Author: Chris Bodenner

by Chris Bodenner

A reader contributes the above photo to the ever-popular thread:

As a blond, fair-skinned child who grew up in Ashiya, Japan in the mid-90s, I can attest to the Asian obsession with blonde, fair-skinned children. Everywhere my mother took me, we were swarmed. Even the construction workers across the street loved me. And everyone was surprised when this little gaijin started speaking Japanese. In fact, they loved me so much that one year they hoisted me off the street during a festival (to my father’s delight and my mother’s horror) and paraded me around on the town’s danjiri. As you can see from the photo, I was not pleased.

Others had more pleasant experiences:

When I traveled through Asia in 2006, I was frequently approached by other tourists interested in snapping a photo with me, and I never did figure it out. I was a tall, skinny white guy traveling on my own – not a hugely common sight in Beijing or Cambodia, but not Bigfoot or anything. At any rate, after the first couple of experiences, I started taking pictures with everyone who requested a picture with me. If they were going to take my picture, I was going to take theirs, dammit! At any rate, I enjoyed turning the tables. I’ve attached a picture with a family at Angkor Wat:

I’m really hoping one of your readers can shine some light on this phenomenon, because it remains a mystery to me to this day.

Another reader:

I love that story about Asians tourists stopping the reader to take pictures of his kid. I lived in Hong Kong for two years, and at that time my little sister was 5 years old and very very blonde. We could never go out without everybody stopping to look at her with fascination. Some would touch her hair without asking, some would ask for pictures. From Hong Kong to Thailand, everywhere in Asia it was the same phenomenon, but in China most heavily.

It’s the novelty I assume. My parents were very nice about it; they would stop each time and indulge. And oh boy did my sister love this. Everywhere you go people stop and worship you. She was a little blond princess and she loved every minute of it.

It was a nice bonding moment with those Chinese families. We couldn’t talk, but the gestures, the smiles … now that I look back I cherish those moments. To think back now and to think about these hundreds, maybe thousands of pictures of my very cute little sister in all these family albums sitting in China and elsewhere is heartwarming.

A parallel but very different experience:

My sister and her husband lived in Nanjing for 2.5 years.  When they moved there, my nieces were 3-1/2 and just-turned 1.  Blond hair, blue eyes – both of them. And they were MOBBED every time they went out.  It actually got scary, as there would be 10-40 (yes) people crowding around my sister and the stroller, taking numerous pictures.  My sister would be unable to move, just hemmed in by the crowd. And not one of them ever asked permission to take a photo.  My niece got afraid to go out. When they moved back to the States, she seemed a bit surprised that her public appearance didn’t immediately garner crowds of people.

And it’s not just the blondes:

My husband and his two siblings visited China as tourists several years ago.  All three of them have red hair – two of them flaming red.  With red hair being a real rarity in China, and with red being the color of good fortune, they were consistently stopped to be photographed with strangers in front of landmarks.

And it’s not just hair color:

A friend went to China with a tourist group that included a morbidly obese American woman. People on the street surrounded her and actually poked her belly! I don’t know if they photographed her or not.

By Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I saw this post and immediately thought to myself that Steven Salaita must not remember Vietnam or does not fully understand the history of the whole movement to express support for our troops. Whatever anyone thought of Vietnam, there’s no arguing that many Americans treated returning vets horribly. People who were against the war were unable to distinguish their hatred of the war and those who were unlucky enough to be sent into the battle, and so there was too much vitriol directed at the troops returning (and going to) Vietnam, despite the fact that they had nothing to do with the policy to continue and escalate the war.

The “support or troops” effort grew directly out of this unfortunate history and was intended to ensure that, regardless of how one feels about any policy decision to send our troops someplace, we don’t take it out on the soldiers who are only carrying out their orders.

There is no question that people sometimes conflate “support our troops” with supporting a broader war effort, which shouldn’t be the case. It is imperative that someone who opposes a war should still “support our troops” and offer them our thanks and gratitude for putting their lives on the line to protect the country. The movement has been so successful that the original purpose behind it has probably become completely lost on most people 45 and below, and anyone old enough to remember Vietnam doesn’t realize that half of the adult population has no memory of those bad old days.

Another turns to a different war:

When I was a junior in high school in 1990, the Gulf War was about to begin and many of us felt that it could go either way – quickly like Panama or more drawn out like Vietnam. So even though my family was conservative, all but the most ardent sons and daughters of the Woodstock generation found resonance in “Support Our Troops”. It was meant to bridge the gap, not to imply some sort of blind allegiance. Iraq had committed international aggression against Kuwait and it was obvious we were the only ones to smack them back into line. But more so, if it went horribly wrong (as the second Gulf War later showed), it meant our troops shouldn’t be rejected as the Vietnam generation had been.

