what will i do with all these leftover pretzels?

i know that for a select few, the new yorker festival just goes on and on and on . . . they have their seminars and dinner parties and galas and elegantly lit corner booths, and the conversations and debates spin out endlessly into the twinkling, mirthful night. but there is nothing select about me, and my expendable income for the month of october is more or less used up, and so my party is all over. i'm so sad that i don't live in an era of public conversational salons and roundtable fêtes; even in college i could feel the loss, but i wasn't in despair. there was still one coffee shop that people sat around and discussed ideas in, there was an art gallery down the street that hosted biweekly potluck suppers open to anyone in the neighborhood, and i could always corner someone at a party and pick a fight about the estate tax or the bohr model or whether there is such a thing as a nonmisogynistic french film (i still can't decide). now everything happens in chat rooms or comment threads or text messages, you can't get anyone to engage in three dimensions, and it's dreadful. the internet will be the death of artistic movements, i'm sure of it. something happens when you put people with a common interest or goal together in a room that just can't occur when they aren't face to face. a spontaneous and immediate reaction to an idea or statement will always lead to a more rewarding discourse. there are more coffee shops all the time, and they're always full of people, but those people are all sitting at their own tables, talking on their cell phones or clacking away at their laptops, and it's a completely dead atmosphere. for me, anyway. i guess the people in the coffee shops feel o.k. about it. but my heart will always long for the communal, intellectual atmosphere of the belle époque, and i know that all of those folks were fairly select, too, but at least they were trying. if i had more than twelve square feet to host them in, i might try to start up some gatherings of my own. well, if i had more than twelve square feet and a chair, and maybe some kind of table, even if it weren't round, you know, an end table or something, or a tray table, and more than one glass. *sigh* someday.

anyway.

the closer to the word-nerd party, featuring ira glass as the ringmaster and susan orlean, chuck klosterman, and malcolm gladwell as themselves, was not officially a new yorker event, though there were, obviously, a high number of references to the magazine and its practices and contents. not to disparage the festival, but i think last night's talk was better than any of the other literary events i attended this past weekend, because it was so lightly mediated and loosely themed, and because ira mostly wanted the writers to talk to each other. the event was both promotion for ira's new book, the new kings of nonfiction (which actually contains a lot of not-new nonfiction that apparently had been piling up on glass's desk long enough for him to feel compelled to do something with it), and a benefit for 826nyc, the local branch of 826, a national nonprofit organization that offers free after-school programs and tutoring in creative writing for school kids from kindergarten on up. i love that 826 exists. i love that dave eggers, john scieszka, and sarah vowell are heavy presences on its board and keep it a little wacky. i love that a young, broadly lauded writer with a good amount of clout chose to start up a wacky nonprofit to help kids instead of buy a $7 million brownstone so each of his own kids could have a private floor (man, foer, you really turned out to be one glaring disappointment after another). and i love susan orlean and fidgety lefties who bite their nails and scrape the labels off of their water bottles and pick at the untucked tails of their shirts (aww, my secret boyfriend fiddles with inanimate objects, too! we're so perfect for each other). until tonight i just kind of felt all right about ira, but now i love him too, and i don't think i'd ever heard of or read anything by chuck klosterman until a few days ago (sorry, dude, but i stopped flipping through spin when i was about 16), but what the hell—i love you too, man! i love your sweeping hand gestures that have probably proven dangerous to passersby, i love that you babble and flail like a vertiginous speed freak, i love that you love what you do. structured, mediated, q&a-type discussions are great for what they're worth, and sometimes they're the only way you can get things done. but ira just threw a handful of smart, eccentric spazzos together and let them gab about why they love writing about smart, eccentric spazzos, and it was brilliant. and i learned some things, too:

• susan orlean and chuck klosterman both think the word "sequelae" is pronounced "suhkweelia." i don't have a problem with this the way i do with "nucular." i had a conversation with my uncle once about which is worse, someone mispronouncing a word but placing it in an appropriate context, or someone speaking a word beautifully but using it inaccurately. we decided that misusage is a greater sin, because someone who knows what a word means but not how it sounds is someone who reads and retains knowledge and wants to enhance his or her working vocabulary, but someone who has heard a word and repeated it without taking the time to find out exactly what it means is basically a blowhard. and "suhkweelia" isn't an unpleasant-sounding word. "nucular," however, is an abomination, especially now that the incorrectness of the pronunciation has been a topic of public discussion for a while. i'll never fold on that.
  
• malcolm's working on a book about, um, something . . . cultural identity? something unbusinessy, i think, anyway, and it doesn't sound as if anyone will be able to use it to sell more chairs or records or crappy movies,* so that's nice. of course, i could be mistaken; all he really told us was that there's one chapter that he interviewed his mother and aunt for, and i have chosen to grab up that nebulous ball and run all the way to juneau with it. i'm open to most any subject matter, really, as long as little, brown prints it in the same font as the first two. the typeface and leading are so refined, and yet also so approachable and calming. very thoughtfully laid out, those books. so there's no birthday article for me this year, but i can totally live with that.
  
• it's entirely true that most people think of men first when they're asked to name people they admire for intellectual or artistic reasons. my cousin asked me the other day for some music recommendations, and i had listed about twenty artists when he stopped me and said, "it's weird that you don't listen to any girls." but i do listen to girls, and am wild about plenty of them. i just didn't remember them until i was prompted to do so. and then i was very disappointed in myself, because no one should ever forget mirah or ani difranco or mary timony or chan marshall. but i had. it's true for writers and visual artists, too, i think of faulkner and ibsen, chuck close and françois truffaut, but when i sit down and concentrate, all kinds of amazing chicks pop into the foreground. it's really strange, that women don't leap out, or really even lodge. i have to dredge them up, even the ones who've kind of changed my life. but i thought maybe it was me, and now i think it's everyone. isn't that troubling. i mean, i'm not a feminist, exactly, and i don't always get along so well with girls, but there are plenty i'd rather remember than forget. and now i'm worried that i won't.
  

susan touched on the difficulty of being a woman and a reporter, as opposed to a novelist or columnist or food writer, something that didn't require travel and weeks of immersion in a subject's life, and i thought, why should it be harder for a woman to travel than it is for a man? but it isn't necessarily; it's just harder for a woman with a home and family, and it's harder for that woman than it might be for a man with a home and family. it's easy to write it off as the result of women's desire to stay closer to home when they have a family, and to then write off such a desire as something inherently female, but what you're implying when you say a thing like that is that men don't love or miss their children as much as women do, and i doubt that. but in the end it's a personal choice, and all of my tiny x chromosomes aren't enough to enable me to muster up much sympathy for women who choose to have a child and then miss their lives. it's their choice, isn't it? you can decide that the other parent should give up a life instead, or you can decide that you will both carry on as usual and hire a third party to raise your child, but someone will have to sacrifice something on one or the other front. it's impossible for me to believe that women who are working at jobs they enjoy and then decide to have a child don't have a rough idea, one way or another, of what's going to happen once the child arrives. you want one thing most, right? and you pick it. it isn't gender-based, it's person-based. susan's still a writer, and an excellent writer, she just writes less. and maybe that's difficult for her, but she has the career she wanted and is positioned pretty highly within her admittedly male-dominated field. (no one was rude enough to ask ira why only two female writers were included in the current anthology, but i'm sure he was feeling the heat for a minute or two.) am i an awful woman? am i a heartless woman? maybe i'm an ignorant woman. it seems that people of both genders whine a lot about how they can't have it all, but nobody has it all. my sympathies are with the people who don't have enough, or who aren't free to make a lot of choices about their own lives, and i think that susan is not that kind of person. i mean, i'm not that kind of person, even without a chair or a table, so what is she complaining about? i like you, lady, but suck it up.

in the same vein, as much as i hate having to jab malcolm in the kidney with my pointy stick, he occasionally drives me to it, and it really irks me when he mocks the wealthy. i mean, the man ain't broke. he's not digging through the couch cushions for enough change to buy a box of spaghetti at trade fair. he isn't on the wrong side of any tracks. rally for the underclass, sure, but don't sling mud at the rich. again, i think that most people have more than they need, but maybe someone with way, way more than he needs will actually be more willing to hand some of it off in a charitable manner, because that handoff is so unlikely to impact his quality of life. someone in the middle class might decide that he shouldn't have to help anyone else, because he still has a lot less than the people with the most. but if what ultimately matters about wealth is how it's allocated, i'm going to side with the obscenely wealthy people who are donating a fifth of their income to social programs and charities before i'm going to side with the people making $30,000 or $40,000 a year who glare at homeless people and toss the jimmy fund can over their shoulder when it's passed around the movie theater. the residents of southampton may or may not ever have done much of anything at all in terms of supporting worthy causes. i have no idea, and i don't think malcolm does, either. what i'm sure of is that i'd rather align myself with the people who are doing something, even if it's only for the tax deduction, than side by default with the people in my tax bracket, because they certainly aren't always the same people. some people make their assets a central part of their character, but i don't think there's any call to do it for them. the rennert saga was moronic, and more than worthy of extensive pointing and laughing, but i want to laugh, you know, at the case, and not the individuals. maybe there isn't a way to do that. i'm kind of struggling, lately, with efforts to prevent my hatred of certain aspects of people from emerging as hatred of those people, period, and i don't know yet how effectively it can be accomplished. i'm looking for the gray areas. and i know that malcolm is also primarily mocking the acts and not the individuals, but sometimes it's just so hard to visualize a firm line. don't worry, though, i'm not going to stop hating people. god, can you imagine? what a boring, wasted life that would be.

