Who knows what to believe when it comes to celebrity "journalism," but it's apparently been confirmed that Angelina Jolie will adopt a child from Syria—something described on the website of the U.S. embassy in Damascus as "a difficult process and often an impossible one." In many countries, celebrity status probably has little effect on adoption matters, but in a country where adoption is "essentially illegal," the perverse effect is that anything pretty much goes—if you've got the required currency. Cash, glamour, celebrity, or all of the above clearly come into play.

In countries that are large players in international adoption, like China, Korea, and Kazahkstan, hard and fast rules apply, designed to protect both the child and the adoptive parent. Placing children through an elaborate system is meant to prevent corruption, kidnapping, and blackmail, and although there have been notorious failures, in general it works. In countries where adoption is handled privately, there's far more room for almost any kind of trouble you can imagine, but if you can get past the initial barriers to entry, there are advantages—if you're Angelina. Most countries place some limit on the number of children in a family. None would allow only one parent in a married couple [correction: or partnership] to adopt a child, as the Daily Mail reports is happening here, and all also require substantial investigation into whether a family is ready in various ways to adopt—although it's hard to imagine a social worker refusing to endorse Jolie.

In other words, Jolie may not be qualified to adopt in the standard way, particularly if it's true that her partner [husband] isn't on board. So one possible objection to this adoption is clearly correct: It's not fair. But it's hard to argue that a child would be better off in an orphanage than as part of the Jolie clan, or that she won't grow up better off. An orphaned Syrian girl has few educational opportunities in her future and very limited social options. I also find it hard to argue that the addition of another mouth to feed is going to change much for the family, other than in the way any sibling does. They're a large, unusual clan at either six or seven, and whether they're being raised by nannies or by Jolie and Pitt, their life is what it is. If Jolie wanted to have another baby, she could. If she feels like she can cope with another child—and with her partner's [husband's] unease, if that part of the story is true—then man, good luck to her. I have four kids under 8, and I couldn't do five, but I'd never say there aren't plenty of people out there better at this than me.

Correction: The original post implied, incorrectly, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were married. The author--while noting that no less a source than Star Magazine steered her wrong--regrets the error.

Tags: adoption, Angelina Jolie, Syria

I’ve always regarded “eco-fashion” with a suspicious eye, telling myself that if somebody truly cared about the environment they would be good stewards or tinkerers and make use what was already around—not support the manufacturing of more and more ultimately disposable crap labeled with vague tags conveying the object’s wishy-washy “cleanly produced” narrative. Surely taking care of one’s possessions would have a more positive impact, environmentally speaking, than shopping for more stuff.

And so it was with tremendous self-satisfaction that I turned to today’s Wall Street Journal and read about the pitfalls of the “eco-textile” bamboo. Bamboo’s “eco” credibility rests foremost on the plant's “renewable” and “pesticide-free” characteristics. To wit: “[L]ike hemp, the plant grows quickly without the irrigation, pesticides or fertilizer often used to grow cotton.”

But the process of turning the bamboo into yarn is a nasty one that transforms the plant fibers into what can be best described as semi-natural/semi-synthetic material:

The bamboo used in textiles has to be heavily manipulated to go from stem to store. To create fabric, it's chopped up and dissolved in toxic solvents—the same process that recycles wood scraps into viscose or rayon. Indeed, bamboo fabric technically is rayon.

This is why the FTC, which monitors false advertising claims, went after four bamboo clothing companies last August, according to the article. The FTC argued that companies had to abstain from labeling bamboo as “natural.” Likewise, the labeling of bamboo fabric as “biodegradable” and “antimicrobial” was misleading: These are properties of the plant, not the processed fabric.

None of this surprises me. Anybody who has done elementary reading on eco-textiles knows that bamboo is a form of rayon—plant cellulose transformed into yarn-like material through chemistry. But here is something the article doesn't get into. There are sound “eco” arguments to be made on behalf of synthetic or semi-synthetic fibers. Unlike natural fibers, synthetic fibers are cheap and are very durable. And the very properties that make the "eco" chic quiver—their ghastly "indestructibleness," their foul "nonbiodegradability"—are, if you value re-use over shopping, positive attributes. Synthetic and semi-synthetic textiles also air-dry beautifully. Cotton doesn't, but I digress.

So it's doubly unfortunate that bamboo textiles, despite being semi-synthetic, are chintzy and fall apart. They are prone to stretching and fading, “unstable and likely to stretch out of shape in damp weather,” according to one FIT professor. After a few washes, the Wall Street Journal reporter’s new bamboo clothes had constellations of tiny holes. Greenwashing at its finest, ladies.

Tags: bamboo, eco-fashion, FTC, rayon

Via Tressugar, Marie Claire has a trend piece about how men in their 20s and 30s are afraid to commit to their go-getter, type-A girlfriends and wives. Superficially, this observation is not incorrect. The male mid-life crisis is not a new thing, as the article's author, Lauren Iannotti, points out with references to Mad Men and Revolutionary Road. Iannotti gets some of the root causes of the generational commitment phobia right, saying "These guys are part of a cause-less generation. They didn't grow up burning their draft cards or fighting the Nazis ... They were spoiled as kids and now they want to spoil themselves as adults. The old cliché was that a man would wake up one morning and realize that he wanted his youth back. The new version is that he never reached adulthood in the first place."

