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Ann, the Spelling Bee makes me squirm too, sometimes. But it also makes me want to jump up and down—kind of like those hyperactive contestants—and squeal, because I love spelling bees so much.
Maybe I'm culturally wired for it: As the Washington Post noted on Tuesday, spelling bees have a special place in Indian-American nerd culture. ("In the same way that Hakeem Olajuwon's success in the NBA inspired a generation of Nigerians to take up basketball, Sidharth, Sameer and Kavya can trace their roots to Balu Natarajan of Chicago, who in 1985 became the first Indian-American national bee champion.") I'm still not really sure what quirk of cultural evolution we owe this to, but seven of tonight's 11 finalists seem to be of South Asian descent—including my girl and fellow Miller Junior High Mustang, Ramya Auroprem. (Class of 1994 has your back, R!)
I get why Stefan Fatsis at the Daily Beast feels the televised finals are exploitative, and maybe I'll feel differently when I make the leap over to the other side of the parent-child divide. But at the moment I feel a lot of pride and excitement, both as a former nerdy kid and as an immigrant's child. As the great documentary Spellbound made clear, for a lot of people—not just South Asians—participating in the the Bee can be a kind of shorthand for achieving the American dream.
Spelling bees are also something I always connected not just with childhood, but specifically with girlhood. Maybe that's just because I happened to meet my best friend—also an Indian girl—when she beat me in the 6th-grade district bee, or because my local spelling nemesis was a boy (also Indian) whom I simultaneously had a wild crush on. But I know that when I saw Spellbound, I remember wishing that I could have seen Nupur Lala, the girl who would go on to win, when I was young enough to have her as a role model. Lala was a smart girl who wore her brains lightly, never apologizing for her gifts—or the eccentricity of her chosen playing field—but always managing to seem ... well ... cool. Collected. (And of course, when she says in the documentary trailer, simply and plainly, "You don't get any second chances in India, the way you do in America," I bawl. EVERY time.)
They say you never forget you first, but spellers never forget their last. Echelon, my losing word in the 6th grade, is forever burned into my brain. (I added an s, thinking it was Germanic.) I feel pretty certain we have plenty of former competitors in the Double X readership—care to share your spelling bee flame-outs?
Photograph of Kavya Shivashankar by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.
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Tonight you can see the finals of the National Spelling Bee on television and watch as the kids contort under the mounting pressure. They “tug at their hair and display preadolescent tics that are hard enough to manage in front of malicious middle-school classmates let alone a nation of living-room critics, sportswriters, and live bloggers,” as Steven Fatsis, author of Word Freak, writes in a column today on the Daily Beast.
I’m inclined to agree with him that the spectacle should make us adults squirm, too, at least a little. But I’m not sure the problem is that we’ve blown this event into something way too serious, as we do so many of our kids’ endeavors these days, destroying open-ended fun by forcing them under the performance spotlight. I’d say something like the opposite is also going on: Should it make us squirm even more to recognize that part of why we go overboard with this display of brain exertion is precisely that we don’t really take spelling very seriously at all?
Photograph of Sidharth Chand in the 2009 Scripps National Spelling Bee by JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images.
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Jason Linkins has a great piece up at Huffington Post quoting Justice Samuel Alito on the virtues of judicial empathy. (“When I get a case about discrimination, I have to think about people in my own family who suffered discrimination because of their ethnic background or because of religion or because of gender. And I do take that into account.") And also quoting Antonin Scalia on the power of courts to “make law.” To which I add a brief P.S., also from Scalia, concurring in James B. Beam Distilling Co. v. Georgia:
I am not so naive (nor do I think our forebears were) as to be unaware that judges in a real sense "make" law. But they make it as judges make it, which is to say as though they were "finding" it—discerning what the law is, rather than decreeing what it is today changed to, or what it will tomorrow be.
How come when Scalia says it, he’s calling 'em as he sees 'em? But when Sotomayor says it, she’s a free-range liberal activist? Note to Sotomayor: The trick is to never apologize.
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One of America’s longest-running love triangles is about to come to an end: According to the official Archie Comics blog, Archie Andrews—hapless ginger kid and proto-Zack Morris—is getting married. (Via CNN.)
In the 65-year-old serial’s 600th issue—on sale in September—Archie and the gang have hurtled into the future. They’ve graduated from college, and Archie’s now preparing to take the marital plunge. According to Veronica’s blog—which, strangely, reads like it was written by a spammer from Singapore—it seems Archie has chosen her over sweet, loyal Betty:
I am so excited, I am getting Married to Archie. There is so much to do, so many plans to make. I wonder if Betty wants to be my Maid of Honor? I bet she is so happy for me!