chuck, um, didn't say anything that i feel strongly about or moved to comment on. he seemed smart and funny, and fun, and a bit manic. mostly he seemed just plain happy, with his life and what he's able to do with it, and that's such a lovely thing. but, it's just, i mean, he didn't want to write about the strokes, but he did, and i don't want to read about the strokes, and i won't. and i can only keep up with one magazine at a time, and he writes for about nineteen, so i don't know how often we'll cross paths. alas and alack, but there are only so many hours in the day.

i guess i'm assuming everyone knows about ira glass, but for anyone who doesn't, here. love him or hate him, but don't hate him in my house.

so, yeah, the end of this party. but all is not lost: reviews are forthcoming on other festival events, i swear. you'd never know it to scroll through iaaph these days, but i do care about things that are not malcolm gladwell. not many, but enough to shut the hell up about him every so often, and i'm going to. honest. tomorrow. i think i'd like to talk about mark danielewski for a while, too, if anyone wants to stop by, and the new mcsweeney's collection of very, very short stories is filling my heart with love and blood and other assorted substances of varying densities. i know there isn't much room in this place; go ahead and climb on the bed if you want, and i'll perch up here on the counter, and if everyone brings a glass i'll make sure there's enough to drink. it won't be the start of a revolution, but i think we'll all get on just fine.





* update, 10/10/08, 1:21 PM: i was, um, really, really wrong about this. the eternal optimist meets with eternal slaps in the face, i guess. this book is more about the creative process than the process of marketing creations, though, i think, and its projected release date is awfully close to my birthday in 2008; he's trying.

i know you're on the edge of your seat . . .

fact: adam gopnik is even more self-conscious and eager to both please everyone and not let on that he cares about pleasing anyone in person than he is in print. i hadn't known it could happen, but there it is.

fact: malcolm gladwell does an adorably awkward and fidgety-teenagerish thing with his right foot when he's forced to stand still while speaking. he's also left-handed. i am incredibly happy about both of these things.

fact*: despite the official call, based on a highly unscientific (and uncounted) show of hands and made by the heavily and unabashedly biased mediator, simon schama, who is a professor at columbia, gladwell made a far better argument, in that he more fully and roundly supported his point: ivy league schools make judgments and awards based on criteria other than academic merit, and this is unacceptable for academic institutions of any standing, but particularly for those of such legendary standing as harvard, yale, and princeton. the problem, i think, was that his well-made point didn't fully support his position, which was that the campuses of harvard, yale, and princeton should be levelled and the land sold for condominium development. i'm not without bias myself, as we all know, but i don't agree with that at all. if the aim is to promote social equality within the confines of the grounds, maybe it would be better to turn the space into a kind of public orchard, to be maintained by the pinko zealots effecting the takeover, using the amassed funds in the schools' current accounts. anyone could come in and pick fruit from the trees and then lounge around on the grass thinking brilliant thoughts for free. all of these schools have large bodies of water nearby for their crew teams, so irrigation wouldn't be too much trouble. we could keep some of the older buildings intact and turn them into hostels and mulch sheds. i guess we could grow other things, maybe tubers and legumes, but i do think the plants should be more utilitarian than decorative. but it would have to be something like that, an open-access venture. if you want to do away with the schools because they bar entry to intelligent and motivated but poorly connected individuals from the lower classes, it makes no sense to turn them into high-end housing that those individuals also couldn't get into. of course malcolm was joking about all of that, but still, hon, make a joke that's in keeping with the theme.

gopnik's primary counterargument was the same one i would have made: if you do away with those three schools, three more will move up to take their place as the most recognizable brands in american higher education. people love status, they love being affiliated with things that convey status, they love bearing brand labels that tell onlookers that their lives are better than the average life. applicants to schools like harvard and yale and princeton know that they're buying into a brand. there aren't any illusions about it; most people understand that they can get the same, if not a better, education at another, less well-known institution. but the names of those institutions don't open as many doors. people think something about you when they see that you're wearing a designer label, and they think something about you when they hear that you graduated from yale. but they think it at the level of the brand, not the faculty or curriculum, and you know when you don the label that you are only attempting to project at the level of the brand. schools like harvard, yale, and princeton—and internationally coveted fashion lines like versace and prada—will exist as long as human beings are human beings. we don't always have the time to tell someone we've just met about all the ways in which we are better than him or her; sometimes we need something small that we can flash quickly, like a handbag or an alma mater, in order to get the job done and be on our way.

and gladwell's rebuttal was the same as mine would have been: the desire for such instant and ultimately meaningless recognition is asinine, and we shouldn't allow or encourage or enable universities to accommodate it. we should enact changes that make the name on the tag irrelevant to the assessment of the product, and those changes have to happen at every level. published school rankings should reflect more meaningful measures, such as what becomes of students once they're enrolled and how many of them go on to do things that strengthen society, and people reviewing or applying to colleges should demand more information on how the school serves its active students, instead of how the name of the school serves its graduates. naturally, right? and yet so not the way things tend to be done.

just to be up front, i'll tell you that i applied and was accepted to an ivy league school (not one of the three mentioned above) but decided not to attend it because i was offended by its graduation requirements. specifically, i would have had to pass a swim test in order to receive my degree. this was a common requirement at a number of schools until around 1980, when most places began to realize how goofy and unnecessary it was. the current holdouts include cornell, columbia, notre dame, dartmouth, and swarthmore. i can swim just fine, but it bothered me, and continues to bother me, that whether or not i graduated could hinge on something that was 100 percent nonacademic. i think the requirement's aquatic nature got under my skin, too. there's something about water and the gilded upper crust in my mind—the newport oceanfront mansions, sculling, gatsby's pool, i don't know. i kept thinking of those 1980s movies where the rich preppy in his tennis whites finishes waxing his yacht in preparation for the regatta and then goes over and kicks sand on the poor townie schlub who really, really, really needs the prize money but will never win (or so everyone assumes) because he can't already afford a killer boat. but a school that doesn't accept students purely on the strength of their academic merits can't be expected to graduate them that way. i went to a private non-ivy college, spent two miserable years there, and then transferred to the state college down the street. the main building of that college had once been a public high school and still had lockers on its ground floor. there were never more than thirty students in a class, the professors were supportive and always accessible, i was able to pay my entire tuition in cash, and i learned approximately eighty-three times more in a semester than i had at my first school. when it comes to basic undergraduate education, failure should be an impossibility for a student who wants and is trying to succeed. if the school provides access to the proper resources, it is impossible. at my state school, there was a very high degree of support for students in terms of assistance outside of the classroom, arrangements made for students who had to hold jobs, flexible scheduling, etc. at the private institution, where i was paying fifteen times the tuition, those things were not really available. of the twenty or so people i became friendly with during my freshman orientation, all incredibly bright and driven kids who'd been near the tops of their high school classes, only about half graduated on time, and some never graduated at all. do i think this means all state schools are boffo? absolutely not. nor do i think all private or top-tier institutions are full of crap. what i think is that you can find outstanding colleges, and lousy ones, at every level of the current ranking system, and i can't help but think that that must mean the current ranking system is pretty full of crap. so i agreed with malcolm before he said anything. what, are you shocked? like that never happens.

i agreed with gopnik, though, too, to a tiny degree, in that it makes less sense to get rid of elite institutions than it does to attempt to reform their operations or enlighten the public so that they can, i guess, demand reformed operations. but he didn't offer any suggestions as to how we might do that. he didn't offer any suggestions at all, really. what he did was call malcolm the pol pot of parchment (at least three times); compare the grouping of harvard, yale, and princeton to the factitious but catchy "axis of evil" triad; insist that the ivy league provides tremendous opportunity without referencing anything even resembling a fact in support of that statement (and even then he was talking about opportunity for its students, or maybe just its graduates, when the problem is that it is denying opportunities to deserving applicants based on snooty, capricious whims); and closed with the warning that a vote for malcolm gladwell's america is a vote for george bush's america, but a vote for gopnik's america is a ballot cast in obama-esque optimism. a gimmicky and failed (and sort of rovian) presentation, i thought, which was too bad, because if he'd tried he could maybe have gone somewhere with the original idea. or maybe that was the best he could do, i don't know. on the quasi-upside, i have decided that his smugness is affected rather than intrinsic. i'm having some trouble figuring out why anyone would choose to project smugness. it could be a defensive posture (new york in the 1980s was a rather fierce place), or perhaps it's the result of parisian influence. i really can't say, never having lived in either place, and especially never having been a short canadian man in either place. i do not like him more, exactly, but i am infuriated by him less. and that's the best i can do. there was no ass-rolling, anyway. sorry to disappoint, kids, i know some of you were keeping your fingers crossed for an old-school rumble, but he was so sweaty and ill at ease up there under those bright lights (which only he had to speak under, weirdly; when malcolm was talking the hall was dimmed. does anyone know what that was about? it was so odd) with his shirt collar open, trying to look so smooth, grasping at liberal straws, that even i would have felt too mean to end it all by letting his sizable audience watch him get beat up by a girl. he and i both know the truth, and that's enough for me.

it was all pretty light, as it should have been, because in the end there's just nothing to it. if we all agree that there are excellent schools that are more willing to accept funny-looking students with no legacies or trust funds than the ivy league schools are, then we could probably agree that those students should attend those schools instead of harvard, yale, or princeton, since they'll probably have a better time somewhere else, anyway. it's an undeniable irritation that someone who went to harvard can simply say "i went to harvard" and be greeted with more and better job or postgraduate offers, despite his high-C average, than a student who maintained an A average at the university of virginia. but the things that need to happen in order to change that can either be brought about now, with schools operating as they already do, or not at all. we have to change our priorities. razing a few lecture halls won't help with that. refusing to pay top dollar and beyond for a designer logo might help that. but that isn't really the american way.