(Above screenshot from the tumblr Six Word War, “Real stories from Iraq and Afghanistan in just six words.”)

by Chris Bodenner

Many readers address the question in rich detail:

I’m sure that many law students waste their third year of law school. But in my 3rd year, I took electives in “International Human Rights Law, Refugee Law, and Civil Liberties”; I interned part time at a local public defender’s office; and I wrote a law review article on free speech rights of high school students. Oh, and the previous year, knowing that I had plenty of time to take all the classes I needed for the bar exam, I got a couple of units for teaching a “Street Law” class at a local high school. In addition, because three years of law school means two summers, not just one, I was able to work at a small environmental law firm after my first year, and a more traditional firm (ie, one that might offer me a job) after my second year. Had law school been only two years, I might have been forced to eschew the former job.

Finally, having taught high school for many years (see, that Street Law gig paid off), I have learned that the most important things that an educational institution can offer a student are opportunities – opportunities to take nontraditional courses, to pursue various career and academic options, and to engage in intellectual inquiry. Yes, many students will waste those opportunities by playing Madden, as was the case with Elie Mystal. However, it is grossly inequitable to allow the fecklessness of a few – or even of a majority – to impoverish the education of those who desire more than the bare minimum – essentially vocational – education of a two-year law school program.

Another reader:

This post is quite timely, as my third year of law school started yesterday. We discussed the president’s comments in my class “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law”. This is something that I wrestle with because it would be great to graduate with less debt but this issue isn’t so simple. The third year of law school serves purposes beyond teaching you to “think like a lawyer.” Two things come to mind:

The first is that students would probably spend two years taking subjects that are on the bar and miss out on other classes. So besides your first-year required courses, second year would turn into another list of rote courses. There’s a virtue in giving students the opportunity to study things besides the general legal knowledge on the bar exam (like environmental law, intellectual property, poverty law) to give them an idea in the area they want to practice.

Without a third year, students couldn’t take a class like “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law” to talk about democratic legitimacy and the effect of money in a democratic system. This is a course that undergrads can take in political science, but studying it now through the lens of the law gives it something new. It can affect work as a lawyer to think about the financial inequalities in a system of laws.

Second, who will foot the bill for the transition from student to lawyer? I am lucky that my school offers clinical programs to start practicing lawyerly work, but the same instruction would cost a firm an enormous amount of money. A lawyer doesn’t start out being profitable, so hiring a two-year educated student could be a riskier investment than someone with a third-year clinic. This could make the legal employment problem even worse. More is needed than the president’s impromptu comments to bring down the costs of legal education.

Another:

While I am a strong supporter of Obama, I disagree with his thinking here. First, Obama has probably had one of the least typical post-law school legal experiences. He never practiced – whether in private practice or as part of a corporate/government legal department – for any notable period of time. He is highly familiar with the academic side of law school, but that is where his experience ends.

Where I believe law school falls short is on the practical training side. Obama’s answer is just to condense the academic side and then turn them loose on the theory that they won’t have to pay for the third year, which tends to be more of a practical application training year than an educational one. But, economics will kick in to make sure that tuition for any two-year program is sufficient to pay the professors, who likely will not easily agree to a 1/3 salary cut and other administrative costs.

Actually, if anything, the academic side could perhaps use some pruning. Constitutional law, for example, while an interesting area of tremendous importance in terms of the country’s legal framework, has practically no application to most attorneys’ daily practice. The training side of law school should start early. Not only writing and argument development – which is currently standard – but listening to and advising partners and clients. These latter qualities, while simple sounding, can be significantly more difficult and may take years to develop – even for the most academically successful student.

The benefit of the third year is learning how to apply the tools gathered from the intensive first two years. Doing this in an academic and supportive environment (or at least with mentors who are actually paid to mentor) rather than some of the cut-throat realities of the first year of private practice is likely of significantly greater value. I would also add that right now firms are generally very reluctant to hire new law grads because of their lack of any practical experience. (And I’m not talking about the rarified top firms, whose own brands sell their services and not their lawyers and who thus operate on a different business model in terms of associate recruitment than most of the legal world.) Reducing law school to solely the academic training would likely only exacerbate this problem in the short term, which would ultimately be of significantly less benefit to students from a career perspective than to pay for the third year.

Another recommends reducing the number of undergrad years instead:

Cutting law school to two years is a bad idea. What I think is a good idea: more combined BA/JD programs that let you get out of school in five or six years. It’s ridiculous that the US is the only country that requires a full baccalaureate degree before going to law school. And our baccalaureates are four years, while in Europe, they’re three.

