Penelope Trunk on why universal pre-school is a bad idea, and what would be better

Penelope Trunk says this (I recommend reading the whole thing to get her full argument with links):

Kids with educated parents do not need to go to preschool. So preschool primarily benefits kids with uneducated parents. Preschool can help those kids start out on equal footing with kids of educated parents.

Children who have educated parents should be playing when they are preschool age. They learn through play. They do not need to learn to sit still and stand in line and play only when the teacher says play.

The idea that kids should learn to read, write, and add when they are very young has been thoroughly disproven, and in fact, this sort of structured environment is so bad for boys that it puts them on an early path to being labeled low performers. This is why the rich don’t even bother with preschool—they know their kids will be fine without it. ...

Here is my proposed solution. First, promote marriage. Yes, it’s judgmental and pushing cultural values onto individual citizens. But so is universal pre-K. Marriage, however, is much more successful at giving kids a good chance in life: keeping a marriage together decreases the chance of a child living in poverty by 80%.

And let’s go after deadbeat dads. The majority of low-income kids are not living with their dad. I do not believe that low-income moms are different than high-income moms; I think l0w-income moms also would choose to be home with their kids over working full-time.

New York City increased the amount of child-support collected by 50% in the last ten years. We can use the same tactics across the country.

"Stop Telling Women To Do Startups"

That's the headline of this piece, in which Penelope Trunk (who's founded three startups) argues:

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?

On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market. So VCs want to talk to women.

So VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch. And women are definitely feeling that they can do whatever they want, it’s just that women aren’t choosing to create tech startups. . . .

I have an idea: How about giving some respect to women who grew up in the 1970s, with feminist revolution baby boomer moms, and are still brave enough to say “I don’t want to work full time. I can work full time. But I don’t want to.“

The whole thing is worth reading. Of course, the real point is much broader than just startups and venture capital.

Two first-hand accounts of the attacks of September 11, 2001, by the same person

Penelope Trunk wrote this on September 12, 2001 (on her blog and for Time magazine):

At the Wall St. train stop people were covered with papers. A plane crash. That's what everyone said. Then a boom. Everyone ran. I ran to my office and called my brother in the Midwest.

I wanted to be closer. At the corner of Church and Broadway, I angled my way through a large, packed crowd to get the best view. We talked about people jumping. The police stood behind the yellow tape. Minutes later, there was a boom. I thought it was a bomb, so I crouched, but people ran, so I ran. I couldn't see anything. I don't know how far I ran. Couldn't see where I was running. Didn't know if I was in a street or next to a building. Didn't know what street I was on. No one could talk because the dust filled our throats. After about ten steps I tripped over a pile of people and then people tripped on me.

I laid there. The only sound was the falling of dust and debris. No one moved under me. The weight of people on top of me got heavier. I couldn't breathe. I knew we were all going to die in that pile. I pulled myself out of the pile. My slip-ons slipped off. I stood up and saw nothing. Not even an inch in front of me. I put my hands out and felt for something. I bumped into the brick side of a building. I bumped into milk crates. I stopped. I had no idea what to do, and I knew everyone around me was suffocating. I thought about my mom and dad, they would be so sad to hear that I died. I thought about my husband. Just married and I will not get to live my life with him. I thought about my brothers. They would cry. I told myself to just keep trying to find a way to air, but I didn't believe I would live.

I bumped into something that I could feel the top of, so I lifted myself up. I worried I was going into the back of a dump truck, and I was scared I'd be trapped. I didn't know if there was fire, or a bomb. I didn't know how to protect myself — find air. Go up? — so I didn't know for sure that a dump truck would be bad. I think it was scaffolding. I think I jumped over piles of bodies by climbing scaffolding.

I pulled myself into a building. What building? I don't know. And I took a breath. I took two breaths. I was sure the building would be bombed. I looked for stairs. I kept thinking I needed clean air. I found a bathroom. I didn't realize I wanted water until it was there. Four men inside. Two fighting over the faucet. I shared the toilet with another man. We drank almost the whole bowl.

Once the four of us were calmed by water and air, we ventured outside the bathroom. We walked up stairs. Slowly. We checked doors behind us, left them all open. We got up only one floor. We waited. I cried. They shared one can of apple juice.

The intercom in the building announced stay where you are. I was so relieved to know people knew we were there. The intercom announced again and I thought another bomb would go off and I'd die. I cried. The guy with the apple juice put his arm around me. I wondered why no one else cried. The intercom announced to go down the stairs. I picked up a wastebasket: I planned to fill it with water. Planned to use it to shelter myself from the next bomb. (I still had no idea the building collapsed.)