* fact: i really do say "fact" in this way when i'm speaking out loud. it's one of my less endearing conversational traits, right after my unfortunate air-quotes affliction, but you're here for the real me, right? and that's what you're getting.

the blue-chip blues

since last summer, when i sat in on my first-ever 401k meeting and was told that if i had any brains i'd start building a diversified portfolio that included some top-notch, dependable corporations like wal-mart and philip morris right that second, i have wondered how i will survive once i turn 65. i do not want to invest in wal-mart. i do not want to support philip morris. i have no interest in funding or benefiting from any business i am not a contented consumer of. but where does that leave me? the most successful businesses, to the best of my knowledge, are almost never the most planet or people friendly, and the trend seems to be for the big, bad companies to get bigger and badder and the earnest, kindhearted endeavors to be mushed into so much opaque goo like fruitflies on a countertop. i feel bad enough about where my paycheck is coming from—ever since sonia shah enlightened me about american pharmaceutical companies' tendency to conduct dubious clinical trials overseas, unfettered by the burdens of informed consent or structured oversight, i have scanned every medical study submitted for publication with a squeamish, twitching eye—and i'm generally quite careful about where i spend it, though i accept that there's no such thing as a perfect business. but if investing turns out to be as essential to my future financial well-being as everyone keeps insisting it is, will my sentimental pinkoism be an option? is this why activism is predominantly a youth-centric phenomenon? is my choice doomed, in the end, to be between my soul and my savings?

at the time of the meeting, my decision was to not devote any time to anwering those questions and to instead go on putting my money into a bank account like i've always done, because i'm relatively young and don't intend to bring any dependents into the world, and at this point even surviving to 65 is a notion i'm fairly ambivalent about. so i'll never retire early and spend my golden years learning how to play the piano and speak perfectly accented gaelic; so what? i'll have done what i believed was right—or at least, i'll not have done some things i was pretty certain were wrong—and that'll be just fine.

but once i turned 28 i found i was unable to stop thinking of myself as 30, and 30 kind of looks like 40, and when i'm 40 my parents will be getting ready to retire, and god knows they're not holding significant stock in coca-cola, or anything at all, and they're still paying off the second mortgage they took out to remodel the kitchen, which isn't quite halfway remodeled, and someday someone will have to take care of them, and it won't be my sister because even though she's finally moved into her own apartment she still stops by my parents' house once a week to demand cash for gas and cigarettes, so it'll probably be me, but if i pay off my car loan just so i can take out a new loan for a condo and never manage to put more than $200 a month into that savings account with its 4.5 percent apr, how will i make sure that they never have to sell that house, which they've dedicated all that time and labor to remodeling, because they can't afford the heating bills anymore? what if someone gets sick? what if a satellite crashes through the roof? what if i have a near-death experience at 43 and decide i must spend at least a year in the rainforest canopy of madagascar documenting the mating rituals of ring-tailed lemurs? how will i afford to pay someone to water my plants while i'm gone?

*sigh* it seemed i would have to start feathering the nest after all, even if only because i am neurotic and plagued by obsessive guilt and an overbearing tendency toward fix-it-ness. knowing i wouldn't be able to wring any satisfactory advice from my coworkers, i turned to other venues. the search yielded both good news and bad, and i would prefer to get the bad out of the way. so.

some of you may already be familiar with the vice fund, a mutual fund that invests exclusively in industries considered immoral, unhealthy, or otherwise distasteful, and which are thus guaranteed to be profitable until the rapture and beyond (the web site refers to them as "recession-proof"—essentially the same thing, but slightly more inviting). it specializes in tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and, curiously, aerospace and defense. i say curiously not because i think the u.s. aerospace and defense programs are spectacular or spectacularly moral—i do not—but because even i would never have thought to categorize them as a vice. a waste of money, maybe, or a national penile implant . . . leave it to the experts, i suppose, to remind me that a vice is simply an unnecessary, self-interested, often misguided indulgence that does the indulger little to no net good, whether that indulger is an individual or country. the fund was started in 2002 and has provided average returns of nearly 19 percent to antihumanitarians devoid of any semblance of a social conscience for the past three years. i had the heartbreaking misfortune to catch charles norton, the vice fund's portfolio manager, speaking to debbie elliott on a recent npr broadcast. if i had to pick one favorite quote, i guess it would be this one:

one of the most important things that we like about these is that the government is a large beneficiary, uh, particularly in gaming and tobacco. what that means is that the government has a financial incentive to, uh, make sure that these industries flourish. . . . we don't perceive socially responsible funds as our competitors; socially responsible funds need to do what's in the best interests of their shareholders, which is all we try to do as well.

well, we already knew that the government *hearts* tobacco, didn't we? and i hope you weren't kidding yourself about how it honestly felt about you. "but," debbie wants to know, "don't you ever feel bad or even guilty about investing in products that do take such a toll on society and, in the case of tobacco, even kill people?" i bet maybe some of you are curious, too; well, mr. norton? don't you?

no, because when you're a serious investor, you have to check your emotions at the door. emotions are the enemy when it comes to making sound investment decisions, so we don't come at this with any personal biases. we come at this just as a purely objective analyst, and in our perspective, those types of judgments have no place in the investment process.

well, i thought, that settles it: i am not cut out for serious investing. i'll have to make one final investment in a new mattress big enough to hide all my money in and/or under, because my emotions refuse to be left anywhere, regardless of the circumstances, and now i'm all worried about what sort of bedevilment my bank might be up to. sorry, mom; i know we grew up in that house and all of our childhood pets are buried next to the deck, but one of us will probably have a pet when you move to your economy retirement village, so we can bury something there, too. dad, you'd better lay off either the beer or the burgers, because i'm not going to be able to help you out with hospital bills for liver and heart problems; you pick one or the other and commit to it. if you need me, i'll be in a fetal position on the floor of my closet, whimpering and cursing the free market. sometimes when i do that i don't hear the phone right away, so go ahead and leave a message, and yes, i am getting enough calcium. oh, woe and anguish, oh sadness and despair, oh world where a successful portfolio manager's number one rule is "don't sample the merchandise."

but you remember, don't you, when i said there would be good news?

socially conscious, or "virtue," funds have been around for years—longer than the vice fund—and while they do pretty well and certainly make investments worthy of their title, most of the funds are affiliated with specific religions. i am not affiliated with a specific religion, and while i feel fine about all of the religions out there, i wasn't sure about throwing my lot in with one i wasn't a part of just to make a few bucks. it seemed, well, sinful. in addition, it's rare to find a virtue fund that's truly virtuous across the board; an environmentally focused fund might look the other way if a company with a strong record of conservation and minimal pollution exercised poor corporate governance, for example, and vice versa. you are forced, effectively, to choose your poison and either inject it into the veins of the working class or dump it into a river. this may be a preferable alternative to zero-conscience investing, but it didn't exactly ring my bell.

well, a few days ago i discovered the blue fund, which offers two diversified mutual funds based on "core progressive values like environmental sustainability, community participation and respect for human rights." companies included in the portfolios are routinely investigated to ensure their commitment to these values—all of them—is sincere and ongoing; they're also required to have made the majority of any corporate political donations to democratic candidates or organizations. while i'm iffy on the political mandate, there is, as i said, no such thing as a perfect business, and since i can't remember the last time i backed a candidate who wasn't a democrat it's not the end of the world for me. and even if i were a republican, if i still felt as strongly about all of those other issues as i do i'd probably be willing to accept the trade-off. this being the wonderfully free country that it is, conservatives are more than welcome to do their best to organize a red fund that accomplishes all of the same goals for the other side. the blue fund portfolios are still peppered with pharmaceutical companies and retail monoliths, but at least they are being watched by people who appear to have clutched their emotions to their chests and barreled right through the door with them. take that, charles norton.

