Author: Andrew Sullivan

Amy Zimmerman appreciates the latest episode of Louie, which ends with a scene (above) lamenting the unfairness of how overweight women are often treated:

The question of “appropriate” show biz pairings is a natural extension of the horribly skewed, superficial world we live in. Schlubby “every man” types are all the rage in film comedies (see any Seth Rogen movie, ever), and always manage to score the hottest girls. The unfairness here isn’t just that chubby men are allowed to get with beautiful women, while we don’t tolerate the reverse; it’s the implication that no one in their right mind would even consider casting a “normal” woman to play a leading role in one of these stoner comedies.

Willa Paskin’s take is more complicated:

The first time I watched the episode, I read Vanessa’s entire speech about the difficulty of being a fat girl as a female cri de coeur.  The second time I watched it, after interviewing [Sarah] Baker [the actress who plays Vanessa] and learning that she had nothing to do with the script, it seemed more like a male mea culpa.

Louis C.K.’s insights into why a man might not want to be seen with a woman like Vanessa are unimpeachable:

his concern about double standards and casual male cruelty seem deeply felt. But his characterization of Vanessa is less unerring. A woman as confident and comfortable as Vanessa would not, I don’t think, imagine herself as the victim of her weight and blame guys like Louie as entirely as her speech suggests. As a guilt trip, her speech is perfect; as a character exploration, it’s a little bit too much of a guilt trip.

Vanessa’s teachable moment, and the episode more largely, is as scathing to Louie as possible. But it’s also condescending to Vanessa: I mean, if all Vanessa wanted in life was to hold hands with a nice guy, a girl as cool as she is could do just that. Wonder if we’ll ever see a fat girl on TV who demands more.

Jillian Mapes has mixed feelings:

I’m torn because it takes a privileged man to give fat women a voice, to start a conversation that no one wants to have besides fat women themselves. And some fat women don’t want to talk about it either, just as they’d prefer never having to acknowledge their own size. Instead they do this dance with potential suitors that, to me, back before I was comfortable freely using the word “fat” to describe myself, felt like a staring contest of sorts: who’s going to point out the elephant in the room first?

That’s the difference between a character like Vanessa and a fat woman whose worst fear is a conversation about her pants size: the former is not afraid of acknowledging her size, which has come to define her in the eyes of others. The right words don’t make the wrong body any smaller, but they do take the power out of language itself. In doing so, you minimize the effects of those who call you fat and don’t mean it as a neutral descriptor, akin to “tall” or “short” or “skinny.”

Still, she declares that “it’s a beautiful thing to see the intimate passages of your mind play out on your TV screen for the very first time.” Melissa McEwan, on the other hand, hated the scene because it “pretends that there aren’t already loads of men who love fat women”:

Men who are specifically attracted to fat women, or men who fell in love with individual women who happen to be fat. Men who, in either case, didn’t need an education on how fat women are human beings, many of whom are desirous of and deserving of romantic love. Men who don’t expect to be “rewarded” in some way for loving and being attracted to fat women.

On its face, that might not seem particularly important, but it is—because the routine disappearing of these men underwrites the narratives which pathologize attraction to fat women. Which, suffice it to say, doesn’t do any favors for fat women.

It would be significantly more radical, and more progressive, for Louis CK to simply have had his character be attracted to and date and fuck a fat woman without any commentary about her weight at all. Like lots of men already do.

After North Carolina Republicans repealed the state’s Racial Justice Act last year, the state Supreme Court is considering whether to send back to death row four inmates whose death sentences were reduced to life without parole thanks t0 the law. Last month, Barry Scheck explained the case:

The four prisoners in the case have uncovered a mountain of evidence of discrimination in their cases and county, including a prosecutor’s handwritten notes in one of their cases. In it, he described prospective jurors differently by race. The white “country boy” who “drank” was “ok,” in contrast to the “black wino” who was excluded. Another African-American juror was “ok” because she was from “a respectable black family.”

The evidence also contained an unprecedented study of race and jury selection in North Carolina. Researchers found across the state, in counties large and small, urban and rural, rampant racial discrimination against African-American jurors by the prosecution was the norm.

Lane Florsheim adds more context:

Jury selection based on race is illegal.

A 1986 Supreme Court decision (Batson v. Kentucky) ruled that prosecutors cannot rely on race to dismiss jurors. In reality, though, this can be difficult to enforce, as prosecutors can eliminate jurors without expressing a reason—a prerogative known as peremptory challenge. In some states, according to the NAACP brief, “cheat sheets” have been distributed during prosecutorial conferences. These sheets instruct prosecutors on how “to hide the fact that you’re really eliminating this person because he or she happens to be black,” says Neil Vidmar, a law professor at Duke and a member of the team who prepared the brief. “The cheat sheet gives [prosecutors] a list of reasons that courts have approved as neutral explanations,” says James Coleman, also a law professor at Duke, “It gives them the answer that will give them a passing grade.”