In the lobby of the building someone gave me a Nantucket Nectar and told me to vomit. I walked outside the building with the drink in my wastebasket. There was no one around. White everywhere. The four of us had nowhere to go. I couldn't remember where I was. I walked toward the water. Police directed everyone north. I asked a woman next to me, "Where are we going?" She said, "I don't know." She had no dust. She looked so steady. I followed her. This was the beginning of her long protection.

She said, "You can walk home with me. You need a shower." I coughed. She asked why I was carrying a wastebasket. I said, "In case there's another bomb." She held onto my arm as we made our way next to the river. In Chinatown, she bought me shoes. At the Bowery we finally found a payphone that didn't have a line of people. So she called her husband and I sat down next to my wastebasket. It was the first time I sat down, and I started crying.

We resumed walking. Sometimes we ran. I made sure to keep up and I didn't tell Teresa that I was worried that I would faint. I drank Nantucket Nectar every time I got dizzy.

At 59th St. a plane went overhead and I screamed. In front of Bloomingdales. There was no one there from Wall St. I knew I looked crazy. I screamed anyway. I reminded everyone there were no planes allowed to fly. Someone said, "It's the army." I came out from under my wastebasket and kept walking. Theresa's apartment was 71st on the Upper West Side. Where everyone looked fine.

In the shower, dripping debris down my body, I remembered one more moment under the rubble. When I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't see. In the middle of the dead quiet was a voice. He said, "Is there anyone here? Can someone hold my hand?" I reached out to the voice, and held his hand. It was shaking and the skin was old. I squeezed and then I let go.

10 years later, here's her very different description of the same events:

I was there when the first tower fell. I was so close to it that I could not even see what had happened. I didn’t run. I ducked for cover. I got trampled. By the time I could stand up, everything was completely dark.

I remember the moment I realized I should close my mouth and stop breathing. Time got so slow. I remember thinking that if I had stopped breathing sooner, I would have had a few extra breaths right now. I remember thinking don't swallow, because there was too much stuff in my mouth.

I thought to myself that I had no idea what to do to save my life. I was in the dark and couldn’t breathe. I thought I’ll only be alive for maybe a minute longer, so I only have to keep trying to figure out how to save my life for one more minute. I told myself I can’t give up until I pass out. I remember that I hoped for a fast death.

Then something switched in me. I was okay dying. I felt okay with whatever level of pain I had before I died. I thought of my two brothers. I wanted them to be okay. To be fine. And I hoped someone would help them deal with my death. I thought of my husband, and I was so disappointed to not see our life unfold together.

That evening, after I had been to the hospital, after I had both eyes patched up, my husband finally told me both towers fell. That evening, I still thought the time that I was in the dark was maybe ten minutes. Now I realize that the time when I could not breathe was probably less than a minute. I had accepted the pain and my death after only 30 seconds.

Today, she posts to Twitter:

My mom called me this morning. She was crying. She said she remembers thinking I was dead. She never cries.

Football and brain damage

I don't generally pay attention to sports news, but this has been a big story this week:

Before he shot himself fatally in the chest Thursday, the former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson sent family members text messages requesting that his brain tissue be examined for the same damage recently found in other retired players. . . .

As a longtime force in the N.F.L. players union, Duerson, 50, was keenly aware of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to depression, dementia and occasionally suicide among more than a dozen deceased players. He had expressed concern in recent months that he might have had the condition, said one person close to him who spoke on condition of anonymity. . . .

Now, at Duerson’s request, his brain may contribute to knowledge of how — and how many — football players are at risk for C.T.E. Thirteen of the 14 deceased N.F.L. players who have been examined for the disease by the Boston University researchers have been found to have it, although that rate is skewed by the fact that many died in part through acts linked to the disease itself, like suicide, drug abuse or mental breakdown.

There also is a question as to whether the disease derives from a career in pro football or simply from many years of playing football at any level. Last year, C.T.E. was found in the brain of Owen Thomas, a University of Pennsylvania football captain who killed himself in April.

A year ago, Penelope Trunk wrote:

It’s unbelievable to me that everyone continues to watch football when we know that men are getting genuinely, permanently, brain damaged. The game is tantamount to cockfighting, only with people instead of animals.

The NFL has finally admitted the problem, to the extent it is poised to be the largest funding source for research about trauma to the brain. But still, the game encourages brain trauma. And people cheer.

I can understand if it’s like smoking. You’re addicted, you can’t stop. But what about bringing your kids to the game? What about all the people who make the Superbowl a family TV event? Kids who play football in high school are more likely to die from that than drunk driving or guns. And parents encourage their kids to play this sport?

The culture of football amazes to me — the incredible level of denial. So what I'm thinking is that people are delusional. And they know it, but they keep going. They cultivate delusion.

My Occam's Razor theory: society has a straightforward gender-based double standard. If there's a self-destructive behavior that's mostly done by women (anorexia, self-cutting), society feels sorry for these women and wants to help them. When there's a self-destructive behavior that's mostly done by men (football, fist fights, "daredevil" stunts), we accept it, or even cheer it on.

