Sheryl Weinstein, former chief financial officer of Hadassah, tells as much as there is to tell in her memoir of her affair and financial investments with Bernie Madoff. The little detail that will have everyone talking is this: “Bernie had a very small penis. Not only was it on the short side, it was small in circumference. It clearly caused him great angst." Could this be Bernie's "rosebud," so to speak? Perhaps it's the key to why he felt the need to put one over on the world, and to why he felt the need to prove he had a big, swinging one. If there's a lesson here, it must be: Find a female investment advisor, or if you end up entrusting your money to a man, make sure he measures up.

Photograph by Mario Tama/Getty Images.

Tags: bernie madoff

KJ,

Let me start off by saying that I admire your ability to vote for the candidate and not the party. I consider myself a moderate along the political spectrum, yet I’m fiercely loyal to the Republican Party.

But if I had to go blue ... let’s see. My ideal Democrat would almost certainly belong to the Blue Dog coalition (or identify as a fiscal conservative). He or she wouldn’t have to be pro-life (I’ve voted for pro-choice Republicans, so I’m not going to be a hypocrite), but votes that show a respect for the abortion debate would help. I’d want to see someone who recognized that climate-change bills that hurt businesses without significantly cleaning up the environment are harmful. I don’t want someone who blows a lot of hot air talking about the needs of “working families” without acknowledging that untold numbers of working families are small-business owners.

Happily, I found a few good candidates. If I lived in North Carolina (and oh, if only I could: the beaches! the mountains!), I would happily vote for Heath Shuler, who represents a district in the western part of the state. Not only is he anti-abortion, but he looks out for small businesses, and he stood up in the face of what must have been enormous pressure to vote against the bank bailout in 2008 and the stimulus package earlier this year (for that, I’ll forgive him his vote on cap-and-trade). Kathy Dahlkemper, a businesswoman whose pro-life views are typical of Pennsylvania Democrats, is another Dem I could support. She and her husband run a landscaping business, and she embodies the “citizen legislator” ideal that I find appealing. (Also, according to this story, she had to train three people to take over her duties at the business when she started campaigning. Superwoman!) One thing that struck me when I was reading about the Blue Dog Democrats, though, is how few women are in the coalition. There are five women among the 50-some Blue Dogs. But there are 57 women among the 256 Democrats in the House. Is there a reason fewer women identify as fiscal conservatives?

Photograph of Heath Shuler by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

Tags: Heath Shuler, Kathy Dahlkemper, Kay Bailey Hutchison

At the risk of sounding like a helicopter parent (which believe me, I'm nowhere near; my parenting style hovers closer to the "Whoops, I clean forgot I had a child, where'd she go again?" end of the spectrum), can I just say that I have some sympathy for the anti-Mr. Softee camp? Granted, this is a trivial issue on which to waste much of one's ire, and some of the parents quoted in the Times article about banning the trucks sound like overly invested nuts. But the fact is, the omnipresence of those trucks is a curse for parents at playgrounds. Even if you don't give in to your child's begging, the arrival of Mr. Softee inevitably turns a fun playground excursion into a half-hour or more of whining and fighting about ice cream, which is followed either by the resentful buying of ice cream, or a tearful dragging home. Then there's that aggravating song (which ice cream trucks are now legally banned from playing while parked, not that all of them abide by this rule.)

But the truck is only one symptom of a larger problem our culture has with the constant availability of junk food. To have a small child in 2009 is to navigate a world in which you're constantly barraged by sugary and fatty treats, whether at school (I hear from friends who are public-school teachers that there are many teachers who offer doughnuts and cookies as rewards for good behavior, and scoff in the teachers' lounge at anyone who disapproves) or at birthday parties (where it's no longer enough just to serve cake and ice cream; there have to be giant bowls of candy on every surface, and "goody bags" to take home and fight about some more). Julia asks if just keeping the trucks out of sight will help kids to eat better, and the answer is a partial "yes"; many studies have shown that kids' food choices improve when the availability of junk food decreases even slightly. This isn't just yuppie handwringing, either; as the Times article points out, one neighborhood that's banned the trucks is Chicago's 18th Ward, which is largely black and working-class (and thus likely to be a neighborhood with fewer healthy eating options).

All that said, it's hot outside in August, and kids lining up at ice-cream trucks are hella cute. I like the approach of the Tacoma, Wash. vendor quoted in the piece, who stops at a park, sells ice cream until the line that first forms is gone, then drives away. Take a hint from your song's seldom-heard lyrics, Mr. Softee: If you've been staking out my playground for an hour, it's time to go ding-a-ling down the street.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: helicopter parenting, ice cream, mister softee

I think it’s already a cliché for bookish girls to be into MMA, but Nina asked—so here’s why I, like novelist Katie Kitamura, frequently find myself watching muscled young men disfigure each other on national television. Boxing and wrestling bore me, and I’ve no desire to watch the kind of gruesome, barbed-wire-intensive spectacle so graphically featured in The Wrestler. MMA is different. As cultural critic Greg Beato once put it, MMA is a free market of fighting—a competition not just between fighters, but among fighting styles. Back in the hallowed days of MMA's infancy, kickboxers would attack wrestlers who would go after Brazilian jujitsu aficionados; you’d be watching an art hundreds of years in the making, an entire tradition, against a wholly foreign challenge. Now accomplished UFC fighters know a bit of everything, but their mixes of strengths and training are different, so there’s still a some kind of global dynamic at play, a question of which mix of skills and traditions most effectively takes down an opponent. Because each guy (or girl!) comes off as representative of that mix, it’s easy to get invested—the overall narrative is much greater than this one individual 22-year-old. People talk about “evolutionary phases” of MMA, as different combinations of skills sets rise, conquer, and then fall as some fighter shows up with better ideas and force everyone to adapt.