I don’t think we need many 21-year-old lawyers on the streets, at least not without a formal paid apprenticeship or preceptorship, but the average law school graduate has completed seven years of higher education – eight if they did law school at night. That’s a lot of loans. I was in law school during the last period of time when it was possible to take out a maximum Stafford loan, pay tuition and books, and live on the rest. I was also fortunate that I paid off my college student debt during the five years I worked between college and law school. A dozen years later, I still owe $75k in student loans. I’m making headway, and I’ll eventually pay them off, but that kind of debt limits your employment (no making $35k a year working for a small nonprofit!) and makes the prospect of unemployment absolutely terrifying.

One more reader:

FYI, at least one law school I know of – Brooklyn Law School – now offers a two-year program (there are probably more – I just happen to know of Brooklyn’s because I’m an alum).  However, this two-year program costs the same as a three-year program; it just fits the same amount of classes into a shorter timespan by cutting out the summer and winter breaks.  Most law school students work as law clerks or summer interns (or “summer associates” at big firms) in the summers, so this essentially just moves that early working experience from the middle to the end of the process.

I don’t think I would have been well-served by this setup, but I’m sure it’ll be useful for some people.  They just have to reconcile themselves to opting out of the usual big firm recruitment model (which, truthfully, a lot of people are doing anyway just by going to BLS).

I’ve heard grumbling that this is a gimmick and since the tuition is the same, there’s no real innovation or change here, but I don’t entirely agree.  I left law school with a massive amount of debt and only some of that was from tuition.  Another huge portion was from living expenses – which, in New York City, are no joke.  Cutting that by a third could be a huge benefit to some people, particularly if they are trying to pay tuition with loans while living on a spouse’s income.

What I’d really like to see is true innovation in how we train lawyers by getting away from a “one size fits all” model.  I’d like to see a model in which different specialties carry different licenses based on passing different exams – kind of how teachers have different credentials for math, science, English, etc.  Some stuff would be common to all.  For example, everyone calling themselves a lawyer should have a basic grasp of constitutional principles and probably all of the other core first-year subjects as well (contracts, torts, crim law, property).  Beyond that, let students mix-and-match as suits them and their goals.

by Chris Bodenner

A reader strongly considered donating:

My wife and I went through the process of in vitro. (And when I say “we”, I mean she endured all the work and physical suffering while I became an expert masturbator. Little known fact: if you have not donated sperm for fertility procedures, you are still a novice. Yes, this means you should keep up your practice.)

The second implantation was a success. We started discussing using the final three embryos for another child when she became pregnant the old fashioned way. Positive we don’t want to implant any more of the remaining embryos, my wife and I face the decision of what to do with them. I struggle with the idea of donating them to another set of parents, mostly because I know how fragile I am at 38 and believe some part of it sprouts from my genetic code. And my family and I are experts in dealing with our brand of crazy. I know my two-year-old needs me, and I guess I just don’t trust anyone else with that responsibility. It is a mix of selfishness and insecurity (and an odd dose of self-righteousness) that makes me believe donation to medical research is the right alternative.

I thought we had made the decision, but the paperwork sits on our kitchen counter and the cryogenic freezer bills still show up every quarter. With all the effort and mental anguish over 3+ years, whatever we decide, it seems like something I will think deeply about for the rest of my life.

Another couple made a different decision:

My husband and I have twins via donor-egg IVF and we had 16 embryos left over. We assumed we’d donate them to science – after all, it was science that enabled us to have our twins in the first place. But after a few years of paying for the freezing fees – for our boys’ “potential siblings on ice,” as we called them – we were pushed to make a decision; the fee was going up and we realized we were sitting on a bounty. Why not give another family a chance at parenthood?

My husband was hesitant initially.

He was the one with the DNA connection to our boys’ frozen siblings. But he pretty quickly came around – no emotional toil! We both felt: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool for our boys to have siblings we didn’t have to potty train and send to college? I will admit that we wanted some level of “control” over who did get to raise our kids’ fro-bros. We are Jewish atheists (not an oxymoron, as you know), and we posted a Match.com-type ad on a website stating, essentially: Republicans and Christianists need not apply. Does the world need more children raised by the likes of Rick Santorum? We felt not.

We got seven takers and chose a non-religious, pro-Obama couple in another state. We drove three hours to meet them and had a lovely chat. We decided that we’d stay in touch and eventually would have our children meet each other.

Unfortunately, the wife miscarried twice with our embryos and blew through 13 of the 16 with no child to show for all the money and heartache. They then turned to the Czech Republic (much cheaper) for a fresh cycle (higher success rate than frozen) and now have a newborn daughter. We don’t know if they’ll try again with our three remaining embryos.

My motivation in this whole endeavor had nothing to do with the embryos or their “right” to life. All of the fertility treatments I’ve been through have only confirmed my belief that life does not begin at conception. Conception doesn’t mean shit. Neither does implantation. Walking out of a hospital with a newborn in a car seat – that’s life.