probably, in the end, the ideal approach for me would be to build my own portfolio one fastidiously researched company at a time; but given my utter dearth of investment savvy and the degree to which i overanalyze the merit and morality of EVERY SINGLE FREAKING LITTLE THING, that task is a bit more than i could accomplish right now. at this point i am simply relieved to know that i am not alone in my desire to back things i'm actually happy to stand behind, and that more motivated people who share that desire have created some options for me. it's such a relief, in fact, that it's almost like being 28 again. that means i can wait to fill out that ira paperwork until next year, by which time i'm certain the stock market will be dominated by wind farms, electric cars, and cradle-to-cradle computer manufacturers, making the whole process that much easier. i may get to keep my soul—in all of its pink, blue, and green glory—after all.

whole foods and lobster: smooth on the outside, slimy in the middle

i remember being floored by the animal-rights uprising and whole foods' subsequent acts of contrite concession last year regarding the sad plight of the supermarket lobster, my shock resulting primarily from the fact that the debate was taking place at all. if anyone did not know or has forgotten, advocates were up in arms not (publicly, at least) over the fact that the lobster was destined to die horribly in a vat of boiling liquid like a medieval heretic but rather that it was forced to come into routine physical contact with other lobsters in the days prior to its execution. yes, yes, yes, all living creatures should be granted the opportunity to live the best possible life, and lobsters are solitary creatures in the ocean, challenging most any other lobster they encounter in the watery atlantic wilderness to a duel, and your local supermarket's lobster tank is a lot like a veal pen, and the whole thing is endlessly troubling to our beautiful minds. but if you are willing to purchase a lobster and drop it flipping and thrashing into a roiling cauldron--even if you plan to give it a few shots of whiskey first, as my family always did*--there is really no way for me to take your pleas for mercy and humane conditions seriously. the best possible life means the most peaceful death, and head-first into the steaming pot ain't it. if the lobster must die, it seems to me that it ought to be killed right on the boat in the quickest and most painless manner possible. and life in a pvc tube, while perhaps affording a sense of security, isn't really living, and certainly isn't living well--even for a large aquatic arthropod. the innate hypocrisy permeating the entire discussion left a taste in my mouth not unlike that of turned shellfish, as does the senseless rule prohibiting the execution of a condemned prisoner when he or she has a fever. you are against putting others to death or you are not, and the drawing of arbitrary lines regarding when killing is cruel and when it isn't is a meaningless practice that serves only to soothe the draftsman. still, though, when whole foods agreed to stop selling live lobsters, i viewed it as a baby step in the right direction and smiled a weak, less than defeated smile. for about eighteen seconds.

banning the sale of live lobsters was never going to have any impact on the chain's pursuit and acquisition of live lobsters, since the walruses and carpenters who were shedding empathetic tears in the deli department were still dreaming buttery clambake dreams. because the customers are always right, whole foods found a way to get all of the lobsters' blood and sadness off of said customers' hands and put it back where it belongs: in the water--the 87,000 psi water, which kills a lobster via intense compression (probably in a less than instantaneous fashion) and blows the shell clean off its body, leaving the shiny, succulent, sterilized corpse to float to the surface.


yummy! and cruelty free! if it's true that lobsters can't feel pain, which would be the result of their not possessing anything that we might recognize as a brain. (this sensory deficit has been supported and contested a number of times by various entities, but i think it wise, or at least thoughtful, to err on the side of caution; it might do us well to remember that for many, many years, doctors believed newborns and infants weren't developed enough to feel pain, either, and surgery was routinely performed on very young children with minimal anesthesia.) of course, if lobsters do lack the sort of neural anatomy that would allow them to register being slowly and simultaneously crushed and blown up, are they really likely to suffer psychological trauma from being enclosed in a crowded, confined space? and if that isn't likely, why did whole foods bother to change anything about its practices at all?

well, because their customers are sensitive. and whole foods cares about its customers--especially their hands, with which they reach into their pockets and bags and withdraw their wallets. so when the chain decided to open a new store in maine, they asked the sensitive customers in that part of the country how they were feeling. and the customers said, "we feel like we want you to sell live lobsters, and it makes our hands tired when you tell us you aren't going to." and whole foods was disarmed by their openness and honesty, their willingness to make themselves vulnerable, and it relented: live lobsters will be sold in portland.

perhaps you, as i did at first, have leapt to the conclusion that the shot-callers at whole foods are a bunch of two-faced, money-grubbing ne'er-do-wells who will say anything to placate their sprout-loving, organic-hemp-draped base. but their commitment to compassion is as strong as ever: the lobsters will be housed in private rooms (the sort that were previously deemed insufficient), and each one sold will be killed via a 110-volt shock administered by an employee in the store, thus "spar[ing] them the agony of being boiled alive in a pot of water." the rest of the country is, apparently, not strong enough even for this method of lobster dispatch, which still forces the customer to be in the room while his or her meal is rendered lifeless. but up in the north country the natives are hewn from hardier stock, and if they want their lobsters to be electrocuted before their very eyes, well, by god, that's what they'll get, store policy or no.

listen, eat lobster, don't eat lobster, but choose a side and stand on it. i think there's something wrong with supporting an action one couldn't bear to participate in, and so i don't eat anything that i would have a problem killing with my own hands. my grandmother loved lobster but couldn't take hers apart by herself or eat while the lobster's head was "looking at her." this bothered me, so i taunted her with lobster-face puppet shows. i felt justified in forcing her to face her own contradictions. i think it's something everyone should do. maybe what whole foods ought to do is set up a tank like the tide pool exhibits at large aquariums, where children get to handle starfish and horseshoe crabs, and force customers to capture and stun their own crustaceans. it would be a fantastic back-to-nature experience for everyone, even the lobsters, and those who insist it's all right to eat shellfish because they're incapable of experiencing discomfort could prove that that opinion is more than just a security blanket. it wouldn't be the first time someone had made a sport of it. we claim to favor accountability in our politics and our business dealings, and members of our society have been known to praise, and occasionally engage in, acts motivated by sincerity and conscience. isn't it time, finally, for everyone--including and especially whole foods--to put their money where their salivating mouths are?






* my father and uncles also liked to place the liquored-up lobsters on the kitchen floor and encourage them to race and/or fight with one another or the family pets, as they had generally had more than a little to drink by then themselves. i do not miss the taste or smell of seafood, nor do i yearn for the summers of my childhood.

in a post-9/11 world

what does this look like to you? a lite-brite, right? or something that might be hung on a refrigerator in a house where an eight-year-old child lives? perhaps you recognize it as what it is--a depiction of a relatively (though, apparently, not universally) well-known cartoon character who will be making an appearance in a feature film that's coming out in march. but you have failed the "war on terror" rorschach, because anyone who appreciated the constant peril america is facing in these dangerous and troubling times would instantly recognize this object as a bomb and make numerous hysterical calls to authorities, who would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. or, alternatively, such a person would make a calm and informative call to authorities, expressing muted curiosity over the nature of the object, and authorities would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. at least, that's how we roll here in beantown.

i appreciate the need for swift measures to ensure public safety, and of course it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with a mysterious, blinking box. but the way boston officials dealt with this situation created mass panic where there had been none and where there had been no need for any, and the fact that these innocuous circuit boards have been up and functioning all over the city for about three weeks isn't likely to quell anyone's fear about the ease with which a person could install a less harmless electronic device. the ad campaign has been running for weeks in nine other cities, and police in those places managed to cope with the situation with a minimum of shouting and foaming and public uproar. governor deval patrick, whom i was so proud of only a few short months ago, wants to prosecute the two men who, after being hired by a third-party ad agency, hung the boards, as well as turner broadcasting, the parent company of the cartoon network, for the full cost of the response effort, and i think that's ridiculous. if my son's friend leaves a plastic snake on my kitchen floor and i see it and lose my mind and throw my microwave at it, i don't get to sue that boy's parents for the cost of the appliance and the amount i'll have to pay someone to come in and fix the dent in the linoleum; that boy isn't responsible for my extreme overreaction. a non-crazy person would take a moment or two to assess the situation before calling in a swat team--even if that non-crazy person had once been bitten by a snake. what happened in this city yesterday was nonsensical and embarrassing, and turner broadcasting isn't to blame for it.

mayor menino, whom i've also stuck up for adamantly countless times in the past, says, "it is outrageous, in a post-9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme." but what's really outrageous is that, knowing the emotional and psychological state of most americans, we still can't take the time, or simply don't have the means, to distinguish between a marketing scheme and a citywide act of terrorism before we initiate the kind of large-scale response that leaves a still-shaken populace soiling its misinformed drawers. there are plenty of people who deserve some disappointed glares, but i don't think any of them work for adult swim.

the two men currently being held on bond in the incident, peter berdovsky and sean stevens, are local multimedia artists who specialize in lighting effects and vj events. you can see photos of events they've worked on here, and you can tell mayor menino to take a deep breath and admit to some culpability in the madness here.

pictures in invisible ink

it's secret pal day here in the states—at least, i think it is. it might have been yesterday, and it might be this coming sunday; the little-known holidays are a bit like floating islands. but they're no less worth celebrating for that, and of course there's no one i'd rather secretly celebrate with than my #1 secret boyfriend. awwww, aren't we cute? now forget you ever saw us. i can neither confirm nor deny having anything to do with that image.

