As far as Halloween costumes go, my results always seem to fall into the category “lazy but soignée.” (I long to invest in made-to-measure pearl-white silicone mask. I’d pair it a satin robe so that each year I could go as Christiane Génessier (played by Edith Scob), the once-beautiful faceless captive daughter of a plastic surgeon in Les Yeux Sans Visage, one of my favorite films.)

Anyhow, last night I decided I was going to lazily costume myself as a 19th-century amazone, basically a snooty horseback rider. The idea came from watching Coco before Chanel. The sentimental biopic didn’t inspire me, exactly. But it did reminded me that I had a 19th-century riding top hat somewhere deep in my closet. The costume would require minimal effort for maximum grown-up sex appeal: some glittery Shu Uemura false eyelashes, lace leggings, a whip, a cape, and some Nat Sherman gold-papered cigarettes. Who knows, maybe I could score some horse tranquilizer and store it in my chatelaine? Kidding.

But when I tried on the costume and looked in the mirror I started wondering about Chanel’s age at various biographical milestones. (At 34, you start wondering about the age of the female personalities: By when did they achieve X? What about Y?) With the help of Axel Madsen’s biography, I did a little math. For starters, Coco was born in 1883. Her first Little Black Dress appeared in Vogue in 1926—she was 43! This seems at odds with the popular Coco Before Chanel conception of her as some kind of savvy, jersey-loving orphan, doesn't it? Coco Chanel was certainly no wunderkind. In fact, we may even want to think of her as a late bloomer.

Tags: Chanel, coco before chanel, halloween costume, wunderkind

Here's my favorite part of Jodi Kantor's really interesting portrait of the Obama marriage in this Sunday's NYT magazine:

When she interviewed for a job at the University of Chicago Medical Center, her baby sitter canceled at the last moment, and so Michelle strapped a newborn Sasha into a stroller, and the two rolled off together to meet the hospital president. “She was in a lot of ways a single mom, and that was not her plan,” recalls Susan Sher, who became her boss at the hospital and is now her chief of staff.

Ah yes, the moment of bringing the baby where she doesn't belong. What I love about this story is that Michelle presumably got the job. Though, come to think of it, marriage and policy-wise, the "Be invincible!" message is not actually helpful. You could imagine Barack Obama concluding that his wife is managing fine, just as he was counting on.

More broadly, Jodi's piece made me think that Michelle has her footing as a First Lady who can handle the constricted role without being defined by it. Rebecca Traister and I went back and forth last November about whether Michelle was letting herself be "momm-ified," in Rebecca's phrasing. I held out then for Michelle's feminist cred. And I do think that when your husband is president, the rules are different. Yes, your power comes from him. But you have so much of it! Michelle impresses me in this new NYT interview by showing us how well she recognizes the tension. When Jodi asks whether it's possible to be married to the president and have a "true and equal partnership," Barack starts to answer and then subsides. Michelle, meanwhile, makes "a small, sharp 'mmphf' of recognition" and then says:

Clearly Barack’s career decisions are leading us. They’re not mine; that’s obvious. I’m married to the president of the United States. I don’t have another job, and it would be problematic in this role. So that — you can’t even measure that.

No, you can't. But she may be able to measure the impact she has as spokeswoman in the administration's effort to combat childhood obesity, her next project.

Tags: Obama Marriage

For a giggle, and further proof that gold lamé leggings don’t look good on anyone, I direct you to “Male Prima Donna,” a spoof video dreamed up by the writers of The Office and performed by Subtle Sexuality, a girl group comprised of two Office regulars, the incisively ditzy Kelly Kapoor and new receptionist Erin Hannon. Like all great spoof videos, from Weird Al to Lonely Island’s “I’m on a Boat" to my personal favorite, “Let Me Smell Yo Dick” (which, OK, may not be an intentional spoof), this sounds like it could be a real pop song, from the vocal effects to some of the lyrics: “What you got, ADD? Add it up, don’t equal you and me."

The other lyrics are, of course, sillier (“You're cute but you think you’re blazing hot/ You're short and you think you’re not”), but do capture the central dilemma of being Kelly Kapoor. As played by Office writer Mindy Kaling, Kelly is a blissfully clueless mean girl, a pop-culture-obsessed ditz, who is bossy, self-important, and unkind (see that the song is performed by the “beautiful and mysterious” Kelly Kapoor and just “the pretty” Erin Hannon, because Kelly Kapoor totally designed the band’s website), but she’s constantly getting played by her on-again-off again nonboyfriend Ryan (who shows up as Mr. Understood in the video, the “OG Prima Donna, my rhymes bite like piranha”). If Kelly's a snotty brat, Ryan's worse, and she loves him for it. The song is about him, and the lyrics speak for themselves: “You’re the Male Prima Donna, but I can’t help but want ya/ I’m an independent diva, but I still kinda need you.”

