From the AP write-up of the newly released Nixon tapes:

Speaking to Charles Colson after the January 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, the president said: "I admit, there are times when abortions are necessary, I know that." He gave "a black and a white" as an example.

"Or rape," Colson offered. "Or rape," Nixon agreed.

This a decade and a half after the Supreme Court struck down state bans on interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia. And 12 years after the birth of Barack Obama.

Photograph of Richard Nixon by AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: abortion, interracial, nixon

Ask and ye shall receive. Just yesterday, some of us here at Double X were waxing nostalgic for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and lo: Today, Salon book critic Laura Miller offers a run-down of "urban fantasy" novels whose heroines would make our dear, departed, demon-killing California girl proud. Among others, Miller discusses the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris (basis for the HBO series True Blood) and the Anita Blake books by Laurell K. Hamilton.

"Urban fantasy" ends up being a bit of a slippery genre. At one point, Miller calls it "a cross of fairy tale, noir and classic coming-of-age narrative." There's sex and romance aplenty—though in varying ratios, depending on the series in question—but the stories generally avoid the pat, happily-ever-after endings usually found in romance novels. In Miller's depiction, the books are delicious but also nutritious—perfect for those nights "when my brain is just too weary for Ian McEwan but not soft enough to settle for The Mentalist.

Sign me up.

Besides being an excellent service piece—thanks for mapping out my summer reading list, Laura!—the essay also offers a fascinating glimpse into the ways we categorize art, particularly pulpy "genre" art, and art that's by (or for) women. Urban fantasy novels are sometimes called "paranormal romances," a term that, as Miller shows, can be wielded with a sneer. Snobbery sucks, but I'm hardly one to throw stones—I'd heard that label before, and even though I'm a big fan of both of those constituent elements (demons? sex? what's not to like?), I never really bothered to check out the offerings. Thank god, then, for critics like Miller, who know how to make us feel good about eating our candy.

Photograph of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar by Getty Images.

Tags: anita blake, buffy the vampire slayer, laura miller, Romance novels, sookie stackhouse

Early in the first episode of NYC Prep, Bravo’s new, Gossip Girl-inspired reality show about New York City high school students that starts tonight, PC, the self-styled Chuck Bass of the bunch, says to the camera, “In New York City, money flows like the wind.” It was at this, the moment of the overly knowing, slightly off metaphor, that I realized it was going to be impossible for me to hate him. Try as he and the five other teenagers featured on the show might—and God they try—there is no talk of money, sex, or power, no uncanny preciousness, no shopper at Barneys, no address on the Upper East Side, no limo rides, and ultimately no reality show that can turn these kids into adults. Despite their best efforts, and all of their privileges, they are in a high school state of mind.

Take, for example, Camille, a senior at tony all-girls school Nightgale-Bamford, who asserts about her own future: “I will go to Harvard. Then I will be the business head of a genetics firm. And then at 40 I will have a husband and two kids.” This is delivered with the frightening intensity we have come to expect from Blair Waldorf, and is not, exactly, typical of the average 17-year-old. And yet, it is still wholly laughable. Check back in a few years, Camille, after life has gotten in the way.

Even more of the series is taken up with genuinely unprecocious high school antics, just enacted on the glamorous streets of New York City. Taylor, a 16-year-old who attends, gasp, public school tells her mother that she is throwing a party. (Her mother, a divorcee, does such a credible impersonation of a good parent, one wonders if she thought she was letting her daughter appear on some PBS special.) It turns out “party” means hanging out with a dozen other girls in a sushi restaurant.

Even the circumstances that do seem unusually adult, like Kelli and her brother living alone in the city while their parents stay in the Hamptons, aren’t quite. Living alone really means ordering Chinese food on your parents' credit card every night. That’s sad, not cool. And then there’s Sebastian, a self-described ladies man, with shaggy blonde hair who tells us all episode that he has sex with girls all the time, like some slightly less creepy version of Kids’ Telly. And yet, there’s no evidence to support his claims, except a few kisses on the cheek. Later in the series, PC asks a dinner table full of his peers how many of them are still virgins—it’s the vast majority.

