I usually find street performers more annoying than entertaining, but this particular act charmed even my cold, frozen heart. A perfect late afternoon Humpday pick-me-up.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Tags: street magician, wedding proposal

Hanna, I hadn't seen your insightful post about the welcome end of the expectations laid on the last generation of Kennedy women when I posted on how not being expected to be president was probably beneficial to Kennedy females. When I think of the Kennedy women who were able to escape the family pathology, I was looking at the current generation: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maria Shriver, Rory Kennedy, etc. This generation of Kennedy females has not suffered from the drug abuse, in particular, that has dogged so many of their male counterparts. But you are absolutely right about saying good riddance to the ethos that women were expected to look good, shoot out endless streams of babies, and silently endure their husband's flagrant infidelities. Kim, I love your girlhood memory of wanting to be Jackie Kennedy. But I bet Jackie was happiest in her life toward the end, when she was working as an editor and living with a nice Jewish guy.

Photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy with her brother-in-law and children in 1992.

Tags: Jackie Kennedy, kennedy family, kennedy women

The Last Days of Disco is one of my favorite movies. It follows a group of recent college grads awkwardly copulating in New York in the waning days of a Studio 54-ish club. Disco was out of print on DVD until the Critereon re-released it this month. The Whit Stillman-written-and-directed film was such a cult classic that when I tried to buy it on Amazon a few years ago, the going rate for copies of the film hovered around $100. Today on Slate, Troy Patterson points out Stillman's virtues as a social commentator and chronicler of "WASP decline." The reason I love Disco, though, is because it is the piece of film that best illustrates the deliciously awkward post-collegiate years.

There has been a great deal of film made about the mortification that goes along with adolescence (see the ouvre of John Hughes). But there is a distinct lack of moviemaking (especially from the female perspective) that is about the misery involved in one's early twenties. The main character in Disco, Alice Kinnon, is, as Troy describes her, "bright, impressionable, naive, virginal, faintly awkward, and, being played by Chloë Sevigny, alive with fluid movement and alarming prettiness." Alice makes several embarrassing social missteps (one involves telling a potential lover that she thinks "Scrooge McDuck is sexy," in order to seem appealing) and all of them seem much worse because she is trapped in a tightly knit social circle. When Alice comes down with an unfortunate social disease, all of her friends know, too—because her bitchy roommate Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) tells everyone about it.

The characters in Disco are all groping around for their adult selves—trying on new personalities, jobs, and lovers—and falling down often on the way forward. The only other movies I can think of that get this life period right are Kicking and Screaming and The Graduate. Am I forgetting any fantastic examples?

Image is a screenshot of The Last Days of Disco.

Tags: chloe sevigny, last days of disco, troy patterson

A guest post from Slate intern Kim Gittleson:

Hanna, I was taken aback by your celebration of the end of the Kennedy women. Not because I thought their model (or the model that was forced on them) was particularly great, but because I remembered the Kennedy women, Jackie in particular, quite differently. For one generation, Jackie and her ilk may have represented the ultimate example of postwar feminine submission, while for another generation (mine), she seemed to represent something a little more positive.

An example: When I was in third grade in 1995, the overachievers in my class were all asked to deliver a book report on their favorite female role model—in costume as her—for a conference at the local Army base. I watched my classmates frantically fight over the biographies on Helen Keller and Anne Frank, but ultimately decided that I wanted to be someone different—someone less depressing, more chic, someone who didn’t wear so much brown. I chose Jackie Kennedy, who represented to my third grade mind the “alternative” choice. I took out an (admittedly whitewashed) biography of her and fell completely in love. Jackie Kennedy spoke French fluently, worked as a photographer for a cool magazine, restored the White House, and impressed heads of state. In the idealized narrative of her life that I was given, Jackie O wasn’t as courageous as Anne Frank or as determined as Helen Keller, but she was someone I could actually aspire to be. So I begged my mom for, and eventually received, a bright pink suit and a pair of large sunglasses, and I strutted into that conference, book report in hand, confident that I was the winner of the unspoken contest to choose the best woman.