Beyond this, there’s the fun of watching practitioners of a sport once marginalized as “human cockfighting” struggle for status as legitimate athletes. As Beato points out in his column, every time the sport’s promoters agree to more restrictions, regulations, and tweaks that align the practice with acceptable standards for middle class spectacle, MMA grows more popular.

So yeah, all that, and the primal pleasure of watching consenting adults unleash themselves upon one another.

Photograph of American MMA fighter Marcus Davis by Lars Baron/Bongarts/Getty Images.

Tags: mixed martial arts, ultimate fighting

Jessica, what I found so odd about the Mister Softee article was the language used to describe the allure of the ice cream man. Vicki Sell prays that her daughter doesn’t have a Pavlovian response to a fruit ice vendor’s bell. Rachael Reiley’s son practically jumps out the window, piggy bank in hand, at the sound of “The Entertainer.” From the descriptions, the ice cream man may as well be the Pied Piper, leading streams of hypnotized kids off a cliff, or selling them Choco Tacos laced with heroin.

But is keeping the truck out of sight really going to make these kids healthy eaters? After all, banishing the ice cream man from parks won’t keep him away for good. He can always set up shop where the adults don’t see him, like he did outside my school as soon as the weather turned warm. I generally bought my ice cream after school and ate it before I got home, possibly unbeknownst to my mother (who might have gotten mad that I didn’t bring a treat home for her). Occasionally, I’m sure, I ruined my appetite for dinner. But I didn’t become some sort of crazed ice-cream addict or sugar fiend. Sugar, though addictive, as it turns out, is not crack.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: helicopter moms, ice cream bans, mister softee, new york times, sugar addiction, summer

Kudos to the New York Times for providing an endless supply of parenting trend stories to irritate and delight. There's a doozy in today's paper, about moms and dads who are trying to oust ice cream trucks from their local parks. Next week: a movement to euthanize Mr. Peanut.

One woman describes the ice cream men as "predatory" because they loiter inside the playground's gates. My favorite passage from the article is a quote from a woman who says that learning how to deal with your children wanting treats from the ice cream man is as difficult as potty training. "The ice cream truck, nobody ever mentions that” as a potential sore spot, the lady laments.

In this matter I must side with the wise Hilary Guishard of Brooklyn, who has driven Mister Softee trucks for over 30 years. “I empathize with moms when it come to health issues," Mr. Guishard says. He continues:

"But moms have a choice. ... We should be mature enough to tell our kids, 'No.'" Wanting the trucks to go away "is not a valid issue," he said, adding, "It’s like a mother being angry at a store being at a particular corner." Besides, the ice cream man isn’t forever. "It’s summer," he said, sighing. "It’s only four months."

Moms out there, do the Mister Softee haters have a point, or are they being helicopter moms to an insane degree?

Photograph of a girl eating ice cream by David DeLossy/Getty Images.

Image in mantle of ice cream and cone by Digital Vision/Getty Images.

Tags: helicopter moms, ice cream bans, mister softee, new york times, summer

The Long Shot—featured in the Daily Beast this morning—seems like an unlikely project. First of all, it’s a literary novel about the violent, gut-churning free-for-all known as mixed martial arts, or ultimate fighting. Second of all, it’s by a girl. And she used to be a ballerina!

The bloody bard giving MMA the humanizing “Mickey Rourke treatment” is Katie Kitamura, a Princeton grad and English Ph.D. holder who was introduced to the sport by her brother. (He got his knuckles tattooed with the words "Long Shot" for the book’s cover.) The worlds of ballet and MMA turn out to be interesting mirror images: Both feature “brutal training regimens, physical injury and pain, fanatical coaches, and success or failure in front of a large audience.” There’s also a surprising amount of bodily intimacy—and artistry—in both:

We’re a culture that hates touching; a handshake is the most skin-to-skin time we usually share with a stranger. But in ballet, “you’re getting manhandled all the time,” says Kitamura. “You get used to the fact of a stranger grabbing your body. Also, I was really preoccupied with the rhythms of fighting, where people are feinting and dancing around.”

 

Kitamura’s unexpected background—and, let’s face it, her knock-out good looks (all puns intended)—means that somewhere out there, a Free Press publicist is falling to her knees and thanking the gods above. But the book sounds pretty good, too—I might add it to my beach book pile.

Any of you Double X­ers MMA fans? If so, what do you love about it?

Photograph of ballet dancers by STR/AFP/Getty Images. Photograph of mixed martial arts fighters by HENNING KAISER/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: katie kitamura, mixed martial arts, the long shot, ultimate fighting