• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 0

Like the word genius, the word hero is overused. But I think the term is fitting for former New York Times reporter Nan Robertson, who died yesterday at the age of 83. Not only was she a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, she overcame alcoholism, the death of her second husband, and the loss of the end joints of all her fingers (though not her thumbs) after a bout of toxic shock syndrome.

What I love best about Robertson is that one of her biggest triumphs was sticking it to the man. Her second book, The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men, and the New York Times, as the Times obituary puts it:

[W]as an account of the events surrounding Elizabeth Boylan et al. v. The New York Times, a federal class-action suit filed on behalf of 550 women at The Times over inequities including pay, assignments and advancement. (Ms. Robertson was not among the seven named plaintiffs in the suit.) In 1978, the suit was settled out of court for $350,000, with The Times agreeing to an affirmative-action plan.

The Pulitzer she won was for an article called “Toxic Shock,” about her experience with toxic shock syndrome. After the joints of her fingers were amputated, she feared she would never write again. But she learned to type, and continued writing. After she retired from the Times, she became a professor. She will be missed.

Tags: nan robertson, nan robertson getting better: inside alcoholics anonymous

Kerry, good point that Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics (read Ruth Marcus’ insightful column about women “firsts”) was not trained as an economist but a political scientist. She joins the ranks of Nobel economic laureates whose backgrounds are in different disciplines. An economics blog post discusses how the field is being upended by people who don’t believe markets (and humans) always behave rationally, which means economic activity cannot be plotted and predicted with mathematical precision. These new economists, such as Ostrom, are teasing apart how and why humans actually act, because it turns out humans are not simply machines for self-maximizing behavior. The question I always had for economists who believed we were is: Have you ever interacted with any other humans besides economists? Yale’s Robert Shiller says that the encroachment of other disciplines has been good for economics, because the prevailing belief in efficient, self-regulating markets “has derailed our thinking.” That the experts can get it completely wrong is good to keep in mind whenever we hear from those who think they can model the world and predict the future.

Tags: elinor ostrom, nobel prize economics

To the DoubleX commenters who were outraged with Lucinda’s “Friend or Foe” column from Monday, and who don’t feel mollified by this morning’s apology: I see where you’re coming from. When I first read Lucinda’s response to the girl who says someone “slipped [her] a mickey” at a concert and then was ditched by her friends, I gave Lucinda the benefit of the doubt. I’ve talked to her before; I like her; I didn’t want to believe she’d be quite this flip about such a troubling tale.

So I reasoned that Lucinda, who is older than you’d think by her impeccable skin, just didn’t know what “slipped me a mickey” meant. It was this line, I thought, that revealed her ignorance:

Yes, overnights at the E.R. are the opposite of fun. So are disastrous drug trips. (I had one in my twenties, which pretty much sealed my fate as an illegal-substance ninny.)

This was not a disastrous drug trip. This was someone being drugged. To conflate the two is to imply that a woman getting drugged at a bar is as responsible for that outcome as one who willingly sneaks into a bathroom stall to snort a line. That couldn’t be what Lucinda meant, right?

But on rereading Lucinda’s response, and seeing that ending I must have glossed over the first time—“I’d wager a guess that [your friends] think you’re lying about the mickey, tales of which are sometimes used as a cover for irresponsible behavior. (Only you know the truth.)”—I realized what our commenters already knew: that Lucinda understood the girl’s claim that she was drugged. She just didn’t buy it.

In her apology this morning, Lucinda writes:

I was struck by how many readers seemed to be hearing echoes of date rape or sexual abuse in ‘Drugged’s’ story. I have to admit, I did not think of that at the time. There is no evidence in her letter that she was a victim of a sex crime.

But the echoes of date rape or sexual abuse aren’t in the confines of the story of what happened that night. The echoes are in Lucinda’s answer, and the implication that the girl should take responsibility for ending up unconscious on the sidewalk. That’s the same sort of “blame the victim” mentality we’re so used to hearing and striking down when it comes to rape.

Maybe Lucinda’s right that this girl is using being drugged as an excuse for letting her night get so out of hand. (As she and others point out, it’s hard to make sense of the friends being angry with her in the morning otherwise.) But, as Mary Carmichael writes on Newsweek today, the fact that some women lie about being drugged doesn’t mean that Lucinda should assume this one woman is lying, or that women are never drugged, “any more than the murkiness of sexual assault statistics and the occasional false accusation means that women are never raped.”

Tags: Drugged, drugs, friendship, Rape

In the wake of Elinor Ostrom’s surprise Nobel win, unemployed economists are really turning on the charm. Check out the seething bitterness on this message board for job-seeking econ geeks. Ostrom isn’t one of their studly quant jock heroes, so these boys have decided that she’s just a P.C., feminist-friendly token of a pick. My favorite comment: “This is the problem with Affirmative Action. Last time a woman tried to go to the moon, the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after the launch.” And not only does she lack the virile, rugged masculinity we all associate with working economists, she doesn’t even call herself an economist! She’s a politicial scientist—just the kind of hedging you’d expect from a woman.