Now, 14 years later and in possession of a college degree in American history, I realize that the image of Jackie I was given was completely fabricated. Or, if not fabricated, it left out a few essential details. But maybe that isn’t so terrible. Thanks in part to Jackie’s example, I learned French, attended the Governor’s School of International Studies, and aspired to live in the White House (as president, mind you, but she somehow made it seem possible). So while I see how the demise of the model championed by the Kennedy men is something to celebrate, I can’t help wondering if maybe we should make a distinction between the lives they lived and the lives they changed.

Photograph courtesy of Kennedy Library Archives/Newsmakers.

Tags: Jackie Kennedy, Ted Kennedy

Hanna, Jessica, Ted Kennedy did run for the presidency against Jimmy Carter in 1980, eleven years after Chappaquiddick—and he considered and rejected another run in 1984. It used to be that a divorce made someone untenable for the presidency; being openly homosexual would automatically preclude someone from elected office. So in those ways today's mores are much looser about the personal lives of our politicians. But, Jess, I agree it is unimaginable now that anyone responsible for the death of someone else in such a way could even be considered a possible presidential candidate. (It's also interesting to consider whether, if JFK were a politician today, his sex life would have kept him from the White House? Hard to say given that Bill Clinton got elected.)

Ted Kennedy's death truly is the end of this political dynasty—there is no one on the family horizon who is even mentioned as a figure of national political stature (except maybe in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is precluded from the presidency). As you look at the entire family, it seems that the women in it have been able to lead lives without the pathology—the drinking, drugs, sexual scandals—that has dogged the men. I have often wondered if this was because without the insane expectation put on every male Kennedy to be a potential president, the women were much freer to carve out lives that exceeded the assumptions about them, rather than be crushed by them.

Photograph of Ted Kennedy by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: Chappaquiddick, Edward Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, political scandals, Teddy Kennedy

Hanna, I like your Kopechne-based theory on why Ted Kennedy devoted his Senate years to public service, particularly for the disenfranchised. As the press releases from women's organizations filling up my inbox will have you know, many of Teddy's triumphs were on behalf of our gender: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, among many many others.

But no one denies that Chappaquiddick was a truly deplorable incident, and the question percolating around the office is whether or not a modern political career would be able to survive such a public and legal trainwreck. The overwhelming feeling is that it would not, because the current media and social climate would not allow it. While it is true that we have far less trust in our politicians than we did 40 years ago, I think this is less an issue of when than who: No other politician's career would have been able to surive that, even back then. After what that family had been through in the '60s, Teddy had an enormous amount of public good will, particularly in Massachusetts. No non-Kennedy would have been forgiven.

Photograph of a ferry near Chappaquiddick Island by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Tags: Chappaquiddick, Edward Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, political scandals, Teddy Kennedy

Google Trends this morning is a perfect window into our tabloid culture and the recesses of our depraved minds. While the papers are full of words like “dynasty” and “legacy,” Mary Jo Kopechne, according to Google Hot Trends, is uppermost in our thoughts. Her name comes up as number one in the ranking, and several more places on the list, misspelled. Chappaquiddick shows up high and often, too; once correctly, and then in several illiterate incarnations.

Partly, I blame this discrepancy on the American papers, which are still bent on hagiography. I prefer British obituaries, which tell it like it is. And partly, of course, this is the fault of our vapid tabloid culture. The only surprise today is that Kate Gosselin has been knocked back all the way to number 30. “Michael Jackson alive” is a popular trend. Yeah. Jamming with Elvis.

Finally, there is the issue of the obvious narrative the papers are not stringing together. In my mind, I’ve always equated Ted Kennedy with Chuck Colson, the disgraced Nixon aide who went on to found an admirable Christian organization called “Prison Fellowship.” Public officials who do terrible things and then say they’re sorry (often in a press conference or book) are a dime a dozen. But the ones who do something terrible and then repent indirectly in the form of a lifetime of dedicated public service are rare. Colson and Kennedy are just about the only two I can think of.

