The Dish

Todd VanDerWerff praises Jane The Virgin for sympathetically depicting characters who don’t spout Hollywood’s default “mushy progressivism”:

The central character, played by the remarkable Gina Rodriguez, is Latina. Much of the show’s dialogue is in Spanish. The family is by no means well-off. And, ultimately, the main character’s religious beliefs — and how they inform her personal politics — are deeply important to the show’s conception of her.

Put simply, this is a show about a virgin by choice (driven by only slightly masked religious beliefs) who is accidentally artificially inseminated, then chooses to keep the baby, because having an abortion is just the sort of thing she would never consider. The show doesn’t really make a big deal about this, but it all happens, all the same. Jane the Virgin is a show about people who are pro-life — written and produced by the much-demonized “Hollywood liberals,” no less — that doesn’t turn preachy or attempt to make much of Jane’s choice. It simply is.

Alyssa calls Jane The Virgin “the exceptionally rare television show to portray religious people not as rubes or bigots, but as smart, compassionate and conflicted.” Margaret Lyons loves the show:

Jane the Virgin is a shining example of how much a show can get away with as long as it takes its characters seriously. The show buys into the idea of Jane, of Jane’s concerns, Jane’s strengths, Jane’s sensibilities. This is the world Jane lives in, and this is the way she feels about it. It sounds so easy! But you don’t need to look at too many other shows to realize this isn’t easy, or at least isn’t common.

Jane is based on the Venezuelan telenovela Juana la Virgen, and it feels at times a little like Pushing Daisies: There’s a whimsical narrator; things feel very fated; we know exactly whom to root for and how much. The show credibly addresses Jane’s option to have an abortion and doesn’t rely only on religiosity to explain why she decides against it. Despite the show’s melodrama, everyone has a backstory, too; the inflated emotions of the show could just kind of float away were they not anchored by authentic, sometimes painful, true ideas. Jane’s grandma isn’t just some Bible-thumper — she’s speaking from experience when she talks about how hard it is to raise children. Jane’s mother didn’t stop having romantic fantasies and personal dreams when she became a mom; she just had to funnel that energy in a different direction. Even in soap-opera crazy-bananas pregnant-virgin world, characters can and ought to contain multitudes.

Kate Kulzick is also impressed:

It’s refreshing to see an unabashedly good person at the center of an hour-long series. Jane is considerate, thoughtful, intelligent, and hard-working. She puts others before herself without a second thought, and yet it never feels like she’s a doormat. This should be a star-making turn for Rodriguez, who handles Jane’s broadly comedic moments as confidently as she does her quietly dramatic ones, and her performance in the role is enough of a reason to tune in by itself.

Hers isn’t the only strong performance. Navedo and Coll play off each other well and have an easy rapport with Rodriguez, giving the Villanueva family instant chemistry and a comfortable, lived-in quality that makes it easy to imagine their years together before the pilot’s instigating event.

Time caught up with the show’s star:

The actress says Jane the Virgin was love at first script. “To read a story about a young girl where her ethnicity wasn’t at the forefront, where her dual identity was so integrated in life that it didn’t feel like a separate conversation, was such a breath of fresh air,” Rodriguez says. The Chicago-born daughter of Puerto Rican parents says she has turned down high-profile roles when she needed the money because she thought the characters were too stereotypical. “I have fought so hard to not take roles,” Rodriguez says. “I had to fight [myself] like, ‘Gina, you can’t pay rent. Are you really going to say no?’”

But it’s impossible to know which party will benefit. Silver explains:

In a number of elections, including 2012’s, Senate polls had a systematic bias toward one party. But the direction of the bias has been inconsistent, favoring Democrats in some years and Republicans in others. The chart here depicts the average partisan bias in Senate polls of likely voters conducted in the final three weeks of campaigns since 1990. (For raw data from 1998 onward, see here; for 1990 through 1996, see here). A year indicated as having a Republican bias means the GOP underperformed its polls. A year shown as having a Democratic bias means the Democrats underperformed theirs instead.

