If the police are right, and Ray Clark killed Annie Le over a power struggle in their shared lab, then that means that the narrative that the media initially plugged this story into doesn't quite fit the circumstances. A pretty, petite woman about to be married who disappears? We're all conditioned to think of sex crimes, instead of workplace violence. If you've ever been the victim of a violent crime, or supported someone who has, there's a bit of comfort to be had in the belief that it could have happened to anyone. Let's hope Le's friends and family are taking comfort in that now.

That said, it's not completely accurate to assume that because this act of violence began as a power struggle at work doesn't mean that gender doesn't play a role in it. According to statistics kept by the Department of Labor (that are sadly out of date), women are more likely to suffer injuries from workplace violence than men. Violence is the second leading cause of death for women at work, after auto accidents. Perhaps with all the attention that Le's death is getting from the mainstream media, workplace violence against women will start to rate attention in the same way sexual assault and domestic violence do.

The one kink in all this is that before the police released the power struggle theory, the standard sexualized narrative about violence against women had set in, which caused some digging that resulted in reasons to believe that suspect Ray Clark may have a history of the more famous kind of violence against women. Gawker collected stories about Clark's high school girlfriend reporting him to the police because she was afraid to break up with him, and excerpts from his girlfriend's MySpace blog that indicates that their relationship is probably stormy and potentially violent. None of this is especially surprising. Our society continues to inculcate violence as a masculine trait, and men who live up to that rarely keep their violent tendencies bucketed in one part of their lives. It's all too easy to see how a man who reacted with violence when he saw defiance from romantic partners would have a similar reaction when defied by a woman he merely had a working relationship with.

Tags: annie le, domestic violence, ray clark, workplace violence

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 10

When I see a headline like "Time to take Susan Boyle seriously," I tend to follow the written instructions, which in this case meant digging up Boyle's version of "Wild Horses" that inspired Ann Powers. I'm billing the LA Times for the dental work to fix my newly popped cavities, right after I put Sticky Fingers on my turntable to wipe out the memory of this travesty. Now, I don't hate everything that achieves a certain level of popularity—I'm a fan of Lily Allen and think Beyonce's a pretty good singer—but I'm still an adherent to the old-fashioned belief that popularity doesn't make up for crappiness.

This no doubt makes me a snob, an elitist, and a hater of democracy. Powers praises Boyle's saccharine, unimaginative oversell of the classic Rolling Stones by praising its lack of irony, its "mask of sincerity," and adherence to all the hallmarks of cheese so beloved by whitebread America that wants to avoid anything challenging. I flatly cannot understand why popularity should mitigate one's dislike of "art" that's so artless. The great thing about the explosion of pop music in the past century is that it collapses the distinction between the individual stamp of being an artist and having popular appeal. The Stones were great pop music, after all.

I'm not made of stone. I watched the video where Boyle overcame prejudice based on looks to prove herself an able singer on Britain's Got Talent, and found myself rooting for her. But let's face it. That she's a competent singer doesn't make her a star, and it has everything to do with her voice and nothing to do with her looks.

A critic guilt-tripping the audience for not thinking much of scrappy Susan Boyle's actual art feels very ... familiar. The pressure to indulge illusions about Boyle's talent reminds me of every time liberals get labeled "elitist" for laughing at creationists, suggesting that Ayn Rand was not a good writer, or scoffing at Sarah Palin. The right wing populism card has been routinely played since Richard Nixon waxed unpoetic about the "silent majority." At least in politics, the idea that being popular mitigates the undesirability of being all wrong has some justification, because it takes being popular and not being right to win. Of course, "popular trumps right" doesn't do much for a nation's well-being, as the Bush administration demonstrated, but you can at least see why the idea is attractive.

But why on earth should this attitude apply to aesthetics? God forbid you get caught hauling around a record by Hot Chip or Yo La Tengo instead of joining Boylemania—someone might call you a "hipster." I can't quite put my finger on when the populism of mediocrity started to overtake the desire to be considered someone of taste, but now that we have an LA Times record critic praising Susan Boyle because she's just mediocre enough to hit the big time, I have to say it's time we started a movement to reclaim the terms "snob" and "elitist."

Photograph by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images.

Tags: elitism, Music, rolling stones, Susan Boyle

Introducing the Puma Index: A website/iPhone app that has men and women take on or off their clothes, depending on which way the Dow is headed. Somewhere, Dov Charney is kicking himself.

Tags: dov charney, puma. american apparel

Some 20-somethings take their relationship advice from friends, some from Cosmo. Me, I like it straight from middle-aged veterans of the Bush Administration. That’s why I’m listening very closely when Michael Gerson tells me I’m living in “a relational wasteland,” a “hormone filled-gap” between adolescence and marriage.