Certainly it is difficult for modern men to achieve adulthood when the script for adulthood is unwritten: With the recession in full swing, many don't even have the job security that would make them feel like real grown-ups. But Iannotti gets it wrong when she says that Gen Y men want to be selfish adolescents for the rest of their lives. "This crew feels entitled to fun; sacrifice is not in their vocab," she writes. That hasn't been my observation at all. I think men in their 20s are desperate to grow up, to feel like men—they just have no idea how to accomplish this. They're not intimidated by strong, successful women; they just want to be confident in their own lives and careers, too.

Iannotti also sets up successful wives and girlfriends as a stereotypical foil to these slacker guys, and it does women a real disservice. She finds the most obnoxious ladies around, like Dana, 30, who is the head of global marketing for a cosmetics company, and offers them up as if they were representative of many young women. Dana is married to an engineer—someone who sounds like neither a commitment-phobe nor a slacker. Dana says, "I have specific goals ... My husband's are more general. I'll say, 'We should buy a place in the suburbs within the next two years.' And he'll say, 'Let's take it as it comes.' That's when I freak out and start yelling, 'But what's the three-year plan?!' " Telling a woman like Dana to calm the hell down should not be construed as commitment phobia. It should be construed as good partnership.

Tags: commitment phobia, gen y male commitment, marie claire, tressugar

In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Lynn Hirschberg pens an intimate look at the behind-the-scenes identity of bombshell actress Megan Fox. And this time Fox’s habitual loggorhea doesn’t take the form of bizarre, highly quotable sound bytes: She doesn’t wax on about her love affair with a stripper named Nikita, or how her Transformers clothing always smelled like farts, or how she thinks she looks like the tranny doppelganger of Alan Alda. Instead she tells Hirschberg that her public persona is all an intricate, deliberate act—a form of self-defense against Hollywood’s swallow ‘em, spit ‘em out treatment of its starlets:

I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world.

Selling oneself, especially as a sex symbol for the mass audience, is not a new Hollywood tactic (though at points it sounds like Fox thinks she’s invented it). After a reporter asked Marilyn Monroe what she wore to bed, she famously responded, “Chanel No. 5,” when the truth was, according to her first husband, she washed her face up to 15 times and slathered on cold cream and Vaseline before hitting the pillow. Fox, of course, peddles a more blunt sexuality than Marilyn did—think the Female Chauvinist Pig Ariel Levy wrote about—adapting a franker pornographic persona, treating herself as an object for mass desire, but also democratically objectifying other Hollywood women.

In her September 2008 GQ cover story, Fox likens herself—and by herself I mean mainly her libido—to a man, “If my mom were to tell me that I’d been born with male and female genitalia and that she had to make a choice, I would believe her.” Repeatedly she’s played into popular hetero-lesbianism by pointing out her desire for women while refuting the status of a lesbian. Olivia Wilde, for example, is so unbearably fuckable, Fox told GQ, that Wilde makes her want to “strangle a mountain ox” with her bare hands. Fox contends that these kinds of myths are necessary to sell herself to the public, though her fearful rejoinder in GQ— “Are you going to push an ‘Is she a lesbian’ angle?”—makes it seem like she easily loses control of her antics.

Fox has a tattoo of Marilyn on her right arm, and is duly obsessed with Monroe’s ability to play the game Fox is trying to beat: ‘‘She lived her whole life as a character playing other characters…And that was her defense mechanism.” But rather than likening Fox to a modern day Marilyn, it’s hard not to see the parallels between Fox and 1950s bosomy starlet Jayne Mansfield. Fox positions herself as a lowly Angelina Jolie competitor (emphasis on lowly—even Fox admits she doesn’t know if she has acting talent. To GQ she commented: “I’m not Meryl Streep”), just as Mansfield was always framed against Marilyn’s status as a respected actress. While Monroe took a less-is-more road to sex symbol-dom, Mansfield, like Fox, sold herself to the public through a series of seriously lowbrow stunts. If the 1950s audience had been ready to hear a fictional account of Mansfield’s torrid love affair with a female stripper, I’m sure she would have willingly played the role. Instead, she constantly staged nipple slips, so many that she became reduced in a sense to her breasts—Raymond Strait titled her biography Here They Are, Jayne Mansfield.

This was much to Mansfield’s disappointment. She, after all, boasted an IQ of 163, spoke five languages, and was a proficient pianist and violinist. Like Fox, after selling herself on her looks, Mansfield complained that Hollywood didn’t care about her smarts, “They’re more interested in 41-21-35,” she told reporters. But here’s where the Mansfield/Fox comparison ends—if you’ve seen any of Fox’s movies, it’s pretty apparent that she doesn’t have obvious talents we’re not appreciating. And reading Fox describe her very inauthentic, planned-out persona like it’s anathematic to the rest of her Hollywood cohorts, seems strikingly naïve. Of course actors and actresses don’t present their authentic selves to the public. A recent Onion headline, "Vince Vaughn Appears On 'Tonight Show' To Deceive Country About Latest Film,” pokes fun at just the expectation that actors are doing something more than peddling their wares. To say that Megan Fox “is a fox,” as the piece begins, is to overstate her talent. She’s simply an actress.

Tags: jayne mansfield, lynn hirschberg, megan fox, new york times, sex symbol