Time’s Mark Halperin goes on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to discuss not the health care issue itself nor the controversial town hall protests that threaten to disrupt debate of the issue but whether the controversial town hall protests that threaten to disrupt debate of the issue are getting too much attention in the mainstream media. Halperin spends his airtime arguing that “the parts of our political media culture that let the discussion of [the disrupted town hall meetings], rather than the discussion of whether the public option is a good idea, are … a national disgrace.” Scarborough, who would seem to have just been berated for his choice of discussion subject by the guest with whom he is discussing it, takes the opportunity to ask whether it would be a national disgrace to cover the shouting-down of a conservative. Halperin says yes, in fact, it would be a disgrace. And so on.

I’m struck by how hard morning-show hosts have to work to avoid actually talking about the subjects they’re purportedly covering. The above is a third-order conversation; obviously, no one wants to talk about the public option because the real news is boring, and talking about the town hall protesters got old, so now we’re driven to talk about whether the coverage of the protesters is crowding out coverage of the boring news we really ought to be discussing. Still, to buy Halperin’s “crowding out” thesis you have to believe that in the absence of these meta conversations the airwaves would be flooded with talk of cost control and risk-adjusted premiums. I think it’s more likely that we’d be talking about, say, the Miley Cyrus pole dance situation and ignoring health care altogether.

Photograph of Joe Scarborough by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images for Meet The Press.

Tags: health care, health care costs, Joe Scarborough, Mark Halperin

There’s something profoundly icky about the breast-feeding baby doll, Bebe Glotón (the name translates to “Glutton Baby”), a Spanish creation that will be marketed internationally next year. But that ickiness has nothing to do with the idea of children holding up fake babies to their nonexistent breasts and pretending to feed them—a practice that no doubt has been going on since there have been mothers, babies, older children, and breasts. No, what’s gross about the Glutton (something tells me the marketing department is working on a different name for the U.S. market) has to do with the transformation of that age-old practice into an expensive and utterly pointless commodity.

Many of the responses to the recently circulated videos of the Glutton in action focus on the “inappropriateness” of such a toy and the fear that it will “sexualize” little girls prematurely, or encourage them to have babies earlier than they otherwise would. The disapproving responses, like Kathie Lee’s on the Today show, include speculation about the slippery slope toward anatomically correct boy and girl dolls that mimic the act that leads to babies in the first place. The counterargument in the doll’s favor holds that breast-feeding is not sexual but a natural act, something to be encouraged, etc. But both sides gloss over the creepiest thing about Bebe Glotón: the anatomically incorrect and thoroughly unnatural accessory she’s sold with. Before suckling her plastic progeny, the child-mom must don a “nursing halter top” with flower appliqués where the nipples should be, against which the doll makes slurping sounds, then cries until you burp her (watch the whole process, from halter-donning to impressively loud belch, in this demonstration video).

This bra-like garment, with its coy metaphorical areolae, strikes me as by far the most perverse feature of this product. Little children, both girls and boys, already come with built-in symbols at the spot where their nipples should be. THEY’RE CALLED NIPPLES. If your child wants to mimic the act of breast-feeding, a lifted shirt and a regular doll (or a stuffed lion, a wooden spoon, or whatever happens to be handy) will do the trick nicely. One of the great advantages of breast-feeding, often trumpeted by its champions, is that unlike bottle-feeding, it’s free (if you don’t count the opportunity cost of missed work time, etc.). Why pay 44 euros (around $55) so that your kid can pretend to save money—and pretend, against all evidence, that human milk is expressed through appliquéd daisies?

Though the Glutton is a European-made doll, her conceptual roots seem deeply American. There’s the bizarre confluence of prurience and Puritanism suggested by that halter top and the depressing assumption that, by buying devices that cost more money and make more noise, we’re somehow augmenting our children's imaginations. The lesson Bebé Glotón really teaches young girls is one that the baby-gear industry would be all too happy to have them internalize as they grow up: In order to bring up your kid right, you need to buy lots and lots of crap.

Image is a still taken from a promotional video of Bebé Glotón.

Tags: Bebé Glotón doll, breast-feeding, Glutton baby doll

My kids only use the computer to check for Red Sox scores. And even then, in the morning they'd much rather read the newspaper. (A shred of hope for the good old dead-tree version of the regional news that Michael Sokolove mourned this weekend in the NYT.) So in our house, Nina, I'm the early-morning online offender. A year or two ago, I could never remember to charge my cell phone. Now I often turn on my BlackBerry before the kids leave for school. And yes, I do think offense is the right word for this, because it takes me out of my family's present, making me answer with a long "ummmm" questions about where a stray hat or library book is.

