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KJ, I think the real reason people find another story in the New York Times about nannies
so annoying is that, according to a recent study by the Center for
American Progress, fewer than 3.5 percent of all families in the United
States, at all income levels, employ a nanny for child care. That's
right: fewer than 3.5 percent. And among middle-income families (i.e.,
most Americans), it's fewer than .5 percent ... (Read the rest of this article here.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Erika Kawalek:
Yesterday’s New York Times finally (finally, because the subject of the article has been debated all over the Web for nearly a month now) gets to the “plus-sized” model debate with a profile of modeling megastar Crystal Renn. Renn, who is Ford Models' most successful and recognizable plus-sized model, has been making headlines since the release of her memoir Hungry back in October. The profile was occasioned by the release of V magazine’s size issue, which hit stands today and features Renn ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX writer Lauren Bans:
A few months back, the New York Times ran an alternately fascinating and creepy story about
Japanese men who were in love with their life-size anime plush dolls,
and shamelessly took them everywhere—to the beach, to karaoke (perhaps
singing Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll”?), to the all-you-can-eat salad bar.
Today, Boing Boing touches on another bizarre Japanese dating trend,
this one two-dimensional: a video game girlfriend ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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A post from DoubleX blogger Lauren Bans:
Breaking news ladies: Cougars are oh-so-real. Yep, science has proved
it. In fact, the word “cougar” is basically a scientific term now.
Thanks, science! ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Samantha, Rachael, yes: Women over 40 are, if not yet terminal, terminally uncool. That seems to be the sole reason that More magazine
has not been able to attract the kind of advertisers you would think
would sign up for a magazine with 1.3 million readers whose average
income is $93,000. Ironically, More's advertising staple of
processed food manufacturers has helped insulate them from the ad page
drop-off suffered by magazines that rely on luxury brands. But the
notions behind this de facto ad boycott are themselves antiquated and
based on decades-old thinking about consumers ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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I can’t quite get my head around the piece about More magazine in today’s New York Times.
Apparently the fact that a magazine aimed at women over 40 is pulling
readers who are women over 40—and rich ones, at that—is off-putting to
advertisers. Silly me, I thought all advertisers cared about was money!
But even though “the average More reader makes about $93,000, around $30,000 more than the average for Vogue, Allure or Harper’s Bazaar,
according to Mediamark Research and Intelligence,” the ads it runs are
notably low end: “The July/August issue’s ads included Crystal Light,
Pringles, Coffee-Mate, packaged meals from Oscar Mayer, Bertolli, Tyson
and Marie Callender’s, and two liquor ads—for wines under $10. Oh, and
Friskies.” (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in DoubleX.)
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The New York Times Magazine published a special issue yesterday devoted to women in developing countries. The entire issue is extremely well done, but I was particularly intrigued by an article about the "daughter deficit" in India. The gender imbalance in China and India—due to cultural preferences for sons that caused parents to abort daughters and even resort to infanticide—is something that's been written about for several years. But contrary to popular assumptions, the "daughter deficit" is more the fault of the rich than of the poor. What's more, when women are given more power, they sometimes use it to favor boys ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A post from Double X writer Julia Feisenthal:
Jessica, what I found so odd about the Mister Softee article was the language used to describe the allure of the ice cream man .... (Read more in Double X.)
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Kudos to the New York Times for providing an endless supply of parenting trend stories to irritate and delight. There's a doozy in today's paper, about moms and dads who are trying to oust ice cream trucks from their local parks .... (Read more in Double X.)
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How sad that Summer Stiers,
the young woman suffering from an as-yet uncategorized illness who was
profiled so heart-breakingly by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine,
has died. At least she ended up at the National Institutes of Health
where the doctors tried—unsuccessfully—to puzzle out the reason for her
many medical maladies.
One of my daughter's favorite shows is Mystery Diagnosis, which presents the story of someone with strange symptoms who goes for years without being able to get a diagnosis ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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A guest post from Robin Marantz Henig, a contributor for the New York Times Magazine (and Sam's mom!):
The death two weeks ago of Summer Stiers, a young woman I met last year and wrote about at length for the New York Times Magazine,
made me think about how hard it was for her to get anyone to take her
perplexing illness seriously. Whatever ailed Summer seemed to cause a
wide range of symptoms, which is why nobody could quite figure out what
was wrong with her. She bled from her intestines; her kidneys failed;
she had chronic pain in her legs and back; she developed severe toxemia
while pregnant and lost her baby; her bones were damaged; she had
frequent mental blackouts attributed to seizures; she had lost one eye,
and the retina in the other was damaged; she was profoundly fatigued;
her hair was completely gray, even though she was only 31 ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Ann, I think you're right that the Times article on gender bias in the theater may have leaned a bit hard on the women-keeping-their-sisters-down aspect of the original study. (I also think you're right that the best thing we can do, as audience members, is actually get out there and support quality work by buying tickets.)