IN THE COMMENTS: My mom throws in some grim irony:

And don't forget the terrible equal pay for equal work problem. All those things you've associated with women are severely underpaid. Aaron Rodgers makes millions, but the self-cutting girl down the street gets literally nothing.

Penelope Trunk's manifesto against "happiness" and "positive psychology"

"I want to help people find conflict and self-doubt."

Does, or should, your taste in music express your personality?

Penelope Trunk has a couple wry observations about how people perceive your taste in music:

[1.] People judge other people by their playlists. (Which is why Ramones t-shirts outsell Ramones albums ten to one.) . . .

[2. P]eople have positive impressions of people who like jazz. This is surprising to me because people do not have positive judgments toward blog posts that are like jazz—complicated and difficult.

Her link on the "people who like jazz" sentence talks about a 2008 study of how musical taste is correlated with personality. Over 30,000 subjects were asked questions to reveal their personality traits and their opinions of about 100 music genres. One of the researchers explained how the findings defied stereotypes:

"One of the most surprising things is the similarities between fans of classical music and heavy metal. They're both creative and at ease but not outgoing.

"The general public has held a stereotype of heavy metal fans being suicidally depressed and of being a danger to themselves and society in general. But they are quite delicate things."

Back to Penelope Trunk -- she says she wants to choose her playlists to have more "focus":

I like to think that I know myself well enough to present a consistent and insightful portrait of myself. And when Eva, from Songza, emailed me to see if I’d put together a playlist that they could use on their music streaming site, I said sure. . . .

When I sent my song list to Eva I asked her to analyze me. I said, “I bet you read song lists like I read resumes, so can you tell me what you see?”

She said she usually doesn’t see such a wide a range of songs on one list.

On a resume, lack of focus is bad. And in a life, doing many different things at once is bad.

But one of the great things about listening to music is that it's not like making a resume: you don't have to worry about the impression you're making on anyone else. There are many situations in life where you can't afford to simply "be true to yourself" (as we were talking about the other day). Choosing what music to listen to is not one of those situations.

I'll repeat what I've said before, paraphrased from Ben Folds:

You should choose the music you listen to entirely based on what you want to listen to, regardless of whether it's a reflection of your personality.

There's no need to worry about whether the person who likes Bach can also like Pantera.* Like whatever you like, and everything else will fall into place.

* I decided to link to Pantera's song "I'm Broken" because the title reminded me of the researcher's comment that metal fans are "delicate things."

All you need to know in order to be productive

. . . is this 11-word formula:

One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

So says Skelliewag (via Penelope Trunk, who got it from Lifehacker, which got it from Scott Rosenberg).

Unfortunately, quoting productivity tips is not the most important thing for me to be doing.

CORRECTION: This is actually bad advice! My mom (Ann Althouse) explains in the comments section:

This tip is wrong if the important thing is huge. We all do lots of little things that aren't very important. We keep our spirits up with variety and fun. I object to this tip! It's too nose-to-the-grindstone. It works for some people, maybe, but you need to know whether you are one of those people. I think the world's a better place because most of us are not.

My favorite quotes by other people on this blog

It's been a year since I did the first quotes post, so here's an update. For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the link on the person's name and look for the quote in the original post.


LIFE

"If there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." -- Thomas Nagel

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert


WORK

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible." -- Paul Graham


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"Scientific psychology becomes unscientific because it is dealing with mind, and mind does not lend itself to experimental precision." Norman N. Holland

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


ENVIRONMENT

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"Can environmentalism be bad for the environment?" -- Edward L. Glaeser


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel


HUMAN NATURE

"The science of happiness barely grasps the things that the average sage of antiquity took as fundamental. The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable." -- Mark Vernon

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


SOCIETY

"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution -- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light." -- Steven Pinker

"What if everyone followed this Larger Meaning Doctrine? Something happens to an individual, and he could drop it or apologize or look into the particular details of the case, but instead he insists that his experience should represent some big problem in the world that people ought to be concerned about, that his case should be the jumping off point for something much more general, so that his problem isn't wasted but yields Larger Meaning for us all. Imagine how annoying that would be! And now think about how you'd react if these Larger Meaning adherents also topped off their demands by declaring 'this is not about me.'" -- Ann Althouse


MUSIC

"This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer to that would be, 'Yes.' And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, 'No.' Therein lies the difficulty. Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions." -- Aaron Copland


WRITING

"I am now part of the conspiracy to intentionally make simple ideas obscure and complex." -- David R. Hakes

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

"Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated." - Blaise Pascal


MEDIA

"People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book. A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything." -- Penelope Trunk

