Samantha, any time I see yet another story about the potential evils of the pill, both my eyebrows shoot straight for the ceilling. Science stories, like any other stories, get promoted because they have a hook, be it a counterintuitive one or a confirmation of people's ugliest impulses. Scare stories about contraception and STD protection—the latter reaching a fever pitch with the scare stories about the HPV vaccination—gain attention because the technological and cultural shift towards a world where women can enjoy sex without dreading the consequences makes many Americans uneasy.

Sometimes these studies on how the pill influences women's choices and attractiveness seem based on very thin evidence. Jezebel linked what may be one of the most comical science!-scare!-pill!-unnatural! stories I've seen in a long time. MSNBC reported that the pill might influence your mate choice toward more domestic kinds of fellas. The theory is that women that near ovulation are more likely to pick "bad boys" who will love 'em and leave 'em, but during the rest of the cycle, women are drawn to men who would make good fathers. But because the pill works essentially by keeping your body at even keel, hormone levels to prevent ovulation, women on it don't go for the bad boys, right?

The evidence MSNBC reports seems like a stretch. Researchers based these bad boy/nice guy conclusions on the fact that women who were close to ovulation chose pictures of men who looked more "masculine" and women on the pill or in different points in their cycle chose pictures of men who looked more "feminine." Their conclusions only make sense if you think that a strong jaw in a man makes him a cad who loves neither women nor children. The casting tropes from John Hughes movies do not, in my opinion, make a very good base of evidence to build scientific hypotheses about human biology. I'm also sure lesbians in the audience will be amused to hear their hormones direct them to this man or that, depending on their cycle.

It's really too bad that this study doesn't seem to amount to much, because part of me enjoyed imagining the anti-choice right getting befuddled because the hated birth control pill might incline women towards monogamy. Of course, knowing right-wing pundits, they'd probably bend this to argue that the pill encourages men to be effeminate; already the Vatican has released unscientific articles insinuating that the pill robs men of their masculine virility. Because even though the pill has been with us for two generations now, it still symbolizes female sexual independence, and that creates a demand on the right for a continual supply of half-baked evidence with which to denounce the pill.

Tags: birth control pill, evolutionary psychology, health, Science

Writer Daniel B. Smith says he's read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to his daughter 796 times, and I'm here to tell him to put the book down and step away. I'm the expert, and I hereby declare that if your kid's favorite book fills you with loathing and despair. then it's OK for that book to mysteriously disappear.

It's a dangerous life, being a children's book. All kinds of perils await. You could fall into the bathtub, say, or slip from a parent's hand above the recycling, or just topple down behind the bookcase amidst the dust bunnies and teeny tiny Lego pieces. Not that that's what happened to Goldilicious, or Snowmen at Christmas after its 40th reading this past July. Oh, no. And Snappy Little Springtime, with its predictably perky rhymes by committee and ripped and shredded pop-ups? I'm sure it's still on the bookshelf somewhere. You're just not looking hard enough.

Mr. Smith's wife rightly defends The Very Hungry Caterpillar and his daughter's attachment to it. Kids like repetition. They like regularity, and rhythm. Making the same delightful discoveries turning the pages of the same delightful book every single night for weeks and months and years on end fills our progeny with a sense of security and a conviction that all's right with the world. I said so myself, when I coauthored Reading with Babies, Toddlers and Twos with reading expert Susan Straub. So here I am, author, expert, and DoubleX's resident authority on children's picture books, and I say: So what?

You've done the repetition thing. You've been held prisoner by Eric Carle, or Sandra Boynton, or Margaret Wise Brown for long enough. Change is also good. New experiences are good. Daddy's sanity is very good. Mr. Smith, if that book suffers a tragic fate, your daughter will grieve, and then move on. You can console her with The Pigeon Wants a Puppy, Bark, George!, or the madly illustrated classic fairy tales collected in Yummy!. We legions of fellow reading-aloud parents are behind you. You are not alone. Just don't tell your wife I said so.

What's the next book soon to sleep with the fishes in your house? Post your nominations (and their ultimate destination) on Xxtra Small's Facebook page.

Like a riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery, this CNN segment—in which correspondent Kareen Wynter “fact-checks” the Saturday Night Live skit in which Fred Armisen, as Obama, explains that he’s done “jack” and “squat” during his first year in office—has me scratching my head.

Is it serious? Is it earnest but lighthearted? Is it self-parody? Hard to say. On Monday, Politifact.com posted their fact-check of the sketch. The article says “Just for fun, we thought we'd go through Saturday Night Live's checklist and match it up with the promises we've rated on the Obameter.” Cool. Fine. Not a bad way to promote their “Obameter,” which is tracking Obama’s campaign promises. But Wolf Blitzer and Kareen Wynter, using the Politifact.com piece as a launching pad for their segment, take it to another level. While the screen flashes a banner headed “New Developments” (as if they were tracking an actual news story), Blitzer asks, “Did the show accurately capture a mood, or did it go off track for comedic effect?” Wynter states, “While some observers say, ‘sure, we are just talking comedy here,’ on many points, SNL could not have been more off the mark.”

As Seth Meyers might say, “Really, CNN? You need to treat a comedy sketch as if it’s a sincere critique of our president? Really?”

While we’re on the subject of CNN and Obama, can we all agree it’s time to stop airing video of children singing about him? However harmless it might be, it’s just creepy.

