Last night, on the latest episode of The Bachelorette, the inevitable happened: One of the contestants—lovelorn, earnest, ready-to-drop-on-one-knee Ed—was given an opportunity to have sex with a girl he is “crazy about” in a hotel room, tricked out with roses, body oil, and ... a crew, cameras, and millions watching at home. He failed to get hard. How has this not happened before?

In this instance, erectile dysfunction (what a lame joke that the guy’s name is Ed), seems to be an indication of a higher brain function than is typical of Bachelorette contestants. As Ed said, in classically opaque, euphemistic Bachelor-speak, “I’m having a hard time adjusting to everything. There are too many external things going on right now that are really affecting the way that I’m behaving.” The kind of guy who doesn’t like his foreplay on camera is not necessarily a dud, but Ed’s going have to field questions about his skittish penis for the rest of his 15 minutes nonetheless. At least the Bachelorette, Jillian, seemed to understand these were unusually stressful circumstances and opted to keep Ed around (making him one of the final two suitors) despite the fact that he could not “show her” how much he cared about her.

Longtime watchers of the series know that the most twisted part of any season usually comes when it’s time for the overnight dates. By this point, the contestants have been culled down to three or four, and it’s sexy time. No really, it’s time to have sex. The Bachelor or Bachelorette spends all day with one contestant, and then, after a romantic dinner, invites them to sleep over. What goes on in the room well ... we can only guess. After some smooching, the camera always fades away, leaving the two contestants in a cinch, usually on a bed covered in petals.

On the one hand, the shagging that likely occurs behind closed doors is appropriate. Sex is an important thing to have done with a person you are conceivably about to marry. On the other, it makes very stark what is super creepy about the show. One dude, or one chick, bangs four people, one night after the other, to see which one he/she loves the most. Those four people, who seem to have genuine feelings for the bachelor/bachelorette, know that the object of their affection is getting nookie from the competition. Do they decide to be the one who says, “Eh, all I know for sure is you could dump me on national TV tomorrow, so maybe, let’s wait until the cameras are gone for good?” Are you kidding? That’s not how you win this contest. Unless Ed gets the girl next week.

Tags: erectile dysfunction, Reality TV, sex, The Bachelorette

KJ, your fury over the New York Times Magazine essay by the high school girl slumming it as an IHOP waitress seems to have hit a nerve: Our commenters tend to agree with you that she’s a spoiled brat, the emblem of an entitled generation who won’t get their hands dirty. I read the essay entirely differently. To me, it was a humble admission from a young girl stuck in a generation of kids who feel like they’ll never get a decent job, or a break. A summer job is a sign of future promise. Making 35 calls and getting no answer is depressing. So she tries something else, and then has to come to terms with the fact that she has no saleable skills. It’s a bummer to realize at 18 that all this nice learning you’ve done amounts to nothing if you can’t hold a glass straight.

Tags: IHOP girl, New York Times lives essay waitress

I prefer Sotomayor’s effort to put her wise Latina point in context to the talking points the Obama administration previously came up with. To be sure, she's not clearing up the internal contradiction between the unobjectionable idea that “life experiences matter” and her hope that being a wise Latina would lead “more often than not” to “better conclusions.” And in his exchange with Sotomayor this afternoon, Sen. Kyl gave her speech a fair and more complex reading than she’s allowing for. But Sotomayor did explain this morning that she gave that speech “most often to groups of women lawyers or most particularly young Latino lawyers and students. As my speech made clear ... I was trying to inspire them to believe that their life experiences would enrich the legal system.” In response to Kyl, she added that she often told her listeners at the end of the speech, “I hope someday you’re sitting on the bench with me.”

In an insightful piece for Slate, Monica Youn pointed out that black and Hispanic and Asian heavyweights often get tangled up in identity politics because as “minority role models,” they “are regularly asked to put on the public record—at lunches, award ceremonies, community events—lengthy statements of their views on America's most explosive topic: race.” White men aren’t asked to explain how being white and male affects them as judges or leaders, so there’s no rope to hang them with. What do you think: Is this take-two from Sotomayor convincing or no?