(((Hugs)))
Ronnie
Betty, predictably, is sad. Jughead will be best man. And Reggie, that scamp, plans on scooping up Archie’s sloppy seconds.
Of course, you should never trust bloggers. With a little more than three months till pub date, we might see a Graduate-style switcheroo at the last minute.
I was always a Veronica girl myself—mostly because she had black hair, like me, but also because the girl knew how to Get. Things. Done. But I have a feeling she might not have nabbed him for long. Is it too much to hope for an eventual Archie-Moose pair-off?
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Last week, Michael Kinsley wrote a brutal takedown of the redesigned Newsweek, attacking it page by page and graph by graph for failing to be readers' "guide through the chaos of the Information Age." It's something that editor Jon Meacham wrote in the editor's note that the new Newsweek would not "pretend" to be, and that Kinsley thinks newsmagazines totally need to be in order to survive. The assessment was shrewd, but perhaps needlessly vicious, as noted in New York's Jessica Pressler's response, titled: "Michael Kinsley Attacks the New Newsweek, and We Feel Bad About It." (Full disclosure: I'm particularly sympathetic to Newsweek, since I used to work there. Plus it's owned by the same company that owns Double X.)
But if the new Newsweek's inaugural issue falls short of making sense of the week's chaos, I wonder what Kinsley makes of the New York Times today, which ran an article—ON THE FRONT PAGE, and with a jump to the highly coveted A3 page—about teenagers hugging. That's it. Just, you know, talking about the ways that they hug ("the basic friend hug," "the hug that starts with a high-five," "the hug from behind") and how they feel about hugging ("We're not afraid, we just get in and hug").
The whole thing reads like an Onion parody of what Slate's Jack Shafer mocks as the bogus trend story. It's what we've come to expect of the Thursday style section, which has featured dubious trend-spotting since its inception. But this is the front page. Of the frickin' New York Times. Enter Kinsley's biting assessment of Newsweek, which feels equally applicable here:
[W]hile it's not impossible to get readers by peddling sheer enjoyment, it's a lot easier to peddle necessity, or at least usefulness: You need this magazine to sort out the world for you and to make sure you haven't missed anything.
We need to need newspapers, too, if they're going to survive—which is something I desperately want, not just because I'm in the industry but because it freaks me out to think of a world without them, as it does Double X reader Sophie. And stuff like this—
Girls embracing girls, girls embracing boys, boys embracing each other—the hug has become the favorite social greeting when teenagers meet or part these days.
—is hardly the stuff we need.
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There is some brewing international trade drama between the E.U. and Inuits about seal meat which is deeply, incredibly fascinating, and I will fill you in later, but the main takeaway is: This fine lady, Governor general Michaelle Jean, who is Queen Elizabeth's representative in the Canadian government, butchered and ate RAW SEAL HEART.
Then she said to the E.U., in laconic superhero fashion: "Take from it what you will." Take that, Kate Connor.
Image of Michaelle Jean by Attila Kisbenedek/AFP/Getty Images
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Here's a guest post from Current TV's Sarah Haskins, whose videos will air weekly on Double X. Each week she addresses a theme in marketing, advertising, or entertainment aimed at women that she finds silly, such as the idea that yogurt is an unbelievably indulgent, wholly beloved miracle food for women. She's giving XXers a sneak peak of tonight's video subject:
Young American Men, this is your warning. For so many years, you've been safe: ensconced in fraternities, apartments with other dudes, sports bars, and post-college intramural leagues.
Yet the natural order cannot long survive without balance. And thus your herds, like deer in the backyards of New Jersey, must be thinned.
Enter the Cougar. Your natural predator. She is everything you fear. She is older. She is going to use you for sex. She doesn't care about your video games or entry-level job. She is going to go to a nice restaurant with you—by any means necessary.
She was formed in the crucible of cable culture: by people who think Sex and The City was a documentary, not a show, by our obsession with youth, and especially by trend-seeking journalists who need something to talk about. She is our modern jabberwocky, gyre and gimbling her way into your 400 thread count sheets.
For years young females have been stalked by male silverbacks, but the Cougars represent a reversal of this natural order. Like global warming or mortgage-backed securities, she is a sign of terrible times ahead. Older ladies and younger men! It does not make sense!
