Questioning the seriousness of food allergies is the definition of a thankless task. When I argued that it's possible to overeact to the dangers of nut allergies a couple of years ago, I got not just hate mail, but the kind of hate mail that trickles on for months and includes people you know, who tell you that they now think enormously less of you. And so I've pretty much stopped brattily griping about peanut-free classrooms and camps, especially after Sydney Spiesel, Slate's medical columnist, pointed out that about 100 people in the United States who are extremely allergic to peanuts die annually from accidental exposure. When risks are small but deadly, we're often irrational about them, and overpay for prevention. But it's harder to protest about how one's own happily allergy-free children are being asked to give up their PB&J.

Still, this piece in Slate by Meredith Broussard, about the conflicts of interest in the work of the non-profit Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, got me feeling manipulated again. Broussard says that FAAN has enormous influence in the food allergy arena, and that it's spreading its money around so as to fund studies that hype the danger of seafood allergies and get TV stations to air infomercials without labeling them that way, among other things. Broussard has taken on the allergy lobby before, and gotten slammed for it. So I'll leave her to defend herself. But I do indeed wonder, as she prods us to, who will get the millions of dollars in allergy education funding that she says is in this proposed piece of federal legislation.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: food allergies, food allergy and anaphylaxis network

I'd like to believe that the recent uncovering of Bob McDonnell's graduate thesis was a smart act of investigative sleuthing, if only because watching people shoot themselves in the foot this badly makes me squirm. But it wasn't. How did the Washington Post get their hands on the thesis that has likely ruined McDonnell's political career in one day? He simply told them about it. OOPS.

In an online forum earlier this afternoon, WaPo reporter Anita Kumar had this to say when asked how the paper found out about McDonnell's decades old thesis:

We recently obtained the thesis. Bob McDonnell mentioned the thesis a couple weeks ago when we were interviewing him for another story. We then went to find it. As we indicated in the story, it is available at the Regent library and has likely been there for 20 years. We did not wait to publish the story until Labor Day. We published the story after we finished our reporting, which included receiving comments from his campaign.

In my mind, this reveal negates his "It was 20 years ago" excuse. Why openly bring up something you think is dated and inaccurately reflects your current political views with members of the press? It's like exposing yourself to a cop, and then acting shocked when your picture ends up in the paper.

Photograph of Bob McDonnell's signature on his master's thesis is a screenshot.

Tags: McDonnell, thesis, washington post

My first thought upon hearing about Robert McDonnell’s moronic 1989 thesis was that it ought to be ignored. We all go through regrettably earnest periods in our teens and twenties; it’s unkind to judge other people by the feeble intellectual output of their past selves. And McDonnell says he ought to be judged by his legislative record, which also appears to be crazy, so nothing much changes if we grant him this.

But then I checked Wikipedia and realized that McDonnell was older than your average master’s student; according to Wikipedia, he was 35, an age at which a little more perspective might be expected. At any rate, before he even starts warming up for what he now calls an "academic exercise," before the fetishization of corporal punishment and no-fault divorce and condom-free marital relations, he chooses to thank his wife this way:

I am deeply grateful to my wife Maureen, whose encouragement and expert clerical support helped turn marginally-legible scratch, into these finished pages, [sic] and whose steadfastness and love for our children provided me with the time to devote to this project.

What a perfect summation of the model wife in this worldview: A steadfast, expert provider of clerical support! Now there's a vision to strive for. Put this man in office!

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Robert McDonnell's master's thesis; Regent law school

Hanna, I too have been fascinated by the dustup over recent news reports of Virginia’s gubernatorial hopeful, Bob McDonnell, and his 20-year-old graduate thesis from Regent University. Here’s the thesis. Like you, I agree that it’s hard to think of the document as some sort of abstract political thought experiment, when it’s so obviously a blueprint for what became much of his subsequent political career (including opposition to working women, abortion, homosexuals, and legalized contraception for unmarried couples, and support for spanking, religious education in public schools, and covenant marriages). This also goes back to a longstanding question I have had about Regent University and other religious law schools that explicitly seek to use the legal system to promote their own values: They are nothing if not honest that this is the goal. So why are we ineviatably astonished by it?

Don’t forget that the uber-loyal Bushie, Monica Goodling, also graduated from Regent law school, and then used her position in the Bush Administration to develop “a very positive reputation for people coming from Christian schools into Washington looking for employment in government." At the height of Goodling’s reign, Regent estimated that "approximately one out of every six Regent alumni is employed in some form of government work." The school's motto is "Christian Leadership To Change the World." Seen in that light not one little bit of McDonnell’s thesis is surprising. The surprise is that we are all so surprised by it.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Regent law school

One of the political phenomena I enjoy the most is when Virginia Republicans from the evangelical wing try to repackage themselves for higher office. Robert McDonnell, candidate for governor, was doing a passable job until this week, when his 1989 master’s thesis was discovered. The paper is a classic of earnest Christian right activism of the late '80s. It’s too bad this PDF is not searchable, or one could have great fun: Find “fornicator,” “feminist,” homosexual,” “abortion,” “prayer in schools,” “working women.” Pick any culture war issue and young McDonnell has, in this paper, taken the most extreme side of it.

In the summation of the Washington Post, which broke the story, he described “working women and feminists as 'detrimental' to the family. He said government policy should favor married couples over 'cohabitators, homosexuals or fornicators.' He described as 'illogical' a 1972 Supreme Court decision legalizing the use of contraception by unmarried couples.”