But I also think there are elements of this study that should give us pause. When Sands sent those scripts out to producers, directors, and literary managers, she found that both female and male respondents were likely to rate a play with a female writer's name attached to be of lower quality—not just less economically viable, but actually of lower artistic merit—than the same script with a man's name attached ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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It’s a catchy, catty angle, that’s for sure: An article in today’s New York Times about a recent study of potential gender bias in Broadway theater opens by suggesting that women playwrights do indeed have more trouble getting their work produced than men do—and that female artistic directors, producers, and literary managers “are the ones to blame.” That’s the conclusion purportedly arrived at by a precocious female Princeton undergrad, who undertook the study for her senior thesis in economics, and who recently gave a presentation to a mostly-female audience of playwrights and producers.
If you read further, and check out the thesis itself, it’s clear Emily Glassberg Sands says no such thing ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Randy Cohen, the New York Times ethicist, caused a tizzy this week with his proposal to decrease gun violence: strip all men of their firearms, and give women guns.
Men are way more likely to shoot and kill people, he argues, citing the
figure that “in 2005, 91.3 percent of gun homicides were committed by
men, 8.7 percent by women.” So taking away their guns should cut down
the number of gun-related deaths. As for giving guns to women... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about
Sotomayor raising "questions about her judicial temperament and
willingness to listen" was subject to a headline makeover this morning? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Last week, Michael Kinsley wrote a brutal takedown of the redesigned Newsweek,
attacking it page by page and graph by graph for failing to be readers'
"guide through the chaos of the Information Age." It's something that
editor Jon Meacham wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek
would not "pretend" to be, and that Kinsley thinks newsmagazines
totally need to be in order to survive. The assessment was shrewd, but
perhaps needlessly vicious, as noted in New York's Jessica Pressler's response, titled: "Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, and We Feel Bad About It." (Full disclosure: I'm particularly sympathetic to Newsweek, since I used to work there. Plus it's owned by the same company that owns Double X.)
But if the new Newsweek's inaugural issue falls short of making sense of the week's chaos, I wonder what Kinsley makes of the New York Times today, which ran an article—ON THE FRONT PAGE, and with a jump to the highly coveted A3 page—about teenagers hugging... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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On May 12, the New York Times ran a photograph featuring a
soldier in his underpants. The photo was eye-catching—I know it caught my
eye—and appeared above the fold on the front page. The photo was taken by David
Guttenfelder for the Associated Press, and its subject was Spc. Zachary
Boyd of Fort Worth, Texas. But what made it a standout was that... (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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Nina, I hadn't heard that archaeologists may be on the verge of discovering Cleopatra's tomb until I read your post this morning. By coincidence, last night I was reading a chapter about Cleopatra in Christina Nehring's forthcoming book A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century. Nehring's contrarian argument complements Schiff's essay nicely. She argues that in domesticating love into egalitarian marriages, by emphasizing equality and intimacy rather than power-differentials and erotic distance, we've lost that special sizzle. Shakespeare's Cleopatra and Antony constitute one of her prime examples of a love match that really works, a love match filled with games and drama:
Convinced that docility in the life of the affections is the road to dreariness, Cleopatra offers Antony a smorgasbord of strategic contradictions. When Antony wishes to ignore a messenger, she orders him to pay attention; when he wishes to lounge in her arms, she reports herself missing; when he desires to go to sea-battle against his enemy Octavius Caesar, she accompanies him, only to flee at the worst moment possible, prompting him to withdraw his ships after her own, and humiliating him before the military world.
As he acknowledges to her after, "My heart was to thy rudder tied by th' strings,/ and thou should'st tow me after. O'er my spirit/Thy full supremacy thou knew'st."
It's The Rules, the Nile Edition. Except that somehow in Cleopatra's case, the game-playing does seem like a form of strength rather than passivity scripted to look like authority. As you point out, Nina, we see Cleopatra as powerful, sexual, and forward. I can't think of all that many contemporary cultural figures who share her traits. I'm curious: Do you, like Nehring, think that her capriciousness is a crucial part of her appeal?