Thanksgiving screw-ups are the stuff of legend in most families. I've never cooked a turkey with the plastic baggie of neck and gizzards still inside or forgotten the defrosting process, but I once cooked up two pumpkin pies without any sugar (not something that whipped cream will cure). This year, I'm doing Thanksgiving with a close friend and her family, and we've already divided the meal according to our interests and abilities: I'm making the stuffing, and she's ordering the rest. There will be no un-defrosted turkeys in our house.

But if you're cooking, act now. Defrosting that 15 -pound turkey should take about three days, so clear some space in the fridge and either pick it up at the grocer (where it's probably in the deep-freeze) or pull it out of the freezer. Wait until Wednesday and you'll be pouring water down the drain. Got any Thanksgiving disaster stories to offer? Please share. And this year, in a crunch, order Chinese.

Blunder-prone waif Kate Moss recently told WWD that she lives by the slogan “nothing tastes as good as being thin feels.” Unsurprisingly, her statement was immediately denounced by eating disorder prevention groups, who made the fair point that the very same motto was the reigning philosophy on pro-ana websites. While the shared choice of words is rather unfortunate, I found Moss’s bluntness refreshing, like a mid-afternoon Fresca. Because the other side of the coin is far more irritating—the celebrities who talk about how they eat and eat and eat, but apparently never gain an ounce.

A few years ago, Grey’s Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo, who often looks more like a sickly patient than an ER doctor at a reported 5’7" and 97 pounds, told Self magazine that she eats 3,000 calories a day just to maintain her weight. And in more recent news, January Jones apparently lives for Chili’s queso, and Megan Fox only leaves her house only for KFC. I mean, really? How many 14-piece fried chicken buckets can Megan Fox actually be downing? I’d rather have Moss admit, however crassly, that she monitors her weight to an extreme, because it's a sad fact that sickly thin still sells, rather than listen to size zero celebs enthuse about their junk-food habits like they exist in a magical La La Land wherein calories dissipate the moment food touches their tongue.

Moss can have her philosophy, and we common plebes ours—buffalo wings and cookie dough taste much better than being grotesquely thin feels.

Tags: anorexia, celebrity culture, kate moss, WWD

Check out this video of Palin supporters in the parking lot.

The video is cut to make them seem like a bunch of yahoos and crackers, or perhaps it’s not cut much at all and that’s what they sound like. Not one of them answers a question with any specificity or intelligence. “I don’t know.” “I’m not sure.” “I’m an American.” “Where you going with that?” “That state she governed is across the street from Russia.” You could conclude that Palin supporters are crackpots or you could conclude that this is how charisma works—people can’t really put words or substance to it but they damned sure like what they see.

Tags: Palin supporter video, Palin supporters, Palin supporters in the parking lot, Sarah Palin

Twice in one day I've found myself considering the social impact of DNA on our ideas of fatherhood—earlier while reading an old essay by Richard Dawkins where he argues against a DNA database because it would inadvertently reveal how many fathers are mistaken about the genetic link to their child, and then by reading this New York Times Magazine feature on the way that paternity testing is doing just what Dawkins feared, creating social chaos. And causing people to rethink their understanding of what makes a father. Is it DNA or is it your presence in a child's life?

I'd argue that the escalating ability to process and read DNA is creating a fatal flaw in the public psyche, one where people are too quick to reduce human beings and relationships to what is programmed in your DNA. This has many ramifications beyond questions of paternity. Prioritizing DNA until you ignore the importance of environment has ramifications for health care, and can cause us to start ignoring the way that we can change outcomes for people through environment, without ever referencing their DNA. (For instance, a lot of the public falsely believes that IQ is inherent and probably genetic, but in fact it's highly malleable depending on nutrition and education.) But in terms of paternity, what's really interesting to me is not the way that DNA undermines our concepts of what makes a "father," but the subtle way it reinforces one of the greatest, longest-held social lies humanity has told itself, which is that men "create" children.

It shouldn't have been this way. The discovery of genetics put to rest one of the greatest self-flattering lies that men have told themselves for eons, which is that men are the seed and women are the soil, that men make the babies and women just nourish them. The conjoining of the sex cells subtly remade most of the public's understanding of sex and conception, except for a few Bible-thumping anti-choicers who will never be completely convinced. But for social reasons, most of us are unwilling to take the next step in believing the biological evidence in front of our eyes. We still round up and say that a child is "half" the father, reducing that child to its genetic code.

But the truth is that a baby is made up almost completely of her mother when she is born. The only thing the father contributes is half the code. The rest—the protein, the nutrients, the very fabric of the baby's body, and all the mitochondria—comes from the mother. (This is why biologists trace human lineage through the mothers, because you can trace it through mitochondria.) Of course, after birth, you generate your own tissues through your own eating, and so you get even further away from being made from your parents. We are a lot more than our DNA, and not just in the abstract, but in the brute physical reality of it. Add to that the fact that our DNA gets so thoroughly mixed up in a few generations that you can't rightly call it "yours" in any way, and the knee-jerk belief that a male obsession with paternity goes back to biology seems weak indeed.