"Book publishers mostly rely on their authors to ensure accuracy; dedicated fact-checking departments now rarely exist except at some magazines. The New Yorker’s checkers are justly renowned for their tenacious scepticism, but even they err sometimes. One reader was annoyed to find himself described as dead, and requested a correction in the next issue. Unfortunately, by the time the correction appeared, he really had died, thus compounding the error. This tale illustrates not only the drawbacks of printed media, but also the role that readers can play in overcoming them -- even if things did not quite work out in this instance." — Anthony Gottlieb

"It was deeply disturbing, but not terribly surprising, to learn that under the guidance of a stern man in a lab coat, ordinary people would torture innocent victims in the infamous Milgram experiment carried out at Yale University. Cronkite was a white man in a tie, with a calm, reassuring voice, and he could have talked us into almost anything, if he wanted to. But his legacy is a paradox: We trusted him to teach us to trust less. The nostalgia for Cronkite is nostalgia not for a lost golden age, but for a brief time when three large media corporations held a monopoly on the airwaves, when trust could be sorted out easily and quickly with the shorthand of race, class and education." -- Philip Kennicott


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- Peter Orszag

"The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes." -- Richard Posner

"I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, 'Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.' Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. We simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars." -- President Obama

"The aughts were ruined by not letting good crises go to waste." -- Will Wilkinson


GENDER

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- Sofa King

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well, that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato

"It’s too bad that one side of teaching our children about sex and relationships means reminding them that there are bad people in the world; stay away from them, stay safe, speak up if someone hurts you or pushes you. But everyone needs that information, and that promise of adult support. We have to get that message across without defining some of our children as obvious perpetrators and others as obvious victims, because that insults everyone." -- Perri Klass


SEXUAL ORIENTATION

"I think the institution would be strengthened by the inclusion of more couples who are genuinely committed to each other. But even if you believe marriage would be changed for the worse by same sex unions, I'm not sure it's a compelling argument for their exclusion. We don't forbid divorce, a more proven and prevalent threat to the health of our society." -- Steve Schmidt


RELIGION

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin

- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"How can it be Heaven if our families aren't there?" -- Greta Christina


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong — I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." — Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


HEALTH CARE

"Whether, in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place." -- President Barack Obama

"We're traveling down the route of Europe. And many Americans just hate that idea. If you're in any group of conservatives, and you say, 'Oh, that will take us down the route of Europe,' they will say, 'Oh no, we don't want to do that! That's awful!' Nobody ever explains what's so terrible about Europe." -- Bruce Bartlett


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"Those that treated political, social or historical levels of explanation as fundamental now seemed to me to be treating externals and surfaces as if they were foundations, and to be superficial and point-missing. Marxism had a complete explanation of the arts in terms of political power, economic interests and social classes, and this seemed to me a grotesque attempt to explain the greater in terms of the less." -- Bryan Magee

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad [art], a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

"'He was in pain all the time,' recalled his father. 'He cried. I bought him a toy piano.' The keyboard looked like a mouth to Michel, and he thought it was laughing at him, so he smashed it with a toy hammer, and his father got him an old full-size upright abandoned by British soldiers at a military base. -- David Hadju, quoting Tony Petrucciani


BLOGGING

"So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now." -- Roger Ebert

"And if I told myself that I would have something interesting to blog about, that I had something to look forward to, and that I still had something to write, then there was absolutely no reason to die." -- Zachary Paul Sire

6 ways blogs are better than nonfiction books

I'm glad someone (Henry Farrell) has finally put into words what's been bothering me for years about nonfiction books (via):

[1.] I would estimate that about 80% of the non-academic non-fiction books that I do not find a complete waste of time ... are at least twice as long as they should be. They make an interesting point, and then they make it again, and again, padding it out with some quasi-relevant examples, and tacking on a conclusion about What It All Means which the author clearly doesn’t believe herself. The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself.

A major defect of nonfiction books is that they're not blogs. (I'm obviously biased in making this statement because I'm not a book author but I am a blogger. On the other hand, I have good reasons for choosing to blog but not to write a book.) Ezra Klein points out one fairly obvious advantage blogs have over books:

[2.] It's possible to follow an issue in real time. People who really wanted to understand the health-care reform conversation were better off reading Jon Cohn's blog than any particular book or magazine. Did those people spend more time reading Jon and less time reading books? Probably. But it was time well spent.

Penelope Trunk's advice to people who want to write a book includes a couple further points, which complement Klein's:

People ask me all the time how they can get a book deal. ... But really, I'm telling you, you probably don't need to write a book. Every time I ask someone why they want to write a book, they have a terrible answer. ...

People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.

[3.] A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it's too late to change anything.