Tags: Barack Obama, cnn, Saturday Night Live, Wolf Blitzer

I have not yet read the work of Herta Mueller, this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature. As of this morning, I hadn’t even heard of her. But after seeing this image on Jezebel (and promptly making it my desktop—I suggest “stretch,” but “tile” is a powerful alternative) and conferring with other DoubleXers, I feel confident that Herta is on the road to fashion icon status. Here's a photo gallery of the Romanian-German writer, rocking her signature colors (black for the clothes, red for the lips) that you're sure to be seeing more of soon.

Correction, Oct. 8: The original version of this post mistakenly identified Mueller as Romanian-Russian.

Tags: books, herta mueller

In a recent interview on Esquire.com, Woody Harrelson gets the yada yada yada treatment when he tries to talk about global warming and a few other ecological issues apparently on his mind. The impulse to ignore celebs preaching from their very luxurious soapboxes is nothing new, but it feels somewhat rude in this instance, especially since interviewer Ryan D’Agostino specifically asks Harrelson how he’s feeling about the world, only to then reduce his answers to a joke of sorts, in which Harrelson’s presumably lengthy answers get described in key words. One example (and, oh, are there more!):

ESQ: Speaking of Earth ceasing to exist, how are you feeling about the world right now?

WH: I think the world's still gonna be here in another 10, 20 years. But I'm not feeling great about things ecologically. [A few minutes on current events. Key words: Obama, oil wars, government bailouts, mountain-top blasting, health care, evil, mankind, Ted Danson.]

ESQ: Were you this interested in social and economic issues when you were in high school?

WH: No, but when I was 12 and I did a report on waning wildlife, I was supposed to just write a five-page thing and I wrote 50. [A few minutes about trees. Key words: clear-cutting, national forests, Montana, John Ratzenberger.]

Doesn't Harrelson in this instance seems like a bizarre target for this kind of mockery? There are much more obvious examples of celebrity hypocrisy, say John Travolta offering tips to combat global warming as he takes one of his five private jets out for a joy ride. And then there are the hilariously vacuous examples of celebrity charity—last month’s real headline “55 World Celebrities Sing To Stop Global Warming” could easily have been written as an Onion newsbrief. (Imagined line: “The emotional potency of the joint song by Duran Duran, The Scorpions, and others, convinced the sun to power down its rays and cease its attack on the planet.”) We have no way of knowing whether Woody's spiel on our impending environmental doom was humdrum or worthwhile, and I wouldn't argue the man's a rocket scientist whose words on ecological issues should be carved out in gold on the mantle of every American household, but if his earnest answers are just going to used to poke fun at him, why even ask in the first place?

Photograph of Woody Harrelson by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Tags: celebrity causes, esquire, global warming, Woody Harrelson

In adding a new character, Lottie the Otter, to the Hundred Acre Wood (Winnie-the-Pooh's terrain), author David Benedictus was bound to catch some flak, but he's in keeping with tradition—both good and bad—in updating a male band of buddies with a new girl. The difference is that he managed to get it right. Benedictus was following in the footsteps of A.A. Milne himself, who added new creatures in both of the story collections he published about Pooh: Kanga and Roo in Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger in The House at Pooh Corner. By making her a girl, Benedictus landed himself smack in the middle of a whole roster of updating writers and producers who've felt compelled to add a token girl to a beloved band of boy creatures. But unlike such television additions as Abby Cadabby and Babs Bunny, Lottie doesn't feel like a token. She's a new character with a part to play, who just happens to be a girl, and that's the way it should be.

Sesame Street has been trying for years to engineer a girl character with the popularity of Elmo and the name recognition of Big Bird, Cookie Monster and Ernie and Bert—trying, and failing. Similarly, every update of the Warner Brothers characters, from Tiny Toons to Baby Looney Toons to Loonatics Unleashed has attempted to add a girl to balance Bugs and Daffy, with varying degrees of success. Even Disney has already tried to add a dose of girly to the world of Pooh with the arrival of Darby in the mediocre My Friends Tigger and Pooh series. In every instance, the harder they try, the bigger the failure. Abby Cadabby looks like nothing so much as a Muppet Disney Princess, and every girl version of Bugs makes me think of the mechanized versions he chased with such delicious political incorrectness across the classic screen.

It's a mistake to believe that girls will only identify with girl characters, and more than a little insulting to suggest that we'd rather be a supporting character than to put ourselves in the shoes of a bunny or bear who just happens to use the pronoun "he." I agree that a lifetime of seeing only boy characters reach iconic status takes its toll, but the answer to that isn't, and never has been, to pop a girl onto the page or screen just to achieve balance. The answer is to create adventuresome, entrancing girl characters that both sexes will love. (Do you hear me, Kate DiCamillo? J.K. Rowling? Pixar?) Meanwhile, it's clear that David Benedictus didn't think "let's get some femininity in there." He set out to add a character in keeping with the time and spirit of the stories, and he created a slightly snotty creature with a high opinion of herself who meshes gracefully with the other flawed denizens of the forest, beloved both because of and in spite of their eccentricities. She doesn't compete with Pooh and Piglet (or strive to), and she may never achieve even the status of Tigger and Eeyore. But she has a place of her own in the updated Pooh cannon, and in a new set of Pooh Adventures (I reviewed them for Xxtra Small here). Benedictus may have added a token girl, but at least he did it well.

Tags: a.a. milne, david benedictus, lottie the otter, winnie the pooh