Hanna, just so you know, I wasn’t calling your marriage “boring”; Cristina Nehring was. No, in all seriousness, I’m glad you posted in response to Loh and to my piece about The Vindication of Love, the provocative new book arguing that we need to be less obsessed with “successful” relationships and more open to passion—in part because, Nehring argues, it leads to greater creativity. Your point that for every crazy artist in a series of chaotic relationships there’s one in a stable partnership is well-taken. Virginia Woolf, no slouch in the achievement department, may have had one of the most boring marriages of all time. But she liked it. It worked for her. Meanwhile, many partnerships you mention—like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne—were hardly boring. As Nehring herself would concede, supportive relationships are key to survival and self-development. But I like that she wants to remind us that that support can take more forms than we sometimes think. To me, the really interesting point in her book is her idea that we don't "fail" when love doesn't work out. It's just part of growth.

Photograph of couple in kitchen by Getty Images.

Tags: cristina nehring, divorce, marriage, the atlantic, tsing loh

Hanna, thank you for the necessary astringency of your last post about the "Neda" video and the construction of a martyr mythology in the blogosphere’s reporting on Iran. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the entire unedited Neda video on YouTube; it feels too close to a snuff movie. Assuming this graphic clip really does document a young woman’s death at the hands of paramilitary snipers—something we lack the reporting to confirm—what gives us the right to watch it and forward to and fro as proof of our solidarity with the forces of democracy and reform in Iran (something that, as you point out, Mousavi is far from representing)? I wouldn’t want my own death, or that of someone I loved, to be instrumentalized in that way. (We don't, for example, treat the deaths of U.S. soliders abroad as YouTube-able moments.) And the fact that “Neda” is a young and pretty woman somehow adds to the ickiness of disseminating the scene of her murder (if that is indeed what the clip shows) as a propaganda tool.

There’s a quote from a Harvard professor billing himself as an “expert on the Internet” that appeared in two different NYT pieces on Iran last week: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful.” Power plus half-baked inanity make for a perilous combination, which is why I can’t help but be wary of the #iranelection fervor that’s been swelling my Twitter feed for the past week. The popular uprising in Iran has been thrilling to witness, and new technologies like Twitter are exciting both as tools for evading censorship on the ground and as platforms for citizen journalism abroad. But however freely flowing, information is only valuable insofar as it can be trusted. Western sympathizers convinced they’re manning the virtual barricades by turning their Twitter avatar photos green, resetting their locations to “Tehran,” and feverishly forwarding a graphic unsourced video of a young girl’s death strike me as both touchingly enthusiastic and dangerously inane.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by David McNew/Getty Images.

Tags: iran election, Neda video, twitter

Hey ladies—are you weirded out by the strange sexual power dynamics in Twilight? So is Buffy the vampire slayer, and she's got something to say about it. Like to hear it? Here it goes.

Jezebel linked to this amazing remix video by Jonathan McIntosh, who edited together scenes from Buffy and Twilight to make it seem like waxy, broody Edward Cullen is trying to put the moves on our favorite demon killer—and she. Is. Not. Amused.

Now, our girl knows from ridiculously good-looking, brooding vampire honeys. So when she tells you that stalking maketh not a courtship, you should listen to her. The awesomeness of this vid helps alleviate some of the sadness I feel about the upcoming Buffy reboot movie, which will feature neither Buffy, nor the Scoobies, nor, it seems, Joss Whedon. At least there's the upcoming animated series to look forward to.

Photograph of Twilight star Robert Pattinson by Martin Bueau/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: buffy the vampire slayer, remix, twilight, vampires

Andrew Sullivan posts this e-mail today under the headline “Confirming the Basij Murder of Neda.” The video, for those who haven’t seen it, is graphic and disturbing. The e-mail Sullivan points to, however, confirms nothing. It claims to be from a doctor who treated her on the scene. He says he clearly saw a “basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house.” He also says “he had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her.” It’s hardly believable that in the chaos of the crowd, this doctor could have been looking at the rooftop the moment before the shot. He then says, in what is obvious rhetorical flourish: “He aimed straight at her heart.”

I do not begrudge this “doctor” his narrative. But it should not be reported by respectable American news sites as confirmation of a fact. It is an artifact in the construction of a martyr story, just like everything else in the story of Neda: Her name, which means “voice” in Farsi (now silenced), her age, first reported as 16, but actually 27, the final close-up of her face, blood streaming from her mouth, one eye opened.