[4.] Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

To rephrase point 4, a blog is an efficient and flexible test of the richness of a writer's ideas. A book also tests the richness of a writer's ideas, of course, but without the same efficiency and flexibility. A blogger has immense freedom to put out a mishmash of ideas that don't cohere to form a beautifully unified whole but nevertheless contain valuable insights. The author of a nonfiction book, in contrast, has to devote so much time to supporting a single thesis in the same time a blogger could have disseminated 10 (20? 50?) ideas on a variety of loosely related or even unrelated topics.

This tradeoff for the book author may be worth it if the result is the rare nonfiction book that thoroughly supports a ground-breaking thesis and is written lucidly enough to engage the minds of a general audience. (Flow, Stumbling on Happiness, The Moral Animal, In Defense of Food.)

[5.] But even this idealized scenario has another downside: The pressure on a nonfiction-book author to support a single, clear thesis means that the author has a stubborn bias in how they view the world. The author shines a spotlight on the facts that support the thesis, meanwhile sweeping inconvenient facts under the rug. Even the best nonfiction books suffer from this bias. Bloggers are biased too -- no one is objective -- but a blogger is likely to be far less invested in any particular thesis.

Of course, some people who have nothing new to say are going to disregard Penelope Trunk's advice and write nonfiction books anyway. And then what happens? My mom's answer to this question underscores point #1:

[6.] I just paid $25+ for a 300+-page book that was an expansion of an article from The Atlantic. I did that for a Bloggingheads diavlog, and — you'll see when it's up — the author scolded me for skimming. Did that open the door for me to scold her for padding? Readers and writers — we all have our tactics and must guard our own interests. You pad. I skim.

Yet, defenders of books will argue that the internet, with its relentless flood of free content that can be accessed as rapidly and vapidly as flipping channels on TV, diminishes the quality of our reading experience and thought processes. Nicholas Carr, in his widely linked article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," said:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with "content," we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.

Carr is right about the value of not just reading books but "any other act of contemplation." What Carr glosses over is that, in 2010, blogs as well as books can lead to "contemplation" that helps us "make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas." In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, on any given day, more of the thinking being done in the world is spurred by a blog post than by a nonfiction book.

Anyway, who knows? This doesn't have to be a competition. All of the content we're talking about is just human thought expressed in words. We should accept it in whatever form it happens to present itself to us.

Penelope Trunk's Twitter post about miscarriage and abortion

Penelope Trunk said this on Twitter:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

The mainstream media has swarmed around that three-sentence comment about what's going on in one woman's life. Penelope Trunk is one of the more successful bloggers, but she's hardly a household name — so why has this caused a national furor?

Ann Althouse (my mom) says the tweet sets back the cause of abortion rights by undermining the perception that pregnant women are on a "serious search for meaning."

Maybe the real-world net result of this tweet will be bad for abortion rights, but I wish it weren't. People should be allowed to post something to Twitter that doesn't include, within the maximum 140 characters, an obligatory qualification about how they realize that abortion is a very serious and somber thing.

And women should be allowed to write honestly about abortions and miscarriages.

Is the problem that she's glad she ended up having a miscarriage rather than doing what she had been planning to do and get an abortion? Well, if that's surprising to people, then that itself is a serious problem that her Twitter post might go some way toward rectifying. Many, many people would prefer a miscarriage to an abortion.

Maybe you think she should have somehow drenched her statement in emotion. And maybe that would have been more effective. But it can often be more subtly effective to take an issue that's usually considered too taboo or tragic to speak about honestingly and -- speak about it honestly. (And let's also remember that this is a Twitter post we're talking about; it shouldn't be held to the same standards as a magazine article.)

Being told just the plain facts can be a more powerful reading experience. It puts more responsibility on you as the reader to do some of the thinking and evaluating instead of having everything prejudged by the author. Even if this doesn't happen to be your favorite kind of writing, it's not immoral for someone to use that style when writing about miscarriages or abortions.

Trunk has also written a blunt blog post about getting two abortions, and another one about being sexually abused. Like the Twitter post, these blog posts don't broadcast their own emotional or moral significance.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to read stark descriptions of distinctly female experiences that I, as a man, haven't had to endure. We'd be a little worse off if people like Trunk felt the need to censor themselves.

15 rules of blogging for myself

As I've been blogging this past year, I've slowly been creating a set of private, unwritten rules for myself. With this post, the rules become written and public.

These may or may not be useful to any other bloggers. If they're useful, then great. If they're not, I still like having them down in black and white.

1. Err on the side of putting things in list form.

2. Never describe things as "interesting" or "funny"; just be interesting or funny. Using the word "interesting" is a sure-fire way to make anything boring.

3. Ask: does this really matter? Will people still be interested in reading about it weeks, months, or even years from now? Or do I just feel like blogging it because it seems to be the thing to blog about? There are issues, memes, and YouTube clips popping up every day that have the aura of "This is what everyone is blogging / talking about / linking to right now." Those can be the most attractive things to blog, but they're often the most pointless.

