Over at Slate, Johann Hari has a fascinating essay on The East, the West, and Sex, the "strange new book"—Hari's words—by journalist Richard Bernstein, which details the centuries-old history of Western men seeking out a little strange in the East.

I haven't read the book yet myself, but have been avidly reading about it. (See here for fascinatingly varied takes from Salon, the New York Review of Books [subscription required], and the New York Times Book Review.) The book apparently rests on the thesis that early Western travelers didn't just imagine the East to be sexually permissive and fragrantly erotic, but that it actually was so. "While Westerners could be condescending and racist in their descriptions of this culture," Hari summarizes, "they were seeing something real."

Of all the reviews I've read, Hari comes down hardest on Bernstein for his (non?) treatment of the female side of the East-West dynamic:

Bernstein deserves credit for raising a tortured subject from which it is easy to avert our gaze. And yet, and yet … there is something deeply uncomfortable about a book that seems at times so complicit in the very exploitation it aims to scrutinize. It's not just the tone, though Bernstein's oblique confession to having his first sexual experiences in an Asian brothel is creepy. It is the fetid attitude toward women.

... This is, in the end, a darker and bleaker story than the one Bernstein wants to tell. European and American men really did find sexual liberation in the East. Some returned home and helped to sexually liberate their own countries in ways we all benefit from today. But the freedom came at the cost of exploiting an extreme form of patriarchy in the countries they went to, and to imply that the beaten-down, deeply deprived women wanted it is revolting.

Read the whole thing here.

Tags: asian women, johann hari, richard bernstein, Slate

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There are many things that I find deeply upsetting about Sarah Palin. But in the new Vanity Fair assessment of Palin's current place in the political universe, the most disturbing thing Todd Purdum reveals is her inability to discern or care about the truth:

At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.

I was going to try to summarize Purdum's epic article further, but Alex Balk at the Awl already did such a superlative job of it, I'll let you read his take instead.

Photograph of Sarah Palin by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: alex balk, Sarah Palin, the awl, todd purdum, Vanity Fair

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A guest post from Arianne Cohen, author of The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life From On High.

At every public appearance I make, someone raises his hand and says something like, “It’s much harder to be a tall woman than a tall man, right?” This point of view was echoed in the current issue of The New Yorker: A story about the director Nora Ephron opens with a quote about being tall from Meryl Streep, who is playing 6-foot-2 Julia Child in the forthcoming movie Julie & Julia. "I mean, it's like having club foot ... it was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born," Streep says.

Yes, being tall has its challenges. I know, I'm 6-foot-3. But at its heart, the constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be public, the constant sense of walking around with a spotlight on you. There's no place to hide, and that's genderless. Tall men are every bit as self-conscious as tall women.

Tall women’s struggles are more subtle. You’re not aware of this unless you’re tall, but there’s a vortex of silence around tall female public figures, and a total dearth of tall female role models. Sure, there are lots of very successful tall women out there. But you probably don’t know who they are. Because they don't talk about it.

No one really knew how tall Julia Child was until Meryl Streep started talking about it.

Tall girls look around and have two role model choices: Sarah, Plain and Tall (note that she’s plain and tall, not tall and awesome), and Janet Reno, being portrayed by a man on Saturday Night Live. It’s not inspirational.

There are few tall women saying, “I’m tall, I love it, this is beautiful,” because tall public figures, including more than a few top WNBA and tennis stars, steer away from their height during interviews because they—understandably—want to be seen for more than their bodies. (Note: Yes, I know that models are tall. But there's a pivotal issue of mass here that changes the experience.)

What messages do slip through are incredibly negative. In the last few weeks, beyond Streep comparing it to a disability: 6-foot Brooke Shields told Health that she’s sad that she waited to lose her virginity until age 22 because she was uncomfortable in her body, and 5-foot-10 Blake Lively told Allure that she, “feels like a tranny a lot of the time. I just feel really big a lot of the time, and I’m surrounded by a lot of tiny people. I feel like a man sometimes.”

Really, height has nothing to do with manliness. Nothing. That’s like associating overweight women with manliness because men tend to weigh more. The trouble is that by not talking about it, us tall women have left space for others to define it. And in our silence, tall women have been very sexualized by popular culture, often portrayed as manly and aggressive (see the amazing poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, or any of Perez Hilton’s commentary on tall lady celebs—whom he calls manly she-men).

I think it’s important for us tall women to speak up and portray ourselves as we’d like to be portrayed as gorgeous and lovely and wonderful, and set culture’s idea of tall women by defining it ourselves by talking about it as much as possible, wherever relevant, very loudly. Like right here.

