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Hours, or even minutes, into the winter holidays, the children of Telegraph readers were apparently declaring themselves bored. Writer Nigel Farndale defended boredom and declared war on his family's Wii, blaming a glut of entertainment options for kids unable to distract themselves with any. But the real culprit isn't electronics, it's vacation itself, an interruption and aberration in our very structured lives.
Vacation—especially winter vacation, when one or both parents and extended family, too, are often home with kids and when work schedules may relax to reflect the holiday—changes all that. We're away from our comfort zones of school and work, gym and sports, and, whether it's for a full two weeks or just a few days, we're able to play that Wii or teach the kids chess or put together a few jigsaw puzzles (or all of the above). Days stretch before us, with time for sledding, strolling, and cookie baking, and after a while, some of us—parents, grandparents, kids, and somewhere in between—just might get "bored" too.
Farndale defends boredom for kids, pointing out that it forces them to "daydream, to stand and stare, to use their imaginations." His hope is that more and better boredom will force kids with too many screen options to learn to cope. He gives a break to adults, who may need activity to chase away "ennui and melancholy." But that's exactly what a long winter vacation, no matter how distraction-filled, is for. To provide a little "ennui and melancholy" and to remind us that, even with our games and our phones and our computers, we like the structure that work and school add to our days. Having things to do and places to see make us feel needed and relevant.
As Jezebel's Anna North pointed out, kids who say they're "bored" when they're left to cope with unstructured hours may not really be saying what Farndale so hates to hear. They may be saying "help me learn what to do with myself," and that's a legitimate question, whether you own a Nintendo and dozens of games or possess no toys other than a precious collection of Waldorf dolls. The question isn't "What can I do to distract myself?" It's "Who am I, when it's up to me to choose?" That question may be tougher for kids used to spending their few leisure hours on a regular day with various forms of piped-in entertainment, but then, it may be tougher for those of us whose BlackBerries and iPhones are rarely out of our hands as well.
There are three full days left for many of us this holiday season. Three days to note that itch to get back to our desks and our daily tasks, and three days to remember who we are without them, and to help our kids, bored or not, to learn to make the most of that kind of freedom. Three days, stretched out like an empty field of snow now, but by Sunday night, they'll be utterly gone.
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A New Year's gift from Scholastic! The publisher is bringing back The Babysitters Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial young girls that more or less taught me how to read. Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the 213-title series—you read that right: 213—as well as a prequel. (Outdated references to things like perms and cassette players have been tweaked for the new millennium.)
I, for one, was shocked to learn that all the books are out of print. 'Tis a travesty that demands rectification! (While you're waiting for the re-launch, you can enjoy the comic book adaptations by Raina Telgemeier.)
The which-Babysitter-were-you game was like a preteen version of the which-Sex and the City-character-are-you parlor game. I like to think I was a Kristy with a Claudia rising: bossy, but more into art than sports. And here I'd like to give a shout-out to Ann M. Martin*—how I love seeing that name in print again!—for having such a great, original Asian-American character like Claudia. Did you sob when Mimi died? I still get choked up thinking about it.
Which one were you?
*Correction, December 31, 2009: Ann M. Martin's name was originally spelled incorrectly.
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As Hanna wrote in October, Oklahoma anti-choicers discovered a clever new way to rob women of their reproductive rights. Under the guise of policy research, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to complete a 37-question autobiographical survey, the results of which would be posted on a publicly accessible Web site. Critics of the new measure argue that the first eight questions could easily identify women living in the state’s more sparsely populated rural regions and discourage them from undergoing the procedure out of fear of public shame, harassment, or retaliatory violence.
This time the abortion foes’ savvy subterfuge backfired. In order to prevent the law from taking effect, the Center for Reproductive Justice filed a temporary restraining order and launched a lawsuit alleging that the bill’s wide-ranging provisions violate the state’s “single-subject rule,” which prohibits prospective laws from addressing more than one issue. Although all of the clauses of House Bill 1595 pertain broadly to the subject of abortion, the Center argues that the creation of a brand new job for the Department of Health and the seemingly random inclusion of a ban on gender selection render the initiative invalid. An Oklahoma district judge recently decided to extend the restraining order until Feb. 19, when the court will rule on the merits of the case.