4. Ask: do I have something to add to the discussion of this issue? Or am I just piling on one more link? That doesn't just mean contributing a completely original thought — if you set the bar that high, you probably wouldn't blog very often. But it at least means a way of sharpening the focus on a point that's too often blurry and dull. Or highlighting an intersection of two issues that wouldn't normally seem to have much to do with each other. Penelope Trunk compares this to her brief dabblings with visual art:

[O]ne really cool thing someone taught me is that the color I choose is most interesting where it intersects with another color. Just knowing the right color to use is not the clever, interesting thing. Rather, interesting is when I am unsure what the two colors will do when they interact.

The same is true for writing. The interesting part of writing is not the part of the piece where you know exactly where it's going. The interesting part is when you get to an unplanned moment in a paragraph and you surprise yourself by what you write next. It's the moment of uncertainty, when you have to look inside yourself to keep going, and pull out something you didn't know you had before.

5. Have self-confidence, but with enough modesty and disclaimers that you don't veer into arrogance. Freely admit you don't know much about a certain topic or aren't sure of your position on an issue.

On the other hand, don't let modesty turn into excessive timidity. Some bloggers seem to think that blogging is such a limited form that the most you can sensibly do is to draw attention to someone else's line of thinking and make some bland comment about how it's a "potentially useful line of further inquiry." Boring! If that's all you have to say, why even blog at all?

Blogging is not inherently limited or terse. Anything that can be expressed in an article, lecture, or book can (in theory) be said in a blog post or series of posts. While those other media certainly have some advantages over blogging, every medium has people making rash or bold or outrageous pronouncements without really knowing what they're talking about. Better to have a cacophony of voices making statements that might be shocking or overstated — even ill-informed or poorly thought-out — than to have a murmur of uncertain voices afraid to reach firm conclusions. The former at least invites others to join in and chip away at the clunky misstatements, which makes it more likely that we'll approach the truth.

6. Put a little extra attention into a post to give it a real beginning, middle, and end. For instance, a post should start out by orienting the reader. Too many blog posts, especially if I haven't read the blog before, keep me wondering, "What's this basically about?"

7. It's good to spruce up a post with a photo or video clip. All other things being equal, more people will tend to read your post if it includes visuals, but only use them if they're high-quality and relevant (and, of course, respect the creators' rights).

8. While you should fearlessly state the principles you believe in, try not to hold yourself out as a paragon of these principles. If you have something to say about what it is to live a good life or achieve self-actualization, then by all means write it down — but don't claim that you yourself are living a good life or have achieved self-actualization. First of all, you're probably not the best judge of your own success at these endeavors. But even if you have been successful as you think, that's just not very important for your readers to know about.

9. There are no official rules for blogging — you can do whatever you want. You need to compensate for this underlying anarchy by imposing standards on yourself. Good writing still matters. Write in complete sentences. (Aside from the occasional rhetorical flourish.) Deploy your vocabulary with aplomb. Avoid the passive voice. Write concisely (see Strunk & White) and elegantly (see Joseph W. Williams's Style). Sarcasm and vague allusions are fine in moderation, but don't encrust your writing with so much irony and engima that the astute reader is likely not to understand what you mean.

10. But it's not just about conventionally good writing — there are also writing tricks that are specific to blogging.

For instance, people will pay more attention to your point if it's in a one-sentence paragraph unto itself.

You don't want every paragraph to be just one sentence. That would be too choppy. But err on the side of shorter paragraphs.

Long paragraphs just don't work very well online. I often have to add paragraph breaks when I'm quoting someone because they made their paragraph too long. I don't think I've ever felt the need to remove paragraph breaks in something I was quoting because the paragraphs were too short.

Putting something in bold or italics can be useful to make sure a key point doesn't get lost. But I used to do this too much. You don't want the reader to feel like you don't trust them to figure out what's important. And too much of it just looks messy.

11. There's another blog-writing trick, one I picked up specifically from reading Josh Marshall's posts on Talking Points Memo. He doesn't always use the short-paragraph technique. But he does something similar. His sentences are shorter than most people's. It's not so much that he's better at being concise. It's something more mundane. He's very quick to end a sentence. And then he'll start a new one, often beginning with "and" or "but." When you use a lot of short, declarative sentences in a row, you convey a sense of authority. It says I know what I'm talking about. And it says I'm getting straight to the point. I'm giving it to you straight. Long sentences contain so much text that you can feel like the truth is being hidden amid the verbiage. A short sentence feels more stark and revealing. You can easily overdo this. But it can be effective when used in moderation. And I never get tired of it.

