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A team of archaeologists believe that they're on the verge of uncovering Cleopatra's tomb—a discovery that could potentially drive the whole world pyramid-mad, the way King Tut did back in the '20s and then again in the '70s.
Stacy Schiff has a fantastic essay in the New York Times
about the legend of Cleopatra—who, Shiff points out, was not just the
lover of two of the most powerful men of her time but a fearsome
monarch in her own right, a woman whose "antecedents were the
rancorous, meddlesome Macedonian queens who
routinely poisoned brothers and sent armies against sons...These
women were raised to rule."
And yet, as we all know, Cleopatra's legacy has little to do with her political prowess:
Cleopatra has gone down in history as a wanton seductress. She is the original bad girl, the
Monica Lewinsky of the ancient world. And all because she turns up at
one of the most dangerous intersections in history, that of women and
power.
She presides eternally over the chasm between
promiscuity and virility, the forest of connotations that separate
“adventuress” from “adventurer.” Women schemed while men strategized in
the ancient world, too.
So
is a double standard simply inevitable when it comes to female leaders?
Cleo herself is mum on the topic. As Schiff notes, "No matter what the
tombs of Taposiris yield, they are unlikely to offer
up an answer to the vexed question of women and power." (Though in Shakespeare's version,
our queen has some choice words on the subject, perceptively declaring
that future dramatists would chalk up Antony's indiscretions to
drunkenness, while she herself would have to suffer seeing "some
squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I' the posture of a whore.")
But according to the BBC, the dig may solve another eternally vexing question:
Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said the coins found at the
temple refuted "what some scholars have said about Cleopatra being very
ugly".
"The finds from Taposiris reflect a charm... and indicate that Cleopatra was in no way unattractive," he said.
Well, thank Amun-Ra for that.
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Meghan, your analysis of the Susan Boyle phenomenon was very astute, but I think it misses something important about why Boyle went viral. Yes, we identify with the judges and the audience—the haters who get to feel proud and magnanimous when we stop hating—but we also empathize with Susan Boyle, the underdog who knows, even though no one else does, that she's something special.
Susan Boyle isn't just, as you say, the "scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts." And that's because she's also Rocky (or a Bad News Bear or Karate Kid—Who wants to bet that the Susan Boyle Story gets optioned by next week?), the underdog facing doubters. Who can't empathize with that? So when Boyle sings, we're both the judges and the judged. And that means, yes, we got a hit off of her performance as said judges, enjoying the "crude catharsis," psyched to "learn" we're not as shallow and cynical as we thought. But we also got a hit off her performance as fellow underdogs, psyched to see Boyle, an extension of ourselves, triumph over the cynical haters trying to keep all of us down. Boyle plays to our ego on two levels then—by letting us imagine we're more generous and open minded about appearance and age than we thought, while also suggesting that, hey!, we just might rule at the next American Idol tryouts. I'm not sure which is worse.
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I hesitate to write this for fear of more hate mail, but here goes. There's a whole new angle emerging in the breast-feeding literature, as today's New York Times brings to light: Not only is breast-feeding best for babies, but it's best for mothers as well! The story highlights a study out of the University of Pittsburgh showing that mothers who breast-feed are at a lower risk of developing diabetes, high-blood pressure and cardiovascular disease decades later, when they are in menopause. The study's author, Eleanor Bimla Schwarz, offers this handy analysis:
Any breastfeeding was good, but more was better...Pregnancy without breastfeeding ups the risk of heart disease and stroke, but with breastfeeding a woman has the same risk she had before pregnancy. The more pregnancies you have, the more risk of heart disease you have. But if you breastfeed longer in each pregnancy you come out just fine.
Now this would be nifty if it were true. But this study is far, far from proving it. It has all the same flaws as most breastfeeding research, as I outlined in my recent Atlantic story. The study shows an association, not a causation. "Women who breast-feed may simply lead more healthful lives than those who do not." Indeed, mothers who breast-feed are much more likely to be white, educated, and older. The researchers guessed that maybe a decrease in belly fat helped explain the benefits. But other studies have shown that, contrary to popular belief, breast-feeding does not necessarily help you lose weight. Also, this should be obvious, but diabetes and heart disease are enormously complicated diseases, influenced by myriad factors. The idea that you should make a decision based on what might happen 30 years down the road seems ludicrous. Better to just stay reasonably healthy and hope for the best.
