Maybe Will Blythe had the best two sentences in yesterday's Book Review, Jess, but in Saturday's New York Times, I grudgingly admit, Tom Wolfe took the cake. To prepare us all for tonight's 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing—too bad the networks won't be running the original footage, since, as Sam pointed out, NASA taped over it—Wolfe wrote a little obituary for the space program. The moon landing, Wolfe argues, was both NASA's moment of triumph and "a real knee in the groin for NASA."

I've never been one of Wolfe's idolators—it's hard to appreciate the insane brilliance of writing so saturated with self-satisfaction. And I can't even talk about the white suit. But Wolfe was there in late sixties America—chronicling Radical Chic and all that—and I wasn't. So I read on.

What Wolfe's brief history of the Space Race really drives home is what a dude's race it was. The piece made me wonder whether, if there had been more women in charge in 1969, the moon would have become such a holy grail. I'm inclined to think not; I feel like a female president or congressional leadership would have found other things to pursue with our time and money, as Wolfe tells us the men in charge at the time did—just as soon as they touched that elusive pie in the sky (which was, incidentally, the classical emblem of virginity).     

But the end of Wolfe's eulogy also left me questioning whether the space program (which actually isn't dead—ETA Mars: 2030) is still just game for boys and their toys. I continue to think of affordable health care, reproductive rights, and finding new ways of sustaining ourselves on this planet as way higher priorities, but the ideas of the late NASA scientist Wernher von Braun, which Wolfe paraphrases (always dangerous), gave me pause:

"Here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the Sun. The Sun itself is a star that ... will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars ... We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of."

Is it just me, or does von Braun's message have an almost maternal ring to it? With all of the drilling and burning and warming we do on Earth, maybe we should put more resources into finding an alternate home for our children's children.  Or is this just good ole' Tom once again flaunting his powers of manipulation?

Photograph of the lunar landing by NASA/Getty Images.

Tags: Apollo 11 moon landing, Tom Wolfe

The world's oldest man, 113-year-old Brit Henry Allingham, died on Saturday, which prompted the British media to do a lot of thumb-sucking about old people. Normally, I'm annoyed by this kind of opportunistic opinioneering, but one sublime radio segment redeemed the whole enterprise: The Sunday morning Radio 4 show Broadcasting House included a amazing interview with 103-year-old Hetty Bower and 89-year-old Alison Selford. I encourage everyone to check it out. (You can download the whole show or listen at the show page; the segment begins at 21:56 and ends at 29:43.)

They're both old lefties—Hetty (seen here with Bianca Jagger at a 2008 anti-war protest) reminisced about general strikes, general elections, and her suffragette sister; and Alison was once the TV critic for the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker. They're feisty and smart and still in possession of their mental facilities.

Still, I was reminded of last week's conversation about the Downeses' assisted suicide when the interviewer asked about living without their husbands after long marriages (Alison's lasted more than 50 years and Hetty's almost 70). Hetty told Paddy O'Connell: "I'd much rather have gone when he went, because my vision had already started deteriorating, and Reg used to read to me. We enjoyed the same kind of book, and [I remember] his reading with his arm around me, holding the book, because I could no longer see. That didn't seem to matter then, because his eyes were my eyes."

When O'Connell asked, "Is old age like this a gift?" Hetty answered quickly, "No, I wish I had died when Reg died ... I can't say living since then has been anywhere near as full and real or happy. Of course it hasn't been. I just exist from day to day now."

Photography of Henry Allingham by Geoff Caddick/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: assisted suicide, old age, survivors

Willa, maybe I'm just blinded by my increasingly debilitating crush on Joseph Gordon-Levitt (now that I've started following his smart and witty Twitter feed, it's reached the point where I'm considering trying to wangle an introduction), but I honestly didn't experience (500) Days of Summer as the misogynistic bait-and-switch you describe. To me, the movie's portrait of romantic love as a one-way delusion was purposely and wistfully tongue-in-cheek; the whole film is a "critique of the fact that Tom is totally oblivious to Summer’s inner life" (even if, thanks largely to JGL's winning performance, that critique is an affectionate one). And unlike the vaguely man-shaped cutouts in He's Just Not That Into You, Tom pays a heavy price for his inability to apprehend Summer's otherness: He loses her, painfully, to someone else.

Though the movie is sympathetic to its starry-eyed hero, the audience is also meant to cringe as Tom repeatedly misinterprets Summer's explicit cues that, shared iPod playlists or no, she's just not that into him. Deschanel's character, Summer, may have been been underwritten at times (I would have loved, for example, a scene where she and Tom hashed out their difference of opinion on The Graduate), but I certainly never saw her as cruel or stupid. Her inscrutability is the inscrutability of the beloved to the lover—a timeworn trope, maybe, but one that cuts both ways, gender-wise.

Photograph of Joseph Gordon-Levitt by Eric Jamison/Getty Images for CineVegas.

Tags: (500) Days of Summer, He's Just Not That Into You, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, romantic comedies, Zooey Deschanel

A while ago, we asked you to tell us about your awkward and wrong Internet interactions. Have you been the pre-date over-Googler? The over-aggressive workplace Facebook friender? We got some great responses from you, including this humorous story of texting gone awry from Double X reader Kelly Seal. But surely you, our super tech-savvy audience, have more tales to tell. So, for this installment of awkward and wrong, we want to hear specifically about workplace goofs. The reply-all from hell. The BCC that led to a big hot mess. The Twitter update about your insufferable cubicle mate...who is, as it turns out, following you on Twitter. Send us your stories, and—with your permission, of course—we’ll run our favorite here on the site.