Tags: comedy, Mindy Kaling, Music, The Office

I have been stuck on a country road twice in my life—once in mud, once in snow. Both times were in the same Honda Civic, with the same fiancé at the wheel, on the same patch of the same road. This road is in Iowa. There is a sign before it that reads something like “Road Impassable During Inclement Weather.” You would think that my fiancé and I would avoid this road after seeing the sign in inclement weather. You would think that my fiancé and I, having gotten stuck once and having had to beg some farmers to pull us out, would thus avoid this road and avoid a second disaster. But the situation was out of our hands. The little green dot said to go down that road. We suspend all judgment before GPS. And as Alex Hutchinson explains in his solid article in The Walrus, GPS really does make you stupid.

Cognitive mapping is a skill that develops with practice and apparently atrophies with lack of use. The kind of spatial information relevant to navigating is stored in the hippocampus. London taxi drivers have famously large hippocampi. Cabbies who have been driving for a long time have larger hippocampi than those who have just started; the size is responsive to the frequency with which navigational skills are called up. Presumably, Mongolian nomads and Inuit hunters have hippocampi to die for. And people who stare at the green dot? According to Hutchinson:

The increase in gps use has meant that people spend less time learning details about their neighbourhoods. British researchers testing cognitive map formation in drivers found that those using gps formed less detailed and accurate maps of their routes than those using paper maps. Similarly, a University of Tokyo study found that pedestrians using gps-enabled cellphones had a harder time figuring out where they were and where they had come from. Their navigational aids, in other words, had allowed them to turn off their hippocampi.

When cognitive mapping skills go undeveloped, we switch to a stimuli-and-response model, which may be part of the reason I find it so hard to disobey my GPS-enabled phone. But none of this necessarily implies that we were better off with the badly folded maps tucked into the backseat pocket. Hutchinson ends the piece with a paean to the pleasures of getting lost. People who love to travel treasure that feeling of disorientation. In strange way that’s an argument for the technology; once you’re totally dependent on GPS to have any sense of your location, you can just turn it off and be blissfully lost wherever you are.

Tags: cognitive science

When Mexico City decriminalized abortion in 2007, pro-choicers took it as a sign of great things to come, possibly including a nationwide liberalizing of abortion laws. Unfortunately, as Mary Cuddehe reports in the Atlantic, the Catholic Church and general sexist establishment reacted with outrage and doubled down on the war against women who want to control when they have children. Since then, 14 Mexican states have passed laws defining personhood as starting at conception, with some even going so far as to ban IUDs while they were at it. The result is that women have been going to jail for obtaining illegal abortions.

Though the anti-choice lobby in Mexico is as adept at affecting a love of fetal life as the anti-choice lobby in the United States, the largely anti-sex, misogynist underpinnings of anti-choice beliefs speak loudly through the laws. As Cuddehe reports, the state of Jalisco even adjusts a woman's sentence for abortion depending on her reputation and whether or not she had sex outside of marriage. And just like in the United States, anti-choicers dance around the issue of what to do with women who do abort. Officials in Guanajuato claim no woman has gone to jail for abortion, but pro-choice activists in the state say dozens have. It also seems that women who spontaneously miscarry also run into danger from suspicious doctors. Already a Mayan woman in Quintana Roo has been brought up on homicide charges for a termination she claims was spontaneous.

Complications and even death from illegal abortion in Mexico are a serious public health concern, and 62 percent of Mexicans believe that abortion should be legal. So why is this even happening? Much to most of the blame can be laid at the doorstep of the Catholic Church, which has chosen Latin America in general as the major front in their war against women. As Michelle Goldberg noted in my podcast interview with her, the Catholic Church has decided the best way to keep the flock faithful is to go after the abortion issue like a rabid dog. When you hear cases like the 9-year-old rape victim in Brazil seeking abortion, it's often because the Church seeks these extreme cases out and makes a stink out of forcing the girl in question to give birth. These cases work to show the extremes the Church is willing to go in its beliefs about mandatory childbirth, even as the rest of the world stands by and says, "Really? A 9-year-old?"

And in Mexico, women are learning how eager the Church is to run over them to prove its patriarchal bona fides. All the sentimental rhapsodizing about fetal life hasn't stopped an estimated 875,000 a year from seeking abortion (in a country with a third of our population). Off-label and black market use of the ulcer medication Cytotec is a popular method, since its main ingredient misoprostol can induce abortion. The problem is that using the drug this way can cause severe bleeding and uterine rupture, and indeed, 18 percent of the women seeking abortion in 2006 in Mexico were hospitalized for complications. But as the women of Mexico are learning, their health and well-being don't amount to much when their bodies can be used as a battleground for the war against modernity.

Tags: Catholic Church, mexico