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True, Sam, my post, below, about the Mirror Awards is a tiny bit misleading. There are women on the list—four women, who won five of the 29 awards:
Rachel Sklar, twice, Julia Klein, Evgenia Peretz, Megan Garber. Go girls!
So women aren't "missing" from the list, exactly. Except in the sense that China has more boys than girls—missing in the proper proportions.
Is it that men are doing the best work? Or that men are getting the best assignments? Name a female media beat reporter in the high-end newspapers and mags. It's a cool beat. Why can't you think of one?
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E.J., you just asked what's missing from the list of finalists for the Mirror Awards just released by Syracuse
University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications. Despite the finalists' names that you mentioned (Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff and
Richard Pérez-Peña), the answer is NOT that women are missing. Among the finalists you didn't call out: Rachel Sklar for her piece in the Huffington Post on a misleading Pentagon story in the New York Times; Evgenia Peretz for her Vanity Fair piece on James Frey; Megan Garber for her commentary for the Columbia Journalism Review.
It's fair to call out the gender imbalance of the list of finalists. There are 23 men and only five women, if you count repeat offenders like Eric Alterman and Rachel Sklar separately for each category in which they appear. But let's not pose a rhetorical question that implies that the list is devoid of women entirely when in fact what it's missing is much murkier: strict gender balance. And as we have already debated on the blog, maybe 50-50 boy-girl splits for all awards is not really a reasonable—or even admirable—goal. Give women an equal education; choose unbiased panels of judges. But after that, if the men are producing the best stuff, then go ahead and let the best man win.
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I'm feeling zero tolerance for zero tolerance rules. Dahlia's description of the Supreme Court oral argument about the case of a 13 year-old girl who was strip searched in school to see if she was smuggling Advil in a body cavity is worthy of Saturday Night Live. It would be funny, except for the fact that school administrators, and now apparently the Supreme Court, thinks this ludicrous humiliation is justified in order to uphold zero tolerance drug policies. It doesn't matter that this girl could stop at a drug store on the way home and buy an entire bottle of this contraband, because judgment and common sense apparently have been outlawed along with painkillers for menstrual cramps. The idiocy of zero tolerance was also described in yesterday's New York Times story about the Human Rights Watch official who is unable to join the administration because he is a registered lobbyist for the group. On the campaign trail, Obama declared a ban on lobbyists joining his administration, so the expert on human rights can't become human rights chief precisely because he is an advocate on this issue. Never mind that the right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances" is part of the First Amendment. Making ridiculous rules is easier than making decisions.
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I just got this announcement via email:
"Syracuse
University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications today announced 29
finalists in six categories in the third annual Mirror
Awards competition
honoring excellence in media industry reporting."
The winners include such media watchdogs as Eric Alterman, Ken Auletta, Seth Mnookin, Clive Thompson, Mark Bowden, Charlie LeDuff, and
Richard Pérez-Peña.
But hmm... something is missing from this list ... whatever could it be?
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A bit after the fact, but no less worth a look, the always remarkable Big Picture blog on Boston.com features an eyemazing roundup of photographs taken around the world during Holy Week. Inside: red, black, and green-hooded penitents, bloodied and bowed self-flagellators, and a true believer nailed to the cross. (Not for the faint of heart.)
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Damn, Jessica. You've really shown up the rest of us. How are we ever going to find Mother's Day presents to rival the one you arranged for your mom—weeks early, yet? Courtesy of your funny and clever new book, Love Mom: Poignant, Goofy, Brilliant Messages from Home, your mother gets to be in The New Yorker's Talk of the Town. She's described as "a psychiatrist with a cool haircut." And she's quoted saying sagely, “As my own mother always says, children are at the center of parents’
lives, and parents are on the periphery. We write e-mails that have to
be perceived as lame, because independence has to be preserved.” True. Coup. I quit.
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A guest post from Slate V intern, Lindsey Hough:
Dahlia's account of the oral argument yesterday in Savana Redding's case forced me to recall a memory of my own strip search. During my rebel stage of 13, I too had to take off my shirt for a school counselor so she could examine the little cat scratches I had etched into my bicep out of my devotion for a then-crush…let’s call him James. Out of adolescent defiance, I had somehow launched this fad of "cutting" in the 8th grade, and a small posse of girlfriends decided to grab their own bobby-pins to tattoo themselves. The school caught wind, and started interrogating.