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court, wise latina speech

A simple but telling little study from the University of Brussels challenges the idea that college kids are gobs of clay passively waiting to be molded by their professors. In general, students of social science are more likely to graduate college as self-defined leftists, while law and economics graduates tilt the other way. To find out why, sociologists gave various cohorts of university students surveys when they entered their schools and when they graduated. They found that while socialization—that is, time with their presumably Marxist professors and fellow students—may have had some effect, the effect of selection was much stronger. Left-leaning students were selecting into disciplines like sociology, right-leaning into economics. Both moved only very slightly to the left during their time as students.

The acknowledgement that 18-year-olds already have robust opinion-making capacities provides an obvious challenge to decades of conservative hysteria over radicals running our universities. But any finding of this nature also challenges liberal notions of the transformative power of education. Data on, say, the provision of comprehensive sex education to high schoolers and its resultant effect on behavior are pretty uninspiring, as are data on abstinence-only programs. Culture wars seem to thrive on blank slatism.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: college, generation y

Emily, I agree that even though Sonia Sotomayor declared early on her first day of questioning that "humans aren't robots," she's kind of acting like one. She speaks thoughtfully, but it looks like that's because she decided a long time ago what she was going to say. Her measured responses to her critics' questions remind me of the "witnesses" in high school mock trials. The teenage attorneys (and I know, because I was one) aren't bound by rules about not feeding answers to their witnesses, so feed they do. They type detailed lists of questions and their required answers, coach their witnesses on tone of voice and demeanor, and explain how the opposing attorneys will try to trap them during cross-examination. Sotomayor, who has been rehearsing extensively with White House staffers during the past few weeks, looks and sounds like those mock witnesses this morning. She knew what she would be asked, and she had a scripted, unrevealing response at the ready. The prize goes to the senator who somehow jogs her out of this.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

I got a bunch of responses to my call for examples of parent-child envy across gender lines, from mother to son and father to daughter. An on-point example: Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (or Meryl Streep in the remake). Jeff Ryan writes in that these mothers "desparately, basely, (Clintonishly?) want their progeny's political power for their own." Other ideas that bring in more varieties of dysfunction: Medea (she kills her children to get revenge on her husband). The mother in Ordinary People (she is weirdly tied up with her teenage son, but isn't it more about compensating for the problems in her marriage than about feeling competitive?). Psycho (deeply screwed up mother-son connection in every way). A great father-son example, from another reader, Robert: Searching for Bobby Fischer, the line where the father says that his 8-year-old prodigy son is now better at chess than he himself has been at anything in his whole life.

And a personal example of father-daughter envy, from a third reader, Albert: "My five-year-old little girl comes in from her summer camp and we're talking. All of a sudden, I'm an out of touch old man. She rolls her eyes and flicks her head and is running down a path of social interaction that is second nature to girls and women. I'm the amateur." Not second nature to many of us. But I can see him standing by, slightly awestruck.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: manchurian candidate, medea, ordinary people, parental envy, psycho, searching for bobby fischer

I’m feeling deflated this morning. For many decades, the legal academy (and to some degree, even the rest of the universe) has been debating the degree to which law is a scientific abstraction—a computer you crank up that spits out the right answer—and the degree to which it is malleable, subjective: a piece of clay that judges necessarily shape. At times, legal realism, as the second position is called, has gone too far. But mostly it’s a hugely welcome breath of fresh air, a way of articulating what everyone intuitively understands. Judges are not robots! They are not, in fact, umpires who just call balls and strikes, to give in to John Roberts’ now all-pervasive sports metaphor, because sometimes they have to determine the size and all the other parameters of the strike zone.