Photograph of Julia Child at her 90th birthday celebration by Thomas J. Gibbons/Getty Images.

Tags: arianne cohen, julia child, the tall book

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I agree with Dahlia about the pole dance of grief in Away We Go: The amateur night performance of barren Munch Garnett (Melanie Lynskey), while riveting and poignant, indeed seemed like it belonged in a different movie. Like Dana, I thought the quirky, uneven road movie had some great moments along the hapless, mapless, trip of expecting parents seeking their adult selves. For example, Maya Rudoph was a pitch perfect Verona, asking her goofy but loveable boyfriend, Burt (John Krasinki), “Are we fuck-ups?” (My husband, who usually is a good sport about chick flicks, audibly conceded that indeed they could be.)

When miscarriage and profound disappointment were added to the narrative, though, the couple’s journey became about more than simply growing up the hard way. Perhaps director Sam Mendes has his own issues over fertility? As Dana warned us last year, the mid-century unplanned pregnancy in Mendes' Revolutionary Road (starring Mrs. Mendes, Kate Winslet) was not resolved “by a happy family picnic.” I was, nevertheless, happy to see Lynskey in the complex role of Away We Go’s mother who could not bear children. It was a big leap from her role of Rose, a multifaceted stalker on the long-running CBS comedy, Two and Three Quarters Men, and I was glad to see her acting range.

Photograph of Melanie Lynskey and Chris Messina in Away We Go courtesy of Focus Films.

Tags: miscarriage; Away We Go; two and a half men;

Reading Hanna's and Dana's posts about a Swedish couple's attempts to raise a gender-free child, I’m struck by how pointless it is for parents to try to program their children.

Of course, I think it's awesome and essential that parents make a conscious effort to raise open-minded kids (by discussing the sort of issues that Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson addressed in their piece about childrens' responses to Obama becoming president, for example), but there are some things you just can't control—like how other people respond to your child.

I'm sure my parents were less than thrilled that strangers referred to me as "him" from the time I was about 3. Some things seem funny now, but probably weren't at the time, like my grandma being asked "Don’t you think he's old enough to use the gents' toilets now?" (I must've been about 5 at the time) or, when I was home from college, my mom being asked if her grandson was visiting (double burn!). It really didn't make a bit of difference how I wore my hair or how I dressed, it's some kind of weird vibe thing.

A few years ago, I met someone who had had the same experience since she was a little girl (I’ve been a friend of her parents for years but didn't meet her until she was 12 or so). It was shocking to see her get the double takes and mangled pronouns I'd gotten. When she was 10, she wrote a fantastic essay for off our backs, in which she said:

I start to make a new friend before they know that I'm a girl, and when I tell them—I have to tell them sooner or later—sometimes they don't want to be my friend because I'm different from some girls. I have to tell them because I don't want my friends going around thinking I'm a boy when I'm actually not. Sometimes I've decided not to tell them and see what happens and it all turns into a fiasco. Not always, but because they've known me for several weeks and I haven't bothered to correct them. And they feel kind of uneasy about that when they find out. I think it's because most people see boys with short hair, pants, and shirts, and see girls as long hair, dresses, skirts.

You might want to ponder that, parents of Pop.

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The Minnesota Supreme Court just ruled 5-0 that Al Franken is the winner of the contested 2008 Minnesota Senate race, by 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. Finally, right? Minnesota has been down one senator for almost half a year. That's already too long. The state shouldn't have to half sit out the summer's big business on Capitol Hill: health care, the energy bill, and the confirmation hearings for Judge Sotomayor.

But there's one avenue left for Norm Coleman, Franken's Republican opponent, and that's a federal lawsuit. From a legal standpoint, such a suit would be extremely dubious, for reasons election law expert Rick Hasen explains here. It would depend on reviving the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore, which as you may remember was supposed to be a one-shot deal. (The court said then that application of the decision was limited to "present circumstances.") But from a political standpoint, the picture is much more mixed. The national GOP has plenty of reason to fight on, since seating Franken will give the Democrats 60 senators. A couple of months ago Senator Lindsey Graham and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged Coleman to go to federal court. Since then, polls in Minnesota, however, have shown voters losing patience with the delay in seating their senator. Will Coleman listen to the voters, or to his party leaders in DC? Or will McConnell and Graham and the rest agree that it's time to cease and desist?

ADDENDUM: We have the answer: Coleman concedes!

