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From David Leonhardt's cool and meaty interview with the president. Obama says:
And so part of what we have to do is to recognize that women are
just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than
men are today. As a consequence, eliminating the pay gap between men
and women, and the pay gap between fields, becomes critically
important....
I
think that if you start seeing nursing pay better and teaching pay
better, and some of these other professions, you’re going to see more
men in those fields, although there’s a little bit of a chicken and an
egg — if you start getting more men in those fields, then the
stereotypes about this being a woman’s field and all the gender
stereotypes that arise out of thinking that somehow they’re not the
primary breadwinner, those stereotypes start being whittled away.
LEONHARDT: Did Michelle ever make more than you did?
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, sure.
Probably only
for a brief time, because I was working three jobs most of the time
that I was in the State Senate.... But when I started campaigning for
the U.S. Senate and I had to drop some of those jobs, then she carried us for a couple years.
OK, so the last part comes off as a bit defensive. But mostly, hey, he gets it.
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Well, gals, if we're talking about old senators, we MUST mention the oldest of them all: Strom Thurmond, who more or less died in office, age 100. I remember watching TV, mouth open, as his aides moved him across the Senate floor. Honestly, the dude looked embalmed. It was awe-inspiring to watch him not break. (I would've been terrified to be one of those aides. Imagine killing your boss accidentally!) If he could be senator, well heck, Specter has another 20 years of useful public service in him!
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It's Obama's 100th day in office (did you hear?). John Dickerson says on Slate today that the hundredth-day hoopla is a "fake moment, a journalistic trope of premature measurement that the administration is compelled to go along with because we're insisting." We're insisting, by rolling out our assessment of the president through the eyes of young artists. Here are three Obama drawings by youngsters that show different sides of the man, the president. The princess side. The neck side. The killing side.
From Dahlia's three-year-old Sopher, a piece showing a triumphant Obama and a dead John McCain. Dahlia's description of the artist at work:
It was slightly awkward because he drew it in synagogue and was just putting the
final flourishes on it when the rabbi walked by and asked sweetly what it
was."Dead John McCain" elicited a very unrabinnical silence.
From Pearl, 5-year-old daughter of Slate design director Vivian Selbo, entitled "BrokoObama":
And from Angelica, an 8-year-old who lives next door to my parents and is prone to drawing Obama—and all people—as a princess, we have Obama With Basketball. Angelica's dad, George Bonanno, says his favorite part is "the long eye
lashes—I guess thats her way of saying 'attractive.'"
If your kid or grandkid or neighbor or niece or student has a great Obama drawing, please send it to us. We'll be featuring more throughout the week.
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Here a pandemic, there a pandemic, everywhere you look lurks the swine flu. What's a girl to do? Get stylish with it. In the blogyard, swine-flu-inspired fashions abound. Refinery 29's Pipeline suggests you weather the pigocalypse with panache, in a sequined hood and armed with cleansing hand gel. Over at New York, The Cut offers face masks for the fashionista, including the Richard Prince nurse-styled, the besnouted, and the Gitmo-esque. Me? I prefer the look of this latex pig mask. If you can't beat 'em, you may as well join 'em.
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The last time I had the misfortune of noticing Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, he was leading an attack on virtual beer pong. Now, in the wake of the (surprisingly well-kempt!) "Craigslist Killer," he has apparently turned his prosecutorial gaze toward Craigslist's "erotic services" section. Tracy Quan, writing in the Daily Beast, thinks Blumenthal is exploiting the public's ignorance about the Internet for a few minutes of airtime:
Craigslist is no more to blame for a homicidal attack on a working woman than is the Marriott hotel where Julissa Brisman was killed, or the BlackBerry her accused killer probably would have used to establish contact with her. Questions arise about whether Markoff's alleged violence is linked to a gambling problem—he was arrested while en route to Foxwoods in Connecticut—but it would be impolitic and irrational to call him "the Foxwoods Killer." Why are we applying a different logic to Craigslist?
The dubbing of Philip Markoff as the "Craigslist Killer" seems as unfair to Craigslist as the term "Swine Flu" is to Iowa pig farmers. Sites like Craigslist may or may not make the practice of sex work more dangerous, but the Internet almost certainly helps law enforcement track violent Johns. Investigators got to Markoff through his IP address, and prosecutors are using Craigslist to try to locate other potential victims. At any rate, Craig himself says the "erotic services" section is staying put, P.R. disaster be damned.