what i can confirm is that this week's new yorker contains malcolm's latest article, which he made a point of speaking right up about the second the issue hit the stands. obviously, after our unfortunate misunderstanding regarding his last piece, he wasn't taking any chances about provoking my bitter, secret wrath. he needn't have worried, though; it's early yet, but all signs point to the universe being more solidly on our side in this new year.

when i stepped through my front door the wednesday evening before last, i did so onto my january 8 issue of the new yorker, which had fallen open to the table of contents after being violently shoved through the (more than wide enough) mail slot. i looked down at its ragged edges and crunched corners and thought, first, "if that poem was from the mailman, i'm in bigger trouble than i thought, because he's taken to destroying the things i love," and second, "oooohhh, i see; the mailman is jealous—'cause my boyfriend sent me a leeeeeetter!" you might be interested to know that january is national letter-writing month, making this revelation all cosmic and adorable. but you might just as easily be not interested at all, and so i'll get on with the story. *ahem*

malcolm's name is very pretty in italics, with all its graceful "l"s and round, welcoming vowels. it's so pretty that i sat right down on the hallway floor to gaze at it, and once i did that i had my third thought:

"enron? aw, damn."

fact: i am not business minded. i don't follow stock reports or bone up on mergers or care what steve jobs calls his company, i'm not shocked or whipped into a scandal-ogling frenzy when corporations do things that hurt their shareholders or employees, and i don't expect anyone i invest my money with to care about what happens to me after i've handed over that money. i have a checking account and a savings account, i pay my bills, i avoid stores that utilize business practices i can't get behind, and that is everything that i have or would like to have to do with global markets. so i was pretty sure that there was nothing more i'd be excited to learn about enron, and besides, malcolm had already written an article about enron, and while i appreciate his enthusiasm and his willingness to doggedly worry a subject until the knot of it gives and falls into a simpler, more linear construct . . . actually, i appreciate that rather a lot . . . and that first enron article was only kind of about enron, and it wasn't half bad . . . i mean, i had to at least give it a chance, didn't i? because i trust the guy.

so i leaned back against the front door in my zipped-up coat and started reading, and i was on the third page before i realized i'd never taken my bag off from over my shoulder, that's how right i was to keep the faith.

i won't lie to you, kids, i really don't care about the enron case in and of itself, and nothing malcolm or anybody else says is likely to induce any radical upheaval in the extent to which my eyes glaze over at business speak. but at some point along the way, out of sheer necessity, this piece changes from an article about enron into something that is only shaped like an article about enron, so that it can more fully become the thing it started as. see, knots come undone a loop at a time, but you can't untie one without constantly reminding yourself of the string's continuity; the process of disentangling a knot has to be as much about the whole as the loops. you have to picture the whole, follow that length of material from one end of the snarl through all its ups and downs and ins and outs, imagine the twists and snags at the center, the part that's hidden from sight—and then you have to move that picture to the back of your mind and focus the rest of your attention on one small, isolated section at a time. i can do this with actual, physical knots; malcolm can do it with stories, which, when they're worth telling, are built just like knots. and while nothing, apparently, is gnarlier than american corporate law, and even though business transactions can be vast and fluid and abstract, at the middle of this particular knot there's nothing but us—us, not just a handful of enron employees and some ruined investors. what went wrong with enron goes wrong in countless other realms all the time, and this story works because it, nearly all alone in the googolplex write-ups on the company's downfall, actually points that out.

so, i don't know what to say about jeffrey skilling. i have absolutely no idea, after reading the piece twice and following the public discourse on the case and studying the law review that inspired and informed the article (the key points of said law review being so surprisingly enthralling, by the way, that i'm not even going to comment on its more wince-worthy spelling and grammatical errors—starting now), whether "fraud" is an entirely accurate description of the wrongs that were committed, and i'm not at all convinced that skilling should have been held as singularly responsible for those wrongs as he's been, regardless of how one chooses to categorize them. if i didn't know what good company i was in, i'd probably be deeply troubled by that. instead, i'm going to accept that there are things going on in the world that are currently beyond my grasp and focus on the fractions of the article that, for me, lit up parts of various other big pictures. like this one:

mysteries require that we revisit our list of culprits and be willing to spread the blame a little more broadly. because if you can't find the truth in a mystery—even a mystery shrouded in propaganda—it's not just the fault of the propagandist. it's your fault as well.

ooooooooooh, he's mad. he's also right. naturally, people have already tried to run him up a pole for saying a thing like that, misconstruing (or misrepresenting; i'd swear on a chicago 15th that at least a few of them are definitely misrepresenting) his stance as a defense of enron's practices, which were unquestionably sketchy (if, perhaps, not exactly shady; but again, i'm not certain) and deserving of condemnation. in his own explanation of his intentions malcolm refers to the article as a "semi-defense," but i doubt i'd have phrased it even that strongly. what the work boils down to is a reframing of enron's breakdown, and it should force people to think about why the word "enron" inspires such an instantaneous flood of negativity, and why we feel justified in giving that feeling free reign. i can't imagine the majority of americans not saying skilling deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison, but i'm every bit as skeptical that a majority of that majority could enumerate skilling's sins. it's imperative, though, that we force ourselves to understand why we've come to the conclusions we've come to in matters like this—matters where futures, where lives, are at stake—because if we fail at that step every subsequent action is rendered utterly indefensible.

i'm going to walk away from enron for a bit, though, now, and venture into the deep, dark, chilling woods that are home to all of the other ideas the phrase "mystery shrouded in propaganda" brings to mind.

the president's approval rating in the united states right now is, according to the most recent zogby poll, about 30 percent. (i think that's dizzyingly high, but i'm just one girl.) in april of 2003, right after the start of the war in iraq and the "fall" of baghdad, his approval rating was closer to 70 percent. in 2002, when he was busy trying to make his case for invading iraq, approval of the president dropped consistently from its october, 2001, high of nearly 90 percent to a low of just above 50 percent in february of 2003, and then skyrocketed when he declared the end of major combat. but he's been the same president the entire time, and the war in iraq has been the same war the entire time; most reasonable people recognized that the combat hadn't ended in may of 2003 and was unlikely to wind to a close over a day or two just because the president had said so. the problem, i guess, was that too many people at that point weren't being reasonable; but does it make sense to assume they've become more reasonable since then? the nation's shift in attitude regarding the war is being touted as a collective awakening, hundreds of millions of people suddenly coming to their senses about a president's, a cabinet's, a party's persistent self-interest and disingenuousness. but i don't see it that way.

when bush presented his new strategy for iraq on wednesday, the plan that had won him approval ratings twice as high, not to mention reelection, a few years earlier was torched for being neither new nor, in truth, a strategy. it might seem like the american people have woken up, since they're no longer buying the rhetoric and propaganda they'd seemed so moved by in the past. but it's got nothing to do with learned lessons. a few years ago, what the american people wanted was revenge. now, they want their families back. they haven't learned anything except that they don't enjoy putting their money where their mouths are, and what's worse is they can't see it, because they aren't putting any effort into understanding—truly, completely understanding—why they've changed their minds, or why they made the decision they made in the beginning.

in the previously cited law review, jonathan macey says this about group decision-making dynamics:

[O]nce boards of directors have been in place for a while, they are likely to embrace management’s perspective. More specifically, after a decision is made and defended by a board, it will affect future decisions such that those decisions will comport with earlier actions. For example, studies of the decision-making process that contributed to the escalation of the Vietnam War showed that leaders paid more attention to new information that was compatible with the earlier decisions. They tended to ignore information that contradicted those earlier assumptions. As one researcher observed, “there was a tendency, when actions were out of line with ideas for decisionmakers to align their actions.” Once ideas and beliefs become ingrained in the mind of a board of directors, the possibility of altering those beliefs decreases substantially. As Tom Gilovich has argued, “beliefs are like possessions, and when someone challenges our beliefs, it is as if someone criticized our possessions.”

in fact, someone had criticized our possessions, and us ourselves, and had ended 2,973 lives to bring the insult home. everything we knew and trusted had been brought to its knees; our hearts were broken. in order for oversight to be effective, macey says, it must be objective, and there was no hope of the average american citizen approaching objectivity at that time. when management's perspective was that we should invade afghanistan and take out the people who had attacked us, no one would have dreamed of dissenting. but when the management selected a new enemy and proceeded to paint it as every bit as much of a threat as the original enemy, if not worse, when they tried to take 300 million people's fear and confusion and misery into their hands and squeeze it, pressing their thumbs into the tears and punctures until everyone was wailing and blind, it stopped being an issue of choosing whether or not to dissent; under those circumstances, most people, if they don't fight to retain it, lose the ability to think objectively, or at all.

so objective refutations of flimsy assertions not only got buried in obfuscations and distractions and reiterations of catch phrases but were actively ridiculed by party members and newly rabid patriots who couldn't imagine any circumstances under which questioning the direction their leader's finger was pointing in didn't amount to treason. when that finger pointed to war, they didn't seek out information that would prove that such a move was neither inevitable nor necessary, even though such information was abundant, and they didn't embrace those ideas when other people pointed them out again and again and again.

