Kim, I disagree about the worthiness of Lord of the Flies. “Anticlimactic ending”? Surely you’re not talking about (SPOILER ALERT for anyone whose middle school curriculum somehow failed to include this book) the death of Piggy? Reading that scene in seventh grade was the first time I remember being truly moved by literature. It was during silent reading, and Miss Newman, our English teacher, had put on the Enya CD that was our silent reading soundtrack. When I reached that moment, I felt my face get hot and red. I was frantic. I looked around the room and locked eyes with Miss Newman, who walked over, crouched beside my desk, and mouthed “Piggy?” More than a few times, I’ve bonded with others (Miss Newman included) over how hard that death hit us.

I hardly think a book so moving for readers of a particular age, and with themes that resurface so consistently, should be yanked from syllabi—whether because the tribal chanting seemed excessive to you, Kim, or because of author William Golding’s sexual history. This is not to say that Golding’s behavior is irrelevant. But should teachers like Miss Newman mention it when they teach the book to preteens? Personally, I hope that teachers do include Golding’s history—even the sexy parts—in their classroom discussions. Students should learn to see authors (and artists, and directors) as flawed, complex people whose own narratives shape the work they produce. What better way to inspire them to write what they know, a trope that I think works wonders, than to show the way that other authors have done the same? And as interested as I am in what all of us think about whether Golding’s sexual past tars his writing, I’m far more eager to hear what a room full of 7th graders thinks.

Tags: books, lord of the flies, Rape

As Frank Rich pointed out in the Sunday New York Times, this season of Mad Men has a new tagline—no longer "Where the truth lies," but rather, "The World's Gone Mad." Things seem relatively normal in the early 1963 moment with which the season begins—though by year's end, we know that history alone, not to speak of the tangled lives of Mad Men's ensemble cast, will make a sense of cultural and political vertigo inevitable.

And, through all this, Don Draper is trying to reclaim his place as the ever stable ubermensch—not just a dashing salesman, and the kind of guy spoken about in hushed whispers by his younger colleagues ("Baltimore? With Don Draper?"), but a good father and a good husband. I rather like his brand of parenting—he usually backs up wife Betty when the kids come 'a-whining about various acts of discipline, and his one-liner about daughter Sally's status as a dependent seemed fresh out of the 21st century daddy playbook. But as a husband, he's been atrocious—the missing piece of a man otherwise crying out for idolization.

Actor Jon Hamm, who plays Draper, has suggested that Don will start to atone for his wayward homemaking in this season. And indeed, the episode opens with a birth scene, showing the broken home(s) into which he was born. Don seems distinctly bothered by this imperfect genesis, and making a silent pledge to be "good at this," as Betty notes shortly thereafter.

So why is Don still cheating on Betty? And with such an obviously idiotic young, blond stewardess? The group of friends with whom I watched the premiere noted that Don's banter with this vaguely southern belle was distinctly stupid compared with his usually zippy seduction protocol. And that Don's dalliances from seasons past (bohemian Midge of the West Village, staid Rachel of Menken's department store, the mysterious Californian heiress, and brash Bobby of the entertainment scene) have been brunettes—and spitfires in their own right. Our theory: Don couldn't help being emotionally invested in women who were his intellectual equals, or close, and fun in bed to boot.

But if we take it as an icky matter of 1960s-era fact that men will cheat on their wives, isn't Don doing his best by picking the least plausible (true) love interest around? It's cold logic, but that's the kind of man Don is.

Photograph of Jon Hamm as Don Draper copyright 2009 American Movie Classics Company LLC. All rights reserved.

Tags: cheating, DOn Draper, mad men, marriage and commitment, Television

I was raised to fear rape. Not by my mom, but by my teachers, my pastors, and advice columns in teen magazines. As a high schooler, I was certain that when I left the safety of the suburbs for the wilderness of a big state school, I would be surrounded by serial killers, rapists, or at least predatory frat boys. But when I actually arrived on campus at the University of Oklahoma, I discovered neither legions of threatening men nor groups of cowering women. In fact, my girlfriends and I had been educated and empowered to within an inch of our lives. We took our drinks with us to the bathroom, but we didn't take trash from guys. We knew that no meant no, you never blame the victim, and there's no such thing as asking for it.  And we knew the guys knew, too. William Golding's contemporaries may have had good reason to fear the men around them, but not us. SafeWalk was there if anyone was afraid to walk home at night, but we weren't.

After four years of feeling very, very safe in an environment that is supposed to be festering with sexual violence, I was startled by this video about "rape culture." The filmmakers seem to believe that women are routinely victimized by men and most people are pretty okay with that. The Chicago teens who put together the video explain that during the course of their research, it "was made clear to us how common rape is" and "we finally came to the conclusion that everything was connected under a bigger concept called rape culture," which includes everything from society's attitudes to its advertising.

While I understand that assaults happen, I was surprised by the assertion that we live in a rape culture. My own experience suggests that we live in an anything-but-rape culture, where some men are more likely to fret about their flirtatiousness being perceived as harassment than they are to actually flirt. But are these the impressions of a sheltered young woman from the South, the product of a specific social milieu that most women wouldn't recognize? What do you think, DoubleXers? Do we live in a rape culture, an overly-politically-correct culture, or some contradictory combination of the two? And if we don't live in the kind of culture we want to live in, what can we do about it?

Photograph is a screenshot from the "Hidden Culture" video.