Of course the kids all want you to think they’re the hippest, coolest, most knowing bunch of teenagers to ever live, and they say all sorts of gross things and buy all sorts of expensive objects to prove it. (PC, in a recent radio interview, called the Real Housewives, who are also on Bravo, “trashy pieces of sh-t who are not in real society at all.” Stay classy, kid.) Is it because of the NYC-SoCal difference, or the Bravo-MTV one, that more coherent sentences are uttered in the first episode of NYC Prep than in all episodes of MTV’s Laguna Beach combined? Of course, it’s unclear that the hyper-verbal New York City kids know or understand themselves any better than their spaced out, mute California counterparts, who at least got to behave like the confused 17-year-olds they really are. NYC Prep did nothing so much as make me feel deep-body tired for these kids, hustling so hard, with a toddler’s frenetic, purposeless energy, to prove they are in the know. Lucky Cali kids just get to hang out on the beach.

Ultimately, these teenagers inspired a pretty genuine sympathy in me, having nothing to do with what they said or did, most of which is pretty heinous. (This feeling makes watching the show significantly less fun than watching The Real Housewives series. Those shows supply viewing pleasure by delicately triangulating our fascination, disgust, and concern. But since NYC Prep involves minors, it lessens our disgust, while amping up our concern. We feel bad, even when they are being little jerks, because they don't yet know better, thus upsetting the carefully calibrated balance that keeps voyuerism fun.) They’re living in that existential, hormonal, crazy crisis known as adolescence, when you just want, you want so fully, so completely, things that are all wrong—like To Be The Business Head of A Genetics Firm, To Make Sure People Know You Are In “Real Society,” To Have People Think That You Hook Up With 32 Girls A Month, and To Have Everyone In Your School Watch You On Bravo. Probably, no one should be allowed on camera in this state, but, if you are, well, I’m not going to be the one to make fun of you for it.

Photo of New York City by Getty Images.

Tags: Bravo, high school, NYC Prep, real housewives, Reality TV, Television

Anne Applebaum puts the Neda video in context, by forcefully arguing that women's rights advocates—not Bush or Obama or Twitter—are behind the incredible energy in the Iranian vote and the protests: "The truth is that the high turnout was the result of many years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and, above all, women's groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help." She also explains why the presence of so many women on the streets matters:

For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is its claim to divine inspiration: The leadership is legitimate, and in particular its harsh repression of women is legitimate, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the last weekend but over the last decade, has to weaken the Islamic republic's claim to invincibility in Iran and across the Middle East.

Dana, when you worried over the instrumentalizing of Neda's death, and what it means when a tape of one person bleeding her life out on the street catapults all around the world, and so becomes a propagranda tool, some of your commenters thought you were questioning the relevance of the death itself. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think you were making a subtler point—that no matter how relevant, Neda has been converted from a self into a symbol, and you wouldn't want that for yourself. I see that. I wonder, though, about calling the video a propaganda tool. (Snuff film just seems right, since that's literally what it is.) For sure the video is being circulated to send a message and stoke the fires of outrage, but the nature of its dissemination makes me think that calling it a propaganda tool for me is too unsympathetic. The man who sent it doesn't sound like he works for anyone. He sounds like a guy who smuggled his footage through the Iranian cyberspace censors, however he could, to get it viewed. YouTube and Twitter and CNN did the rest. If the video is propaganda, it isn't only that. It's also a collective howl. Impotent and even exploitative, but also a heartfelt expression of the hive mind.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Louisa Gouliamaki/Getty Images.

Tags: women's rights; Iran; Neda video

Jon and Kate Gosselin announced their separation on last night's much-hyped episode of Jon and Kate Plus 8. This surprised no one, as tales of Jon sweatily cavorting with coeds and Kate's utter nastiness have been littering the tabloids for months. What did surprise me is that the Gosselins will be doing what Sandra Tsing Loh is doing with her kids: instead of just having Jon or Kate move out, the couple's 8 children will remain in their Pennsylvania mcmansion, while the parents switch off living there.

