Dear Double X readers in NY: Tomorrow is your chance to meet with Double X writers and editors in person. We're co-hosting a meet-up with Guernica, the excellent online literary magazine of politics and culture, from 6 to 10 pm at Le Poisson Rouge at 158 Bleecker Street (please rsvp here). Come join us and raise a glass to celebrate our recent launch. And check out Guernica beforehand if you haven't already. This issue (pleasingly to us XXers) focuses on some smart, independent women: There's a fabulous interview with Geek Love author Katherine Dunn about what drew her to boxing, among other things; a moving excerpt from Katherine Russell Rich's memoir, Dreaming in Hindi, about traveling to India after a remission from stage 4 breast cancer; and a revealing interview with correspondent Michaela Wrong about corruption in Kenya. (Plus, we like the pretty pink looping design that pops up when you scroll over the site logo.)

Tags: guernica, meet up

Bruno approaches. It’s three and a half weeks until the arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat follow-up, about a gay, Austrian fashion reporter who talks like this “Ich sleep in a seaweed body wrap under a Zac Posen Navy-Cut Nightshirt. In mein dreams, ich sleep naked in a giant reed basket drifting slowly down ze Nile, cradled in ze arms of Daniel Radcliffe.” But Cohen’s already posing naked on the cover of GQ, worrying Austrians, troubling troubgay rights groups, and sticking his bum in Eminem’s face. The emerging question: Will Bruno be good for the gays?

In Brooke Barnes' piece exploring exactly this, she asks whether Bruno, “a movie that, in mercilessly exploiting the discomfort created when straight men are ambushed by aggressive gayness, that happens to (surprise!) expose [their] homophobia," will be "vulgar, inappropriate and harmful? Or bold, timely and necessary? All of the above?” Who will the joke be on? Homosexuals or homophobes?

It’s an interesting exercise to compare the anxiety about Bruno to the anxiety about Borat, a movie that had many folks wondering “Is it good for the Jews?” (Though, perhaps it should have had them wondering “Is it good for foreigners?” who were the real butt of that film's joke.) The concern with Borat was that Borat might be a hero. While he was making us laugh at the anti-Semites, racists, and homophobes living among us, he was also making us laugh with an anti-Semitic, racist, homophobe—him. Borat might expose the racism of some Americans, but he would also make being racist and ignorant seem funny ("eez niiice").

The worry about Bruno is the opposite, that Bruno won’t be a hero. That while Bruno makes us laugh at the homophobes living among us, he’s also making us laugh at homosexuals—him. Borat made worriers worry we’d like the bigot too much. Bruno makes worriers worry we won’t like the bigot enough. (Bruno is racist, politically incorrect, and profane in addition to being gay.) Perhaps we should stop worrying?

Besides, if Bruno is anything like Borat, it might actually show America to be a less homophobic country than we fear. (Though, if Barnes' story on Bruno is any indication, there will be some brutal scenes, as when Bruno, "intent on becoming straight, goes to a martial arts instructor to learn how to protect himself from gay people. 'If they get close to you, hit them,' the teacher says. How can you spot a gay man? 'Obvious is a person being extremely nice' is the answer. Gays can be tricky, the instructor warns: 'Some of them don’t even dress no different than myself or you.'") Borat may be best remembered for its instances of shockingly casual hatred (a rodeo host wants to hang gay people; frat boys wish they could own slaves), but there are far more instances when regular people refuse to take Baron Cohen’s bait. Most of the marks punked by Borat try their best to stay calm, remain civil, and never seem on the verge of using ethnic slurs. This may be the prejudice, or complacency, of diminished expectations, but the fact that five of the 30 people tricked by Borat proved to be utterly despicable surprised me; I would have expected more. That 15 percent of Americans think racist, hateful things is beyond disappointing; that 85 percent of Americans will try to be polite and helpful to a guy who brings poop to the dinner table? I had no idea.

