Month: April 2011

A sampling.

Brian Frazer defends childless couples:

For Heather McGhinnis, a married 35-year-old marketing specialist in Elgin, Illinois, motherhood is simply a lifestyle choice that's not for her. "The job of being a parent doesn't interest me," she explains. "Just like I don't want to be an accountant, I don't want to be a parent." According to Laura S. Scott, who surveyed 171 subjects for her book Two Is Enough: A Couple's Guide to Living Childless by Choice, that kind of attitude is linked to a specific personality component. "A lot of introverts, thinkers, judgers—these are people who think before they act," she says. "They're planners, and they're not the kind of people who can be easily led into a conventional life just because everyone else is doing it."

I'm in the first generation of gay men to confront this dilemma. Almost the first thing our relatives and friends asked us after our marriage was, "So are you going to have children?" My answer is that it has never really occurred to me. I'm lucky Aaron feels the same way.

There are times when one sees what one is missing. I spent Saturday with a couple who are newly parents. Seeing their infant son explore the world for the first time was as mind-blowing as it usually is. His smiles and eyebrows, his tiny hands reaching out to touch utterly new things, his occasional recourse to his mother's arms or his father's trousers, the excitement of a simple peek-a-boo are simply priceless. But I got to leave and merely enjoy this kid after a few hours, not stay and take care of him, or to endure a week of his sickness, or a minute of his nightly cries.

I guess I have too much respect for parenting to want to do it myself. Being an uncle is such a blessedly free way of loving the young.

Susan Orlean gets spooked:

Has any single person more indelibly colored the perception of a place than Sarah Palin has Alaska? I’m spending a few days in Anchorage, and at every turn I find myself reacting to things and people through the scrim of Palin identity. Every woman I see with a messy up-do, every snowmobile dealership I pass, every glimpse I get of a pristine wilderness waiting to be stripped and drilled reminds me of her. It’s eerie. I’ve never felt more aware of a person hovering over a place.

Meanwhile, Palin is upping the Birther ante by saying that Donald Trump's questions about Obama's birth certificate are legit: "More power to him." Joe McGinniss thinks out loud:

Of all the issues I would have thought Sarah would not have wanted to get involved in, I would have put “birth certificates” at the top of my list. Just shows that even I can underestimate her capacity for putting her foot in her mouth when she easily could keep it on the ground. She wants to join Trump’s inane campaign to revive the issue of Obama’s U.S. citizenship?

Didn’t anyone teach her about Pandora’s Box? Or does she think that’s a zone defense used in women’s basketball?

On the question of birth certificates, Obama has already produced his, but Palin only says she has released Trig's. Funny how no-one covers the latter story, isn't it?

(Photo via Buzzfeed)

Alyssa Bereznak revisits her father's obsession with Ayn Rand and how it didn't make for the best parenting:

What is objectivism? If you'd asked me that question as a child, I could have trotted to the foyer of my father's home and referenced a framed quote by Rand that hung there like a cross. It read: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." As a little kid I interpreted this to mean: Love yourself. Nowadays, Rand's bit is best summed up by the rapper Drake, who sang: "Imma do me."

Noah Kristula-Green compares objectivism to scientology:

From my own knowledge of the world of Objectivism, it occurred to me that the materials that Bereznak’s father was using to sustain her Objectivist education might not have come cheap. You can end up paying $150 for some of the CD lecture series or $60 for a lecture titled “Friendship: Who Needs It”. (Other items can be browsed at the Ayn Rand Bookstore.) As for the “Objectivist Summer Conferences” that the piece mentions, those will cost you around $600.

But obviously, objectivism is not a cultish scam like scientology. It has the appeal of all totalist systems in which the inevitable conflicts of being a socialized human are simply wished away. As a bracing antidote to leftist collectivism, it has its points. As a worldview, it has always struck me as making the most sense to someone who is 13 years' old.

To remain an unalloyed objectivist for one's entire life is really, it seems to me, a form of arrested development. 

Qaddafi is reported to have accepted an African Union ceasefire:

The AU deal's main points are:

An immediate ceasefire
The unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid
Protection of foreign nationals
A dialogue between the government and rebels on a political settlement
The suspension of Nato airstrikes

The deal is now being presented to the rebel leaders in Benghazi, but, according to Al Jazeera, "opposition leaders say it will not work unless Gaddafi relinquishes power." Juan Cole puts the talks in context:

The problem with having the [African Union] mediate is that the leaders chosen are not viewed by the rebels as honest brokers. While the world has not been paying attention, Qaddafi has been using his oil wealth (and I do mean ‘his’) to peddle influence in Africa, to gain the loyalty of it leaders, and to intervene militarily.

Josh Rothman foresees them. Ride-sharing apps use GPS to help passengers save money, but researchers are mining GPS data to help taxis too: 

It seems inevitable that, someday soon, "intelligent recommendation systems" will be built into taxicab GPS displays, and into consumer smartphones. But whether passengers' and drivers' systems will work together or against one another is anybody's guess. Today, inefficiency is a natural part of the taxi system, shared equally by everyone. Tomorrow, it may be a hot potato, tossed from cabbies to drivers and back again.

The more we know, the more conflicts arise. It's not always non-zero-sum.

Flowing Data graphs them:

In the United States the average years in retirement is 10 years for men and 16 years for women (mostly because men typically die earlier)—among the least in the world.

Ben Yagoda compares words whose definitions have shifted over time:

Presently has gone from "shortly" to "currently"; momentarily from "for a moment" to "in a moment"; and nonplussed from perplexed to unimpressed, or fazed to unfazed.

Should we acquesce to newer meanings when they are obviously less clear than what they replaced?

Balancing the possibility that you'll confuse your audience, and the prospect of appearing pretentious or dorky, is the chance that the old meaning could be a really good meaning, which no other word conveys precisely. There is no exact synonym for (the old-fashioned) disinterested, for example. In such cases, keeping a "legacy" sense in circulation is laudable activism in pursuit of semantic sustainability—as if you found some members of a near-extinct species of mollusk and built a welcoming environment in which they could breed.

And that's not the same as being merely a linguistic scold.  I miss the words "gay" and "queer", for example, in their original meanings. I say that not as a homophobe, but as a lover of Anglo-Saxon English, in all its polyglot bluntness. I hope that future generations will not find Shakespeare or the Book Of Common Prayer unintelligible or, worse, meaning things they did not mean.

Given all the praise and attention bestowed upon Facebook and Twitter during the Arab 1848, David Kenner rightly tells us not to forget YouTube:

Revolutionaries all across the Middle East, filming with the video recorders in their phones or other rudimentary technology while dodging bullets or racing through angry crowds, have created an online visual archive of the uprisings: urgent, jittery videos, punctuated by gunshots, shouts, and moments of breathtaking horror. Unfortunately, they're not easy to find — nobody is in charge with organizing this massive amount of information, and the videos tagged solely in Arabic can be hard for English-speakers to track down. Once seen, however, they are difficult to forget — exactly what the dictators feared.

(Graphic video from the Syrian crackdown in Latakia on March 30 following Assad's speech)

Did Todd Palin have a child by someone other than his wife? It's an explosive allegation – but Joe McGinniss had come across it before but didn't have enough data to include it in his book. He has kept a final chapter in reserve, however.