the united states chose bush in 2004, after he ran on a platform of intimidation, threadbare slogans, and a guarantee of business as usual. and now that they've gotten what they asked for, what they've earned by failing to recognize or even look for the truth about a situation they had a massive investment in and should have been scrounging for every shred and scrap of objective intelligence on, what they've built for themselves by failing to just plain think,

they've turned en masse to point their own fingers at the people they placed the order with and say, "how dare you. how dare you be dishonest. how dare you do this to me."

when people thought enron was winning, they didn't want to know anything else. someone was responsible for providing them with information, and the information they were getting from that someone was to their liking; they let that be the end of the story. but the information being furnished wasn't the whole story, and while its purveyors must be held accountable for their actions, it is not their fault that no one involved wanted to admit—or even know—that they were meeting with far less success than they were being led to believe.

as dense as the bush administration's fog of propaganda was, there were elements of information that shed enough light to cut through it. some people affixed them to their pith helmets and marched up and down the street ringing bells, while 200 million people hurled fruits and vegetables and stones and slurs and flags and ribbons at them. those rioting mobs weren't different people at the time of last november's election; they just voted differently. the information they're getting isn't pleasant anymore, and they'd like to hear from someone else. but how much sense does that make? how does that signify an awakening? you could throw every last republican in the country into the grand canyon with a pocket full of trail mix and a pound of jerky and tell them that it's their turn to fight and sacrifice, but of course your problem wouldn't be solved. because the untruth that was sold to you was one you, at the time, said you were willing to pay for, and when that transaction leads to disaster, it's your fault as well. america, like a willful child, has gone from a parent who won't give it a cookie to one it thinks probably will. certain circumstances might change, but the practice that brought them about won't, and when we decide we don't like this cookie in however many years and would actually like a popsicle, we'll switch loyalties again. no objectively reasonable thought in sight, not from sea to shining sea.

i couldn't care less about enron. what i care about is people making solid decisions based on all of the verifiable information at their disposal and then accepting responsibility for the fallout from those decisions. what i care about is blame being assigned as it should be, by people who are in a position to know where that blame honestly lies.

jeffrey skilling is taking a hard, more or less solitary fall for a collective wrong that involved all kinds of irresponsible investments and convoluted hand-offs and insufficient models and impossibly unreadable documents—but he's been convicted of fraud. i don't know enough about corporate law to say whether or not, based on what i've read, that's a crime he committed, but i, like malcolm, would like his conviction and associated sentence to be something no one had any questions about. i'd like as many convictions as possible to go that way. whatever your interest in business, whatever country you hang your hat in, you owe it to, at the absolute least, yourself to make certain your legal system is operating in a just and clear-eyed manner.

sometimes ours fails. but it's our fault as well, and i am pointing my very angry finger at an extremely broad population of people who i'm afraid will never, ever care about a word i'm saying.

*sigh* i won't fix the universe tonight, anyway. so i'll close my little rant with this: all of you out there fighting the good fight, working like hell to think with the best parts of your heads, trying to hold yourselves and each other up while you watch the world around you fail you and fail you and fail you, doing all you can to make sense of it even when you have no reason to hope that it will ever make sense: you've got an extremely loyal pal.

i am angry at slate

no doubt the site's staff are weeping into their macchiatos about it, too, but i won't hide it for their sake. i'm too disappointed to care about sparing anyone's feelings.

the idea of a filmed execution was always, in my mind, one of those morbid jokes thrown out at the tail end of a conversation about a society's ethical and intellectual decline; you know, "if they keep it up with these reality shows, there won't be anything left to put on the air but people eating babies and live executions." the image of a mob of townsfolk gathering around the gallows was a symbol of a darker age, one which we, in our triumphant role as citizens of The Fucking Greatest Fucking Nation Fucking Ever, could laugh about disparagingly from our pre-fab homes with their bleach-coated counters and ultracivilized sofa sets. but i haven't been watching the reality shows, and so i didn't realize how far down the chute things had slid. the cell phone footage of saddam hussein's execution is all over the internet, and while i would expect it to crop up on independent pages and wouldn't have been at all surprised to find it front and center on, say, the fox news site (where, in actuality, it occupies no such position), i was deeply creeped out to see links pointing to pages with names like FunnyVideoSpot.com and comic2.com, and i was terribly unhappy to find the video smack-dab in the center of slate, with its eye-catching red and yellow "graphic content" banner giving the finger to the idea of journalistic decorum. i never looked to jacob weisberg and his apple dumpling gang for even-tempered objectivism, but i did believe i could count on them to not be morally bankrupt sensationalists. sometimes i had to squint to get it to pop up out of its verdana background like a typographic autostereogram, but there was, as a rule, some worthwhile information in almost every piece of work they put up.

almost.

william saletan's "human nature" column, slate's version of a scientific catch-all, may or may not live up to its title. all but one of the ten headlines in the current list involve drugs, fat, or the human reproductive system. i like to think that my own personal nature encompasses a somewhat broader variety of interests and activities, but who knows? i could be kidding myself.

today's column sports the heading, "mop vs. mastectomy: does housework prevent breast cancer?" you, being the astute between-the-lines reader that you are, may already have guessed at the alternate title: "hey, angry feminist! over here! you will not believe how pissed off you're about to get!" the blurb is about a research article recently published in cancer epidemiology biomarkers & prevention which reports a correlation between the amount of housework women perform and breast-cancer risk. there are a number of important factors that should be mentioned in relation to the data reported, such as that the data on housework only included past-year activity and that there was no record of the frequency, duration, and specific intensities of reported occupational activities. i'd also be very curious to know how many children each of the subjects had had, whether any of them underwent fertility treatment in order to become pregnant, whether or not they had breastfed and for what duration . . . things that were, according to its authors, outside the scope of this particular study, which aimed only to explore the relationship between activity levels and cancer, but which are every bit as relevant as other variates that were included, such as age at first pregnancy and education. besides, if they only collected activity data from the past year, they don't have much of a case for that specific relationship, anyhow. women do not get breast cancer because eleven months ago they started vacuuming the house every other sunday instead of twice a week.

or do they? e-zine enthusiasts may never know. saletan, in his skimpy overview of the work, doesn't seem to have any interest in the study's merit or lack thereof. of all the things he could have brought up in this column he is paid to maintain, he chose to close with this zinger:

Male spin: See, women belong in the home. Female spin: Now, for that study of housework and prostate cancer…

oy. maybe we get breast cancer from dismissive un-jokes. i hope it isn't positively correlated with eye strain, because i am squinting and squinting, but i just can't see the sailboat . . .


update, 1/4/07, 1:28 PM: could one tiny blogger have so much power? i wouldn't bet the lint in my pocket on it, but slate has taken the execution footage down and replaced it with frames from comic books about the human toll of the iraq war, and the two newest "human nature" references are to south carolina's proposed intention to start collecting dna from anyone and everyone arrested in the state and nasa's, um, nasa stuff. no pot! no gonads! still a semi-weak one-two close, but with a far more embraceable tone. nothing more than a happy synchronicity, i'm sure, but the sky is very blue and i'm willing to try to forgive and forget. don't think this means you can slouch, though, guys; weisberg, saletan--i've got my eye on you. my squinty, piercing eye.

smoke 'em in the cold, mean streets if ya got 'em!

there's been a bit of hubbub in the news today about the smoking ban taking effect in d.c.-area bars, as there always is when a city enacts such a policy, and, as usual, i can't see what all the fuss is about. even when i smoked, i couldn't see what all the fuss was about. every time the issue comes up, bar owners stomp their feet and whine about how no one will want to come to their house to play anymore, ignoring the majority of the available statistics for cities that have already implemented bans, which suggest that more people go to bars and restaurants regularly now that these environments are guaranteed to be smoke free. the staff are healthier, the customers are happier, people who need to blacken their lungs with expensive, unspeakable evils can do so outside, and after about two weeks everyone has completely adjusted to the new rules. bar owners are concerned that they'll lose business to surrounding towns that don't ban smoking in public establishments, but the idea that anyone who was driving into d.c. from virginia just to have a drink would suddenly stop doing so strikes me as beyond silly; there are people who like small townie bars and people who like flashy city bars. if you're going out at all, you're doing it for the atmosphere. if all you were interested in was having a beer and a ciggie with your buddies, you'd have been doing it at someone's home, where the beers are always a dollar and you can take your shoes off. all this hue and cry, it's just, i mean, suck it up. you will still and always be more than welcome to kill yourself at a safe distance from me and all the rest of us who have chosen to do something different with our money and time.