The thing is, economists with jobs seem pretty impressed with Ostrom. Men like Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, Harvard’s Ed Glaeser, and Stanford's Paul Romer say she’s both brilliantly creative and rigorously empirical in a discipline that can discourage engagement with the actual world. “Elinor Ostrom may arguably be considered the mother of field work in development economics,” says George Mason professor Alex Tabarrok. “She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal. In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.”

Elinor Ostrom has taken an interest in the way humans coordinate. She doesn’t seem to care much whether her findings are called “political science” or “economics” or “anthropology.” This kind of interdisciplinary chutzpah seems enormously, fascinatingly threatening to some people.

Tags: economics, Nobel

It's increasingly clear that for many in the fashion world, there are two kinds of women: those about to die from starvation, and fat women. There's been a disturbing denouement to the controversy over Ralph Lauren's overzealous Photoshopping that led to a picture in which a model's hips were narrower than her head: The model in question, Filippa Hamilton, was fired for being "overweight." It took me a while to find a good, nonaltered picture of Hamilton so you can judge for yourself, but it seems to me that if you can call that woman "fat," it might actually be time for psychiatric intervention for your delusions.

But those kinds of delusions define the fashion industry. In case you haven't heard, it's now been determined that Barbie is too fleshy for the delicate tastes of fashion designer Christian Louboutin. He agreed to join a larger project of fashion designers making specialty clothes for the doll, and decided that he had to redesign the doll herself because her ankles were "too fat." Feminists sit around worrying that Barbie will distort little girls' body images, but fashion designers apparently fear that Barbie's setting a bad example of what happens to you if you let yourself go.

Of course, part of the problem appears to be that many male fashion designers seem to think women get to dangerously obese weights like 95-100 pounds by doing nothing but shoveling chips in their mouth all day. Or that's the impression I get reading Mary Elizabeth Williams' post at Broadsheet on the issue, where she quotes designer Karl Lagerfeld denouncing "fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly." He was responding to Brigitte magazine's announcement that they were no longer using profesional fashion models, as they were tired of Photoshopping away the inconveniently ugly parts of being painfully thin, such as the jutting bones. One can only imagine how Lagerfeld thinks a woman who reaches a whole size 6 must eat. Perhaps he pictures a woman with an IV pumping cheesecake directly to her veins 24/7.

In reality, many women take a pass not just on cheesecake but also on chips in order to even get down to a size 6, which the fashion world treats as morbidly obese. And as the Brigitte magazine example shows, according to the standards set by the fashion industry there is no such thing a beautiful woman, period. If you're painfully thin enough to make it as a model, the Photoshop team has to spend hours covering up the boniness. If you have enough weight on you that you have a little softness to you, then you're treated like the Goodyear Blimp.

The obsession with wiping out any traces of humanity from female bodies in the fashion industry reminds me of nothing so much as the obsession with sexual purity that flourishes on the Christian Right. In both cases, anxieties about the dirty biological reality of life are projected onto female bodies, and the solution proposed is an extreme form of control. As fashion designers balk at anything even resembling soft tissue on women's bodies, some factions of the Christian right are moving towards extreme forms of premarital abstinence that ban even closed-mouth kissing before the wedding. But since the anxieties they're trying to quash never actually go away, it's worrisome in both cases to see what the next steps in appetite-denial will be.

Tags: body issues, weight

Add dried fruit to the ever-growing list of things food scientists just can't leave alone. In the ongoing quest to develop "lo-cal fruit" (who knew that was an issue?), researchers have figured out a way to suck the sugar from strawberries and replace it with stevia. Yum! Maybe they can add some artificial strawberry flavoring, too—because why eat a convenient natural food unless you have to?

Better yet, why not add different flavors. Why should a strawberry taste like a strawberry when there are so many other flavors available? If an apple can become a Grapple, surely the humble strawberry can dream. How about a rasp-strawberry? They could call it a "Raspberry."

I appreciate a little food innovation—no one could be a bigger fan of the Halloween Oreo than I. But junk food is supposed to be processed and fruit isn't. With a few exceptions, the less that's done to a food, the healthier it is and the better it tastes. Strawberries can be grown almost anywhere during some part of the year, and dried nearby for muffins, granola, and snacking. They're full of natural sugars and a whole host of other healthy stuff, some of which we probably haven't even identified yet. Why mess with a good thing?

Because strawberry "applications" that make use of dried fruit often add a lot of sugar to the finished product—so letting the dried strawberry keep its natural sugars results in a product with a "considerable caloric load ... limiting consumer acceptance. " It's all part of an effort to develop "healthier and more nutritive products."