Despite the preliminary success of this dilatory tactic, some feminists lament that the Center’s complaint attacks the legislation on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds, and does not address the fundamental affront to women’s health and privacy. Even if a judge tosses out the new law, there is nothing stopping lawmakers from drafting a similar, more narrowly focused bill. Defeating the law on substantive grounds should not have been difficult. As some have pointed out, the purported goal of gathering information is bogus at best, as the data would be inappropriate for academic research. Moreover, the identifying details in women’s responses likely qualify as “protected health information” under HIPAA and cannot be made available to the public. Perhaps most importantly, publishing this kind of data tacitly incites vigilantism by Christian fundamentalists. In Operation Rescue country, women identified as abortion recipients don’t simply risk losing health coverage—they risk losing their lives and livelihoods.
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DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: When a male celebrity perpetrates violence against a woman do his female fans have a responsibility to turn their backs on him? Can you love the performer and hate the person? Forgive and forget once his next project is released? Or is supporting an abusive celebrity's work akin to supporting his violent behavior?
Nina Rastogi: I think this is the flip side of “love the sinner, hate the sin”—it's completely possible to love the art and hate the artist. (That's different, of course, from loving the art and excusing the artist, a la Roman Polanski.) At the same time, it's impossible to avoid having our experiences as viewers or listeners or readers colored by what we know about an artist's personal life. If you can't hear a Chris Brown song without cringing or getting enraged, by all means, stop listening to him. But I don't think there's anything hypocritical about buying a ticket to his concert and then spending the next morning, say, volunteering at a domestic abuse center.
Claire Gordon: I struggled with a similar question as a major Woody Allen fan, given his marriage to Mia Farrow's adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. In a lot of Woody's oeuvre he casts hot young leading ladies 30 years his junior as onscreen loves, which always seemed to me sexually unsavory and shameless—especially when the man hit 70. I still bought a Woody box set and watched it last holiday season. It was awesome. If we boycotted every artist who behaves unethically, our lives would be pretty desolate. The fundamental problem is that we live in a culture that normalizes violence to women; punishing individual perpetrators with a pocketbook protest seems more like self-punishment than effective political action.
Amanda Marcotte: If we couldn't separate the art from the artist, most of us wouldn't enjoy much art outside of Jane Austen's. Enjoying someone's art is no more endorsing every bad thing they've done than is working with someone whose politics you hate. That said, I understand why some feminists wish to make an exception for rape and domestic violence. Rapists rape and wife-beaters beat because they get public support even in the face of their crimes. We want to do a small part for creating actual shame for men who abuse women. But it seems to me that conflating the art and the artist is counterproductive. We'd do better to say that Chris Brown (or Roman Polanski) may make fine art, but they need to be doing so from prison.
KJ Dell'Antonia: I'm intrigued by the double standard that exists between entertainment and politics, although I don't think it's unreasonable. Governors Sanford and Spitzer, you're out. Ditto John Edwards: Career over—we can't trust you, and you're clearly blackmail material. A liability. But although there may be fresh new implications for his face on the Wheaties box, Tiger can still hit a golf ball, Chris Brown will still take the stage. I'm not interested in either, but then, I wasn't interested before. The lesson seems to be: if you're a guy who finds the siren song of his nether regions to be more important than anything else (and I presume you know who you are), avoid politics.
Photograph of Charlie Sheen and Brooke Mueller by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.
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ABC News has a story on Anastasia Kelly, an AIG executive who resigned alongside male execs who were protesting the Obama pay cap of $500,000 a year. Because they resigned before the pay cap went into effect, they got millions of dollars in severence pay. Somehow this is being spun as a girl power moment. I suppose it could be construed as a feminist act if Kelly were the only executive at AIG being subjected to the pay cut, but she wasn't—it was a government edict. It was a purely capitalist decision, and it has nothing to do with the fact that earlier in her career, Kelly attended a conference call while giving birth to twins, though ABC News felt it necessary to include that bit of information. It was meant to imply that Kelly "deserved" to get those millions from AIG because she had sacrificed more than the male executives. Somehow I don't think that feelings of populist rage should be quelled, or that people should be more sympathetic to Kelly, because she is a woman, or a mother.