the one truly sinister note in this melodramatic opera is that sounded by the state of virginia, a golden child in the tobacco-growing world, whose government has forbidden individual cities and counties from implementing smoking bans of any sort. the political subcommittee opposing the bans paints it as a personal-freedoms issue, declaring it unamerican to tell a property owner what he or she can and can't do with said property, but that, as i think we all know, is bollocks. we tell restaurant owners when they can and can't serve liquor, we implement regular (yes? fingers crossed?) checks from the board of health to tell them what they can and can't do in their kitchens, which they own, all in the name of the public good. but when we recommend that they tell customer a to stop exhaling toxic fumes all over customer b's hair and/or hefeweizen, we're fascists? come on. it's murderous navel-gazing, virginia house of delegates, and you know it. stand up and own your heinous wrong like a man--or group of men, as the case may be.

that being said, three cheers for washington, d.c., for not letting the country's legislative heart be the last place to show concern for the health of its citizens. the city has stepped up just in time to land in more or less the exact middle of the moral-responsibility road, leaving all our houses right-side up and as we've always known them to be. huzzah and happy new year, second verse, same as the first.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear jon stewart,

i know that this is way, way overdue, but you really rocked the wang back in october. i was the girl to your left in the orchestra pit who "woo hoo"d when you said your home computer was a mac (thanks for the subtle point in my direction in acknowledgment; for the record, i know next to nothing about graphic design, but i'm proud to have been able to provide you, at least in part, with an opening for a joke). it was the first time i had seen you live, but it was far from the first time i had seen your stand-up act. everybody knows that story, and i really wouldn't tell it again, but it becomes hugely important in the context of this letter; i'll try to inject some new life into it.

in what i'm almost entirely certain was the late spring of 1992, a portion of your act was aired as a segment on the mtv half-hour comedy hour, and the only joke from that segment that i remember in its entirety is the one about the inanity of the u.s. military's refusal to allow gay men to enlist. at the time, the DOD's policy on homosexuality was receiving a fair amount of coverage, the freddie mercury tribute concert had been playing on a loop for weeks, and i had recently become close friends with a shy, slight boy whose sexuality was frequently called into question in a none-too-tactful manner by the population of our small-town high school. i was pretty young, but i was already beginning to adopt the strongly liberal stance that has since become the cornerstone of all my daily dealings (i'm surprised anyone can even read my letters, given how smudged and obscured the writing is once my pink, pink heart is finished bleeding all over it). it may be why that joke stuck, or something about your delivery may have made it especially resonant, leading to its longevity in my memory and thus influencing some portion of my social and political development. whatever the case, the moment lodged itself, and i have loved you ever since because of it.

and when you told it again, word for word, at your show this fall—god, i didn't even know what to do. i wanted to squeal and stand on my seat and cry and throw a brick through a window and buy you a state-of-the-art video game console and run out of the building and into the woods and renounce society, because it was my joke, it had been my joke for almost fifteen years, and i hadn't heard it since that first time, and there you were, not fifteen feet away, telling it in person—and because it was my joke that i had heard for the first time fifteen years ago, and you could still tell it and get the same reaction as you had gotten the first time you had told it, because nothing had changed.

this year the u.s. army dropped its recruitment standards to the lowest permissible levels in an effort to meet enlistment targets, which they've been missing by margins greater than any since the 1970s. they're willing to accept recruits who have failed aptitude tests, who have criminal records, who have drug or alcohol problems, and who have health issues that could interfere with their performance; they are not willing to accept healthy, competent, sincere men with spotless records who refuse to lie about who they are. while daniel goure, vice-president of the lexington institute, has said that the main requirement for the army is a high school diploma, only 81 percent of the newest recruits have one. the military feels fine about actively recruiting autistic teenagers, but they'll discharge anyone who's openly gay, regardless of his or her performance, on the grounds that homosexuality is an irredeemable defect. i think that's nonsensical. i think that's INSANE. i know you're with me on this, jon, but while misery may love company, this particular misery is incapable of taking solace in the number of people in its corner, even when one of them is you.

in defense of its new tactics, the army issued a statment affirming that "good test scores do not necessarily equate to quality soldiers . . . test-taking ability does not measure loyalty, duty, honor, integrity or courage." but who you sleep with does? can they honestly believe that? what do they think's gonna happen?

well, you know the answer to that question. and i just wanted to thank you for shining a floodlight on it, then and now. sometimes i can't muster up any hope about the masses finding a way to approach ideas like this with a modicum of logic. but i think maybe you can't, either, and you haven't let that stop you from begging them to do so for the past two decades. so i'll soldier on alongside you, because the folks on the other side were never adorable in my eyes, and they only grow less so with time.

that's it. my best to your family, including that cat with the nine recta and your vomit-slurping pooch. thanks for standing up, and thanks for your dogged, unswerving moral clarity. i don't know how you feel about being a role model, but i feel inexpressibly fortunate to have you as one.

your always-devoted fan, who knew that was you in the rollerblades in that steve martin movie with the christmas tree,

juniper

sobriety: responsible choice or divisive barrier?

today we should all take a moment to offer thanks to the stoic americans who quashed the temperance movement, leaving the door splintered and dangling tenuously from its hinges for us to make any occasion to drink a national holiday and any national holiday a prerequisite for getting wringably sodden. despite the nation's growing ire regarding its influx of mexican immigrants, no one seems to have any problem knocking back a sixer of corona on cinco de mayo. maybe the idea is that if we take the occasion to remind them how strong and free of frenchmen their own country is, they'll go back to it. but perhaps it's a sign that our society is preparing to turn the corner into a more tolerant age; after all, it was the festive air of st. patrick's day that finally drove american business owners to take down their "no irish need apply" signs in the late 1800s--well, that and the growing numbers of jews and italians. happily, the new enemies also became friends, when we realized pizza and bagels were awesome and that after a couple of glasses of wine they were happy to admit that even they didn't like mexicans. and soon we will embrace the mexicans as well, because they have given us an excuse to get blindingly drunk without having to wait the full ten weeks between st. patrick's day and memorial day (here in massachusetts we have long since granted ourselves the mid-april reprieve of patriots' day, but that only whets our thirst), and because they are not muslims. who could ever expect us to forgive a religion that forbids alcohol? it's an insane request that will leave the islamic public forever on the fringes of this great nation. the rest of us, though, can always, and perhaps only, band together in hatred--crazy, bleary-eyed, liquor-soaked hatred.

anyway. today is also my beautiful part-syrian, part-jewish, part-portuguese mother's birthday, and i'm sure my irish-catholic dad is drinking something stiff in her honor or just for the hell of it, because he knows that americans fought for his right to do so, just like they fought for his right to be a blindly nationalistic bigot. please think of my mum fondly when making your toasts today; her saintly patience has prevented countless wars and probably a fair amount of bloodshed, and if repeal day is what it takes to remind the people who know her that there is more than one important day in december, well, i'll absolutely drink to that.

what, no intersex option? bigots.

for months i have been frequently fleetingly befuddled by sony's ad campaign for its bravia flat-screen television, the tagline of said campaign being, "the world's first television for men and women™." yes, i've typed that deliberately and correctly—this golden droplet of marketing sputum has been trademarked. it's left my brow furrowed frequently because i have been forced to take equal pause every time i've heard it and fleetingly because i dismiss it the second the ad ends, as i'm not interested in purchasing a television or in defragmenting the decision-making processes of the men and women who are interested in purchasing televisions. but tonight, for whatever reason, i cracked. what is it about this shiny box that makes it capable, at long last, after millenia of stereotyping, mutilation, glass ceilings, and saccharine self-help books, of bridging the previously boundless gap between the sexes? how has the bravia succeeded where all other projection media have failed?

well, it hasn't, unless "bridging the gap" is now a euphemism for putting little blue hats on the boy babies and little pink hats on the girls. in fact, sony's web site does this more or less literally, using distinct horizontal bands of the two colors to express to consumers how happily their respective genders can now coexist in a single space. (even on planet happy sony, however, the genders remain separate and unequal; the pink band is less than half the size of the blue and is trapped underneath it.) the site doesn't dangle any carrots; all of the appliance's secrets are revealed under two headings: Why Men Like It and Why Women Like It. in case any of you men and women out there are too crippled by your current asexual viewing experiences to know what you like and why, here are the bravia's draws:

1. amazing hd picture
2. wider viewing angles
3. broader color gamut
4. slim design

stop thinking now! these are The Reasons! you do not like anything else about this television, and no other television can offer you these things! and these are The Reasons for all of you. The Reasons are androgynous; it's your reasons for liking The Reasons that give you away on a gonadal level. the masculine appeal of wider viewing angles is as follows:

and you thought you'd only get to hog the couch. with a generous 178° viewing angle, now you can hog any piece of furniture in the whole living room and get outstanding clarity and detail no matter where you sit.

who needs a couch? climb on top of the trophy case! build a nest of empty beer cans and dirty socks in the far left corner! be the crazy frat-house animal that dumb broad—i mean, your restricted line of vision—has never allowed you to be! but don't beat your chest too hard about it, because for the ladies we offer the feng-shui-obsessed flip side:

why does the couch always have to be in the middle of the room? with the bravia lcd tv it doesn't have to be. its 178° viewing angle gives you 178° of space to design. so rearrange the living room any way you want. you'll still get an outstanding picture no matter where you sit.

