped at random into one or the other, with street signs blurred like the face of an innocent bystander walking by as "The Real World" is being filmed, I might not be able to say in which city or neighborhood I was standing.

Only the ATA flight (...do people with persistant coughs get special deals with ATA or something?...) separating the two suggests that those neighborhoods are not in fact just different parts of one big hipster paradise. Both have boutiques where the clothing either is or appears vintage, bars with understated and decidedly sports-free atmospheres, and skinny women with asymmetrical haircuts trying to sell you rustic-looking pastries, scattered, and breaking up long blocks of deserted buildings, small remnants of once-vibrant Eastern European immigrant life, empty lots, and thrift (as opposed to vintage) stores that are most likely picked-over by the more frugal of the hipsters. As it so happens, both are reached by something called an 'El'.

Perhaps what connects the two areas is that both give the visitor the sense of being at once out of the city and more hip and laid-back than those who spend time downtown. These areas (like David Brooks's "bourgeois bohemians") hover between scorning the squares and fearing the cutting-edge go-getters, the unashamedly ambitious. These areas seem less like gentrified urban districts (which is how they're generally described) than like non-urbanites' fantasies of cool city living. While these areas have lingering crime and poverty, they also have that unintimidating look of smaller American cities, with low, but never boxy, buildings, and without the hordes of people striving to make it to the top of their professions, or straining to see the sights. In Wicker Park or Williamsburg, you can opt out of the rat race, not because you're a bohemian, but because the city is dirty, ugly, and crass, and you, like those boring members of your generation who've move to the suburbs, want to keep your distance.

To really get either Wicker Park or Williamsburg, it might help to come from somewhere other than the downtown part of a major American city, since the neighborhoods are both variations of, and ironic comments on, suburban life. Williamsburg has this "mall" (so dubbed ironically, no doubt, as it contains, among other things, an independent coffee shop; an independent book shop; a cheese shop that is quite possibly the most expensive in all five boroughs; a Tibetan store; and a store that sells two seemingly unrelated but nevertheless both counterculture-ish things: vintage apparel and sex toys) which is, like any actual, unironic mall, a more or less continuous row of places to buy stuff, complete with the requisite place to eat stuff. Williamsburg's mall may sell all the items a hipster could dream of, but it is laid out in a way that is easily comprehensible to someone used to traditional malls. Quite different, then, from NYC's West Village, with its confusing, non-numbered, and winding streets, or NYC's Upper East Side (or downtown Chicago's Oak and Walton streets), with its unapproachable storefronts and its dearth of cosy-looking places to get a snack.

Coming from smack dab in the middle of Manhattan, I find places like Williamsburg and Wicker Park charming but slow-paced, and visiting them is, for me, like taking a trip to the country, except instead of seeing goats, you see hipsters. I didn't grow up with malls, so it took me a moment to get the joke when entering the "mall" in Williamsburg. I grew up with access to takeout of an endless number of national origins, so it's difficult for me to tell the ironic all-American diner and the ironic hot-dog stand from the real thing. Lacoste polo shirts were not especially popular at my high school, so I fail to get a kick out of outwitting my former classmates by buying one used at a shop in Wicker Park. I'm not saying that those who come from cities are by definition too sophisticated for these places--being a city kid doesn't necessarily entail sophistication--but that native urbanites are simply not their intended audience...

Finally, something about these neighborhoods seems a bit phony. Maybe it's the illusion that, unlike in the big bad city, in these places, rich and poor live in harmony because no one's really rich. While class and income differences are easy to spot on the Upper East Side, where a real Burberry scarf is on the necks of some but not others, in the hipster neighborhoods, everyone looks shabby and no one eats at a "nice" restaurant. But hipsters are, as everyone knows, wealthy people who have not yet reached the age at which they will cease to find their wealth embarassing. I'm almost certain that the non-hipster residents of these areas are not fooled.

UPDATE

Daniel Moore, "a different type of urbanite" (his words, not mine) has responded.

