Month: October 2011

Lisa Miller spots a trend:

The age of first motherhood is rising all over the West. In Italy, Germany, and Great Britain, it’s 30. In the U.S., it’s gone up to 25 from 21 since 1970, and in New York State, it’s even higher, at 27. But among the extremely middle-aged, births aren’t just inching up. They are booming. In 2008, the most recent year for which detailed data are available, about 8,000 babies were born to women 45 or older, more than double the number in 1997, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Five hundred and forty-one of these were born to women age 50 or older—a 375 percent increase. In adoption, the story is the same. Nearly a quarter of adopted children in the U.S. have parents more than 45 years older than they are.

A reader last night went to see the new documentary Tahrir at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center:

Essentially this Italian filmmaker, Stefano Savona, who had been traveling to Egypt for years, saw what was happening in January and dropped everything to go shoot in Cairo. He did not have any interest in doing day-to-day journalism, so none of his footage made it onto the then-current media. That also allowed him the trust of a group of people who became the film's protagonists, and who several times protected him and his project from others who were suspicious of him. He left Tahrir Square periodically to recharge his batteries but tried to live and sleep there as much as possible (it was also the safest place to be). There is no narration or discernible storyteller's hand in the film either; it is almost pure cinema verite.

Anyway, as I had hoped, he emerged at the end with tons of professionally shot HD footage with surprisingly great sound, the likes of which I certainly hadn't seen before as far as first-hand account of what being in the square was really like. In fact, my whole video memory of those events is grainy webcasted AJE footage. There are so many occasions when he just walks through the crowd or lets them walk by him, or films the wonderful and funny chants people did, or just lets people talk (he barely understood anything they were saying either, so that makes it even more remarkable to see what he captured). Overall it's just an incredible and moving supplement to the experience we all had witnessing the revolution from afar/the web. And seeing it on the big screen affords you the opportunity to look over people's shoulders and take in the larger environment, or read people's faces – to generally immerse yourself in the film so that you feel, at least a little bit, like you were there.

Who knows if it will ever get picked up for a theatrical (or any) release, so that extra-immersive effect makes seeing it at the New York Film Festival all the more urgent. Here is the NYFF link. The next screening is tomorrow night at 9pm, and the director will likely be there again.

The Arabist's Ursula Lindsey reviews Tahrir and describes the above teaser as "the protesters fighting to defend the square from pro-Mubarak thugs." Below is a "completely different side of Tahrir: the funny, moving, poeting chants that inspired protesters came up with on the spot":

More dramatic footage here. Speaking of the NYFF, Dish editor Bodenner saw the Iranian film A Separation – "an Iranian Rashomon of searing family drama that turns into an unexpectedly gripping legal thriller" - and said it was excellent. Trailer here.

McArdle thinks not:

Social Security does not just depend on the existing pool of workers; it depends on their output.  You cannot keep the pyramid going by replacing each retiring public accountant with 1.5 cleaning ladies and carpenters.  While there are certainly lots of highly skilled immigrants who want to come here, it's far from clear that the math works for social security.  To be clear, that's not a brief against letting lower-skilled workers come in; they are a valuable complement to higher-skilled workers. But they cannot en masse shore up social security's finances, especially since they too will eventually collect it–and social security's benefit structure is progressive.

How to keep it alive:

When we explain things to kids, we shouldn’t pretend that we have all the answers. We shouldn’t turn science class into a dry recitation of facts that must be memorized, or only conduct experiments in the classroom in which the results are known in advance. Because it’s the not knowing – that tang of doubt and possibility – that keeps us playing with the world, eager to figure out how it works.

Louis CK tackles the subject starting at the 7:10 mark.

Ron Kampeas gets Republicans to tell him the story:

Current and former GOP operatives and veterans of Republican administrations have identified a number of factors in explaining why the Republican Party, which until a decade or so ago tolerated a faction that advocated keeping Israel at a friendly distance, is now hewing almost exclusively to a policy of no daylight between the United States and the Jewish state. The chief reason they cite is the growth of the evangelical movement as a cornerstone of the party, but other factors include the changed attitudes toward the Middle East in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the significance of the Jewish vote in certain swing states and the emergence of a Jewish Republican donor base in a community that for decades has given mostly to Democrats.