In 2012, Senate polls had a Republican bias of about 3.5 percentage points. That means in a state where the polling average showed the Republican ahead by a point, the Democrat would be expected to prevail by 2.5 points instead. If there’s the same bias in the polls this year, Democrats would be very likely to keep the Senate.

But as I mentioned, this bias has flipped back and forth.

Waldman rejects the notion that Democrats are unskewing polls this election cycle:

What Democrats are doing is arguing that whatever the polls now say, they’ve got a great turnout operation this year, and that’ll make a big difference come election day. Or they’re expressing the hope that in a couple of key races, voters will eventually wise up and understand the radicalism of the Republican candidate. But that’s very different from arguing that the polls are systematically skewed against them. One is about expressing optimism and keeping your side motivated, while the other is a delusional denial of reality.

The NYT’s model now gives the GOP a 73 percent chance of taking the Senate. Leonhardt puts this percentage in context by listing situations that occur “between 25 and 30 percent of the time”:

■ The odds of rolling a 9, 10, 11 or 12 with two dice

■ The chances that a blackjack casino dealer busts

■ The percentage of calendar years since World War II that the Standard & Poor’s 500 has declined

■ The share of days in which it rains in Kansas City (as it did Monday, postponing a baseball playoff game)

■ The frequency with which a 25-year-old woman is shorter than 5 feet 3 inches

■ The frequency with which a 25-year-old man is 5-11 or taller

■ The odds that a National Football League defense prevents a first down on third-and-one.

He insists that, if the GOP’s odds stay roughly the same through election day, “it won’t be right if the Republicans win any more than it will be wrong if the Democrats keep control. “

Megan Garber contemplates Facebook’s and Apple’s move to pay for female employees to freeze their eggs:

[W]hile the companies’ inclusion of egg-freezing as a health benefit may certainly be part of the Valley’s notorious perks arms race, you could also read it as a sign that egg-freezing has reached a kind of cultural normalcy. In 2008, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine called the technique “experimental,” warning, based on current evidence, that it “should only be offered in that context.” In 2012, however, citing sufficient evidence to “demonstrate acceptable success rates in young highly selected populations,” it lifted that designation.

Since then, according to NBC’s Danielle Friedman, doctors have seen a steady increase in the number of women who have sought out the procedure.

Amanda Hess doubts many other employers will follow Facebook’s lead unless they are forced to:

Despite ample evidence that covering assisted reproductive technology is generally good for business—a 2008 review found that 91 percent of companies that cover fertility treatments didn’t see a rise in costs to the employers—the vast majority of American employers still decline to provide the benefit, dismissing it as too expensive. Maybe other employers will heed Facebook’s example and cover $20,000 in egg freezing costs for their employees; maybe they’ll also take a cue from YouTube and install giant, three-lane indoor slides in their offices.

But Jessica Bennett thinks numerous companies would be wise to get onboard:

As the Lancet put it in a medical paper earlier this month, covering egg freezing as a preventative measure could save businesses from having to pay for more expensive infertility treatments down the line – a benefit that is already mandated in 15 states. As Dr. Elizabeth Fino, a fertility specialist at New York University, explains it: with all the money we spend on IVF each year, and multiple cycles of it, why wouldn’t healthcare companies jump on this as a way to save? And while success rates for IVF procedures vary significantly by individual, and are often low, using younger eggs can increase the chances of pregnancy.

Claire Cain Miller wonders whether free egg-freezing will allow companies to avoid implementing family-friendly policies “like paid family leave, child care and flexible work arrangements”:

[W]orkplaces could be seen as paying women to put off childbearing. Women who choose to have babies earlier could be stigmatized as uncommitted to their careers. Just as tech company benefits like free food and dry cleaning serve to keep employees at the office longer, so could egg freezing, by delaying maternity leave and child-care responsibilities.

And Nitasha Tiku compares the move to another recent corporate innovation:

Unlike unlimited vacation days, which go unused to the point where Mastercard built an ad campaign around it, I imagine most working women would exercise this option in a heartbeat because of the huge financial and personal cost of continuing to hustle, crush it, and shut up in their careers while biologically constrained. This subsidizes the cost of choosing when to prioritize having children. …

It’s too soon to tell whether female employees will feel pressured to freeze their eggs rather than take time out to have children, just like everyone feels pressured to always be on call to the office, always check email, always have a smartphone in hand. The choice is yours to decide whether or not to take those vacation days, except sometimes that choice feels like an illusion and this decision might be the hardest one working women have to make.