Uh, packing?

Why are such great things on TV when I'm supposed to be fitting all sorts of winter-wear (along with impractical shoes and other impractical accessories and clothes) into a suitcase?

Casablanca, which I'd never seen before.

Annie Hall, which I've almost memorized.

Brideshead Revisited, which involves a young Jeremy Irons.

I do not have a television at school, which is a good thing, because I can imagine an alternate universe in which, say, Seinfeld would win out over, say, astrophysics...

Which brings me to my New Years Resolution: I am taking two classes this quarter in subjects (tennis and astrophysics) in which I have, if this is possible, a negative amount of natural ability. So my resolution is to do well in both, despite being endowed with neither coordination nor anything that even remotely resembles spatial sense...

Chicagoans: Alive, but sniffling

For fellow Chicagoans, some good news:

"Chicago, which had the unwanted distinction of having more homicides than any other city in the nation a year ago, seems in a single year to have undergone a remarkable turnaround, with killings in 2004 at their lowest tally since 1965."

Now that the law has shown its might, Illinois is focusing on the details, issues that were set aside in the bad old days of 2003. The Chicago Tribune reports that there's "a new state law that says consumers can purchase only two packages of many cold medications in one transaction."

New Years Revelations

My mother told me her plans for now that it's 1994.

A man pointed to the Dakota and confidently explained to his friends that that's where "John Harrison" lived.

I mistakenly assumed 50 degrees meant "summer," and was very jealous of a lap dog on my bus that was wearing what looked to be a warm sweater.

Cappuccinos, sushi, and a trip to the zoo

 

 

 

Eric looks at a seal. 

"Really, really well-written"

For a change, OxBlog links to a diary blog, giving the reason, "it's just really, really well-written." The diary blog, "May Day Cafe," only has four posts so far, and one of them, "Arm-Muscle Man," recounts the young woman's brief romantic encounter with a young man who is not only an Ivy Leaguer, a Rhodes Scholar, and Jewish, but also has "quite nice" arm muscles. The only drawback was that this young man " had managed to acquire a severe case of arrogant arsehole syndrome" but was nevertheless "charming."

The quality of this diary blog's writing might, just might, have had less to do with why it got a link from OxBlog than did its content...

In praise of cellphone use in public places

Cellphone use may be permitted on airplanes. And this is supposed to be a bad thing?

Those who complain about cellphone use in public places seem to imagine that, were it not for the phones, buses, cafes, and the like would be filled with people quietly reading the Classics or scribbling to-do lists. They ignore that loud, obnoxious conversations existed before cellphones, and that they are louder if not more obnoxious when multiple people are actually present. Headphones turned up to full volume, hot dogs with sauerkraut, snapped chewing gum--these all existed before the cellphone, and I'd take overhearing even the dullest cellphone conversation over having to sit near someone consuming a pungent snack any day.

Plane riders should embrace their inner novelists, or at the very least their inner gossips.* Aside from the admittedly annoying rings (which could, as the NYT suggests, be eliminated if phones had to be on vibrate), other people's cellphone conversations can be a welcome change of pace on transportation. They're like two-person ones, except they intriguingly require the eavesdropper to imagine what the person on the other end might be saying. It's incredible the sorts of things people reveal on their phones in public, as though they were talking from the privacy of their own houses. Adult cellphone users, who grew up without any concept of the public, mobile phone call, often do not know to adjust topics to surroundings, which means that a ride on a city bus might reveal that the woman in the seat in front of you is getting a divorce, that the man sitting behind you is a lawyer defending a murderer, and that the young man standing near you just got some. All potentially more interesting than whatever's in your New Yorker.

* Prof. Thomas Pavel convincingly draws a connection between the need for gossip and the desire to read novels. So this is my (perhaps less convincing) attempt to show that this same deeply human need can be met through the supposedly unpleasant act of having to hear the perfect stranger seated next to you yapping away.