You can arm yourself against her, young men. Study the enemy. Begin by watching The Cougar on the TV Land network. Did you know that was a network? Neither did I. Enjoy.
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Bloomberg has a story proposing the health of global trade can be judged by extramarital affairs, and Latvian hookers. Why Latvian? Two websites, one that caters to British traders having affairs, and another that offers the services of Latvian prostitutes, compared their traffic patterns with market activity. Apparently traffic was way up in two circumstances: markets booms and collapses. Analysts say this has something to do with "animal spritis" pushing the market in extreme directions. When people are over- confident, or despondent, they buy or sell in bulk, and they also stray from their usual bedding habits.
Lesson: Mothers, don't let your sons grow up to be traders.
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Between the recession and feminism, we have reached the inevitable moment when the stay-at-home dad becomes a real, quantifiable phenomenon. Journalist Jeremy Adam Smith just published the Daddy Shift tracing this "startling evolutionary advance in the American family," and Lisa Belkin interviews him. Smith argues that our maternal lens causes us to miss the things dads do differently and well—encourage risk taking and independence, for example. I buy that argument. In general, moms could use a lesson from dads on how you can leave the house without individually wrapped snacks and still have a fine time. But there's one problem with the daddy shift argument. The more dads find their own voices the more they sound just like ... moms.
Neal Pollack started this lamentable trend with Alternadad and now there are dozens (and three new dad memoirs coming out this summer alone). Rice Daddies, DadLabs.com, and Mike Adamick's blog Cry It Out are three Smith praises. In his view, dads just need to keep "telling their stories" to inspire other dads. I'm not so sure. I read these blogs and I'm not finding so much risk taking. Instead, once again, I'm lost in the minutae of epidurals and homework and yes, snacks.
Though I don't share her worldview, I find myself recalling a snippet from Caitlin Flanagan's story on wives who won't have sex with their husbands.
The men who cave to the pressure to become more feminine—putting little notes in the lunch boxes, sweeping up after snack time, the whole bit—may delight their wives but they probably don't improve their sex lives much, owing to the thorny old problem of la difference. I might be quietly thrilled if my husband decided to forgo his weekly tennis game so that he could alphabetize the spices and scrub the lazy Susan, but I would hardly consider it an erotic gesture.
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A guest post from Yale law professor Heather Gerken:
Over the last day, I’ve been fielding calls from reporters, members of your tribe, many of whom have asked some variation on the following questions: “What role does identity politics play on the Supreme Court, and should those who support civil-rights causes be happy about Judge Sotomayor’s nomination?” (This, for what it’s worth, is almost a direct quote).
There is only one sensible answer to such questions. Please stop. Honestly. It’s embarrassing even to have to say this, but let me spell it out.
These aren’t just the wrong questions; they are silly questions. They begin with the premise, already evident in commentary, that someone who is a woman (or a Latino or from a working-class background) somehow has an “identity,” whereas the other recent nominees to the court mysteriously do not. If you think Judge Sotomayor’s nomination raises questions of “identity politics,” then you should ask yourself what exactly you think is so neutral about the politics of prior nominees.
You might insist that President Obama—and Judge Sotomayor herself—have put her identity at issue, so it’s fair game. But that leads me to the second reason to resist the question. It is one thing to say that all of the justices bring their own histories and experiences to the courtroom. It’s quite another to insist that one’s background gets witlessly translated into votes on specific issues. Surely that’s not a hard distinction to figure out. After all, the whole point of judging is to leverage what one knows about the world and to compensate for what one doesn’t know. It’s exceedingly hard to do it, and judges don’t always succeed. But if we think there’s no possibility that judges will at least try to step out of the bounds of their experiences, it’s not entirely clear why we have courts in the first place. It must be possible to say that Judge Sotomayor—who presumably has had some experience with discrimination, some sense of the dilemmas faced by people without means—might help enrich the justices’ deliberations without assuming that her identity will translate into specific kinds of votes.
I have faith in the possibility that judges can move beyond their histories because I worked for the man whom Judge Sotomayor has been nominated to replace: David Souter. Justice Souter was one of the remarkable judges who consistently looked beyond himself for answers to the questions the court was asked to resolve. Consider his voting-rights jurisprudence. Souter was perhaps the least politically connected person on the court, and he came from a racially homogenous home state with little experience with the Voting Rights Act. Yet Souter ended up carving out a position on the relationship between race and voting that was more nuanced and more pragmatic than his brethren’s. It’s what made him a great justice, and there's no reason to think that Judge Sotomayor won't become one as well.
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