Year: 2013

Liza Mundy argues that paid paternity leave is an important tool for promoting gender equality:

[H]ere’s what men may not realize: While paid paternity leave may feel like an unexpected gift, the biggest beneficiaries aren’t men, or even babies. In the long run, the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women, and the companies and nations that benefit when women advance. In October, the World Economic Forum released its latest global gender-gap report, showing that countries with the strongest economies are those that have found ways to further women’s careers, close the gender pay gap, and keep women—who in most nations are now better educated than men—tethered to the workforce after they become mothers. One strikingly effective strategy used by the highest-ranking countries is paternity leave, which, whatever else it may accomplish, is a brilliant and ambitious form of social engineering: a behavior-modification tool that has been shown to boost male participation in the household, enhance female participation in the labor force, and promote gender equity in both domains.

Arlie Hochschild makes the economic case:

Those who advocate for paternity leave resort to various kinds of appeals. Some invoke feminist values, noting that paternity leave encourages dads to share the workload at home. Others point out that men who take paternity [leave] continue to be highly involved as their children grow older. In one study, University of Michigan researcher Norma Radin found that three-to-six year old sons of highly involved fathers ranked higher on tests of verbal intelligence. U.C. Berkeley psychologists Carolyn and Phil Cowan found that children with involved dads were better at classifying objects and placing things in logical order. And according to a study by psychologist Abraham Sagi, Israeli kids of attentive fathers showed more highly developed empathy. These effects last: In one study, children of highly involved fathers were still more self-directed than other kids 20 years later. And such sons grow to became better fathers themselves.

But in all of these discussions, we’ve forgotten—or given up on—the appeal to business. In fact, there’s something in it for the bottom line. Paternity leave enables families to survive in an increasingly unpredictable economy. It’s hard to know whose salary—his or hers—will be higher, and paternity leave helps parents become more domestically interchangeable. Just as companies “cross-train” workers to meet shifting market demands, so spouses need to cross-train at home.

Noting that men aren’t always keen on staying home with their kids even if they can, Alexis Madrigal makes an important point:

Let me grossly generalize, based on my own limited friend group and set of associates: men are terrified of babies. (I know I was before I spent 1,500 straight hours with one.) We are scared of these creatures for good reason. Babies are tiny things that don’t talk. They’re fragile. Their hold on life is tenuous. And no one ever taught us what to do with them. No one taught us how to coo and rock, where to put our hands, or what the right way to hold a bottle is. What if the baby cries? What if I can’t get the baby to stop crying? What will it say about me if I can’t get the baby to stop crying?

This situation is exacerbated because men lack what is known in many households as “The Boob.” As in, “I don’t know why he’s crying. Maybe I’ll give him The Boob.” Men don’t have the go-to move of breastfeeding, which a very large percentage of women (at least in the American west) do. Under these circumstances, many men retreat into the default stance that they are “useless” during the first few months of a baby’s life. I can’t tell you how many well-meaning men have told me that they felt helpless dealing with a newborn. Many only found their purpose and parental commitment after many months, or even years.  Our midwife gave us a simple directive as we left the hospital. Turning to me, she said, “You do everything but breastfeed.” Turning to my wife, she said, “You breastfeed.”

TNC, who spent time as a stay-at-home father, doesn’t want a medal for it:

I felt a lot of things in those days—lonely, broke, sometimes frustrated. But what I didn’t feel in my allegedly hyper-macho black community was stigmatized. And I don’t think my dad felt that way either. If anything, I felt like I got a lot more credit than I deserved. I’d put the boy in the stroller, head down Flatbush, and a cheering section would damn near break out. The only people I felt stigmatized by were old black women, who were certain I was about to either direct the stroller into a cloud of influenza or the path of an oncoming train.

So rather than hear about the stigma men feel in terms of taking care of kids, I’d like for men to think more about the stigma that women feel when they’re trying to build a career and a family. And then measure whatever angst they’re feeling against the real systemic forces that devalue the labor of women. I think that’s what’s at the root of much of this: When some people do certain work we cheer. When others do it we yawn. I appreciated the hosannas when I was strolling down Flatbush, but I doubt the female electrician walking down the same street got the same treatment.

Jordan Jeffers considers how J.R.R. Tolkien approached fiction in The Hobbit:

Tolkien is a storyteller, a myth maker, for he believed that myths demonstrated truth, that truth cannot actually be understood apart from myth. We can have no true vision of the stars unless we can first see them as “songs of living silver,” no true understanding of the earth until we can first understand it as our mother. Our myths matter a good deal, and how we think of elves is of vital importance to how we think of ourselves.

