Tag: Premium

Lisa Miller sticks up for feminist stay-at-home moms:

Feminism has never fully relieved women from feeling that the domestic domain is theirs to manage, no matter what else they’re juggling. There is a story, possibly apocryphal yet also believable, of an observer looking over Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s shoulder during a Cabinet meeting in the late nineties. On the pad before her, the secretary had written not “paths to peace in the Middle East” but “buy cottage cheese.” (Albright declined to comment for this story, but while promoting a book in 2009, she told an audience that all her life she made it a point always to answer phone calls from her children, no matter what else she was doing. “Every woman’s middle name is guilt,” she said.)

Jessica Grose objects to the premise of Miller’s article and reframes the issue:

[W]hen you strip away the weird gender essentialism and the fact that the article is ginning up a trend where there is none, you do see the core of what the current “problem that has no name” is. It’s time. When you’re in a marriage where both people have not-extremely-lucrative careers and you throw a child into the mix, something, someone has to give. As Miller puts it, “When two people need to leave the house at 6 a.m., who gets the children ready for school? When two people have to work late, who will meet that inflexible day-care pickup time? And who, finally, has the energy for those constant transactions?” No wonder some families are deciding one parent will take on primary responsibility for the kids in this morass.

(Chart from Pew)

Frum reflects, at length, on the Iraq War. This is where it gets really interesting:

The last time I saw Chalabi was in his London apartment, on the very eve of war. My little group arrived past midnight. Chalabi was listening to the evocative strains of Sufi music. He showed me a black-and-white photograph of seven men, wearing the clothes of the 1940s. They were the board of directors of a company his father had founded: a mixed group of Sunni, Shiite, and Christian, and even a Jew. Chalabi remarked that this picture was taken while Europe was tearing itself apart in genocidal violence. He didn’t add that it was taken shortly after British forces defeated a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad—but failed to prevent a murderous pogrom against Baghdad’s Jewish population.

I was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration. However, since one of those “others” was Vice President Cheney, it didn’t matter what I thought. In 2002, Chalabi joined the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute near Vail, Colorado. He and Cheney spent long hours together, contemplating the possibilities of a Western-oriented Iraq: an additional source of oil, an alternative to U.S. dependency on an unstable-looking Saudi Arabia.

Greenwald claims this is proof the war was for oil, not against WMDs. But the two are not mutually exclusive. As for good faith, I’ve long since stopped believing that Dick Cheney believed there really were WMDs in Iraq – but I remain unsure about Bush. (As the archives show, I was seriously convinced by the WMD argument, because I wanted to be convinced, i.e. a useful idiot). But Glenn is not done with David, though:

Frum claims that he “was less impressed by Chalabi than were some others in the Bush administration”. But, as Ruben Bolling just reminded me, Frum wrote a long and angry defense of Chalabi in 2004 at National Review, hailing him as “one of the very few genuine liberal democrats to be found at the head of any substantial political organization anywhere in the Arab world”, and ended with this proclamation: “Compared to anybody [sic] other possible leader of Iraq – compared to just about every other political leader in the Arab world – the imperfect Ahmed Chalabi is nonetheless a James bleeping Madison.” James bleeping Madison. Whatever attributes characterized David Frum back in 2003 and 2004, a skeptic of Ahmed Chalabi was not one of them, his present-day suggestions notwithstanding.

(Photo: US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (C) speaks to the media with Ahmed Chalabi (R), leader of the Iraqi National Congress, and Paul Bremer (L), top US civilian administrator in Iraq, prior to a meeting of the new Governing Council in Baghdad on September 6, 2003. By Rabih Moghrabi/AFP/Getty Images)

Daniel McCarthy makes the case:

While Republicans wage a war on the past, Barack Obama has staked claim to the future—in the same way that Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan once did. The reputation for competence in wielding power that Nixon (before Watergate) and Reagan accumulated now accrues to Obama’s advantage. He brought the troops home from Iraq—however reluctantly—and is on course to end the war in Afghanistan next year. His foreign policy, like Nixon’s and Reagan’s, involves plenty of military force. But like those Republicans, the incumbent Democrat has avoided debacles of the sort that characterized the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush.

