Our own Emily has a fantastic and revealing Q & A with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg up on the New York Times website today. Their conversation ranges from Roe v. Wade to summer camp in the Adirondacks to Savana Redding to losing her shoe under the bench. It seems primarily designed as a warning to any holdouts on Sotomayor. (“Yes, the notion that Sonia is an aggressive questioner—what else is new? Has anybody watched Scalia or Breyer up on the bench?”) Her feeling about the lack of women on the bench could pass as pointed fashion advice: “It just doesn’t look right in the year 2009.”

Tags: Emily Bazelon, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor

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Jessica, I saw nothing cruel or exploitative about allowing Paris Jackson to speak about her dad and I’m inclined to believe the Jackson family didn’t force her to do so. According to several news reports, Janet Jackson was slated to speak but let Paris speak instead because she wanted to say something about her father. I watched the whole thing and found the memorial to be tasteful and well-executed, not the bizarre spectacle you describe.

Perhaps after seeing such an outpouring of emotion for her dad, Paris was moved to be more than a just a front row spectator. I'm glad she got that moment. Hopefully it will serve as an emotional touchstone for her and not as a source of deep pain and embarrassment when she’s grown up and looks back on that widely broadcasted day. Maybe she’ll be reminded that despite all the things, good and bad, that have been said and written about her dad, regardless of the media’s obsession with his bizarre and tragic life and the public’s schizophrenic fascination and repulsion toward him, at the end of the day she was the one person who reminded everyone else that he was a human being. That he was her dad and he loved her, and as importantly, that she loved him too. On that stage, her love for him seemed pure and simple. There were probably not many people in MJ’s orbit that the same could be said of with any certainty. Paris and her siblings gave MJ something that not even his most committed fans could give him and that his clearly dysfunctional family never gave him, but he seemed to always crave — unconditional love. As heartbreaking as her moment on stage was to watch, Paris was able to profoundly humanize MJ with just 26 words and in a way that no one else could.

Yes, allowing her to speak was risky but prohibiting her from speaking could have hurt her too. Children are much more resilient than we give them credit for. When my mother died last fall, my little niece and nephew spoke at her memorial service. My niece was 9, my nephew 13. I was afraid they would fall apart but instead they spoke lovingly and in surprisingly great detail about how their grandmother touched their lives. It was very cathartic for them and for us adults too. I know that’s not the same as being on stage in front of 20,000 people and hundreds of television cameras, but my point is that speaking allowed my niece and nephew to take part in the celebration of my mother’s life and helped them to understand that that her death was part of the cycle of life and was not something to fear or despair inconsolably over but something to accept and understand. Children are often sidelined at funerals and memorials because adults want to protect their feelings. As a kid, I was always very scared and sad at funerals. I felt like I an outsider at a very adult ritual of grief and regret.

Now that MJ is gone, I think it’s possible for his kids to eventually have somewhat normal lives—albeit not in the short term and not during the next few years of custody and other legal battles expected over his estate—absent of round-the-clock paparazzi and outside the constant glare of the media spotlight. That is if their guardians protect them and they don’t grow up to be scandal-prone musicians, movie stars, attention-seeking children of once famous parents or, heaven forbid, freakish media magnets like their father.

Photograph of Paris Jackson at her father's memorial service by Mark Terrill-Pool/Getty Images.

Tags: Michael Jackson memorial, Paris Jackson

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Sam, your post on Gen Y's educational entitlement sounded eerily like a schpeel that plays through my mind every morning. As you know, I am a grad student getting a master's degree in your field. Government and private loans, check; no more earning potential with my degree than without it, check; denial—not really. I went back to school last fall for a specific purpose: to make up for what I, one of those Gen Y strivers, didn't get out of my supposedly idyllic undergraduate education.

Like Walter Kirn, whose Sunday New York Times Magazine piece sparked this discussion, I went to Princeton. Overall, it's a wonderful place. The problem is that I didn't approach it with appropriate wonder. Why? The truth is that after years as one of those aptocrat kids Kirn wrote about, I was totally burned out. Some people seem to emerge from the quest for that single, all-validating prize, the Ivy League (or equivalent) admission, hungry for the intellectual challenges of undergraduate life. I, for one, was exhausted. Between the AP courses, volunteer work, essay contests, and academic competitions, I averaged five hours of sleep a night in high school. When I was a senior, I looked so run-down that a rumor went around my small Catholic school that I was On Drugs. I was a machine.