One day, I was in PE class and watched as our counselor interrupted the game of kickball to drag a friend into her office. I knew what was up, and after class went into the girls' locker room to apply cover-up to the few scabs that measured the width of a strand of hair. I put on a long sleeve shirt and thought to myself, "There, no way they’ll find that." I tested my sleeve, pulling it all the way up to my shoulder with no success. My tracks were covered.
They made me take the shirt off, and obliterated any sense of autonomy I thought I had. I got the sense the counselor knew she was doing something fishy but covered by "bringing in the nurse who has to check it out." Forced to sit shirtless in front of these two women, I felt exposed and humiliated, embarrassed and angry. I felt they weren't just judging my actions but my body. We talk a lot on the XX Factor about young women and their changing ideas about privacy. But no matter who you are, being forced to take your clothes off against your will is an act of humiliation, embarrassment, and violation. It stings to know that 8 years after my own strip search, those feelings still don't matter.
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I never thought I'd write this sentence, but poor Dick Cheney. Last week's disclosure of the torture memos he fought to keep secret has forced him into the extremely uncharacteristic position of calling for more disclosure:
...they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified. I formally asked that they be declassified now.
Ah, secrets—if only Cheney had thought of declassifying these reports when he had the power to do it himself! It almost makes you wish he was vice president again, doesn't it?
Meanwhile, Jane Mayer reports at the New Yorker that the Senate Armed Services Committee's unredacted report (pdf), released Tuesday by Sen. Levin, shows that the CIA used torture before the first Bybee memo granted approval on August 1, 2002. Like I said the other day, I don't think prosecuting CIA agents for what they did in the months after 9/11 is the best way to go. But this kind of evidence of law-breaking could be hard for Eric Holder to ignore.
Then there's this from Dafna Linzer at ProPublica: dozens of former CIA prisoners have gone missing.
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I didn't see the Susan Boyle clip until Sunday, and unlike everyone else in America, I didn't find it moving. Instead, I found it to be a savvy, cynical piece of TV editing. The visual sequence (the one now on YouTube) is perfectly designed to elicit a crude catharsis in its viewers—to borrow a crucial critical term from one of our earliest drama critics, Aristotle. The skeptic in me hardly believes it wasn't scripted. All the obvious reasons why so many have found it so "moving" have been trotted out. Letty Cottin Pogrebin proclaimed it a powerful strike against pervasive "ageism," a clip that showed us how wrongly snide we are about the dreams of a plain 47-year-old woman. And on one level, that's right. Boyle's life has been changed. (For now, at least.) But the real catharsis the sequence offers is that it lets us indulge as a group (this is crucial) our culture's superficial feelings about appearance, age, sexual worth, and then expel them. (Boyle is as unerotic as it gets; actually, she's an-erotic, since she has never even been kissed.) Watching at first, we too are the sneering audience members, the young girls who roll their eyes. (Note how carefully edited the audience shots are.) But—then, cue the music, and even as Boyle is just opening her mouth, people's faces are lighting up. She has relaxed into herself and her voice is... pretty good. (Not great.) And so we get to exhale and let our saccharine hearts soar with the schmaltzy music as, for a moment, we see "proven" on TV that looks and sex aren't everything. For that moment, the light mantle of eros even seems to rest around Boyle—she smiles, she has some cultural worth, someone, we think, might even kiss her one day! Thus, release. In a sense, Boyle inhabits the role of the scapegoat of early village traditions whom we punish with exile (or sneering), but whom we now, through the magic vehicle of TV, welcome back into the fold, surprising ourselves with our capacious hearts.
But do not take this for a moment to be a blow in the face of ageism. Or a sign that we're becoming a more thoughtful culture. Just listen to the condescension in beautiful, tanned, made-over Amanda Holden's language when she tells newspapers that the moment they give Boyle a makeover would be the moment "it's spoilt." Indeed, it would be. It would mean we couldn't for that moment feel our little hit of catharsis, of canned "uplift," before going to our usual over-valorization of erotic value and celebrity plasticity. In one sense, Robin Givhan was wrong yesterday to suggest we're fooling ourselves if we think Boyle doesn't need a makeover. She does. But my bet is that the makeover will only disenchant us with her over time. We got the hit we needed, and like any stimulant, its effect will decrease as we try to re-experience it.