But now we have Sonia Sotomayor going along with and indeed promoting a view of the law as all about Input automatically dictating Output. As she keeps putting it, in this or some other variation, “I’m a judge who believes the facts drive the law. By drive the law, I mean, determines how the law will apply in that individual case.” Sometimes, it is true that the facts of a case matter for interpreting a statute or a prior court ruling. But often, there is play in the joints, room for disagreement, reason that smart and yes, even wise judges reach different conclusions. Sotomayor’s formulation ignores all of that reality. It frames cases as marching inexorably to one right answer. It’s the Dragnet version of juding: “Just the facts and the law, ma’am.”

I know, I know: Sotomayor is repeating this mantra to distance herself from all her past statements about how life experience and background do matter to the work of judging. Those statements are complicated and subtle. They might lead her down tricky paths today. And so into the attic of the past they go. Sen. Jeff Sessions rightly points out to Sotomayor, "Your philosophy is much more likely to reach full flower if you sit on the high court than on the lower court, where you are subject to review." Sotomayor is giving us her version of Roberts’ simplistic, misleading umpire metaphor: A meaningless safety zone to retreat to whenever a question could take her anywhere interesting. I guess this is what it takes to become a Supreme Court justice. But no wonder my colleagues are sending depressed notes about how Obama might as well nominate a computer next.

Photograph of Sonia Sotomayor by Alex Wong/Staff/Getty Images.

Tags: dragnet, legal realism, Sotomayor

Susannah Jacob meant to write a humorous account of her failures as an IHOP waitress. Instead, she offered yet more fodder for our “entitled generation” conversation, and revealed herself, intentionally or not, as being unable—or unwilling—to succeed at one of today’s most elusive goals: an actual, if unglamorous, job.

Jacobs lives in an affluent Dallas suburb. She’s heading to college in the fall. She doesn’t, by her own admission, “need the paycheck.” And it’s clear that she thinks it’s funny that someone like her can’t succeed at a job that her trainer, Suzanne, an immigrant ex-con, a former drug addict, and a multiple divorcee, is not only good at, but takes pride in. This young scion of the upper middle class just can’t do it. “Waiting on tables, it seemed, violated my very constitution.”

If you’re not wincing enough already, the rest of the essay—intended as a send-up of her failures (putting powdered sugar on hamburgers, breaking things, and splashing hot coffee)—stands out mostly for the throw-away descriptions of those she’s condescending to work with and wait on. A tattooed family “even manage[s] somehow to smell British,” a baby unlucky enough to have a family who eats at a major chain “slouch[es] on his mother’s lap.”

There’s no dramatic turn-around; no Shop Class as Soulcraft realization that Suzanne the self-professed “damn good waitress” has a valuable, un-outsource-able skill set, no admission that any job worth doing is worth doing well. Instead, drinks are spilled, pancakes are ruined, and the writer ... quits. And however relieved she thinks her mid-shift departure made her manager, it left this reader, a parent and a veteran of plenty of service jobs, fuming.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: lives essays

In a new twist to the subplot that abortion has become in Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing, it seems that the woman who was arrested for shouting down a Democratic senator during Monday's proceedings was "Roe" herself. Or, more accurately, Norma McCorvey, the woman whose abortion-rights lawsuit in the '70s led to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade. After becoming the face of the fight for abortion rights, McCorvey later reversed her stance and began campaigning against abortion. She apparently took that campaign back to the Supreme Court (sort of) on Monday. The Washington Post is reporting that Capitol police arrested McCorvey after she shouted at Sotomayor on her way out of the chamber. "You're wrong about abortion, Sotomayor!" she yelled. Her voice broke a little but she repeated "You're wrong!" before she rushed out of the room.

Even before we knew who she was, McCorvey's outburst felt different than the ones that preceded it. The two men who had already been dragged out of the chambers for similar infractions were very calculated in their actions—they stood up straight, they shouted loudly, but they responded rather amiably to the grip of police officers on their arms. They were there to get arrested. But McCorvey, who seemed to want to say something but also to want to get out the door, was there to deliver a message.

Photograph of Norman McCorvey by Travis Lindquist/Getty Images.

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court