12. Don't link to another blog for the sheer purpose of promoting it. If there's a new blog I like enough to want to promote, then surely it has at least one specific post I can blog about. Not only will this make for a better post on my blog, but it will be better promotion for the other blog.

13. Assume that anything you write will be seen by your family or your employer or your prospective employer or anyone. And once you publish it, it will never go away. (Even if you delete a post or your whole blog someday, search engines can retain caches of the deleted content.)

14. Don't worry about giving your blog a "focus." Write about whatever you want. Let the themes emerge organically, unconsciously, haphazardly.

On the other hand, be aware of how a given post fits in within the whole "web" — not the world-wide web, but the web that is your blog. I like to think that eventually, all the posts here will reveal themselves to be interconnected — to the theoretical reader who takes the trouble to sort out all the connections. Is that realistic? Of course not, but I'm driven by imagining that the blog will get closer and closer to that ideal.

15. If possible, end a post with something that invites the reader to think more about the topic, beyond the surface of what you've written.

What are your personal rules for blogging? Let us know in the comments!

My favorite quotes from a year of blogging

The following are my favorite quotes by other people that I've blogged in my first year of blogging (April 12, 2008 to April 11, 2009).

For the sake of readability, I've removed all formatting (italics, etc.) and alterations (ellipses and brackets). If you happen to need a more exact quote, just click the attribution link and look for it in the original post.


LIFE

"My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it." -- Daniel Gilbert

"Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life." -- Summer Anne Burton


WORK

"Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable." -- Bertrand Russell

"One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to 'do what you love.' If you tell yourself that your job has to be something you'd do even if you didn't get paid, you'll be looking for a long time. Maybe forever. So why set that standard? The reward for doing a job is contributing to something larger than you are, participating in society, and being valued in the form of money. -- Penelope Trunk


ENVIRONMENT

"You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one's motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You're right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you'd probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won't change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered." -- Joel Achenbach

"If you're a progressive, if you're driving a Prius, or you're shopping green or you're looking for organic, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian." -- Mark Bittman

"On the one hand, we are told that our overconsumption is polluting and cluttering up the earth with garbage, using up resources and showing insensitivity to all the needy people in the world. On the other hand, we are told that until we start buying more goods and services, the economy will be in the dumps and we will leave many of our fellow citizens jobless, homeless and hungry. Something is wrong with that picture." -- Ina Aronow


THOUGHT

"We have grown terribly -- if somewhat hypocritically -- weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable. Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace -- as their predecessors did -- big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth -- however provisional it might be." -- Cristina Nehring

"Is Mount Everest more 'real' than New York? I mean, isn't New York 'real'? I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean, isn't there just as much reality to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different." -- Wallace Shawn

"Complexity and obscurity have professional value -- they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery." -- John Kenneth Galbraith


DOUBT

"It is an odd fact of evolution that we are the only species on Earth capable of creating science and philosophy. There easily could have been another species with some scientific talent, say that of the average human ten-year-old, but not as much as adult humans have; or one that is better than us at physics but worse at biology; or one that is better than us at everything. If there were such creatures all around us, I think we would be more willing to concede that human scientific intelligence might be limited in certain respects." -- Colin McGinn

“Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past. To speak of a crisis of financial epistemology may sound abstract, but it has had very concrete and disastrous consequences.” -- Jeffrey Z. Muller

"And this is the point in which I think I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know." -- Socrates


RELIGION

-- "Is life in general more rewarding if you are spiritual, and a real believer? Does someone who truly believes that God is watching my every step, God is taking care of me, whatever happens to me is somehow approved by or helped by God, does that person live a richer, fuller life than someone who thinks: we're on our own here?"
-- "It depends on your specific conception of God, because belief can equally well leave you with this constant sense that you're coming up short and you're being judged and you're not doing quite the perfect thing. You know, I was brought up very religiously, and I never totally lost that sense, you know, that I'm screwing up." -- Joel Achenbach and Robert Wright

"Our general repression of matters disgusting prevents us facing up to a serious health problem. If we are the 'god that shits,' then we are in full flight from ourselves. I even wonder whether religion itself and the whole idea of a god is produced by our self-disgust." -- Colin McGinn

"Every religion I know of has changed its views with respect to concrete controversies over long periods of time. People's views about the morality of homosexuality are likely to undergo some change, even though they're making judgments based on their religious beliefs. Because in fact, religion is an extremely durable, and yet flexible, way of trying to apprehend what's good and what's bad in the world. In fact, its durability comes from its flexibility. Now, speaking from inside a religion, it's hard to talk that way." -- Jack Balkin


SCIENCE

"It is this claim to a monopoly of meaning, rather than any special scientific doctrine, that makes science and religion look like competitors today. Scientism emerged not as the conclusion of scientific argument but as a chosen element in a worldview -- a vision that attracted people by its contrast with what went before -- which is, of course, how people very often do make such decisions, even ones that they afterwards call scientific." -- Mary Midgley