When Princeton accepted my carefully crafted early decision application, I was over the moon—for a few days. But a week later, I found myself lying in my dry bathtub in my school uniform with the sense that I had never once considered what I really wanted or enjoyed, never even allowed myself to ask that question. I'd spent years proving myself—but proving what exactly?

I got to college the following fall not motivated to achieve much of anything. I didn't see the point. When a book or idea excited me, instead of pursuing it with the enthusiasm the admission committee signed me on for, I resisted. I'd learned what hard work, even on things you cared about, earned you: an overwhelming sense of emptiness.

As a result of my freshman year malaise, both the academic abilities that had once been second nature to me and my sense of myself as a go-getter, so long my primary source of self-worth, atrophied. A bout with anorexia, a subsequent year off, and the time I spent at my alma mater's infamous eating clubs didn't help.

So for me graduate school is the best investment I could have made this year, despite the recession. I entered what is probably the most wonderfully nerdy journalism program on the planet to make up for lost time—intellectual and personal. It's self-indulgent and financially terrifying, but I chose it knowing what I was getting into. And the price is nothing compared to what my years in the aptocracy cost me.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: generation y, Princeton, trophy kids

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Obama 2012 watchers are all aflutter over yesterday’s news that the president’s approval rating in bellwether swing state Ohio has dipped to just 49 percent, down from 62 percent in May. The obvious culprit, as Nate Silver points out, is the still-ailing economy. But when stats whiz Silver compares the Ohio numbers to states with similarly miserable unemployment numbers, he can’t quite come up with a reason for why my native Ohio is taking this whole thing so much harder than, say, his native Michigan, the ground zero of Rust Belt decay. But maybe this Richard Florida map of neurosis in the United States has something to do with it: While the largest cluster of neurotics unsurprisingly emanates forth from New York, the second-most neurotic region of the country is...Ohio. Our crisis might not be any worse, but we stew, we blame, we stress about it more.

Tags: 2012, Barack Obama, economy, neurosis, Ohio, Richard Florida

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The Delhi High Court’s decision last week to legalize gay sex is indeed a big moment for Indian democracy, Nina, and one brought about, like many others in India, by an admirably independent judiciary. It’s also interesting in light of the recent growing support, legislatively and from some courts, for gay rights in the U.S. Here, the battle has centered increasingly on the issue of marriage and the legal and cultural benefits it bestows. Winning that fight, as well as getting rid of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, seems to depend, at least in part, on making people forget that civil rights for gay people have anything to do with the sexual behaviors that distinguish them from heterosexuals (as opponents of a gay-marriage ban in Arizona did in 2006 by focusing on the measure’s disadvantages to all kinds of domestic partners, including straight, unmarried snowbirds). In the U.S., what gay people do in the privacy of their bedrooms has successfully been de-linked from what kinds of rights they deserve. In India, the situation is different, as indicated by the High Court’s ruling, which, after all, legalized a particular sexual behavior between consenting adults, but did nothing to change a social structure that profoundly favors heterosexuals.

One of the fascinating things I learned while living in India in the early part of this decade and reporting on gay rights there at a time when a decision like the High Court’s seemed an extremely distant possibility, was that while same sex intercourse as a behavior was tacitly accepted—and, indeed, engaged in and enjoyed by many who publicly identified as straight—the idea of a civic endorsement of gay personhood in the form of, say, legalizing gay marriage was well nigh unthinkable. In other words, Indians are far less puritanical about sexual behavior than Americans. But their culture so mythologizes the institution of hetero marriage that the U.S. is far closer to civic and legal protections for gay couples than India is. One Indian activist I met compared being gay to smoking. As long as he smoked in secret, he said, it would never bring disapproval from his parents, even if they caught on. But if he ever had the audacity to light up in front of his father, all hell would break loose.