He goes on to argue that such an understanding of Tolkien’s work is what Peter Jackson fails to grasp:

Jackson is neither a communicator nor a mythmaker. He is a spectacle maker, a ringmaster, a showman. And he is very, very good at this. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug manages to be both overwhelmingly big and manageably entertaining, balancing the actions of all the important characters quite deftly, allowing each of them just enough heroic moments to justify their presence in the movie. Basically, Jackson made The Avengers: Middle-Earth, and it is this very bigness that breaks the movie so forcefully from the books.

Tolkien’s book is not a story about superheroes. It’s a story about a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, one of the smallest of folk, shorter even than the dwarves—a fat, ordinary person who does a lot of brave, ordinary things.

Ethan Gilsdorf unreservedly pans the movie:

As a fan of Tolkien and a fan of Jackson’s first trilogy, it’s difficult to distance myself from my desire for the movie that I’d hoped The Hobbit would deliver. This Hobbit Peter Jackson is less impressive than the Peter Jackson I came to know, respect and love in Lord of the Rings. This is an undisciplined director on display, showing no restraint. To me, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is too too loud, too fast, too much focused on action and distracting plot threads. I prefer the relative simplicity of Tolkien’s first Hobbit to the over-inflated, overblown, over-the-top epic Jackson aims his bow at here.

Larison also has brutal review, writing that “the second installment in this trilogy is a mockery of Tolkien’s story and insult to the audience”:

It is well-known that Peter Jackson has added a large amount of material to the story of The Hobbit in his quest to expand a short adventure story into a bloated would-be epic, but it is hard to appreciate just how silly and unnecessary these additions are until you see them. Thus we are treated to quite a few characters that never appear in the book, plotlines that have no relevance to the main story, villains that serve no purpose except to remind us of The Lord of the Rings, one pointless love story that functions at most as a lazy plot device, needless rewriting and mangling of key scenes, and frequent additions of battles that exist solely to fill up time in a movie that should never have been made.

But Cromercrox defends the director:

Jackson couldn’t possibly have made a film of The Hobbit that was ‘true’ to the original text – whatever that means, and leaving out the significant alterations Tolkien himself made to it. For, unlike The Hobbit‘s original readership, and unlike Tolkien himself when he wrote it, we can only come to The Hobbit backwards, as it were, through The Lord Of The Rings. There are those for whom nothing but a word-for-word treatment will do. I am not one of them. For one thing, I see no artistic merit in such faithful transliterations. What would be the point? For another, I think that to do have done a vanilla treatment of The Hobbit would be to have done Tolkien and his audience a grave disservice. Jackson’s treatment has its flaws, of course it does. But it’s much deeper, more honest and more Tolkienian in its spirit and execution than many people appreciate.

Dr. David Perlmutter rails against carbohydrates:

The neurologist and president of the Perlmutter Health Center in Naples, Fla., believes all carbs, including highly touted whole grains, are devastating to our brains. He claims we must make major changes in our eating habits as a society to ward off terrifying increases in Alzheimer’s disease and dementia rates.

After reading Perlmutter’s best-selling book on the manifold evils of carbs, and after talking with supporters and critics of the Paleo diet in the medical community, James Hamblin is unconvinced by the anti-gluten crusader:

Even as someone who was seriously skeptical of Perlmutter’s story, after reading his 336 pages—and watching his whole YouTube channel and most every TV appearance—I have found myself hesitating around grain. His message is so ardently and unwaveringly delivered. That is how one-sided pop-science works, though. [Dr. David] Katz wrote a tongue-in-cheek case that the 1974 advent of the Post-it note was the cause of the obesity pandemic, to show how easily correlations can be spun. If I read 336 pages on the evils of Post-its, I might set our office supply room on fire. …

When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof on them should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong. Perlmutter has interesting ideas that I would love to believe. I’d love it if a diet could deliver all that he promises. There is value in belief. It’s what the Empowering Neurologist literally markets. His narrative comes with the certainty that you are doing something to save yourself from cognitive decline and mental illness, which is probably the most unsettling of disease prospects. With that belief also comes guilt; an idea that something could’ve been done to prevent a mental illness, when in fact it was bigger than us. To think that every time you eat any kind of carb or gluten, you are putting your mental health and cognitive faculties at risk is, to me, less empowering than paralyzing.