In her post describing Tsing Loh's set up, Liza already pointed out the major cracks in this scenario, like what happens if Jon continues seeing that 23-year-old he's been photographed with? Then would it be Jon, Kate, and the Jerk Who Broke Up Mommy and Daddy's Marriage Plus 8? Even though we probably won't get to see how this plays out in Tsing Loh's case, it looks like we'll be able to watch what happens with the Gosselin's arrangement almost in real-time. The couple has no plans to stop filming the show.

Tags: divorce, jon and kate plus 8, jon gosselin, Kate Gosselin, sandra tsing loh

Rarely is the public let in on how clothes actually get made—the gritty world of sourcing, manufacturing, cross-ocean container shipping, distribution and slick marketing that goes into supplying that perpetually regenerating stock of textile novelties we call fashion.

That may change. On June 7, the New York Times ran a story about the new barcode sticker called GS1 DataBars. DataBars store information that is useful to retailers, the kind of tidings that are meaningless to shoppers: inventory stats and sales data. I marveled at the possibilities of an enhanced version. What if we could scan any object in the marketplace for “behind the label” information—how would that change the way we shopped? Could we influence what got made, and how? Could DataBars be used as a tool for consumer empowerment deployed in thwarting Madison Avenue fictions and promoting cleaner manufacturing?

This concept is already being applied, albeit in a hokey manner, by a few companies that claim to be socially and environmentally responsible. Jewelry by Love Earth, sold at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, can be scanned for a “chain of custody,” which traces an ornament from the Windexed-shined, velvet-lined display case all the way back to the diamond and gold mines of origin. Icebreaker, a fashion company specializing in woolens, labels each sweater with a “Baacode.” You can enter the code on the Icebreaker website and trace the garment along the supply chain to—you guessed it—the sheep.

One of the reasons why women want to buy fashion from local purveyors is that they can “see” who made their clothes and “trace” how items were produced. This plays into social pressures (and status) associated with “ethical consumption” while feeding the desire to reacquaint our cubicle-drone selves with lost crafts and useful domestic arts, the feminine version of Shop Class as Soulcraft (Home Ec as Soulcraft?). But, if a barcode could let us “see” the steps of industrial production it might usher in a retail revolution, one whose impact goes far beyond the confines of the merely local, nostalgic and handmade: Think factoryspun rather than homespun.

Photograph of factory girls courtsey of the New York Public Library.

Tags: crafting, fashion, Home Ec as Soulcraft, Shop Class as Soulcraft, shopping, sustainable fashion, traceable retail, Wal-Mart

Dana, Susannah: Like many Americans, I watched the “Neda video” yesterday. This is, of course, a horribly shorthand way of saying that I opened a video clip that captures a young Iranian woman dying after being shot. The movie is short. It is “graphic,” if by graphic we mean that we see blood, and the violence that can be done to a body. More subtly, and entirely fascinatingly (in the old, sober sense of the world), it captures the moment a person’s life drains out of her body. I have, in the past, always decided not to watch videos like this (Danny Pearl’s execution, say). This time I changed my mind, and it haunted me all last night.

Why has Neda become a symbol of Iranian freedom? Because we witness the sight of her death. That sight, even at a remove (or perhaps because at a remove), is so difficult to hold in mind that we have to transform it. Ironically, I think, even as many genuinely try to honor the random violence of her death by making it representative of “freedom,” they rob it of meaning. In reducing it to a symbol, it becomes monolithic rather than intimate. Perhaps that’s what you mean, Dana, when you ask whether this is a “snuff” video, and Susannah, when you say it is. Certainly, it's an artifact that turns a single individual’s death into an example. Neda, as many newspapers reported, was, according to her friends and family, not political. She stepped out of the car to get a breath of air. She was a casualty of conflict. What does that mean? Does it mean anything?