In their excitement over the role of technology in building democracy, American sites have been gullibly reporting every Twitter and post in support of Mir Hussein Moussavi, conveniently forgetting Moussavi’s own bloody past. Even in the age of Twitter, confirming a murder is not something we do by e-mail.

Photograph of Iranian-American protesters by David McNew/Getty Images.

Tags: andrew sullivan, iranian revolution

The reliably wired Marc Ambinder flags National Journal's almost foolishly comprehensive, 366-person omnibus study of the folks working in every nook and cranny of the Obama administration (complete with phone numbers)! I've only carved my way through a third of it, but Marc dishes the important stats:

12 percent of top Obama officials have served in the military, down from 18 percent of top officials at the start of Bush's first term ... A top female Obama administration official is three times as likely to be single as her male counterpart. Four years ago, a top female Bush administration official was almost five times as likely to be single as her male counterpart ... The percentage of white Christians among top officials whose religious affiliation is known dropped from 71 percent during Bush's second term to 46 percent in the Obama administration... 37 percent of top Obama officials graduated from an Ivy League institution ... with Harvard being the top college for undergraduate and graduate degrees.

This is all fascinating demographic information (Noam Scheiber has made the case that Harvard "won" over Yale in the Obama-Clinton primary), especially the news that white Christians are now only half running the federal government. But the statistic that jumped out for me is that "top" females in both the Obama and Bush administrations were likely to be single, and that they were more likely to be single under W—unwavering defender of the traditional family. Of course, I suspect Bush had fewer women in his administration (Obama employs 123, to 243 men), and those who served were of the Condi Rice / Harriet Miers mold (presumably more attached to W than to their personal lives), but perhaps Obama—despite conventional Christianist demagoguery about Democrats—is slightly more pro-family.

At any rate, the same disproportionate numbers, in radically different administrations, seem to reinforce the sacrifices women make—not just to balance work and play, but to run the free world. On the Hill, for instance, as per Lisa Lerer, "dating as a congresswoman is almost impossible. It's not just the power thing, they say, but the difficulty of fitting someone new into an already tight schedule of weekends back home in the district, weeknight events and tiring days.'" The news that Jackie Norris, former schoolteacher and Michelle Obama confidante was bumped (or bumped herself) from her position as East Wing chief of staff in order to spend time with her young children is more evidence of the unique tradeoffs of being a politica. And when "The Melody Barnes," longtime D.C. heavy-hitter turned domestic policy chief, got married recently, the New York Times narrated her story thusly:

She and her friends often joked about the cast of characters who came courting, including the date who announced that his primary passion was whittling. But one of those conversations left Ms. Barnes in tears, recalled Laurie Rubiner, her good friend. “We laughed about it, but it was heartbreaking,” Ms. Rubiner said. “Here is a 45-year-old woman who is so successful, yet the one thing that really defined success for her, family and love, was something she didn’t have.”

Oy. This definition of "success" brings me back to a dueling set of articles at The Root last week on what single women can and can't learn from Michelle Obama. In echoes of that inflammatory Lori Gottlieb article on "settling," the theses are as follows: Women should stop being picky so that they can get married and be happy. Everything up to but not including girlfriend-beating should be excused ("he had ashy toes" is not a dealbreaker). Power is not as important as progeny.

But what if Barnes had shacked up with the whittler, and sat out the Obama campaign? Or all the female congresspeople had foregone important constituent visits to stroll, two by two, by the Potomac? I know this balancing act is timeless for "type A professional women"—but is the calculus different when the jobs in question are so, well, important? It seems odd that the women personally determining many key elements of American public life could shrug off that privilege—but then again, it doesn't.

Photograph of White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.

Tags: condoleezza rice, congress, ellen tauscher, george Bush, hariet miers, jackie norris, marriage, melody barnes, obama administration, power, single women, white house

Hanna, you call out the false dichotomy between the miserable married and passionate single, and in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, Ginia Bellafante discusses Jodi Picoult's novels, and the false dichotomy between good parent and bad. According to Bellafante, Picoult's incredibly successful slew of novels, including My Sister's Keeper and Nineteen Minutes, involve "terrible things happen[ing] to children of middle-class parentage: they become terminally ill, or are maimed, gunned down, killed in accidents, molested, abducted, bullied, traumatized, stirred to violence." Bellafante continues, "Picoult’s message is at once cautionary and subverting. As much as her novels underscore the hazards of parental shortcomings, at a certain level they seem to exist to make a mockery of the cherished idea that we ought not to have any."