Mary Jo Kopechne is on our minds because this narrative about Ted Kennedy makes sense, in some intuitive, appealing way. Kennedy killed a girl. That’s his Rosebud. He made up for it partly by declining the ultimate glory of running for president, and choosing the more humble path—helping the underclass using the slow, steady machinery of the Senate.

Tags: Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, Ted Kennedy

Last month, the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2012 London games would be the first to feature women’s boxing—and India is gunning for the gold. Somini Sengupta reports in the Times today on how the boxing ring “represents a new kind of freedom” for Indian women.

Boxing not only provides financial security—successful Indian athletes are rewarded with “coveted government employment, usually with the police or with the railways”—but, as we know from every sports movie ever committed to celluloid, a stronger sense of self:

For other women, boxing brings less tangible rewards: the confidence to go out on the streets without fear, for instance. Or as a boxer named Usha Nagisetty put it, a chance to be somebody.

“Before boxing, I had nothing,” said Nagisetty, 24, who came to train this summer at another camp, in the central Indian city of Bhopal. “Who is Usha? No one knew. I was fat. I was average in studies. I didn’t think life had anything to offer me.”

Here's the accompanying slideshow.

Photograph of Indian boxer M.C. Merykom by Findlay Kember/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: boxing, female athletes, india

In his 77 years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy was many things to many people, from baby of an enormous political family to eminence gris of an enormous political party. The charismatic and attractive statesman succumbed to brain cancer late Tuesday night. A champion of legislation affecting millions of citizens whose rights as Americans needed protection, his personal life was not always handsome and dignified.

Every lifetime has its lowpoints and Kennedy’s particularly had valleys. As a Senate aide in the hallways of the Dirkson Office building one Saturday in the early '90s, I ran into the powerful committee chairman and, occasionally, carousing bachelor coming out of his third floor office. Apparently on his way to a match, an unathletic-seeming Teddy, known for his great appetites, was wearing tennis shorts shorter than Michelle Obama’s. He clearly needed a healthier lifestyle. Some time after that, he married Victoria Reggie, the love of his life, and got one.

In his career as a public servant, however, Kennedy’s arrow was always true. The fourth son who saw two middle brothers killed trying to lead the country and his oldest die trying to defend it, EMK regarded public service as the least he could do. His entire adult life, Ted Kennedy served the people of Massachusetts and the citizens of America respectfully, honestly, heroically, scrupulously, and with great discipline. The man may have shown a little too much leg on the tennis court but he came to work with his sleeves rolled up.

Photograph of Ted Kennedy by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: brain cancer, obituary, Ted Kennedy

One thing we have lost with the passing of Edward Kennedy is a certain generational model of the proper role for the family women in public life—the mother, wife, mistress, and daughter. It’s not a model I will miss.

It starts, of course, with Rose Kennedy, described thus in a review of a book about the Kennedy women:

Rose changed from an ambitious, lively, curious girl to a wife and mother whose emotions were rigidly controlled and whose mechanisms of denial so highly refined that she could accept her husband's lovers—notably Gloria Swanson—into her home. She passed much of that legacy on to her daughters Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Jean.

In the Kennedy family, the women preened and posed, suffered mistresses, got divorced. That iconic video of Jackie Kennedy giving a tour of the White House, recently replayed on Mad Men, is disturbing to watch today. She honestly seems as if she’s being directed by a remote control.

If they were lucky, like Eunice Kennedy Shriver, they managed to install themselves at the head of virtuous nonprofits—“charities,” we used to call them. When it came to the family’s sense of its own mission, the women were not in the picture. Here is Joe Kennedy’s line of succession, which seems medieval today:

It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

Now, thank god (and feminism) we have Maria Shriver and Caroline Kennedy, who are contained by their husbands and children, but still exist as independent women in some recognizable form.

Photograph courtesy of the JFK Library/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Edward Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Jackie Kennedy, kennedy women, Ted Kennedy