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June, I admit once you read the litany of illnesses Specter has dealt with—two brain tumors, recurrent Hodgkin's, cardiac arrest—you've got admire his self-proclaimed "vim,vigor, and vitality" (which as Slate's Andy Bowers observed are three adjectives which mean, "I'm really old"). However, I totally agree with you that we are strangely lacking a discussion about the fact that an 80-year-old man with this medical history should be willing to step aside and let someone new run for a job with a six-year term. It surely says something about the life-enhancing effects of power that jobs that come with it are clung to like life-support. While most Americans would probably love to hang it up in their 50s, we have the specter not just of Specter, but of many others, like the infirm Robert Byrd, 92, from the state of Robert Byrd—I mean West Virginia, who will have to be carried out. I was amused by the recent congressional battle in which the 83-year-old John Dingell lost a chairmanship because whippersnapper Henry Waxman, who will soon turn 70, was tired of waiting his turn.
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So, one day after Sen. Arlen Specter transitioned from R to
D, the consensus seems to be that he gave President Obama the best
100-days-in-office gift ever. For all the reasons Slate's John Dickerson pointed out, it's a canny move for
Specter, who knew he faced real trouble in Pennsylvania's 2010 Republican primary. But
here's what I don't get: Why is Specter, who'll be 80 years old by the time
next year's races roll around, so determined to serve another six years? He has
famously survived several serious illnesses, including cancer—twice. Perhaps
it's because I can't imagine working until 80, much less vying for one of the most
competitive jobs in the world at that age, but I just don't get why Specter finds
the prospect of pottering and porch-swinging so unattractive.
Clearly, in a democracy, the voters get to decide if they're
comfortable electing an oldster to represent their interests. Just as clearly,
the seniority system puts a premium on experience. Still, some of these guys
are too old to drive cars—yet we're happy to have them drive the ship of state?
Between the senior citizens on the Supreme Court and the
geezers in Congress, I'm starting to wonder if there's something in the D.C.
air. But we're in a recession: Let's open up some jobs for younger people.
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Thy Neighbor's Wife, a narrative of the sexual revolution and one of my favorite books, has recently been reissued with a new forward by Katie Roiphe. I read it long after the controversy that nearly sunk Gay Talese's writing career, and his marriage to publisher Nan Talese. In a fabulous profile in New York Magazine this week, he talks about that period and a new book he's working on, about his actual marriage. The controversy began when he let a reporter from New York follow him around on his reporting trips, which included jaunts to massage parlors and orgies. The literati iced him for supposedly betraying his very popular wife.
It was presented in a way that really trivialized what I was trying to do, says Talese. It didn't take it with any seriousness; it was a mocking piece. It really put me down as a silly person. It was very diminishing.
In retrospect, Talese seems to have triumphed. Thy Neighbor's Wife is fueled by an intense curiosity about his subjects' intimate lives, the kind that only comes when the author has a personal stake in the matter. Plus Nan swears in the latest profile that she didn't mind, and he called her every day from wherever he was.
Now, thirty years later, Talese is making the exact same mistake all over again. Here he is, with a reporter from the same magazine, drinking with Nan and their girls and talking too much about a book he hasn't even written yet.
Unlike his first love, his Zelda Fitzgerald, Nan was his compromise match, he says:
When I met Nan, I thought, this is a person that I'm not going to be dumped by. And that mattered to me. In a practical sense, I wanted to succeed, and I wanted to have someone who cared about me personally, and Nan did.
Nan obliges in turn.
I thought that it was my responsibility to take care of everything that involved marriage. He paid the Con Ed and the rent bill and anything he would have had to pay anyway. I would pay for the groceries, the nanny, and everything to do with the children. I never wanted to be a burden on him. I knew he always wanted to be free.
I'll read anything Talese writes. But somehow this is making me uncomfortable. I excuse his earlier "betrayals" in the service of telling the great American story no one else would tell. Also, his transgressions were so extravagant, and theatrical. But for a confessional memoir? And such small betrayals which feel more intimate than the flashy ones. In this case, it feels self indulgent, and I resist letting him have the last word
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Yesterday something important happened in the world of books: A federal judge ordered an extension of the deadline for authors to choose to participate in the Google book search settlement. The deadline had been May 5; now it's September 4. This is important, because the settlement is very peculiar, and more attention ought to be paid to what is going on. It presents a lot complicated questions that merit more debate. By settling, Google essentially transformed a relatively small lawsuit brought by the Author's Guild into a class-action style settlement that applies to all books. (Or so I understand from this piece.)
The part that is cause for concern has to do with so-called "orphaned books," or books that are out-of-print and whose copyright holders can't be located. In the fine print of the settlement, Google has in effect set up what some feel will be a monopoly on these books (you can read more at this New York Times blog) claiming it has the rights to scan them and put them online. This is one thing: Many writers would want their books to be widely available once they are, say, dead, and can't benefit from royalties. But Google isn't necessarily merely planning to make books more available. The company would establish something called the "Books Rights Registry," initially funded by it, which will, as I understand it, handle request for reprints, and be the recipient of monies derived from sales. All of this may end up being on the plus side for authors, but what is troubling is how far the range of the settlement was expanded, and with very little public knowledge. As Pamela Samuelson, a copyright scholar at Berkeley, put it last Friday:
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
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