Photograph of Al Franken by Jeffrey Thompson/Getty Images.

Tags: al franken, election law, u.s. senate

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Sharks have a serious public relations problem. It's understandable—it's hard for people to feel bad for an animal that ate an adorable surfer girl's arm. But sharks are in serious trouble. To paraphrase Alan Moore, people shouldn't be afraid of sharks. Sharks should be afraid of people.

A new report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released last week, found that more than 30 percent of sharks and rays are threatened with extinction. An additional 24 percent of species were classified as Near Threatened. These are not sharks that were lining up to eat you—of the 350 shark species, only 10 are considered dangerous to people. (Seriously, people, the most dangerous part of your visit to the beach is the car ride there! Compare 10 shark deaths per year in the entire world to 40,000 auto deaths each year in the U.S. alone.) But the declining species are sharks that are strange and beautiful and important to the ocean's health.

Sharks are slow to grow and reproduce, and their decline is primarily due to rampant and wasteful overfishing. The most well-known practice is shark finning, where the valuable fins are removed and the rest of the animal thrown back to rot. Though shark finning is illegal in many locations, poaching is rampant, particularly in isolated, poor areas such as the Galapagos. The lesser-known cause of sharks' decline is as bycatch in other fisheries. Millions of sharks are unintentionally killed every year in the tuna and swordfish fisheries, alongside turtle and seabirds and other unwanted fish.

People are indoctrinated into fearing sharks in childhood. Even the quasi-friendly-sharks in Finding Nemo aren't nice sharks after all. But like all top predators, sharks are critical to maintaining the stability and health of their ecosystems. Without sharks, Nemo and all his buddies would be homeless, their coral reef demolished through a series of food chain breakdowns. To help sharks, consider buying fish that are caught with minimal bycatch. And never, never let your children see Jaws.

Photograph of a Caribbean reef shark by Tom Brakefield/Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: environment, extinct species, IUCN, ocean, Science, sharks

Zoos across the country are reporting higher attendance as consumers look for affordable entertainment closer to home. (Springfield News-Leader)

As well-off families confront the new contours of their budgets, education may emerge as an attractive, if painful, place to cut. (New York Times/City Room)

The recession has begun to cut into eating habits, affecting not only how much we fork out on food but also what we are putting into our shopping baskets. (BBC) There are easy ways to cut down on your grocery bill. (Recessionwire)

A standoff at a Georgia chicken plant shows how two important imperatives in a recession — creating jobs and cutting excess capacity — can collide. (Wall Street Journal)

Across the country, slim financial aid packages and family monetary concerns are preventing students from attending their choice university. (Dallas Morning News)

Twyla Prindle on what should you tell your children about the recession. (Examiner)

DIY Nation: Strapped consumers are trying to save money by cutting expenses such as lawn services, opting instead to tackle projects themselves. (Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette)

The recession is hitting harder than forecast in the U.K., as figures show the country’s GPD dropping 2.4%, the most since 1958. (Bloomberg)

The securities firms still standing on Wall Street are about to close the most lucrative quarter since the credit crisis erupted. (Wall Street Journal)

More landlords have loosened their pet policies over the past 18 months, responding to a spike in demand from pet-owning renters — many of whom have been victims of foreclosures. (Associated Press)

Tags: cheap recreation, college, education, employment, food, kids and the recession, recession, Wall Street

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Hanna’s post about the Swedish couple who are attempting to raise their child “gender-free” (not telling anyone its birth sex or permitting the genitals to be seen by anyone but a select few intimates) has had me thinking all day about the chicken-and-egg problem of gender identification. Do I think the category of gender is more constructed than the dominant culture gives it credit for? Definitely. Does the parenting of this couple horrify me? Completely.

Hanna, your analogy (to a “militant feminist friend” who tried unsuccessfully to make her daughter play with trucks) doesn’t quite hold up; in terms of the violence visited on the kid’s sense of self, the Swedish family’s choice to conceal the fact of gender altogether seems infinitely worse. Being told by your parents that you should (or shouldn’t) conform to this or that gender stereotype is bad enough, but imagine being told, “The entire category of gender, which from empirical observation you can see is hugely significant in all areas of human life, doesn’t apply to you alone, because we say so.” I’m picturing my own 3-year-old, who asks complex and essentially unanswerable questions about gender on a daily basis (Why can mamas have babies and papas can’t? Why don’t men wear dresses?), having to keep her own sex a secret. (That would gall her, as she’s very proud to be a girl and would hate to miss a chance to brag about it.) Obviously, you don’t have to dress your kid in tutus or football jerseys (or whatever the Swedish equivalent is), but to truly obfuscate all evidence of gender, and keep your child from giving away the game, would require some fancy footwork.