Gerson, who is very attached to the particular way of ordering a life that prevailed during his own childhood, doesn’t like the emergent distance between the onset of sexual activity and marriage. He wants to argue that there is only one appropriate time to get married, and he wants social science to be on his side:

Later marriage has been one of the reasons for declining national divorce rates. But this does not mean the later the better. Divorce rates trend downward until leveling off in the early 20s. But people who marry after 27 tend to have less happy marriages –perhaps because partners are set in their ways or have unrealistically high standards. The marital sweet spot seems to be in the early to mid-20s.

Ah, yes, perhaps—the magic mechanism by which columnists bend correlation into a suggestion of causation. Perhaps you 28-year-olds are too deeply traumatized by your dark time in the relational wasteland to ever love again. Gerson’s framing implies that if you wait until your 30s to put a ring on it, trouble awaits. I emailed Steve Horwitz, an economist who studies marriage and family formation, to ask where the number 27 came from. He pointed me to this report from the National Fatherhood Initiative. According to a survey commissioned by the Initiative, people who married at 28 or older were somewhat less likely to say their marriages were “very happy.” As Horwitz points out, “They give us no analysis to show that this difference is statistically significant. Even if it is, it just means that those 28+ group could be more 'happy' than 'very happy.' " The report’s own authors clearly state that they can't say whether marrying late "causes low marital success."

Beyond these lazy conflations, we have Gerson's framing of the premarriage 20s as a "gap," a hiatus between childhood and marriage. It seems not to occur to him that some might consider their 20s as meaningful a period as any other. Some might not aspire to marriage and children. It's weirdly fascinating to watch someone worry about the placing of various goalposts before he realizes the whole game has changed.

Tags: late marriage, marriage, Michael Gerson, national fatherhood initiative

Does anyone really think the drinking age should be 21 any more? Binge drinking hasn't gone down—in fact, it's up among college students. Former proponents of the 21 law admit it hasn't worked. It's been a year since 135 college presidents first petitioned the government to reconsider. Why is 21 such a tough genie to put back in the bottle?

I drank in college. In those heady days, the drinking age had just been raised, and most of our local bar owners considered it a crock. My fake ID and I had much the same time we would have had if the drinking age were still 18, with the added thrill of a little mild law-breaking. Bar owners, parents, and colleges take the drinking age far more seriously now. They have to—the penalties for allowing underage drinking have increased substantially. Meanwhile, something else has increased—binge drinking among college students.

Raising the drinking age did little to end adolescent drinking, and although some credit it with lowering alcohol-related driving fatalities, many others put that decrease down to increased education and awareness. Meanwhile, teen drinking moved underground. College students, in particular, find places to "pre-load"—drinking before a social event, then heading out with their buzz on. Ask an honest college partier, and she may tell you she believes she has time to drive to the party before the alcohol hits her bloodstream. The result, as Middlebury college president emeritus John McCardle said yesterday in a CNN editorial, is that 60 percent of the deaths each year associated with underage drinking occur off-road, often the result of binge drinking gone terribly wrong.

On the other hand, education does reduce the rate of binge drinking among both younger teens and college students. If the goal of U.S. alcohol policy is the safety of its citizens, why not replace a law that encourages dangerous behavior with a policy of education on responsibility? If we're honest, getting around a law they perceive as unjust and hypocritical just makes drinking more fun for many students. Replacing that thrill with a "drinking license" or programs like eChug that educate about the risks and responsibilities of drinking might help lessen the buzz in more ways than one.

• 
• |
• 
• |
• |
• 0

Ray Clark, the co-worker of 24-year-old Yale med student Annie Le, has been arrested for her murder. Clark's motive is unclear, but New Haven Police Chief James Lewis stressed that it was an issue of workplace crime, "which is becoming a growing concern around the country." Is workplace violence actually on the rise? According to the most recent CDC statistics, workplace homicides were actually far worse in the mid-'90s, reaching a high in 1994 with 10,040 murders on the job. In 2006, there were only 540 workplace homicides.

Which is not to say that Le's death isn't incredibly upsetting, or that workplace violence isn't a problem. But I think tying this lone act of horror into a larger theme is problematic. From the scant details released about the case so far, there is no obvious impetus for Clark's alleged murder of Le—though Gawker wonders if Clark's rage stemmed from Le's inability to clean up after her lab mice properly. In cases of senseless violence, everyone is looking for a narrative that explains the issue in a way that can prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. Sociopathy isn't something that's so pat or easy to control.

Photograph by Christopher Capozziello/Getty Images.

Tags: annie le, annie le murder, murder, raymond clark, yale bride murder, yale student murder, yale university