Millman pushes back:

I’m unconvinced that Vietnam is the key reason why the Democrats lost their status as the majority party. Rather, I believe it was overwhelmingly domestic policy considerations – and particularly the nexus of race and crime – that overwhelmingly drove the “Silent Majority” into the arms of Richard Nixon, and, subsequently, motivated the Democrats of Macomb County, Michigan, to pull the lever for Ronald Reagan.

That doesn’t mean Vietnam was irrelevant, but in the absence of the currents of domestic social change, I suspect the Vietnam debacle would have looked more like, say, the Korean War, the memory of which did contribute to the Democrats’ losses in 1952 and 1956, but did not lead to a long-term realignment.

Larison’s view:

The war was instrumental in driving younger voters away from the GOP and into the Democratic coalition in 2006 and 2008, and most of them have remained there since then. Of course, Iraq was not the only thing about the Republican Party and mainstream conservatism that alienated Millennials, but it is correct to say that the Iraq war increased and hastened Millennial alienation from both. The important point is that the GOP was already going to be struggling to appeal to a more diverse, more liberal younger generation, and a foreign policy defined by the Iraq debacle has made that task even more difficult. So the sobering thing for Republicans to consider is that the Iraq war is a liability for them with Americans of all ages, and it has already proven to be a disaster for them with younger voters.

I wonder how that may affect the GOP’s clear desire for a new Middle East war against Iran. For the first time, I suspect, the party will be deeply split between the Paul and Rubio camps. Which is when it gets really interesting – and when America’s decision to remain the global hegemon for the indefinite future will come under the deepest strain.

In a review of two books about our relationship with dogs, What’s a Dog For? and The Puppy Diaries, Sue Halpern considers the power dynamics at play:

When humans breed dogs, we breed them for us—to suit our fancy, primarily, and sometimes to help us accomplish certain tasks. Snout-compressed dogs like the bulldog have been bred to appeal to a particular human aesthetic, even though this means that they sometimes have trouble breathing. The Cavalier King Charles, which in the twentieth century was rejiggered to resemble dogs in royal portraits, is, as a result, often born with a brain too big for its skull, with excruciating consequences. And bulldogs, as handsome as their oversized heads may be, are typically too large now to descend through their mother’s birth canal and require surgical extraction to be born. The soft mouth of the retriever is a human invention, and so is the tail of a pointer. The labradoodle—a cross between a poodle and a Labrador retriever—was initially made to create non-shedding guide dogs because the standard guide dogs—German shepherds, Labs, and golden retrievers—could not be used by people with allergies. …

The human–canine bond is inherently unequal. Like it or not, it is a power relationship.

And yet, I still feel my own dogs have power over me. I’m sure this is because we haven’t been the sternest disciplinarians; and because one of them is a beagle. They have different strategies for controlling humans. Dusty, the pure beagle, just insists on one simple thing: getting her way. If you’re late for her dinner, she will whine in a way that sears through the brain like the Time Warner Cable announcer. If you crate her, she will howl until the neighbors complain. She’s older than fifteen now and yet can stop a large grown man dead in his tracks if she decides she has found some elemental trace of a former pizza crust in a sidewalk crack. I know I have the power of food and medicine over her; but that’s about it. She seems to me to live in her own world, with us as her personal assistants and chefs. And, yes, of course, we ceremoniously and punctiliously follow after her sphincter and pick up her crap. I’m not sure even Marie Antoinette had such a service at hand.

Our other dog just guilts you into surrender. She’ll gaze at you with such tender love you are rendered completely helpless. She’ll just pee in the apartment if one of us is away too long. She worships Aaron as a sun-god, while I am the moon, something to see by during the nights of his physical absence. Now that I no longer have a boss, she easily has the most power over me of any other living creature, including my husband. I know this is all a terrible paradox and that their obedience should reflect what Cesar calls our “calm dominance.” But I tend to agree with Montaigne:

At home, he extended his perspective-leaping to other species. “When I play with my cat”, he wrote, “who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” He borrowed her point of view in relation to him just as readily as he occupied his own in relation to her. And, as he watched his dog twitching in sleep, he imagined the dog creating a disembodied hare to chase in its dreams – “a hare without fur or bones”, just as real in the dog’s mind as Montaigne’s own images of Paris or Rome were when he dreamed about those cities. The dog had its inner world, as Montaigne did, furnished with things that interested him.