"If a psychological Maxwell devises a general theory of mind, he may make it possible for a psychological Einstein to follow with a theory that the mental and the physical are really the same. But this could happen only at the end of a process which began with the recognition that the mental is something completely different from the physical world as we have come to know it through a certain highly successful form of detached objective understanding. Only if the uniqueness of the mental is recognized will concepts and theories be devised especially for the purpose of understanding it." -- Thomas Nagel

"We're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow its peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)" -- Robert Wright


GOVERNMENT

“Something that’s unsustainable, like a dysfunctional relationship, can go on longer than you expect, and then end faster and messier than you think.” -- President Obama's budget director Peter Orszag, as quoted by David Leonhardt

"The confidentiality of the judicial process would not matter greatly to an understanding and evaluation of the legal system if the consequences of judicial behavior could be readily determined. If you can determine the ripeness of a cantaloupe by squeezing or smelling it, you don't have to worry about the produce clerk's mental processes." -- Richard Posner

"And that was an unedited interview with the secretary of state taped earlier this morning from Jordan. We appreciate Secretary Powell's willingness to overrule his press aide's attempt to abruptly cut off our discussion as I began to ask my final question." -- Tim Russert


ANIMALS

"I'm not a vegetarian. Now, don't get me wrong -- I like animals. And I don't think it's just fine to industrialize their production and to churn them out like they were wrenches. But there's no way to treat animals well when you're killing 10 billion of them a year. Kindness might just be a bit of a red herring. Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." -- Mark Bittman

"If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too." -- Ann Althouse


GENDER

"Back then, it was better to be a man because before a woman and an animal were considered the same thing. Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men, and are even more powerful." -- Pashe Keqi, as reported by Dan Bilefsky

"No matter how bad things get for boys/men, well, they're men, so they can look after themselves. Women, on the other hand, need a Presidential Council to make sure they're doing all right, even if by many metrics they are outperforming men." -- "Sofa King"

"[quoting this New York Times article:] 'Women's desire is dominated by yearnings of self-love, by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need.' A lot of feminist writing would say that the culture has oppressed women by presenting them as the object of male desire. What if that originates in the woman? Well that would shake the foundations of feminism!" -- Ann Althouse

"From the moment of conception on, men are less likely to survive than women. It's not just that men take on greater risks and pursue more hazardous vocations than women. There are poorly understood -- and underappreciated -- vulnerabilities inherent in men's genetic and hormonal makeup." -- Marianne J. Legato


RIGHT and WRONG

"We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters." -- Ed Hickling, as reported by Gene Weingarten

"Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere 'statistical people.' They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations." -- Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule

"Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part." -- Bertrand Russell


ART

"The devaluing of the visual goes along with the theory that there is no such thing as quality, i.e., good versus bad, a theory that inevitably comes to parody itself as a prejudice against the beautiful." -- Richard Lawrence Cohen

First ladies and gender insanity

Penelope Trunk has some choice words on the awkward gender dynamics of the present day:

What is up with the constant photo ops of the wives of the men running the financial universe? What about the two women in the G-20? Do we put their husbands in the midst of this group of women? No. It would look insane. And that is exactly the reason that all the other women in the group should feel insane. ...

The G-20 Wives’ Club photos are particularly insulting because these women are being associated not by their special interests, or particular education, or common background, but merely by who they are sleeping with. Seriously. When, other than when rounding up prostitutes for jail, has this approach to grouping women been acceptable to society? ...

While I write this post, Adam Toren has the unfortunate timing of sending me an email to tell me I have been named one of the top 100 women bloggers. I email him back immediately to ask him if he has a similar award for the top 100 men.

And here's my point: women do not need to be called out just because they are women. It's bullshit. Women are doing fine competing with men. Women are earning more than men in corporate America, women are keeping their jobs at a higher rate than men in the recession, and, Adam, when it comes to making money from blogging, the mommy bloggers knock the ball out of the park. So what's up with segregating women? What is the point?

As a reminder, I'm still looking for data on men's vs. women's salaries in America. I asked this question before, and LemmusLemmus pointed me to a 1999 study cited by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate that suggests it's dead even. Based on Trunk's examples, women actually make more than men. I'm interested to see if anyone has data showing that women make less than men for comparable work.

Don't "do what you love"

Of course, I'm not going to say you shouldn't do what you love! That's why I put "do what you love" in scare quotes — as in, the familiar career advice to "do what you love."

Maybe a lucky few can truly live up to that advice. But Penelope Trunk says that the more realistic (i.e. better) career goals would be...

• contributing to something larger than you are,


• participating in society, and


• being valued in the form of money.

That list is quoted from her simple but thought-provoking career advice.