Tags: Rape, sexual assault, sexual politics

There are times when I think we should just embrace the mommy wars and stage actual wrestling matches—celebrity smackdowns with XXtreme Moms. This one week is one such moment. On one side, all the way from Tunisia, we have our latest entry into Mad Momdom. She is so MOM we don't even have a name for her yet, as she is pregnant with 12 babies—Dodecamom? Faced with this fact, she and her husband express only ... gratitude. "Our joy increased with the growing number," her husband told the Sun. On the other side, we have the slew of American moms who can feel utterly overwhelmed by just one child, so overwhelmed that by 4 p.m. they just have to pop the cork and find themselves soused before dinner—but not so soused that they can't blog about it. These Cocktail Moms, as they're known, are showing their full rage this week as one of them has broken ranks and gone sober. Whose side are you on—Dodecamom, or the Cocktail Moms?

Photograph by Getty Images.

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The Los Angeles Times has a story about yet another study raising questions about the efficacy of mammograms. As Charles Krauthammer noted in his recent column on the health care debate, Obama is pushing the idea that prevention and early detection will save us billions. But the mass testing of people for all sorts of diseases racks up enormous costs—not just because of the testing, but because of the treatment of symptoms and signs that turn out to be meaningless, and because of the imperative to "cure" diseases that may never have progressed. (The PSA test for prostate cancer is one such example.) The LAT article notes that the new theory of breast cancer is that many cancers found by the X-rays would actually just sit there minding their own business, and some would actually disapear on their own. These constitute a whopping one-third of breast cancers, according to a British Medical Journal study. (DoubleXers, how widely known is it that some breast cancers cure themselves? I would say not known at all.)

The problem is that medicine cannot distinquish the deadly ones from the harmless ones, so almost all women found to have breast cancer get some combination of surgery, radiation, and chemo. The study concludes that for every woman whose deadly breast cancer was cured, 10 women with non-progressive disease endure this awful treatment. To me, one of the most notable parts of the article is that in Europe, mammagrams start at 50 and are recommended every two or three years. In the United States, women are told to get one annually starting at 40. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary radiation, which surely must carry its own risk, which the piece does not address. Following the European guidelines, I would have had only one mammogram in my life, instead of the 8-10 I've had—and practically every time I go, the technician has had to redo one side or another for technical reasons, so I'm being double-dosed. Obviously we need to put a lot more money into research into distinguishing diseases we need to treat from those we don't. In the meantime, we could find some of that research money by adopting the European mammogram schedule (and can't you just hear the radiologists screaming about that?).

Photograph of mammography image by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images.

A guest post from Slate intern Kim Gittleson:

Should what we learn about an author’s personal life change the way we view his or her work? That’s the eternal question that’s sprung up again in the wake of the revelation that William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, tried to rape a 15-year-old girl, Dora, when he was 18. Biographer John Carey stumbled upon Golding’s admission in an unpublished memoir that Golding wrote for his wife. Golding writes that he went on a walk with the unfortunate Dora after returning from Oxford and “felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth.” Although Sigmund Freud might have agreed with Golding, it turns out Dora was anything but itching for an affair: The two ended up “wrestling like enemies” before she eventually escaped.

These admissions, as well as the plethora of manipulative sexual dealings that Carey goes on to describe in his biography, William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, are shocking and nauseating. But do they change anything? Did anyone after reading Lord of the Flies really believe that Golding was a stand-up guy who really understood the female psyche?

Personally, when I read the book in fourth grade, I was horrified that my teacher even thrust the material on us. A group of pig-headed boys trapped on an island in an implausible 1950s-era Lost scenario don’t want to work, try to one-up one another in increasingly dangerous displays of male bravado, form rival gangs, and eventually start killing one another. Shocker! Anyone observing playground dynamics would have been able to predict that outcome. While the lack of female characters isn’t enough to write off the book completely, that, combined with the unbelievable dialogue (“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”) and the anticlimactic ending, should have been enough to have it removed from reading lists across the country. It seems to me that condemning Golding (or questioning whether or not the incident was even rape) is moving the focus away from where it should be—namely, getting that tripe off of required middle-school reading lists. What do you all think? Am I the only one still holding on to my childhood Golding grudge?

Tags: books, lord of the flies, Rape

Did Nancy Drew wear a hat? Well, put on something that makes you feel sleuth-y: Wired magazine reporter Evan Ratliff is on the lam—and Wired is offering $5000 for anyone who can find him.

The contest accompanies Ratliff's piece in the magazine's September issue about Matthew Alan Sheppard, an Arkansas man who tried to fake his own death. In the article, Ratliff notes that our always-on, always-connected lives makes it much harder to truly disappear. "It’s almost easier to steal an identity today than to shed your own," he writes. (Authorities sensed something fishy with the Sheppard case when they noted that his BlackBerry had been used—after he supposedly drowned.)

So as an experiment, Ratliff is going to spend the next month trying to see if he can stay hidden from the world. His family and friends don't know where he is. He'll still be using Twitter and Facebook and making cell phone calls, though. Will he be canny enough to avoid being caught? If you find him, say the magic code word, and snap a photo so his editor can confirm his identity, you win the cash prize. Stay updated on the search for Ratliff here.

Seems like Wired is upping the ante on its recent secret-code-and-riddle-packed "Mystery" issue. The ARG-loving geek in me is ridiculously excited about the game as a game; the media nerd in me is intrigued by the use of creative, real-life events as a way of extending a publication's brand.

Tags: disappear, evan ratliff, mystery, wired