In case you haven’t heard, tonight at 10 p.m., the Sundance Channel premieres a new show called Man Shops Globe, which follows longtime Anthropologie buyer Keith Johnson around the world as “his eye ceaselessly searches for ‘scale’ and ‘a big statement,’…‘something enormous’ and ‘important’; elusive, distressed objects that are ‘huge, incredible,’” as The Washington Post’s Hank Stuever describes it.

I haven’t seen the show, but I have read today's reviews, and they are filled with what can only be dubbed Anthropologie Rage—which inadvertently reveals the confusion so many of us have with regard to our objects. Anthropologie, a huge corporate chain that sells authentic antiques mixed in with reproductions of antiques as well as standard mass-produced replicas of pretty things, is the perfect outlet for expressing the rage of the female shopper. She wants authenticity in her life, as in her purchases—but she doesn't trust the marketplace, which is where most of us go to carve out our identities, or at least art-direct them.

So over at Salon, Heather Havrilesky, the most enraged reviewer of the lot, classified Johnson’s esteemed job as little more than junk peddler:

His job traveling the globe to buy enormous overpriced pieces of weird, ancient junk so that Anthropologie can put that junk in its stores and sell it for truly ludicrous, mind-blowing prices … He's a creative professional, one who's exceptionally good at spotting exactly the sorts of rusty old bullshit that anxious, existentially wobbly, overworked yuppies find hopelessly, thrillingly, reassuringly authentic.

But then she contradicts herself—of course she does, who doesn’t like the dainty flea market wares stocked in Anthropologie?—writing: “Johnson's job [is] traveling far and wide in search of grandiose antiques, impish art and off-kilter treasures.”

So are the wares in Anthropologie junk or off-kilter treasures? Keith Johnson becomes a whipping boy for our desire to settle on a definition of an authentic marketplace, a value-laden consumer experience.

Havrilesky continues, now taking out her consumer rage on mass-produced stuff:

Because if the world weren't so filled with tacky, impermanent things, then we wouldn't thirst so terribly for big, heavy, meaningful furniture flown in from Paris. If the world weren't littered with Styrofoam cups and vertical blinds and stained wall-to-wall carpeting and other tacky junk, then we wouldn't be so hungry for that meticulously branded, fully sanctioned and approved, carefully designed, obscenely expensive imported French junk.

Harvilesky, like so many of us, senses that she must put a value on objects—it's become an ethical imperative to many of us either because of environmental concerns or thrift coupled with our desire to cultivate unique sensibilities—but discovers that that undertaking is likely a futile one. Man Shops Globe has become a soapbox upon which to vent our confusion and dismay. And for the record, I like Anthropologie. Johnson does a great job curating the place. What difference does it make, really, if the stuff comes from a Corporate Eye or a French bitty in a marché aux puces?

Tags: Anthropologie, antiques, consumerism, Man Shops Globe

Ruth Reichl, editor of the newly defunct Gourmet magazine, tells the New York Times that now that her magazine has been killed, she's going to write a memoir about her years at Condé Nast. This will be Reichl's fifth memoir. The others are titled Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires, Not Becoming My Mother, and Tender at the Bone. So what she should call her latest? My contenders are: Comfort Me With Town Cars; Si, Sigh ... ; Bye, Si; and I Have Better Bangs Than Anna Wintour.

Tags: gourmet, ruth reichl

A decade ago, going public meant frothy tech IPOs. Now, it's what private school kids do when their parents can no longer pay their tuition. Private school enrollments are down everywhere, from Washington D.C. to Tennessee to California, while requests for financial aid are up. Yet recessionary budget cuts have hit many public schools hard, forcing them to lay off teachers (which increases class size), scale back instruction in art, music and theater, and even shorten the school year. Given the cutbacks, public school parents who can afford it may consider sending their kids to private schools.

Are you thinking of transferring your child from private school to public? Or from public to private? Have you already done so recently? Why? What has the transition been like for your children and family? If your kids are already in a public school, are you seeing an influx of children this year who formerly went to private schools? Has that changed the school in any way?

I'm reporting on this topic for DoubleX and I'd love to get your feedback. Please e-mail your responses to doublexschool@gmail.com. E-mail may be quoted in DoubleX unless the writer stipulates otherwise. If you want to be quoted anonymously, please let us know.

Tags: education, private school, public school

If the blood clots and stroke risks don’t scare you off the pill, maybe this will: Women taking oral contraceptives are less attractive to the opposite sex and less likely to pick a good mate, according to a roundup of studies on the pill, published in this month's Trends in Ecology and Evolution, that Sarah Kliff at Newsweek reported on today.

When a woman is ovulating, her hormonal fluctuations affect her “facial appearance, her vocal pitch, even body odor,” Kliff writes. “And during ovulation, those changes increase a woman's attractiveness because they indicate fertility.” Hardly as dramatic as the potential side effect that terrified many of my friends when we started going on the pill: rapid weight gain. But apparently men—who, so the legend goes, don’t even notice a new outfit or restyled hair (or is that just my dad?)—pick up on these shifts, as shown in a study in the roundup that found that lap dancers make higher tips when they’re ovulating.