No, the traditional male obsession with paternity has its roots in patriarchy and controlling women's bodies. Fundamentally, it's a justification for an unfair system. And now, in our more feminist era, we've re-utilized this obsession for the purpose of determining male responsibility to children and, to a lesser degree, to women. But is it really such a great idea to do that? On one hand, this way of thinking does mean that children receive more financial support and care than they might from men under another family system. But as this article shows, defining family lines according to DNA patterns instead of through relationships and love causes a whole mess of problems, and the actors involved in these confusing situations often feel unmoored. The fathers in this story, for instance, genuinely seem rattled because they love children they don't share DNA with. And they use terms like "biologically intact family," which has the uncomfortable implication that a man who impregnates a woman lays some sort of claim to her very biology.

Of course, the current system will continue because we don't have many other competing systems. But a girl can dream, can't she? A society that loosened its obsession with "biologically intact" families might end up being one where a child benefits from more, not fewer, adults in her life to look over her.

Tags: DNA, fatherhood

Ariel Levy’s wonderful piece in The New Yorker raises the essential question about South African runner Caster Semenya, and then an even deeper essential question. Testosterone—which Semenya seems to have in excess quantities—is powerful stuff for an athlete. Maybe it’s not actually fair that she compete as a woman. Maybe it does make some kind of sense to divide athletes not into male and female, but into higher and lower level of testosterone, or some other measure of physical and chemical attributes that results in an even match. However:

There is much more at stake in organizing sports by gender than just making things fair. If we were to admit that at some level we don’t know the difference between men and women, we might start to wonder about the way we’ve organized our entire world. Who gets to use what bathroom? Who is allowed to get married? (Currently, the United States government recognizes the marriage of a woman to a female-to-male transsexual who has had a double mastectomy and takes testosterone tablets but still has a vagina, but not to a woman who hasn’t done those things.) We depend on gender to make sense of sexuality, society, and ourselves. We do not wish to see it dissolve.

Photograph of Caster Semenya by Paballo Thekiso/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Caster Semenya, South African runner

KJ, I too was thrilled to read that Time had declared an end to overparenting, because if Time just noticed, then the trend must be already well underway. But the story proved the opposite, with many earnest and unintentionally hilarious examples of supposedly mellow parents. If you truly wanted to stop overparenting you would just cancel the Suzuki lessons, call off the therapist, stop spying on the playground, and watch Sponge Bob, right? But this new class of parents praised by Time are joining a movement—slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting, whatever you want to call it. And they are taking “slow family living classes” to learn how to back off. Better yet, they are backed by studies that prove that if you let kids play, they learn stuff, so yes, it’s OK to pack up the flash cards and just (deep breath here) play.

So in short, they are substituting one parenting orthodoxy for another, which is likely to create an equally insufferable household. No, honey, you can not play football now because we are a slow family, remember? No organized sports, no video games, and no music lessons of any kind. Got that?

This reminds me powerfully of the first time I took a yoga class. I could not grasp why these people had to go through all these machinations and movement just to relax, when they could have just sat on the couch and, you know, relaxed, the regular way.

Tags: free range parenting, helicopter parents slow family living, over parenting, Time overparenting

A cache of stolen e-mails among prominent climate scientists reveals disturbing evidence of possible manipulation of data, of attempts to destroy data so it will not be available in response to Freedom of Information requests (why not proudly stand behind your work?), and suggestions on how to damage the careers of warming skeptics. This comes at a time when even those scientists who say we’re facing climate catastrophe have to acknowledge that for the past 10 years—in defiance of the models that predicted relentless increase—global temperatures have flattened.

For years, anyone who questioned the warming orthodoxy has been called a flat-earther or a tool of the energy companies. But before we go further toward a massive rearrangement of global economies in order to save us all from melting, this seems like a good time to acknowledge that the predictions aren’t panning out and that it’s legitimate to examine the data and the assumptions of the scientists who say they are in sole possession of the truth.

Tags: climate scientists email, global warming

Sad news out of Ohio: Funeral services will be held tomorrow for Stefanie Spielman, who died late last week at age 42 after a very long—and very public—struggle with breast cancer. Spielman might have been among the millions of women who face breast cancer quietly and privately if not for the gesture her husband, Chris, made upon her first diagnosis, at age 30.

At the time, Chris Spielman was a linebacker for the Buffalo Bills. He personified the rugged toughness so often associated with NFL players. But when Stefanie was diagnosed with cancer, he walked away from the game to be with her during her treatment. It’s easy to discount that decision—he had become wealthy playing a game for a living—but the NFL culture is such that teams used to balk at players missing games or practice for the birth of their children. For a player at the peak of his career, especially one as tenacious and competitive as Spielman, to put his family first was an incredible statement at the time.

Out of the game (he tried to come back after one season but an injury forced him to retire) but not the public eye, the Spielmans turned their energy into raising money to assist cancer patients and fund research. And while Chris might have been famous for his football exploits, Stefanie won hearts—and wallets—for her tireless energy advocating for others despite her own illness. Together they helped raise more than $6.5 million for the James Cancer Hospital at Ohio State, where the high school sweethearts attended college while Chris played for the Buckeyes.

This is not a commentary on mammogram guidelines or other health care issues. It’s just a reminder that terrible things happen to good people. And that good people can do amazing things when they are confronted with such a struggle. You can read more about Stefanie here. Sympathies to the Spielman family and their many, many friends.

Tags: breast cancer, Stefanie Spielman