But here's the thing: I turn my BlackBerry on early, and check it at night, because my e-mail account is such a hodgepodge of the personal and professional. It's how I communicate with my colleagues, yes, but before 8:30 a.m., I check it to make sure our carpool is running smoothly or my kids' babysitter knows what time soccer practice starts after school. Texting is a lot less intrusive than the phone, especially during those hours on either end of the day when I'm not ready to talk to anyone I'm not related to. So I stick to it, as do most of the other moms I do daily kid-management business with. This, of course, is the eternal conundrum of our plugged-in world: Are we better off for our new-fangled devices, or do they just generate more and more messages? If we weren't online, we'd have less fluid arrangements. But we'd also do less arranging. Time-wise, it's either a wash or a loss, I think.

Photograph of a BlackBerry by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

Tags: blackberry, family, internet, morning

I am not a first-thing-in-the-morning person. The minutes—OK, sometimes hours—between the moment my alarm clock goes off and the time my feet hit the floor are among the most unbearable of my day. Back when I clocked in at an office, the thought of having to shamefacedly skulk past my boss's door was usually enough to propel me out bed. But now that I'm a freelancer who sets her own schedule, what's to keep me from hitting the snooze button till 11 a.m.? My iPhone, that's what.

The New York Times reports today on how early morning rituals are being changed by technology, describing parents who crack open laptops at the breakfast table and kids who start texting friends before bothering to wipe away their eye crusties. Analysts explain how online and wireless traffic patterns are spiking in the hours between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.

I'm the first to admit I have a bad case of Internet creep: My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner. But in the morning, checking my Twitter and Facebook feeds or reading an article or two from the Times helps jog my brain just enough to face my day. And on any given morning, at least three of my friends have already posted updates about how cranky they are about having had to get up, which always makes me feel better: Morning misery loves company.

Are you a morning texter/tweeter/e-mail checker? Does the habit fill you with shame and your family with rage? Or is it a necessary beacon in the morning fog?

Photograph by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: family, internet, morning

I don’t which infuriated me more: Bob Herbert’s sanctimonious Sunday column describing American society as “saturated with misogyny,” or the unusually thoughtless, “right-on” commentary that followed it. Herbert’s thesis echoes the drumbeat of self-pity that has been coming out of paleo-feminist groups and women’s studies departments for decades: America, in their view, is a country where “barbaric treatment of women has come to be more accepted,” where we are all so inured to the victimization of the female half of the population that we don’t even notice it anymore. Presumably because he is unable to prove this ludicrous proposition in any other way, Herbert uses the case of a single, certifiably insane mass-murderer to argue that all of American culture is anti-woman. The implication: All American men are, deep down, in sympathy with this crazed killer, thanks to our mass media that denigrates women, etc.

What on earth is he talking about? Having lived in several allegedly more progressive European countries, and having visited many far less female-friendly parts of the world, I can testify that American society is, at this point in history, one of the least misogynist on earth, one of the few in which real female achievement is possible, and perhaps the only one where women can and do succeed on a large scale. We are now on our third female Secretary of State; in Afghanistan, three women running for parliament have been chased out of their houses in the past few weeks. We consider it normal for women with children to work; at the school my children attended in Germany, this was considered borderline socially unacceptable. The majority of American university students are now women; in Saudi Arabia, women can’t even leave the house without a male relative.

Maybe it’s unfair to compare the U.S. to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or even Germany, but if we are talking about “barbaric treatment of women” then I think it’s important that we all understand what the word “barbaric” really means. As for all the respondents who wrote in to Herbert thanking him for his profound comments, I recommend that all of them pay a visit to Iran, where women are fighting—and dying—for the kinds of basic rights that American women achieved decades ago: the rights to testify in court, to be treated equally under the law, to inherit property, to make their own decisions about marriage and divorce. American society is far from perfect, in this respect as in many others, but if we can’t recognize how far we have come then it won’t be possible to assess, with any degree of realism, how far we have to go.

Photograph courtesy of Stockbyte/Getty Images.

Tags: bob herbert, iran, new york times, women's rights

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat writes a defense of Judd Apatow’s Funny People as a kind of “realistic morality play,” claiming Apatow for the social conservatives. I too loved Funny People, but precisely because its morality was so limited. Most of his other movies involve a move toward redemption. You get a girl pregnant, you step up and do the right thing. You’re stuck in an extended childhood, you find a good woman and marry her. Funny People involves an extended flirtation with redemption. Adam Sandler’s character almost finds love, almost becomes a family man, almost becomes ennobled by suffering.

But then Apatow rejects all those options. The whole storyline is an extended tease of both his conservative defenders and of Hollywood studio heads, who must have been sweating when they watched the last half. In the end he doesn’t die with dignity, get his girl, or adopt a child. He decides to hang out with his buddy, perfecting dick jokes.

This is not especially “moral,” unless one’s sense of morality involves a very limited possibility of change. Douthat writes that in this movie, “doing the wrong things for too long has significant consequences.” But that’s not really true either. By the end it seems obvious that Sandler’s character, like Apatow himself, never really wanted to live that suburban idyll. Yes, this makes the movie insular, self-referential, and a little cold-blooded. But it seems perfectly true to the Apatow worldview.

Publicity still of Judd Apatow's Funny People courtesty of Universal Pictures.

Tags: Funny People, ross douthat and funny people