Tags: Borat, Bruno, gay, Homophobia, movies, Sacha Baron Cohen

Like Hanna and Meghan, I read Sandra Tsing Loh as arguing that companionate marriage involves trade-offs; that for all we gain in trading hierarchy for equity, something, perhaps, is lost. But I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It’s not like she got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning. She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will—“a gravestone sunk down on two decades of history”—rather than a natural, peaceful end to a happy and productive union?

As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without deeming the institution a waste of everyone's time. Tsing Loh thinks we’re deluded, but perhaps we’ve adapted to the fact that modern unions can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a successful partnership than “does/does not last forever”? Tsing Loh asks “why we still believe in marriage,” but I’d like to know why she still believes that the only successful partnership is one you’re in when you die.

Tags: divorce, marriage, the atlantic

As riveting images and stories pour out of Iran, the Obama administration's lack of moral clarity today is getting to me. As in:

The State Department asked Twitter to defer maintenance so that Iranians could keep using the site to organize and inform, but Obama could only bring himself to say that he found the violence "deeply troubling," a muted response in the circumstances, as my colleague John Dickerson pointed out.

The administration will announce some benefits for the partners of gay federal employees today, but not full health insurance, and last week Obama lawyers filed a brief arguing for the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, which Obama the candidate spoke out against. Gay rights advocates are furious, and rightfully so. The suit the administration responded to—a challenge in federal court to California's bar against same-sex marriage--is premature and a mistake. But the administration didn't have to go this far in batting it away. The NYT reports that "a White House spokesman said that it was standard practice for the administration to back laws that are challenged in court—even those it does not agree with." Maybe, but when a president really objects to a law, he makes an exception.

In a 2003 speech that Charlie Savage reports on, Judge Sonia Sotomayor doubted the legality of expansive wiretapping under the Patriot Act, but she also said “one can certainly justify” the secret detention of enemy combatants, and the curtailing of their legal rights compared to regular criminals, “under precedents and current law.” Actually there was scant Supreme Court precedent on that question at the time, and Sotomayor could have easily pointed out that the law was unsettled. I know all the straddling is consistent with Obama's famed pragmatism. I know that's what we bought when we elected him. But today, it feels lame and tedious.

Tags: defense of marriage act, executive power, gay rights, Iranian election, Sonia Sotomayor

There’s something fishy about Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign’s admission yesterday that he had an affair. He and his wife were separated during that time, and what someone does during a legal separation isn’t usually called an affair. Plus, he is too quick to point out that his lovely wife Darlene “has found it in her heart to forgive me,” and then use the usual passive language politicians revert to: A hectic life “put me in situations” which “led to” inappropriate behavior.

Of course, Ensign, who’s talked about running for president, was quick during the Monica Lewinsky affair to say Bill Clinton “has no credibility left” and call former Idaho Sen. Larry Craig, of bathroom fame, a “disgrace.” So maybe he’s just built up a store of enemies over the years. But still, why bother? And why now?

Tags: GOP, infidelity, John Ensign

Earlier this month, an Israeli Newspaper, Haaretz, undertook an intriguing experiment. What would happen if, instead of traditional journalists, novelists and poets wrote the news? Forward recounts the results in "Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News."

Haaretz is a serious newspaper. In other words, this wasn't like the time Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to guest-edit The New Yorker. In honor of Hebrew Book Week, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent home most of his staff reporters and replaced them with 31 of Israel's top writers and poets, among them: Avri Herling, David Grossman, Roni Somek, Yoram Kaniuk, and Eshkol Nevo.

The results were a meta-mix of odd news bites, first-person impressions, and lines of poetry:

Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: “Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place ... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points ... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….” The TV review by Eshkol Nevo opened with these words: “I didn’t watch TV yesterday.” And the weather report was a poem by Roni Somek, titled “Summer Sonnet.” (“Summer is the pencil/that is least sharp/in the seasons’ pencil case.”) News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that “hot” is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?

Haaretz is something like Israel's version of the New York Times—although, of course, the New York Times would never do something like this. Which is too bad. As we all know, newspaper are the dinosaurs of 21st century media. Maybe if they opened their doors to the more literary-minded among us, they might win readers with news that can do more than inform us, and move us.

Tags: Israel, journalism, media, writers