Because nothing says summer goodness like a product.

Tags: food science, fruit, nutrition

Apparently parents wandering a party store in Manhattan were shocked (shocked!) to learn that sexy costumes are available for toddlers, tweens, and teens. Have these people totally missed Toddlers and Tiaras? Letting your 4-year-old cavort in a revealing cheap satin ensemble may be poor parenting (although it could also be described as "buying her that Disney Princess costume she's been begging for"), but is letting your 14-year-old dress as a Devil Grrl really asking for trouble?

Sharon Lamb, author of Packaging Girlhood, told the New York Post that the costumes were "very damaging, " adding, "The one night when its ok to live out your fantasies, marketers are telling children their fantasies should involve sex." Here's the thing: Plenty of 14-year-old-girl fantasies already involve sex. (In her defense, Ms. Lamb was talking about all of the costumes, not just those for teens. )

Teenagers want to be cool, and they want to look hot. I distinctly remember the annual struggle to come up with a Halloween costume that conveyed my hidden assets and yet didn't look like I was trying too hard, and certainly anything that involved fishnet tights invariably fit the bill. When everything fell together, the feeling I remember best was one of power—of flaunting what felt like a rebellious choice in front of peers and adults alike, risk free. Were men and boys looking at me in inappropriate ways? I guarantee that I hoped so. I also guarantee that I knew—as do the vast majority of people—that I was not inviting my drama teacher to go all Roman Polanski on me.

I'm not OK with 7-year-olds dressed as French maids, but I don't begrudge a 15-year-old the chance to dress as the risque version of the Cheshire cat for a night, should she so desire. (Although I'd argue that a homemade homicidal-goth-cheerleader look would offer infinitely more cred.) Every girl should learn to play with her sexuality, and our adult fears and judgments shouldn't be allowed to take that away. But that's easy for me to say, as I'm a decade away from having a 15-year-old girl of my own. Still, as an onlooker, taking the sex out of a teenage Halloween strikes me as a battle that was well lost a long time ago.

Dear Commenters,

I’m sorry I offended so many people with my response to “Drugged” (Friend or Foe, October 12 ’09). Reading through the comments this evening—as I tried to make sense of the outpouring of fury—I was struck by how many readers seemed to be hearing echoes of date rape or sexual abuse in “Drugged’s” story. I have to admit, I did not think of that at the time. There is no evidence in her letter that she was a victim of a sex crime. And I believe that if she had been, or thought she had been, she would have alluded to it in the letter. All we know is that something she drank caused her to pass out. Moreover, had I believed for a second that she’d been assaulted, I would have responded in an entirely different manner.

It seemed to me that, by the time “Drugged” called, she was out of physical danger and simply frightened and upset. This doesn’t mean that she did not deserve sympathy—only that her friends were not being asked to sit vigil as she hovered between life and death (in which case, yes, they definitely would have needed to be there, no matter what the hour). Why am I so sure she was out of danger? Not only did she place the initial phone call, but there is no mention of her having her stomach pumped—only that she was in the emergency room and, presumably, being watched, in a safe environment, by medical professionals.

I suppose part of me suspected that I wasn’t getting the full story, and that colored my answer. Why? The fact that “Drugged’s” friends were described as “angry” the next morning made me think that there might be a back story we weren’t hearing. I’m not suggesting that the writer is lying about what happened. But possibly she has asked favors like this more than once or twice in recent years. Otherwise, there is no reasonable explanation for why her close friends would be anything less than sympathetic for what was, by all accounts, an awful night. Unless they're simply nasty people. Which, in turn, begs the question: How did they become "Drugged's" best friends?

I know many of us assume we would jump out of bed after that call. But how many of you would actually, honestly get out of bed and get dressed at 4 a.m. and drive to the hospital to keep your close friend company while she recovered? And it is not really clear what she is recovering from. It's hard to tell from the letter. Some of you would be there no matter what, I’m sure. But definitely not all of you, in every circumstance, for every friend. At least if you’re being honest with yourselves.

I was being intentionally flip in suggesting that girl friends are best when your cat is sick, etc. The point I wanted to make is that there are limits to what you can ask of people who are not related to you. (Or, at least, you can ask—but you might well get a "no.") I don’t actually believe that commiserating over sick pets is all close friends are capable of—far from it. Apparently this little joke did not translate. I’m sorry about that, too.

Finally, to those calling for my dismissal, all I can say is: If you don’t like the column, don’t read it! I sort through scores of letters in search of ones that will provoke debate on the site. Apparently, this one has done exactly that. So maybe I’ve done my job, after all.

Sincerely, Lucinda (aka Friend or Foe)

Tags: Drugged, lucinda rosenfeld