Basically Picoult is pointing out that there's no such thing as the perfect parent, without shortcomings, just as Sandra Tsing Loh observes that there's no such thing as a the perfect marriage. But Bellafante's commentary on the underlying message in Picoult's novels—that they expose a deep ambivalence about having children—could be said of our collective feelings toward marriage as well:

Picoult’s books and the whole cultural machine devoted to maniacal worry about children often seem like a reflection of our collectively sublimated ambivalence about having children to begin with...Picoult’s novels access this disparity, the difference between what is said and what is done, the difference between parenting that assumes the shape of performed concern and parenting that takes the form of active tending. So much of the ugliness that transpires in her books could be prevented by a marginally greater degree of psychological caution.

Substitute marriage for parenting—"the difference between marriage that assumes the shape of performed concern and marriage that takes the form of active tending"—and you've hit on what we've been discussing all week with Tsing Loh's piece. Meghan quotes a statistic from an AOL poll that says 72 percent of women have considered leaving their husbands. What she didn't mention was that in that same poll, 71 percent of women said they'd be with their husbands until they die. Talking about any of these monumental life events—marriage, motherhood—in absolutes is a mistake. It shouldn't be surprising at all that most women are ambivalent about marriage and motherhood; most people are ambivalent about everything. Just because some marriages don't work out and sometimes terrible things happen to good children doesn't mean the institutions are doomed or are in need of an overthrow. As a woman who is on the brink of what Hanna describes as a "vanilla pudding" future, I think I'll take Dahlia's advice: Ignore what the books say and just live.

Photograph of mother and child by Getty Images.

Tags: ginia bellafante, jodi picoult, marriage, motherhood, new york times magazine, sandra tsing loh

Anna Balkrishna’s article about her mother’s ill-fated love for a convict in Double X last week was a fascinating story, compellingly told. Reading it, I went from curious, to emotionally engaged, to feeling personally invested in her mother’s hard won success.

The talented daughter’s heartfelt writing also revealed her struggle to forgive her mother for the older woman’s stumbles, and I posted an (unsolicited) suggestion that the author, whom I have not met, communicate directly with her mom as genuinely as she did with her readers. In a passionate response to my busybody post, Anna and her mother both replied they are communicating with each other honestly and openly, and the writing of her essay was collaborative. I apologize for my narrow assumption.

My concern focused on the privacy aspect of their dynamic, and my own efforts to write about my family. Samantha thoughtfully weighed in that when her mother writes personal essays (Samantha’s mother, Robin Marantz Henig is a stellar journalist), Sam is more discomforted by the revelations of her mom’s own experiences than the tidbits sprinkled in about her daughters. The thing that we all—Anna, Robin, and I and the many authors, bloggers, memoirists, and thinly veiled fictionists who excavate the rich emotional vein of our personal relationships—struggle with is not whether to write about our loved ones (we find our muse wherever she lives), but how to do it with compassion. If I were a better writer, I wouldn’t write less about my husband, mother, children, or friends, I’d just do it more artfully and with greater consideration. I’m certain I will continue to over share about my own embarrassing mistakes, but I now lament that by doing so I may make my children cringe.

Getting back to Anna Balkrishna’s piece, I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of women who are attracted to incarcerated individuals. I have made some spectacularly poor decisions in my life and am particularly sympathetic to other women’s bad choices. When I was 20, I had a boyfriend who told me we were going to Europe together, somehow persuaded me to bankroll the trip, took me with him as far as New York from Minneapolis, then kissed me goodbye in a taxi and sneaked back to our room in the McAlpine Hotel, grabbed our (my) cash, all his stuff, and took an early flight. I didn’t know I’d been dumped 'til hours later when I got back to the room and found his note. That aborted adventure wasn’t my worst bad judgment. About six months later, he landed back in Minneapolis, and I got back together with him. We did not live happily ever after. (Note to my kids: Sorry about that anecdote, I should have posted a cringe alert. —Mom)

Photograph of writer by Getty Images.

Tags: Anna Balkrishna, oversharing, women who marry convicts

Dame Helen Mirren (my #1 girl crush) is currently starring as Phèdre at the National Theatre in London (my #1 arts institution crush). Stuck Stateside this summer? You're in luck: Starting on June 25, the National will be beaming the production to cinemas around the world.

Filmed theater is always a little bit dicey, but I'll chance it for the opportunity to see La Mirren play the iconic Athenian queen who's crazy in love with her stepson. (Let's see, would Cristina Nehring approve?)

Click here to see a list of venues around the U.S. that will be showing Phèdre. Act fast: Tickets are already sold out for the first New York performance.

Photograph by Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

Tags: helen mirren, london, national theatre, phèdre