Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - Posts
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No longer the home of hits like Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and The Wire,
HBO is looking to replace its sex-and-violence lineup of yesteryear
with ... more sex. Last spring, the network issued a somewhat
mysterious announcement about Hung, a dramatic comedy that debuts this summer... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In seven seasons of 24, I've never given much thought to
its gender politics. For one, I've mostly tuned in for the escapism of
watching Jack Bauer save the world. For another, it's always had enough
strong female characters—villains, heads of CTU, and the
ass-kicking-yet-socially-awkward Chloe—to make up for the damsels in
distress. (Yes, I'm looking at you, Kim Bauer.)
But two sequences at the end of last night's finale jumped out at me
for their portrayal of the women. (Warning, if you have the finale
waiting on your TiVO: Spoilers ahead.) To wrap one storyline, President
Allison Taylor has to decide... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like Slate's Jack Shafer, I'm curious to see whether Maureen Dowd uses her next Times column to address the mini-plagiarism scandal surrounding her last one (Dowd admitted to unintentionally lifting a paragraph
from Talking Points Memo blogger Josh Marshall, blaming the confusion
on a conversation with a friend who quoted the passage to her without
attribution.) But I can't agree with Shafer that Dowd's explanation
sounds "plausible—if a tad incomplete." Her account of how Marshall's observation found its way into her column is patently absurd. Unless the friends in question are... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews wrote a doozy of a story
in a recent issue of the paper’s magazine, about how he went from a
beaming homeowner and newlywed to an anxious debtor who owed hundreds
of thousands of dollars on his mortgage. He described the trials and
headaches of borrowing, and throughout the story, a basic disbelief
that he, a reporter *who covers economics,* could have been caught up
in the same overzealous swindling and poor decision-making that he
wrote about for the Times.
His story may have been cause for a lot of rubbernecking and tsk-ing
among readers, but Dana Goldstein and Megan McArdle have perhaps hit on... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Jaclyn Friedman:
Last Tuesday, in the debut of Double X, Linda Hirshman said that the bloggers at Jezebel need to accept that they may be raped if
they’re going to insist on being such public sluts (I'm paraphrasing
here, but not as much as I wish I were). Latoya Peterson responded by
rightly pointing out that screeds like Hirshman's give feminism a bad name. The internets erupted. And now, just what we needed, the Observer has swooped in to Explain It All To Us, clucking their editorial tongue about the whole "infighting" mess.
Missing from this entire kerfuffle is one crucial point. Women aren't... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan McCain was on The Colbert Report last night and despite some giggles and a hideous, huge, Bedazzled ring,
she acquitted herself admirably. When is someone going to give this
self-identified "24-year-old, pro-sex woman" and Republican her own
television show? Young and Republican In America, hosted by Meghan McCain, running on one of the cable news networks twice a week? I'd watch.
Colbert tries his best to throw his guests off their talking points, but McCain could recite hers in a coma. She was not to be derailed. While defending her core position... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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My husband has been in love with Bruce Springsteen longer than he's
been in love with me. Bruce's lyrics were the soundtrack for our
courtship (I came for you, for you, I came for you), our long-overdue wedding (So you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore), the many years of our marriage (This life, this life and then the next, with you I have been blessed), and his own work (sick of sitting round here trying to write this book).
He rarely misses a Springsteen concert and can recite tracks, covers,
and lyrics for any occasion. It was no surprise to me then that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa Gezari:
The Preakness Stakes is
not a particularly gender-neutral event. The second leg of the Triple
Crown is, in fact, one of the last places where men dress like men of a
certain era (waistcoats, wingtips, fedoras), and women dress like women
as we grew up imagining them: in crisp yet feminine suits, low-cut,
brightly colored dresses and high, high heels. I’ve been to the
Preakness three years running, and I gave up on the dress-and-heels
approach long ago. (Unless you book a limo to and from your box seat,
the amount of walking and stair climbing required by Pimlico’s layout
demands comfortable footwear.) On Saturday, I noted with empathy... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Agreed, Dahlia, that Justice Ginsburg is carefully applying the law as she sees it in her dissent in AT&T v. Hulteen. Her problem is a bad old ruling that haunts this case and that all but one of her male colleagues refused to banish. In General Electric Co. v. Gilbert
in 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on pregnancy
is not discrimination based on sex, because some women (the nonpregnant
ones) won't be discriminated against. By ignoring how... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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In his review of the new Warren Buffet biography, Michael Lewis
has a great description of how writer Alice Schroeder won over the
billionaire by turning his need to be mothered by lovely brainiacs
against him... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Supreme Court ruled, 7-2 yesterday in AT&T v. Hulteen,
that women denied credits toward their pension for their pregnancies in
the 1960s and '70s—before it became illegal—were not the victims of
gender discrimination. The question came down to whether AT&T could
rely on past discriminatory practices—before 1978 pregnant women were
denied disability leave granted to men—to calculate pensions. Writing
for the majority, David Souter found that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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