Image of dollar sign in mantle by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Research shows 80 percent of New Year's resolutions are broken by Valentine's Day.
Do you make a resolution each year, and have you ever actually kept one successfully?
Hanna Rosin: I used to have no hope for resolutions. But I recently took a pledge to complain less often, or less obnoxiously, for a whole month. Two months later, I am still less whiny and irritable than I used to be. So I have newfound hope that resolutions can work. Maybe for New Year's I'll get really ambitious and try for cheery.
Ellen Tarlin: I think the word "resolution" and resolutions on the whole are too stringent. I sometimes set "goals" for the year, which suggests a little more room and fluctuation about whether they are successful or not. But if I make a resolution, it's usually something ridiculous like "I am going to exercise every day in 2010!" -- which means it is usually broken on Jan. 1 or Jan. 2.
Laura Moser: I make resolutions every year; I even write them down. I love formal gestures of self-improvement so much that I'll sometimes throw in a few extra goals on Chinese New Year and Rosh Hashanah. The key for me is to keep the bar really low, the better to avoid disappointment. So instead of “I will save enough for a down payment,” I stick with “I will never exceed $5K of credit-card debt.” Forget about finishing the novel that has been moldering on my hard drive since the Clinton administration; I'll be happy if I can print out that short story I started writing after Hurricane Katrina. In 2010, a friend and I will be reading all 201 Chekhov stories in order—anyone care to join us?
KJ Dell'Antonia: I actually adore making resolutions. Christmas and birthdays tend, for me, to involve dwelling on time passing and things that will never be the same again, so I love both September and January as opportunities for these grand new starts that I never get tired of making -- a chance to look forward, not back. I tend towards the career and organization-type resolution, and since those are things I actually enjoy, what I'm really doing is giving myself permission to work harder at something that's important to me. Besides my next-step career plans, I'll be repeating an annual resolution to organize the whole house, top-to-bottom, and probably buying a shiny new notebook to record my progress (I like making lists and crossing things off). Last year I got as far as the kitchen--which, since I started in the kitchen, wasn't very far, but the kitchen remains organized. Tangible proof that it's worth it.
Amanda Marcotte: The only thing I resolve to do is lose a couple of pounds, and the only time I do so is when I put on jeans out of the dryer. In the distant past, I think I tried making New Year's resolutions, but learning that most of them are broken immediately pushed me to quit doing so. Who am I to think I could do better than 80 percent of Americans? There's no compelling evidence to suggest I could.
Rachael Larrimore: If you ask me, Jan. 1 is a terrible time for resolution-keeping, at least for some of the most popular resolutions. Eating better? It's the middle of winter. The selection of fresh produce is meager to the point of being depressing. Exercise more? It's cold and dreary and it's dark about 16 hours a day. Exercising outdoors is impossible, and it's even hard to drag oneself out of bed to get to the gym when it 7 a.m. looks like the middle of the night. Quit smoking? What, when you're stressed about paying off all those Christmas bills and you just found out your company is skipping raises? Why don't we set resolutions in the spring, when the world is fresh and new and full of hope?
Lauren Bans: My New Year's resolutions are always the same and always sufficiently vague to keep me from ever really taking them too seriously-- exercise more, pitch more, call my grandma more.
Photograph of revelers in Sydney by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images.
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Charlie Sheen's wife, Brooke Mueller, called the cops on him Christmas Day and Sheen was charged with second-degree assault for choking her. The latest on this scandal is that Sheen allegedly threatened to have her killed. Considering what a big star Sheen is—he's on one of the most popular shows on TV—this scandal has had relatively little coverage, especially when you compare it to the Tiger Woods coverage. What gives?
The New Yorker's James Surowiecki explained why Charlie Sheen is scandal-proof while Tiger's career has been nearly destroyed by his transgressions:
Scandals that aren’t out of tune with a celebrity’s image are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from: after images of Kate Moss snorting coke surfaced, her bookings fell, but, over time, they went up. Revelations that Michael Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling barely dented his appeal, since the story reinforced the image of him as a fierce competitor. But scandals that conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc.
Charlie Sheen's image has always been debauched—as Gawker's Foster Kamer points out, he's a known druggie, hooker enthusiast, conspiracy theorist, racist and wife beater, and yet, he continues to work consistently. It doesn't make his alleged treatment of his wife any less repulsive, but at least it explains why the outrage is low grade.