the remaining 182° of space will be lost to you, as all space not penetrated by tv-generated radiation eventually collapses into a vacuum, but you'll be too exhausted from the furniture moving and hypnotized by the pretty colored lights to ever miss it. bravia is huge! it's shiny! it's outrageously expensive! and even if you go out of your way to keep it from being at the center of the room, it'll still be all you can see no matter where you look! just like the diamond that you know in your heart he'll never give you.

men and women are different. they like different things. but i'm pretty sure that when it comes to a television, we're all asking the same question: how's the picture? we want our images sharp and our pixels undetectable and our colors rich and true to life. but even the bravia can't serve up anything that comes close to the visceral impact of immediate reality, not that it appears to want to extend anything more than 1950s-era condescension and a gleeful passing out of footballs and feather dusters. tonight the commercial drove me away from my own television and toward my sofa, which i've moved not just out of the middle of the room but into a different room, a room filled with books and plants and paintings, all of which are quite vivid and utterly enthralling. after all these months, sony's marketing department has finally gotten through to me. from the bottommost recesses of my uterus, sony, thank you, for reminding me not to settle for eyesores.

to be or not to be . . . i, um, i don't understand the question.

stem cell research is controversial, and there are plenty of valid reasons for why this should be the case. even your humble narrator, who as a rule passes instant, unapologetic, and highly opinionated judgment upon everything that comes before her, can not keep from shifting from one foot to the other about this issue. i feel very strongly, oh so incredibly strongly, that disease happens for a reason and population control and equilibrium are essential in all populations, and scientifically speaking it's detrimental to the species in question and the entire ecosystem for every member of a given population to survive all obstacles, particularly the genetic ones that more or less incapacitate individuals. but i feel so strongly about it precisely because i believe life on this planet is such an astounding, intricate miracle, and all of it needs to be treated as such. i get stuck in this debate, every time, because i want to save everything, including the people, but saving all the people makes it impossible to save all the everything . . .

i can't say that any living thing doesn't deserve the best possible shot. our president seems, to some extent, to disagree.

now, i am not about to initiate another exhausting round of fisticuffs over whether or not an embryo is a person, and please don't you, either, because that's not what i, or most people who are in favor of stem cell research, are arguing about, and it never should be. here are the only two points regarding the right-to-life aspect of this subject that should ever come into play:

1. people with genetic diseases, neurological conditions, and paralyzing injuries who could be aided by stem cell therapies are, by definition, people, and therefore have at least as many rights as amorphous clumps of cells.

2. the cells that scientists are hoping to utilize would come from fertility-clinic stores that would otherwise be disposed of as medical waste.

let's look at that second point again. ready? *scrollscrollscroll*

2. the cells that scientists are hoping to utilize would come from fertility-clinic stores that would otherwise be disposed of as medical waste.

these embryos aren't being fertilized or harvested specifically for research; nobody wants that and nobody would condone that. they aren't being stolen from loving parents, as the donors would be required to consent to the embryos' use in research of any sort. there's no subterfuge or sinister activity, and however lovely bushy's angelic army of snowflakes is, even he would have to admit that there's no way every spare embryo in every clinic in the country is ever going to be adopted. these cells are being held in storage, and then they're being incinerated. that's their entire destiny. if you can't stand the idea of that, rally against fertilization technology; that's the field that's helping create life only to destroy it. well, that and factory farming, but that's a rant for a different day. my thought on this fine summer afternoon is that allowing the embryos to be donated as research lines would provide their five-day lives with some sort of grander purpose, which, really, is what we're all hoping for.

sam brownback, r-ks, says "we do not need to treat humans as raw material." and that's a fine statement, it really is. commendable, even, maybe, in certain contexts. but no one's pushing soylent green. in this context, it sounds like, "your life is not worth more than this not-quite life. in fact, your life is expendable, whereas this one must not be wasted." to the people desperate for some way to help a suffering loved one, and to me, it sounds insanely hateful. these "lives" were begun in hope, but they'll end without having meant anything, unless a lot of stubborn people change their fundamentalist minds and decide to focus on helping some people who actually have a chance of being helped.

best friends forever. FOREVER.

i work with pets, i have pets, i've lost pets, and it's always heartbreaking, i know. it's natural to want a keepsake. when we had to put my dog to sleep i kept her collar and leash, because they smelled like her. i still have them here in my bedroom. but i never thought of putting her dog-smelly collar on a stuffed animal and wrapping my arms around it in the dead of night, and i like to think that i would never indulge in the sort of "rose for emily" pathos being catered to by comfort pets™, the makers of plush pet-replica urns designed to literally embody the memory of your faithful fuzzy friend.

oh, no. that's not right. it's really not. and here's something even less right:

My shih tzu callie was hit by a car and died last year. I couldn't bear to put her in the ground. I wanted her with me always so I had her cremated. All I got back was a hard box so I slept with a picture of Callie under my pillow and cried for days. …My Mom couldn't bear to see me so upset so she took Callie's cremated remains and gave me a Comfort Pet. Callie is in the Comfort Pet that looks like her. Now I can sleep with her and she even sits on my lap like she used to when I watch TV. I stopped crying for Callie when I got her back in a Comfort Pet.

a year. a year this grown woman has been cuddling the synthetic-material-encased ashes of her pet. and you thought your pup's habit of gnawing on the legs of the kitchen table was evidence of profound separation anxiety. way to enable, joelle's mom. don't encourage her to take up watercolors or volunteer at a shelter or anything healthy like that, it's really best to give her a foolproof way to evade reality and scare off new friends. why heal, when there's comfort pet™?

oh, that's right: because you're NOT CRAZY.

get your filthy nymphette-loving hands off of my childhood!

i understand that preying on our nostalgia is sometimes how toy industry executives make their living. when my friends and i were in college we spent hours upon hours listing our favorite cartoons and toys, most of which, obviously, overlapped. not all, though; i found it interesting that, while everyone had owned about four dozen plush popple dolls, almost no one had watched the cartoon, and even though everyone had watched the smurfs regularly, i was the only one with a collection of two-inch-tall plastic figurines. maybe all that really demonstrates is that i watched too much tv and owned too much plastic crap, and i'll tell you right now that i wouldn't have needed empirical evidence to convince me of the truth in that statement. but forget that; we dragged these items up in the middle of the night because they were important to us. these characters had captivated and shaped us, we were enthralled by them, we adored and looked up to them; they were our role models.

i think they were pretty good ones, too. they saved the planet over and over, either through teamwork, mutual respect and selfless and uninhibited affection (care bears, rainbow brite, rose petal) or overwhelming inner strength and physical prowess (he-man, she-ra, thundercats). we thought of them as rock stars, either literally (what little girl didn't bounce around in front of her mirror pretending to be jem? and someone tell me i'm not the only little girl who tried to give her sister aja's crazy layered haircut) or figuratively (i think my inability to completely separate rainbow brite from cyndi lauper only enhanced my frenzied worship of both). and then there were some, like my little pony and strawberry shortcake, who just comforted us with their sweet, placid faces and fruity-powdery aromas, like being wrapped in a blanket that's still toasty from the dryer after an apple-scented bubble bath. look at them, look how warm and soothing they are:


ss image found here

ponies found here

aren't they soft and sweet and darling? couldn't you hug them until they became embedded in your chest? didn't you think it would be swell to be able to share them with your own kids someday?

yeah, you did. and so did bandai and hasbro, for a minute or two. then they thought your kids would be better off with this crap instead:




now, undoubtedly, fashion tastes change and evolve over time, and there may have been a need to modernize certain aspects of the characters. but strawberry shortcake was never supposed to represent the pop starlet next door; she was a magical baker who lived inside of a dessert. she was not a princess, or a bride, or a denim diva, and she was definitely not skinnier than a ck model. she was a little girl with freckles who liked pastries. childhood obesity is a problem, and we want kids to be conscious of their eating habits, sure, but do we want to tip the scales in the opposite direction? new strawberry lolita doesn't eat pastries. she doesn't eat anything. her elastic-waisted pants are ballooning out over her bony hips. she used to smell like berries because she had a yummy surprise for you in the oven, and now it's because she read an article that said the smell of food was sometimes enough to trick your brain into thinking you had satisfied its craving. and what have they done to my pony? i don't mind the ankle tattoo, that's kosher, you can buy rub-ons identical to the one she's wearing by the dozen, but why does she have no subcutaneous fat? if the spca came to your farm and found a real pony in this condition, they'd confiscate it and fine you. this is a pony:



it's not the same thing at all, is it? no, it's quite different really, isn't it? i think piña colada pony has even had a chin tuck and a nose job. for shame! is this why lindsay lohan turned into lara flynn boyle? (and let's not even discuss the thing lara flynn boyle has turned into.) when i thought about recapturing my youth, i meant all of it, not what was left after it was highjacked by trimspa, baby. so listen up, execs: i want my 80s icons returned to me in good health, with full rosy cheeks and thighs that are wider around than their upper arms, and i want it done promptly and with a heartfelt written apology.

at this point i would like to tip my hat to femme feral at fluffy dollars, who introduced the reappearance of these toys in the context of a larger and more serious societal problem, freeing me to discuss it on this questionable and self-interested level.