In an interview, Walter Kirn – whose latest book, Blood Will Out, chronicles his relationship with the con man masquerading as “Clark Rockefeller” – discusses the peculiar appeal of swindlers:

Rumpus: Why are stories about impostors—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Six Degrees of Separation, Blood Will Out—so compelling? And beyond that, why are they of particular interest to you?

Kirn: We’re all impostors to ourselves. By that I mean that we know instinctively, intimately, the difference between whom we are inside and who we appear to be to others. Most of the time—when we aren’t flat lying about something or playing a particularly stylized role in some heightened dramatic situation—this difference between the internal and the external is modest and manageable. But there are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It’s a spectacle that we can’t help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

I’ve always defined a truly alluring story as a journey we’re not equipped to take ourselves with a person we’re tempted but afraid to emulate. Impostor narratives are exactly that. When they end in disaster, as Clark’s did, or as Gatsby’s did, we can congratulate ourselves for our own wisdom. We can also experience, safely, at no cost, the terrible thrill of radical self-invention, of trading who we are for who we might be.

Rumpus: To what extent do you think Clark believed his own lies, and to what degree was he aware of all that he was doing?

Kirn: People who know Clark’s story superficially tend to find a strange comfort in the notion that he fell for his own lies. They imagine that he was delusional, confused—not unremittingly shrewd and calculating. They’re wrong, though. They’re projecting their own humanity onto a sociopathic, alien mind, a mind that couldn’t afford for even an instant to lose track of its own schemes. You or I would have trouble targeting different people with an array of specialized deceptions tailored to their respective personalities; we’d crack under the stress, the mental strain. But for someone like Clark, such pressure is a pleasure. I imagine that he woke up each morning wondering whom he could deceive that day. It made him happy, misleading people. It was his craft, not merely his compulsion.

Previous Dish on Kirn and Blood Will Out here.

After reading Nicholas Parsons’s Meth Mania: A History of Methamphetamine, Sullum believes so:

Although NSDUH data cited by Parsons indicate that monthly meth users never accounted for more than 0.3 percent of the population between 2002 and 2011, the drug in its latest incarnation loomed large in the public imagination. Meth did become the next crack in the sense that it was portrayed as the scariest drug ever, turning its users into hideous, homicidal, zombie-like subhumans who made speed freaks seem attractive and tame by comparison. Popular portrayals of meth’s effects, which Parsons describes in detail with a keen eye for exaggeration and unjustified assumptions, were grossly misleading on two major counts: They presented extreme cases as typical, and they blamed every harm suffered or inflicted by meth addicts, ranging from tooth decay to murderous rampages, on the drug itself.

This sort of pharmacological reductionism is belied by the history of methamphetamine, which shows that the effects attributed to the drug are powerfully shaped by context.

Phillip Smith praises the book for addressing how these myths are made and by whom. He writes that “Parsons is especially interesting in his discussion of law enforcement as a claims maker when it comes to drugs”:

[L]aw enforcement has its own interests to protect. Parsons notes one particularly brazen example of self-interested panic purveying, the “ice” scare of the late 1980s. The DEA jumped all over that — until its annual budget was secured, then not so much.

This leads me to something Parsons didn’t discuss, but which I have long wondered: Why, exactly, are police considered experts on drugs? Because they arrest drug users? Police arrest domestic violence suspects, too, but that doesn’t make them experts on domestic bliss, as their own divorce and domestic assault rates indicate.

Last week, the Justice and Education Departments issued new guidelines reminding public schools that they are required by law to accept all students regardless of their or their parents’ immigration status:

The guidelines come in response to a number of reports that schools are denying undocumented immigrants entrance on questionable grounds. Undocumented parents living in Butler County, New Jersey were unable to enroll their kindergarten-age children in school because the Butler Public School District had a policy requiring parents to provide state- or county-issued photo identification, a document that requires a social security number and valid immigration status, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to file a lawsuit in March. The ACLU also found that 138 New Jersey school districts asked for documents that indicated immigration status.

Dara Lind looks at some of the ways public schools have evaded that obligation:

When Alabama passed an anti-unauthorized-immigrant bill in 2011, one provision required public school teachers to record the immigration status of their students, and submit it to the state once a year for a “report.”

The Alabama bill didn’t say that anything bad would happen to students who reported that they or their parents were unauthorized. But it didn’t have to. Hundreds of students across the state stayed home from school the day the law went into effect, as families were scared that the results of the “report” would be sent to law enforcement or federal immigration agents.