Tags: awkward and wrong, internet

In his review of Robert Cohen's new book Amateur Barbarians, New York Times book reviewer Will Blythe cleverly comments on the genre of the midlife crisis novel, a category with "a thickening waist."

This has to be the best couple of sentences in the entirety of yesterday's book review section:

If American life now offers as many possibilities as a supermarket, then by a certain age a fellow must live with the unsettling notion that for all of his satisfactions, he might have missed something nice on Aisle 12. If the holy grail of so-called chick lit is relationship and marriage, the reward promised the protagonist of the male midlife crisis novel is escape from same, along with belated entry into the dazzling, new country of self-fulfillment. Rabbit, run!

Ultimately the review of Amateur Barbarians is middling (Blythe praises Cohen's ear for dialogue and says he does not allow the genre to "bully" the characters), but I appreciate the fact that for once, the generic male midlife crisis is lumped in with the too-often reviled formula of chick lit.

Tags: amateur barbarians, new york times book review, robert cohen, will blythe

Most everyone who bought a movie ticket this weekend saw Harry Potter, but I want to talk (500) Days of Summer, the new quirky romantic comedy starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel that Dana reviewed on Thursday. She compared it to bad champagne: not as good as the good stuff, but better than He's Just Not That Into You. (500) Days wants desperately to be a smarter rom-com, and the effort, so rare, is commendable. But ultimately, (500) Days, like HJNTIY, is merely posing as being insightful about relationships. It's just a bunch of pap—and even worse, pap for women that portrays them as cruel or stupid or both.

Both films dispense this pseudo-wisdom, though only one does so in tagline form. “He’s just not that into you,” preaches the message that, when it comes to men, a woman should not delude herself into thinking she’s special. It’s not that he has to go to a funeral or his cell phone is broken or he’s an emotional basket case: If he doesn't call, he doesn't like you. The movie follows various woman behaving foolishly because they do not “get” this and keep imagining they are the one person in the world a dude will change for. (Jennifer Aniston will get Ben Affleck to marry her; Ginnifer Goodwin will get Justin Long to like her; Jennifer Connelly will keep her husband from smoking/cheating.) Except that at the end of the movie, guess what? The dudes change. Turns out he really is that into you, he just didn’t know it yet. The lesson of this movie is basically, “never give up on your douchebag, even though we just spent the first two hours of this film telling you that’s exactly what you should do.” Oops.

The message of (500) Days is that a person can idealize love so completely, he has no idea who he’s in love with. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tom falls head over heels for Summer because she likes The Smiths, sings mean karoke, and is as cool and cute as Zooey Deschanel. He’s so smitten, he fails to notice that maybe she’s not.

This set-up could be rich territory for a romantic comedy (about reciprocity, expectations, power, kindness), but as rendered in (500) Days, it just results in a horribly drawn female character, because the filmmaker’s sympathy is so fully with Tom (and the audience’s as well—JGL is, as Dana says, a stone fox and a movie star to boot). There’s no critique of the fact that Tom is totally oblivious to Summer’s inner life, emotions, issues. He’s sweet! He’s in love! How could she not love him back? She really, really should! The fact that she doesn’t love him back (plus a late developing, implausible plot twist) makes her seem unknowable and heartless, even though Tom has never tried to know her—he’s been too busy being in love with her. Even worse, when the film ends, Tom is doing exactly like he always did: falling in love with a new girl because she likes something he likes. He hasn’t changed at all. He’s going to idealize this chick too; the only difference, we’re manipulated to hope, is that this woman will love him blindly back. They’ll be happy in delusionland together, and Tom will never have to learn to be clear-eyed while in love—because, really, that’s just not romantic. In (500) Days' defense, He’s Just Not That Into You had paper thin chicks and paper thin dudes. (500) Days only has the former. Still, that's not quite good enough.

Photograph of Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer courtesy of Fox Searchlight.

Tags: (500) Days of Summer, He's Just Not That Into You, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, movies, romantic comedies, Zooey Deschanel

Francis Kissling has an article in Salon today discussing the strategies of the "new pro-lifers." These men and women (though they're mostly men) have shifted the focus away from making abortion illegal. Their movement seeks to make bearing and raising children easier, and reducing abortion that way. It almost sounds reasonable to pro-choice Kissling, except for one thing: Making bearing children "easier" doesn't acknowledge how gestation can change a woman's life. According to Kissling, the new pro-lifers barely acknowledge the difficulties of childbirth:

It denies the reality that even in modern Western culture, in the high-tech U.S., every woman who agrees to be pregnant still risks dying if the pregnancy goes awry. But the new anti-abortionists want to use their rosy view of pregnancy as the frame for public policy, and that is where they become indistinguishable from the old anti-abortion movement. For both groups, women are passive participants in gestation. They are the Tupperware containers in which children grow. "Left alone," anti-abortionists say, "the fetus will develop and be born into the world." Left alone? The development of the fetus into a baby is not a mere matter of geography. It is governed by what philosopher Maggie Little of Georgetown University describes as the "actions and resources of an autonomous agent." That includes the woman's "blood, hormones, her energy, all resources that could be going to other of her bodily projects."

What's more, many of the new pro-lifers don't support efforts to bring contraception to women who don't have access to it. Though it feels like both sides in the abortion battle are waging wars of attrition at this point, the issue is likely to come back in a big way in the next few months as the administration's new health plan is debated. White House budget director Peter Orszag told the New York Times that he couldn't say whether tax dollars would fund abortion under the new plan. "I am not prepared to say explicitly that right now. It’s obviously a controversial issue, and it’s one of the questions that is playing out in this debate," Orszag said.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: abortion, francis kissling, health care, peter orszag