Photograph of Charlie Sheen by Aspen Police Department via Getty Images.
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As the curtains close on what Pew is calling the worst decade in half a century, the Internet is aflutter with uncharacteristic positivity, offering up bushels of best of the decade lists. The Village Voice recently ran a piece on the Best Dining and Drinking Trends of the Decade that included nods to the Slow Food movement and the mainstream emergence of local brews. The Hollywood Reporter issued a best films of the decade list with United 93 and No Country For Old Men making the cut (though feminist blog Women & Hollywood quickly pointed out that HR failed to elect even one female-directed movie to their list.) And Paste Magazine put together an all-encompassing series of Best of lists ranging from Best Video Games of the decade to the more self-indulgent Best Paste Magazine Covers of the Decade.
But what about the worst of the decade lists? From the attacks of 9-11, to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s a reason 50 percent of Americans view the ‘00s with negative feelings. Lucky for us neggos, Engine Industries has put together an exhaustive compilation of the Best of The Worst of the Decade Lists. Feast your eyes, and breathe a sigh of relief that the ‘00s are nearly over.
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News hit today that there has been an ongoing custody battle between Sarah Palin's daughter, Bristol, and Levi Johnston, the shiftless father of their son Tripp. Bristol and the Palin family had tried to keep the case closed to the public, and the court record had previously used pseudonyms for the feuding couple. But Levi's lawyers opposed the Palin gag order: "Simply put, this matter is public in nature, the courts are not refuges for the scions of the elite to obtain private dispensation of their legal matters because the public at large has an interest in the proceedings," said Johnston's lawyer Rex Butler.
Is it common in celebrity trials for proceedings to remain sealed? I don't know about the precedent in Alaska, but Christie Brinkley's philandering ex-husband, Peter Cook, tried to keep their nasty divorce trial private in New York State because he feared the couple's children would be hurt by what came out during the proceedings—which is the same reasoning Bristol gave for wanting to keep her custody battle private. In the Brinkley/Cook case, Suffolk County Judge Mark Cohen wrote: "[O]pen courtrooms, in general and in divorce actions, may provide a basis for societal education...The required high burden of compelling reasons to close the courtroom has not been met."
The judge in the Palin case refused to grant a gag order, so even if the case were private, Levi Johnston would run his mouth to the press about what went on whether the proceedings were public or not. However, I can't imagine that this custody battle will hurt Sarah Palin's image in the long run, no matter what comes out about her trying to keep Tripp from Levi Johnston. Her appeal is her relatability, and so many Americans can relate to messy divorces and crappy sons-in-law.
Photograph of Bristol, Sarah and Trig Palin and Levi Johnston by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.
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Tyra Banks announced today that the current season of her talk show will be her last. She wants to produce movies, she tells People.com. To any student of Tyraology this seems like an idiotic plan. Her talk show is currently the most succesful part of her media empire. Her other main gig—as host and creator of America's Next Top Model—is on the decline, as ratings were down 10 percent in the most recent cycle and the show is no longer as culturally relevant as it was just a few years ago. Despite the fact that Tyra is a lunatic and an egomaniac, her show has a sort of bizarre appeal, and millions of young women look up to her as a role model. Her major assest is her own persona, so why would she bury it by producing movies meant to bring "positive images of women to the big screen"?
My old Jezebel colleague Tracie thinks that Tyra is ditching her talk show because Oprah's ditching her talk show, and Ty Ty's business model is all about following in the footsteps of Oprah. But, if Tyra—who is many things, among them shrewd—thought about it for a second, she wouldn't follow the big O down this primrose path. Oprah's movies have not been particularly succesful, because Oprah's appeal, like Tyra's appeal, is herself. So even if Oprah is in the movies she produces, like the flop Beloved, no one wants to see them, because they don't want to see Oprah playing a fictional character. Even though Oprah can get scads of women to buy scented candles, she can't entice them to see her films. Tyra should take note of this and continue her talk show. Because there are lots of people who can produce mediocre films, but who else is going to ask primordial dwarves to breakdance?
Photograph of Tyra Banks by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images.
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