McDonnell’s response was that he should be judged by his 14 years in the General Assembly, not some paper he wrote as a kid. But, of course, as a legislator he has acted pretty much in keeping with what the blogosphere has taken to calling “Bob’s Manifesto,” calling for abortion restrictions, tax policies to favor the traditional family, opposing ending wage discrimination, and supporting the arcane notion of covenant marriage. It’s just that young Bob grew up, so he stopped talking like that.

You have to feel sorry for poor Bob. He didn’t write anything different than you could have read in 100 books—and no doubt college theses—during what was the birth of the Christian pro-family movement. It "was simply an academic exercise and clearly does not reflect my views," he told the Post.

Tell that to Sotomayor.

Photograph of Robert McDonnell by Waldo Jaquith.

Tags: Robert McDonnell

This is a guest post from Katie Roiphe, responding to the various critics of her recent DoubleX essay, "My Newborn is Like a Narcotic."

I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that credit for the interesting brouhaha surrounding my last piece belongs to the inventive subtitle writer, and not to me. (To answer some of the comments: No, I am not responsible for the subtitle, nor did I see it until the piece was on the site, which is in no way unusual.) I am, however, a little surprised that people would be so blinded by a flashy subtitle that they would not be able to read the substance of the piece itself: After all, it is the job of a headline to attract attention, not to present a nuanced or subtle analysis. It seems to me that we read too many millions of eye-catching headlines that do not perfectly distill the essence of the piece to take them quite so much to heart. And if people are not going to read past the headline, it would save writers a great deal of time and trouble to admit that now.

I have on occasion written a provocative or inflammatory piece. In fact, I teach a class on the art of polemic at NYU, which begins with Milton's Satan, whom I greatly admire, but this particular riff I viewed in the category of "quiet personal reflection." The one very tiny paragraph on feminism was not central to the argument. I was thinking about how we had come to talk about childcare as work or a profession. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, through Betty Friedan's brilliant The Feminine Mystique, to Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions, feminists have long argued about the arduousness of babies. I don't think this is a particularly controversial or original point: They wrote about the difficulty of child-rearing and they had their reasons. Any political ideology has to collapse the ambiguities and complexities of human experience in order to get things done, and feminism is no different.

To answer some of the other comments: Nowhere in the piece did I tell anyone else how to live. Nowhere did I suggest that my experience of the first days of motherhood was any better, richer, or more interesting than anyone else's. (To me, the addiction metaphor implies a derangement and desperation not entirely to be recommended.) Nowhere in the piece did I attack anyone for having a different viewpoint or experience. (Though frankly one does worry about the fragile commenter: If someone chooses to wear an orange dress are you hurt because of the implied critique of your yellow one?) Nowhere did I say that feminists hate babies. In fact, my own mother was a feminist, and I like to think she liked me.

Tags: katie roiphe; feminism; newborns

The media, it’s not doing so well. Maybe you’ve heard? The Audit Bureau of Circulations released their semiannual report on magazine figures yesterday, and though subscriptions held steady, there were still plenty of unappetizing statistics to pain a glossy mag devotee’s heart. Single-sale magazine copies fell 12.4 percent from the previous year and 24 of the top 25 newsstand titles reported declines. The exception: Real Simple. Apparently out-of-work folks will pay a few bucks for daytime craft ideas and an organic bellini recipe.

Judging from the number of B-list celebs who snagged highly sought-after media jobs this week, it seems like the favored editorial solution to such trying times may be: Don’t merely write about undeserving famous people, hire them to work for you. NBC received much-warranted criticism when they announced Jenna Bush Hager as their new Today Show correspondent this past Sunday. What’s worse, Bush Hager herself didn’t seem all that happy about the gig. Her take on her hire seems more apt for the poor soul passed over for the position, who, demoralized about the nepotistic state of journalism, resigns herself to filling out law school applications:

"It wasn't something I'd always dreamed to do, but I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change."

Meanwhile, Kim Kardashian landed a contributing editorship at OK magazine, and yesterday Gawker pointed out that the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair contains a piece penned by Levi Johnston titled “Me and Sarah Palin.” (No joke.)

Sigh.

Every time Levi Johnston gets a grammatically incorrect cover story, a J-school grad loses her wings.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Tags: Jenna Bush, levi johnston, sad state of the media, the Today Show

The nomenclature surrounding the selling of sex acts is notoriously awkward. Is he/she a prostitute? Hooker? “Sex worker” seems to do the trick, but there is perhaps a whiff of condescension in this kind of politely clinical nonprofit-speak. The always-interesting Melissa Gira Grant here introduces us to new terminology recently encountered at a panel discussion among self-described “male feminists." A panelist told her his organization doesn't like the term "sex worker." They much prefer "women used by prostitution." Because you know what really empowers women? Exclusive use of the passive voice.

“Having men tell me how powerless I am,” fumes Grant, “is why I turned to a life of contracting with them the specific terms under which I could give them attention, and also under which I would ask them to treat me. ... How wonderful, a voiceless mass of women to invoke as your beneficiaries. How awful, when any of us do show up.”

Check out the whole post, if only for the innervating powers of a feminist rant on a weekday morning.

Tags: Melissa Gira Grant, prostitution, sex work, sex-positive feminism

What’s the male version of the Lipstick Level? The Men’s Underwear Index. The theory goes that underwear, hidden as it is to the public eye, is the first necessity men start to scrimp on when they’re worried about money. (Sales of women’s underwear remain fairly steady, even during downturns.) But the future is looking a little more bright-white: Ylan Q. Mui of the Washington Post reports that sales of men’s underwear, which were down by a startling 12 percent in January, are showing signs of recovery. The index might not be as fluffy it sounds—Alan Greenspan himself endorsed it a couple of years ago. No word on whether he’s bought new boxers lately.

Tags: alan greenspan, lipstick level, men's underwear, men's underwear index