Month: August 2011

On the 40th anniversary of The Bell Jar, Emily Gould examines the life and death of Sylvia Plath:

Trying to be all things to all people, especially if two of those things are “creative genius” and “mother,” still seems like a recipe for unhappiness, if not certain death. While I do think of Plath as a feminist icon, I don’t think it’s necessary to essentialize her in the way the feminists who chipped “Hughes” [the last name of her husband Ted] off her gravestone did. Those feminists want Plath to be a victim—specifically, a victim of Hughes and America’s repressive 1950s perfect-housewife culture. And Plath was a victim: a victim of not being able to see any situation she was in clearly. She wanted very badly to live in a reality where she was a good, kind person who was also a good mother, but that part of her was always fighting with being a very selfish person who wanted to devote time and resources to her work. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to want—it’s just not compatible with being a pretty, popular girl who is nice to everyone all the time. Instead of acknowledging this impossibility, Plath tried to keep both sides of herself going until the whole precarious enterprise broke down.

Alan Jacobs bemoans our ADD cultural trend and wants us to refocus on deep, leisurely reading:

From 1945 to 2000, or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books. In 2005, Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, sociologists from Northwestern University, published a paper concluding that while there was a period in which extraordinarily many Americans practiced long-form reading, whether they liked it or not, that period was indeed extraordinary and not sustainable in the long run. "We are now seeing such reading return to its former social base: a self-perpetuating minority that we shall call the reading class."

A reader writes:

No. There's no sign the "Tea Party" are actually against government. They're just against government run by anybody except themselves. And since "they" are the rump South, that "anybody" mainly means the feds: the Northerners, the liberals, the carpetbaggers, the negro-lovers — and of course, worst of all, the negros themselves ("negroes" to include not just African-Americans, but all sub-human others, including gays and, now, Muslims).

You have to remember this is the planter class. The planter mentality. The foundation of the South, and so of this country, when one considers the fortunes of many (most?) of the founding fathers. We have been at war with ourselves from the beginning. 2008 was just one more battle: a nigger (radical, terrorist, illegal alien) up against a son of the South (patriot, military man, scion of the McCains, among the largest slaveholders in Mississippi before the Civil War, still owners of the original plantation "Teoc").

All the Tea Party/Republican/Fox News actions since losing the election have simply been scorched earth warfare: deny the oppressing invader any sustenance, no matter what the cost to the country. Because first things first: destroy the usurper first, the alien, the radical, the invader, the liberal, the fed, the other — then rebuild once the war is won. That's the game. No, they are not against government, or debt. They're just against any government or debt other than their own.

That is Bret Anthony Johnston's contrarian advice for wannabe writers:

I’ve long believed that what has kept writers, again myself included, from fully transcending their personal experiences on the page was fear of incompetence: I can’t write a plot that involves a kidnapping because I’ve never been kidnapped, etc. But what if it’s the opposite? What if the reason we find it so difficult to cleave our fiction from our experience, the reason we’re so loath to engage our imaginations and let the story rise above the ground floor of truth, isn’t that we’re afraid we’ll do the job poorly, but that we’re afraid we’ll do it too well? If we succeed, if the characters are fully imagined, if they are so beautifully real that they quicken and rise off the page, then maybe our own experiences will feel smaller, our actions less consequential. Maybe we’re afraid that if we write what we don’t know, we’ll discover something truer than anything our real lives will ever yield.

Always has been one of my favorite Republicans of the old school. But he disagrees with me in thinking Obama should have embraced his own deficit commission's proposals, because he would have gotten savaged, the way Obama savaged Ryan. Money quote:

“This guy is a little bit smarter than some of the guys who are trying to hammer him,” Simpson said in an excerpt from an interview with the Denver Post posted online Friday. “They ought to give it up.”

Wile E. Coyote never gave up. Neither will they.

Rami Nakhle orchestrates the Syrian uprising from Beirut, acting as a conduit between journalists and activists on the ground:

Spreading news is an increasingly dangerous business in the Middle East these days. But Rami believes the battle is too important to lose. So he types and types. A knock at the door could be a film crew or a mukhabarat officer with a Soviet-era pistol. The ringing of the phone could be an AFP reporter or news of the death of somebody close to him. “I made my choice,” he says, his eyes momentarily diverted from his laptop. “I am sending my friends everyday to the streets. I know they might get arrested, get shot, get tortured … and now when it comes to me, I will not withdraw.”

PoliticalProf thinks the 10-year expiration date on the Bush tax cuts was always a mirage:

It was perfectly clear 10 years ago that it would be very contentious, politically, to let the Bush tax cuts “expire.” It was perfectly clear that, in 2011 (or 2010, as it happened), Republicans would scream that failure to extend the Bush tax cuts would mean imposing the giantest most horrificest and business crushingest tax increases on “the American people” in US history. In 2001, Republicans hoped they would be able to extend the tax cuts going forward after 10 years; Democrats hoped that they would have enough to votes to let the cuts expire. Both parties kicked the can down the road 10 years. The Republicans were on the winning side of that decision.

Jonathan Bernstein thinks it's time for a power play over recess appointments:

What’s happening now has reached a new level of creativity on the part of Republicans and (if nothing happens) a new level of timidity by Obama and the Dems. But if Obama thwarts the Republicans with action – with one recess appointment as a warning, followed by many more if the obstruction doesn’t stop – it would help him with disgruntled Democrats as well as with Republicans who think that he can be easily rolled.

Remy Melina shows how ending a retail price with "9" works for more than just the cents column:

[MIT professors] Anderson and Simester illustrated by asking a national clothing catalog to increase the price of one of its dresses. "You'd generally expect demand for an item to go down as the price goes up," Anderson and Simester wrote. "Yet in our study involving the women's clothing catalog, we were able to increase demand by a third by raising the price of a dress from $34 to $39. By comparison, changing the price from $34 to $44 yielded no difference in demand."

(Hat tip: David Pescovitz)