I’m stymied by the very grammar of this undertaking. Assuming Swedish has gendered personal pronouns (confirmation, Swedish speakers?), this kid’s parents must have to engineer all kinds of weird locutions: “Pop chooses Pop’s clothes Popself.” But if I ridicule Pop’s parents (and worry about both Pop and his/her brother/sister on the way), it’s not in a dismissive, vive la différence kind of way. I respect the instinct to radically reinvent the role of gender in childrearing; I think every mother I know seeks, in some measure, to free her child from the constraint of gender expectations. But this couple’s literal and dogmatic interpretation of that instinct strikes me as borderline child abuse.

Photograph of a French child reading a gender-neutral book produced by a Swedish publishing house by STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: gender identity, sweden

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The plaintiffs in the hotly contested affirmative action case Ricci v. DeStefano stood out among the crowd outside New Haven City Hall today. They wore dress blues and wide smiles or poker-faces that occasionally cracked into grins. They were, but for one, white, and they were celebrating their win in a 5-4 decision handed down by a sharply divided Supreme Court.

Mingling on the sidewalk before the conference, plaintiff Frank Ricci posed for photos with his family. Ben Vargas, the one Hispanic amongst the 18 plaintiffs, grinned beneath his sunglasses and crisp peaked cap. Attorney Karen Torre, surrounded by her clients and jokingly donning one of their caps, delivered a statement in boldly Obama-esque fashion: “We had the audacity of hope—that some court at some point would enforce the letter and spirit of the civil rights laws, accord to firefighters the recognition and respect that they deserve, and reject attempts to lower professional standards of competence for the sake of identity politics.”

It took some audacity indeed to invoke Obama in support of a lawsuit that called into question the country’s most significant civil rights statutes. At a podium in the City Hall foyer, defendant and Mayor John DeStefano lamented the Court’s stance on equal opportunity when he declared this morning’s decision “a continual erosion of civil rights law by the Supreme Court.”

By choosing to hear the case, the Court placed the question of race-influenced hiring decisions back on the table. In an opinion written by Justice Kennedy, the majority decided that “the City made its employment decision because of race. The City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” If the city had rejected the results because the exams were poorly constructed or because there was a less discriminatory alternative—see Justice Ginsburg’s dissent for an argument that they were, and there is—then the court might have ruled differently. But scratching test results solely because city officials did not like the complexion of the top scorers, Kennedy argued, “is antithetical to the notion of a workplace where individuals are guaranteed equal opportunity regardless of race.”

Lieutenant Danny Stratton, who’s currently being considered for captain in the Camden, New Jersey Fire Department (see part one of our previous Ricci series for Camden’s own history of racial tension in its firehouses) and who came to New Haven today to show support for the Ricci plaintiffs, explained that diversity plays a big role in his department’s hiring decisions. “But it doesn’t guarantee you’ve got the top guy for the job,” he said. Like Stratton, Max Schneeman is a Camden lieutenant waiting for a promotion to captain. He’d taken the test, he told me, and is part of his own lawsuit. I assumed he meant a reverse discrimination suit similar to Ricci, but Schneeman quickly clammed up, crossing his arms and turning away, his eyes shielded by reflective sunglasses.

DeStefano acknowleged the divisive nature of the case, noting the views of both firefighters like Stratton and Schneeman, but also of those who were conspicuously not present—the minority firefighters. “I have no doubt that there is a set of firefighters who feel that they’ve played by the rules and who feel justified right now,” the mayor said. “And that there’s another group who feel like the rules are stacked against them and that as soon as they start to get ahead, the rules change.”

I kept thinking about the black firefighters I’ve been talking to over the past few weeks, none of whom I saw at the press conference. After decades and decades of lawsuits founded upon civil rights statutes, they have started to get ahead. Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about 60 percent of New Haven’s population, are now more or less proportionally represented within the rank and file of the city’s fire department. But their efforts to penetrate the upper management ranks have been less fruitful. Currently, only one of the city’s 21 fire captains is African-American. The anti-discrimination laws that once won them spots in New Haven’s firehouses are now the laws that have planted the smiles on Frank Ricci’s and Ben Vargas’ faces. There go the rules, changing again.

Photograph of Frank Ricci by Nicole Allan.

Tags: ginsburg, kennedy, Ricci v. DeStefano