The pill’s influence on scent goes both ways: Women on the pill react differently to men’s scents, too—in a way that might be leading us toward the wrong guys. One study in this month’s report found that women on the pill are more likely to be attracted the smell of genetically similar guys. (More impressive than the study’s findings, perhaps, is that the researchers “collected body odor from volunteers and put it in jars for the ladies to smell.” Sucks to be that research assistant.) That means that pill-popping women may be selecting partners counter to the credo that the species is stronger if we mate with people who are genetically dissimilar (put in simpler terms, “opposites attract”).

I imagine that the more tangible threats of weight gain, loss of libido, and mood swings will remain the only pill side effects that actually keep people away. Still, these studies are going to stick with me for a while, if only for the imagery of menstruating lap dancers and smells in jars.

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Tags: birth control, health, Science

According to the FBI, reported rapes are at a 20-year low. 89,000 women reported being raped in 2008, down from a high of 109,062 in 1992. While the data is not available yet for 2009, this is a pretty hefty drop. The USA Today article about these new findings attributes the drop to the use of DNA to catch rapists, who are often repeat offenders, and also to anti-rape public awareness campaigns in the '70s and '80s.

The article does not touch on whether the ratio of actual rapes to reported rapes has remained steady for the past 20 years, and according to this Washington Post article, the percentage of unreported rapes dropped from 69 percent in 1996 to 61 percent in 2006. All of this is positive movement forward, but as Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network tells USA Today, "We need to encourage more victims to report to police and guarantee that when they do report, the case is properly investigated."

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Tags: Rape, rape statistics, Scott Berkowitz

A third woman has won the Nobel Prize for science this year. Israeli Ada Yonath is sharing the chemistry prize for her work on the structure of the ribosome. She joins Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider (once Blackburn’s student) who shared the prize (with a guy, Jack Szostak) for medicine. Yonath was born in Jerusalem before the founding of Israel to a family so poor they couldn’t afford books. Like generations of women scientists since the early 20th century, she was inspired by the work of Marie Curie. Blackburn and Grieder both had mothers who were scientists—and have said how important it was to have these role models in their lives. All three women are mothers themselves. I hope the spirits of Rosalind Franklin, who was excluded from the Nobel she should have won with James Watson and Francis Crick for the discovery of DNA, and Lise Meitner, who was passed over for the prize she deserved for her work on nuclear fission, are smiling down today.

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Tags: marie curie, Nobel Prize, women scientists

Yesterday, the Today show featured a segment on a new trend for the modern day radical bride: trashing the dress. According to the clip, the cooler brides among us are destroying their wedding dresses post-ceremony, whether through a paintball fight or a four-wheeler ride across swampy grounds, as a form of creative self-expression. One bride, still donning her untouched white satiny number, tells the camera that weddings are so “formal and traditional,” so not her, right before she and her husband dirty up their matrimonial garb in the desert dust. The photographer shooting them points out that it’s "a more creative way to express yourself ... in a way you can’t on your wedding day." And that’s when I got really irritated.

If being a prim, dressed-to-the-nines bride isn’t your “thing,” so to speak, why even have a formal wedding and spend gajillions of dollars on some silky fluff you’re just going to turn around and destroy? If there's anything worse in my mind than rampant wedding consumerism, it's intentionally wasteful wedding consumerism. I'd like to think that the women who spend hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on a wedding dress do it for some sacred reason, not just to burn money.

Over on Jezebel, Sadie was just as annoyed with the segment as I was, and also points out the uniquely Western indulgence of such an act by juxtaposing the trend against a recent article in British Marie Claire about Ugandan brides-to-be, many of whom had been raped, who felt blessed just to be receiving used dresses:

First of all, almost all of the women had been raped by rebels - some held as "wives" - and had thought they'd never marry as a result. Then, having fallen in love, many of the grooms were unable to come up with the traditional dowry, let alone the trappings of a wedding. And planning marriages amidst the chaos and despair of the camp was a challenge that the newly-married Katie Karpik appreciated. They raised the money for a wonderful wedding, and six couples were able to get married - in dresses donated by British women to an organization called Jireh Women. More than 50 gowns and bridesmaids dresses were donated, and Karpik says they'll continue to use the gowns for future weddings.

Note to brides: You know what would be really rebellious? Not buying into the crazy consumerist patriarchy-fueled rites of a traditional wedding in the first place—say, don’t have a wedding, or don’t wear a dress, if it’s not you. I fail to see how playing radical-Barbie-bride only after reinforcing the admittedly ill-defining cultural traditions of a formal wedding could function as cathartic form of self-expression. Seems more like a copout to me. Then again, when the Today show highlights something as a badass trend, you know it’s about as hardcore as a fly in a glass of Kool-Aid.

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Tags: Jezebel, rebel brides, Today Show, trash the dress