To see the animal world not as something to be exploited, but to be engaged with, even taught by, was, of course, legendarily attributed to Saint Francis who saw animals as his brothers and sisters. Montaigne took it further, although the best historical book I’ve ever read on changing attitudes toward nature is Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World. He charts a shift in human consciousness toward animals that led to this disposition:

For 2,500 years it has been known to the students of nature that the more one learns about animals, the more wonderful they become. The observation stands confirmed by the instruments of both science and art, but the animals are most instructively perceived when they are seen, as they were by [American writer Henry Beston] from the beach on Cape Cod, as other nations complete in themselves, “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

If you have ever gone whale-watching on the Cape you’ll know what I mean. You see not just another creature, but intimations of another world, another way of grasping – or mercifully not grasping – the whole, a model for us primates, as well as a mirror into our own species’ ugly aggression. And a constant element of surprise. Check out Ken Layne’s interview with Derek Lee of the Wild Nature Institute:

I’ve seen so many crazy things in my life: orcas toying with a bird, elephant seal bulls battling to the death, lions killing impala, grey whales exhaling in my face, a million shearwaters feeding over humpbacks, a million wildebeest migrating after the rains, dolphins making phosphorescent trails around our boat during a midnight sail, but I still wake up every day expectant of what new wonder the world is going to surprise me with.

Readers continue the recent thread sparked by Jill Filipovic:

One of the most common complaints I hear from women who don’t want to change their name is the fear that their family name will “die out,” and I’ve heard the reverse from men as well. So I think the default last name of a newly married couple should be whichever one of their names is shared by the fewest guests at their wedding … and negotiations can go from there.

Another reader:

The truth is, it’s easier when you share a last name, and it’s a wonderful symbol of your shared life. That said, it doesn’t have to be *his* name; I have friends where the husband took her last name, where they both hyphenated. My husband and I chose a new last name – a shared family name.

Another:

When my wife and I first got together and were talking about marriage, without even prompting her, I said simply “Hey, what would you think about me taking your last name?” Why did I offer?

Because I come from a family of all boys. If my father has any concerns about “his name passing on”, he has three sons to do it for him. I know both of my younger brothers are far too close-minded to ever consider it themselves, so why not be the first one to go a different route?

She was surprised I offered, but as we talked about it, we at least got to a point where it wasn’t an assumption but a conscious choice of which direction we were going to go. We did ultimately decide to retain my name and she dropped her “maiden” name. (Notice we still call it a “maiden” name, a term that hasn’t been relevant for at least 500 years …)

Another:

This June I will have been married for 20 years.  When my wife and I got married, she chose to continue to go by her maiden name.  I wasn’t thrilled, probably because it threatened my manhood.  Over the last 20 years my views on so many things have changed but not on this issue.  The problem for me is that it feels like hedging your bets in case things go wrong or possibly infers, whether true or not, a lack of commitment, like we are not really a family but rather a group of individuals working together, at least for now.  So the real issue for me (at this point in life) is not the woman taking the man’s name, but rather the family unit having separate names.

We will most likely be in the position in the near future of adopting a foster child and I wonder how she would feel if we told her she won’t be getting my last name or my wife’s.  I can only think she would feel that maybe it’s because we might want to give her back some day.  And if we don’t do that, whose name does she get and what does that mean to her?  There is something about a unit of people calling themselves by the same name, family or group or otherwise, that seems to naturally pull us together.

One more:

Since I was a teenager I’ve adopted the quip: If I get married, the only way I’ll change my last name (my first name being Dorian) is if I marry someone with the last name ‘Gray.’ When I cavalierly explained this to my future husband, I got a stunned silence. I felt bad that it didn’t even occur to me that he would just assume that I’d take his name when we got married and thus be shocked that I announced that I wouldn’t be. “Are you ok with that?” I asked. “Uh, yeah I guess – it just never occured to me that you wouldn’t change your name,” he said.