Aaron Carroll highly recommends getting a flu shot:

Pediatrician Russell Saunders recounts his attempts at convincing parents to pay closer attention to the flu than to Ebola:

Though at present flu activity is low in the United States, it’s only a matter of time before people start coming down with it in greater numbers. (This is as good at time as any to exhort you to get a flu shot if you haven’t done so already.) Thus far, the parents who have raised concern about Ebola have been relatively easy to reassure, as their children haven’t really had symptoms that looked like it. As more come down with the flu, I suspect the reassurance will become more challenging.

James Surowiecki reminds everyone that the flu will kill far more than Ebola:

At work here is the curiously divergent and inconsistent way most of us think about risk.

As a myriad of studies have shown, we tend to underestimate the risk of common perils and overestimate the risk of novel events. We fret about dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash, but don’t spend much time worrying about dying in a car accident. We pay more attention to the danger of Ebola than to the far more relevant danger of flu, or of obesity or heart disease. It’s as if, in certain circumstances, the more frequently something kills, the less anxiety-producing we find it. We know that more than thirty thousand people are going to die on our roads this year, and we’ve accommodated ourselves to this number because it’s about the same every year. Control, too, matters: most of us think that whether we’re killed in a car accident or die of heart disease is under our control (as, to some degree, it is). As a result, we fear such outcomes less than those that can strike us out of the blue.

These attitudes toward risk are irrational, but they’re also understandable. The real problem is that irrational fears often shape public behavior and public policy. They lead us to over-invest in theatre (such as airport screenings for Ebola) and to neglect simple solutions (such as getting a flu shot). If Americans learned that we were facing the outbreak of a new disease that was going to do what the flu will do in the next few months, the press would be banging the drums about vaccination. Instead, it’s yesterday’s news.

A particularly great email from a reader:

Thanks for your post on anosmia, or loss of smell.  This really hit home for me.  I completely lost my sense of smell following a sinus infection a few years back.  Mercifully, it was a temporary loss that lasted a couple of months.  But I can honestly report that that was one of the darkest periods of my life, and it nearly drove me insane.

In this state, life becomes flat and inescapable in a profound way.  I had no idea how central this sense is to our well being.  Everything big and small loses its luster. My anosmia nightmare would begin every morning with my coffee tasting like nothing more than hot water and would continue to torture me throughout the day.  Beer tasted like carbonated water.  Food?  Well, I was lucky if I could get a hint of cardboard out of any of it. 

People whom I would confide in would casually respond, “yeah, I had a cold once and food tasted weird.”  “No!” I would snarl.  That didn’t begin to capture the experience.  There was NO taste.  Zero. There isn’t any flavor or any sense that you’re addressing your hunger. I actually gained weight, since the failure to get that emotional satiation drove me to stuff more food in my mouth. 

Additionally, as your post highlighted, intimacy really suffered, as I couldn’t smell my girlfriend’s skin, perfume, or hair. And the simple pleasure of walking outside was considerably dulled by the fact that I couldn’t smell the fragrance of grass or leaves or flowers.  Yes, I had the benefit of not smelling auto fumes, but they were killing me regardless.

The only consolation was that I didn’t have to smell my cat’s offerings in the kitty litter (nor my own in the toilet). But I’ll tell you this:  the first time I noticed my sense of smell coming back was while taking a dump, and to paraphrase Hitchens, the odor was like a breath of fresh air.  In all my life I had never imagined that I would be so excited to smell shit!  I was ecstatic.

To this day, I relish scents no matter how foul – garbage, kitty litter, my kid’s diaper, rotting cheese in the back of my car (don’t ask) … it doesn’t matter.  It reminds me that I am alive and that good smells and flavors are to be had just around the corner.  I thank my lucky stars for the return of this sense and have no shortage of empathy for those who never regain it.

Again, thanks so much for this post and your blog!