A reader writes:

Thank you for helping to bring attention to the issue of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). My hero, Edna Adan, has made it among her life missions to help to eradicate this evil. In Somaliland, the breakaway independent republic in the Northeast of Somalia, she has built a maternity hospital that educates local women about FGM in the hope that their daughters will be spared. In this region, as elsewhere, it is the women who enforce and carry out this practice.

I was present when Edna spoke last year to several hundred students at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Edna shocked the audience when she told of an 11-year-old girl brought to Edna’s hospital. The child, born with Down Syndrome, was near death.

She had been bleeding for several hours following a botched FGM procedure. Through the heroic efforts of the staff, her life was saved. But so much was cut away, Edna said, that the girl would never be able even to control her bladder. "Cut to the bone."

After a week, she was released back into the care of her mother, but first Edna took her aside. "Your daughter already had Down Syndrome. Didn’t she have enough problems? How could you do this to her?" But the mother was adamant, maintaining she had done what was necessary.

In Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa, at least 98% of girls are mutilated. And, of these, 99% are mutilated in the worst way, Type 3 FGM. "Excision of part or all of the external genitalia and stitching together of the exposed walls of the labia majora, leaving only a small hole (typically less than 5cm) to permit the passage of urine and vaginal secretions."

Copyranter calls it "the creepiest pizza ad ever":

For the Providence, Rhode Island location of Pizza Pie-er. Looks like a scene from American Horror Story. Taste Buds, I think, should be non-threatening sorts, not suicidal pink Lugo Men.

A commenter adds:

These are via Keith Manning, creative/art director, based in Boston. In 2006, he did the most disgusting pizza ads ever, again for Pizza Pieer. The name of the campaign was "Behold the Possibilities". View [here]. While well done, those nasty creatures make me wanna throw up.

Another:

I'm going to be honest, while this is terrifying, I kind of wish I could order one of those pink suit things. Looks comfy. :)

As we know it:

If someone were to tell you that roughly 100 million years ago, our ancestors were infected by parasitic DNA, which copied and pasted itself throughout their genomes—and that this was linked to the evolution of modern human pregnancy—you might assume they were channeling early L. Ron Hubbard. But this week, in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics, researchers provide evidence for such a theory. Seeking to explain how our ancestors developed a more advanced kind of gestation—including the ability to carry fetuses in the womb until they reached a more developed state—scientists studied the uterine cells of three contemporary mammals. Specifically, they compared opossums (whose young develop largely in pouches) to armadillos and humans (whose offspring spend more time in the womb). They concluded that rogue DNA, which probably arrived by way of a virus or bug, was associated with wild new horizons in baby-making.

The moment Rod Dreher became a parent, his appetite for violent programming dropped off:

I was an observant Catholic and a conservative in every sense prior to the baby’s coming, but I was able to hold film violence at an ironic distance. Suddenly, I felt it in my bones in a way I had never done. Why? I think it was the simple fatherly act of holding my newborn son close every day, and experiencing how unbelievably fragile human life is. Watching its wanton violation, seeing the terrible abuse of the human body and the graphic murder of human beings, was literally intolerable to me. It wasn’t that I became indignant about it; it was that I literally could not watch it.

Debby Herbenick looks at how men and women tend to answer the question differently:

Women tend to report lower numbers of sex partners than men, which, even accounting for same-sex couplings, makes no mathematical sense. One possible explanation is that women tend to tone down their sex numbers and men tend to exaggerate theirs—or at least to count more people as "sex partners" than women do. Other research shows that men and women estimate sex partners differently; that is, men tend to give rough guesses and women tend to tally their partners, listing them mentally by name, arriving perhaps at a more precise (and often lower) number.