I tried to explain that it’s very much a part of my identity, of who I was, that it’s the name of my business and had been for years so it wasn’t practical to change it, and not least of all, the whole connotation of ‘ownership.’ And then to make a point, I asked him if he’d be willing to change his last name to mine and he looked horrorstruck: “No!” “Well,” I said, “that is how I feel about not wanting to change mine.”

A lightbulb went off and I think he really saw what it meant for a person to give up their name.

More reader discussion at our Facebook page.

Bourbon distillers, long bound to the traditional barrels of American oak, are beginning to experiment:

[Distiller Chris] Morris put standard six- to seven-year-old Woodford Reserve in a maple wood barrel as well as former sweet wine casks to lend more chocolate, nutty and dark cherry flavors not usually found in bourbon. Much like the original Woodford Reserve mingled with the new charred American oak barrel, the “Four Wood” chemically reacted with its barrel wood to produce a particular set of flavors. The former fortified wine barrels had wine soaked into the wood and are larger than standard whiskey barrels, giving the Woodford Reserve a larger surface-to-whiskey ratio as well as the small-scale fruity flavors that remained from the barrel’s former alcohol. …

Aging has even gone beyond stationary warehouses.

For its Ocean-Aged Bourbon, Jefferson’s Reserve placed several barrels on a 126-foot ship and let the casks cruise at sea for nearly four years. The increased oceanic air pressure (compared with its warehouse), along with the Panama Canal’s extreme heat pushed the whiskey deeper inside the wood, causing the wood sugars to caramelize and add a rumlike black hue. The whiskey breathed a little easier, too, says Trey Zoeller, who co-founded Jefferson’s Reserve. “The porous nature of the barrel not only allows for evaporation of bourbon out of the barrel, but also [for] the barrel to breathe in the salt air, giving it a briny taste,” Zoeller notes.

Update from a reader:

Larger barrels will have a smaller surface-to-volume ratio than smaller barrels.  This applies to other objects as well – it’s why small animals lose heat faster than large animals in cold environments.

Gabe Habash tries to calculate how many book sales it takes to become an Amazon bestseller, something Amazon refuses to reveal:

Like everyone else, [we] couldn’t get sales numbers from Amazon, but by studying the print bestseller list for a two-week period, we were able to determine that a title in Amazon’s top five averages 1,094 print copies sold across all channels, including other retailers, on a typical day. And because the general industry thinking is that Amazon accounts for about 30% of print sales, that means it likely takes around 300 copies per day to reach Amazon’s top five, depending on the day of the week and the time of year.

Or you could just hire a company to buy your way to the top (WSJ):

[Author Soren] Kaplan purchased about 2,500 [copies of his own book] through [a marketing firm named] ResultSource, paying about $22 a book, including shipping, for a total of about $55,000. Mr. Kaplan says he also paid ResultSource a fee in the range of $20,000 to $30,000. With 3,000 copies sold in its first week, [Kaplan’s book] hit No. 3 on the Journal’s hardcover business best-seller list. It hit No. 1 on BarnesandNoble.com on Aug. 7. By Nielsen BookScan’s count, about 1,000 print copies have been sold in the six months since.

It’s had an impact:

In “The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence,” political scientists Frank Baumgartner, Suzanna DeBoef and Amber Boydstun found that since the mid-1990s, news coverage of the death penalty has increasingly focused on exonerations and wrongful executions. In earlier eras, the debate in the media was more frequently about other issues, such as capital punishment’s constitutionality or cost.

This shift in media coverage, which has highlighted problems in the death penalty’s application, has encouraged the public to evaluate capital punishment in terms of fairness, especially the potential for innocent people to be sent to death row. As a consequence, Baumgartner, DeBoef and Boydstun find that along with a decline in the U.S. murder rate and other high-profile events (such as former Illinois governor George Ryan’s (R) 2001 mass commutation of death row inmates), negative news drove down support for capital punishment.

How much did public opinion move? By one measure, 86 percent of Americans in 1995 said they favored the death penalty for people convicted of murder. But by 2006, just 70 percent did.