As it happens, I was just reading art critic T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death. Near the end, he writes, “I think we hide, necessarily, from an understanding of what is most to be avoided in the sight of death.” Then he diagnoses “the confusion of mind that human beings experience in the presence of a corpse. Different, and largely unconscious, worlds of inference are set in motion, working full speed, colliding with one another. Corpses are (still) persons. They are people we cannot help treating, at one level, as entities with wishes, fears, awareness, sadness, maybe depths of despair." This, it strikes me, is what has happened to Neda; the mystery and horror one feels at watching Neda’s face go still in the YouTube clip have been transformed to a profound identification with her humanity, if not her selfhood.

Photograph of Iranian protesters by Mark Ralston/Getty Images.

Tags: iran, Neda video, snuff movie, youtube

According to the social media analytics company Sysomos, there were 19,235 Twitter users in Iran on Sunday; this in a country of 70 million. Some 93 percent of those accounts were in Tehran. Presumably those users are young, wealthy, and worldly. As Elizabeth Lazar implies in her solid Double X piece on Guatemala, reading the world off Twitter is like peeking into a Connecticut prep school and claiming to have seen America.

I happen to be in Guatemala at the moment, so it’s pretty easy for me to imagine a place in which the vast majority of people live lives untouched by Google or Facebook. But in general it's pretty hard to imagine one’s way into a different social and technological context; far easier to conjure the college kid texting from Tehran than the family of Ahmadinejad supporters who lack indoor plumbing. From here the discussion over the Twitter Revolution, and the perhaps more fervent discussion over the fact that there is no such thing as the Twitter Revolution, looks to have little to do with actual events in Iran. (Add this post to that pile, I suppose.) Yet even those who acknowledge the conversation to be insular defend its existence. Ethan Zuckerman, one of those Harvard Internet “experts” Dahlia was talking about, says that despite Twitter’s anemic presence in Iran, it’s “helping people globally feel solidarity and it's keeping international attention on what's happening. It's giving people a sense of involvement that they otherwise wouldn't have, and I think that's very important.”

But what if that sense of solidarity is built on an incomplete view of the country and a simplistic take on its political economy? And isn't there something childlike—something ever so slightly The Quiet American—about seeking "a sense of involvement" instead of acknowledging that there are limits to what outsiders can accomplish? I’m having trouble seeing the value in an illusory sense of efficacy.

On a different note, nearly every piece I’ve read about Twitter finds room to note how “banal” it is; I’m left wondering to what tweets are being compared. Are people’s water cooler conversations so much more riveting than this? There seems to be a much higher standard for small talk when it's typed rather than spoken.

Tags: iran, twitter

Yes, Dana, you're absolutely right that the Neda video, in which a young Iranian woman is shot and killed during the post-election protests, is a snuff movie. "And the fact that 'Neda' is a young and pretty woman" has absolutely played a part in the YouTube clip's rise to infamy. This isn't to diminish the content of it. It is a horrifying, saddening, frantic look at a woman dying in the street.

But I don't think that's exactly what we're talking about here. We're talking about the something else the video becomes when its focus and attendant narrative take on the qualities of martyr and myth. The video becomes something else altogether, something that, more often than not, is more about us than the subject itself.

We watch the video not purely for political reasons, but also because we are curious. About life, and death, and what happened. And in that, it becomes a form of entertainment. We fetishize it, its story, and its characters. And it's fair to wonder about why we do that, what purpose that serves. The vitriolic comments Dana's post received suggest that some are hell-bent on holding on to one meaning of the story. But it's not that simple. The video itself spawns a collective narrative through which we all speak in myriad, conflicting voices.

No, like a "true" snuff movie, the video was not created for the purpose of entertainment. Although why it was created, at least for now, remains something of a mystery. One man stood over Neda and videotaped her while she died. Somebody else uploaded it to the Internet. Now, we disseminate it. It plays before our eyes, enigmatic, and we imbue it with meaning.

It reminds me a bit of the character of Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks, a dead girl whom everybody fetishized, in death more so than in life.

Photograph of Iranian protester by Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: iran, iran election, youtube