One need only look at Bollywood—or indeed, its recent international offshoots like Slumdog Millionaire—to see how heterosexual romance and marriage are idealized in India. Slumdog is also a good example of how, in popular Indian depictions, straight romance is often deprived of sexual heat. The film’s hero and heroine are more like brother and sister than lovers drawn together by the humbler and holier magnetism of the flesh. Not so in portrayals of gay characters—check out Deepa Mehta’s classic lesbian film, Fire, for some really good chemistry on screen. In the land that gave birth to the Kama Sutra, sexual pleasure is still appreciated for its own sake. Unconventional lives, not so much.

Photograph of Indians celebrating the legalization of gay sex by Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: gay rights, india, new delhi, slumdog millionaire

Sorry Dana, but I’m with Jess on Paris. The contrasts contained in the moment of her speech, to be really eloquent about it, freaked me the eff out. Here’s a young girl, a daughter, having a genuine, raw moment of grief and she’s surrounded by a bunch of… actors. Her authenticity was matched in pitch only by the performativeness in the people surrounding her, these totally dysfunctional family members putting on a show of solidarity, projecting protectiveness with their shoulders, but wholly aware they were making a YouTube moment with their minds. Janet Jackson done up like Jackie O, specifically, made me feel like I was watching some David Lynch dream sequence likely to give me nightmares.

While watching the funeral it also occurred to me that the saga of Michael Jackson’s death has followed the exact same arc as his life: What began as wholesome, heartfelt, feel-good celebration of talent and music has transformed at break neck speed into a twisted, creepy kind of mass denial about the dark side of celebrity. This whole thing has gone pear shaped, fast.

Tags: michael jackson funeral, Paris Jackson

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Jessica, though there were plenty of things to be creeped out by during the Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday, for me Paris Jackson’s short and tearful tribute to her father didn’t number among them. In fact (along with Brooke Shields’ speech and Jermaine Jackson’s vocally unsure but heartbreaking performance of “Smile”), Paris' appearance struck me as one of the day’s few uncreepy moments. Given that Paris and her brothers have been made to wear Halloween masks in public for most of their lives, I can understand why it might have been meaningful for her to step forward in public with her own face on.

Far ickier was the whitewashing of Jackson family dysfunction in the speech of Al Sharpton (has he ever said anything more demonstrably untrue than “wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy”?) and in that horrid occasional poem by Maya Angelou, read by Queen Latifah. In addition to being just an atrocious piece of doggerel (“now that our bright and shining star could slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind …”), Angelou’s poem was awash in pious falsehoods: “Despite the anguish of life, he was sheathed in mother love and family love …” Obviously a funeral is not the place to probe old wounds, but give me a break. Joe Jackson’s ruthless careerism, and the allegations of abuse leveled by several of his children, are well known, and if Katherine Jackson really let all that happen, she must be a world-class enabler. (Joe’s self-defense is chillingly clueless: "I never beat him … I whipped him with a stick and a belt.”) In the looming custody battle between the Jacksons and her biological mother Debbie Rowe, Paris will need all the poise and courage she showed at the podium yesterday.

Photograph of Al Sharpton by Mario Anzuoni-Pool/Getty Images.

Tags: child abuse, michael jackson funeral

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So. That happened. The bizarre spectacle of Michael Jackson's funeral was everywhere yesterday, and the most talked-about moment was when Michael's daughter, Paris Jackson, went up on stage and told the world, "Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much." Her Aunt Janet softly urged her forward and said, "speak up." Though I don't doubt Paris's emotion was genuine, the thing felt creepily staged. By the family's account, Paris wanted to say something at the memorial. But that doesn't mean the Jackson family should have let her.

I'm all for public grieving, and for Paris to have spoken at a family funeral would have been entirely appropriate and I'm sure cathartic. But having her grieve in front of the entire world felt incredibly exploitative. The only other public funeral in recent years of this magnitude was the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Her sons, William and Harry, were largely left alone by the press. They did not mourn their mother in public until a decade after her passing, when they were ages 22 and 25. The Jackson kids are going to face enough scrutiny for the rest of their lives. To allow this child to put herself out there in this manner just seemed wrong. Video is below.

Photograph of the Jackson family by Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Janet Jackson, michael jackson, michael jackson funeral