Alissa Torres lived down the block from me on 9/11. We both had dogs. We both had creative ambitions. She was very pregnant with her son, I had just given birth to mine. We were working on being acquaintances. We were meant to turn into friends. Her husband worked in the wrong tall building; he died, mine didn't. There might be budding friendships that could survive that—but ours wasn't one of them.

I went to her husband's memorial. I wanted to reach for her, but I wanted to give her the privacy I knew she wasn't getting from others. In those days after the towers fell, every New Yorker felt like a victim, and every New Yorker wanted to somehow help a real victim. I know we spoke. I can't imagine what we said.

After her son was born, we sat, once, in the tiny back garden attached to my basement apartment. We didn't talk about Eddie—much. We didn't not talk about him, either. I know it came up. I know I tried to say—not something kind, or something helpful, but something real, and I'll bet didn't really succeed. And that was it. My husband and I moved, Alissa stayed. We lost touch. When I saw American Widow reviewed in the Times, I knew instantly that it was her. When I saw a link to her article this morning, I knew. I think about her more than I have a right to; her story is hers and not mine. We were all only a butterfly's wing away from our knees that morning. We all believe that because we had a meeting in the towers the day before or took a plane from Boston once, that we could have been—and somehow were—the victims. Alissa remains my touchstone for the huge gulf between what could have been, and what was.

Tags: 9/11, alissa torres, american widow, grieving

Amen, Emily, the “lurking discomfort, in some kitchens out there, with having an African-American president,” that you speak of is no longer lurking, and it certainly has moved out of the kitchen and into the open. And it’s getting full-throated endorsement and encouragement from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michelle Malkin, and all the other Obama-haters out there. Glenn Beck, of all people, called President Obama a racist. As laughable as that accusation was, it was an excuse for all the real racists, including Beck and his cohort, to go on the attack against President Obama in very personal, racially coded ways. It’s no wonder that death threats against Pres. Obama are up 400 percent.

It’s interesting how the views of certain opponents of health care reform and of President Obama’s recent speech to school children mesh with those from the birther movement. No matter what he says or does, it is seen as a sinister plot by an illegitimate black president designed to take away the long-cherished rights of good, law-abiding white Americans. For proof, just listen to some of the language used and read the signs that were held at anti-Obama rallies masquerading as healthcare reform rallies.

When I wrote about this issue early this week, I was not the least bit surprised by the level of a hate-filled, racist, invective I received in response.

And Hanna, the president did not call members of Congress liars, individually by name or as a group. He said his health care proposal had been distorted and lied about by opponents, which is true. That’s very different than being heckled by a member of Congress, a former colleague, no less, shouting “You lie!” Even Bill Clinton, whom many of the right-wing bluebloods in Congress also resented because he, like Obama, didn’t have the right pedigree (rich and with politically powerful white male relatives), didn’t get shouted down during speeches to Congress—even when he did lie. And yes, Rachael, presidents are insulted all the time and in various forums, and have been booed at the State of the Union (Bush was not the only one, was he?), but I don’t recall Bush, or any other president, being called a liar while addressing Congress and the nation—even though Bush lied to the American people about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction.

And Hanna, as for being disappointed that Rep. Joe Wilson’s stunt “was a spontaneous outburst instead of a genuine, deliberate heckle,” how do we know that it was even spontaneous? I’m sure he has disagreed with past presidents speaking before Congress. Why was able to contain himself then? That half-hearted apology he gave afterwards was a joke: “Last night, I heard from the leadership that they wanted me to contact the White House and state that my statements were inappropriate. I did.” So essentially he apologized because the Republican Party leadership asked him to, not because he regretted it and wanted to do the right thing.

If the civility shown during joint sessions of Congress and during the State of the Union is tedious and phony, as you say, what’s the alternative? A free-for-all of rudeness? This may be your definition of us finally "arriving" in our level of public discourse, but I personally think we have a long way to go.

There was one silver lining to Wilson’s outburst, however. It has prompted a rush of campaign donations—more than $400,000 in less than 24 hours—to his Democratic opponent. What a costly and poetic ending for putting his foot in his mouth.

Tags: Obama health care speech

I am addicted to a new subgenre of memoir, namely memoirs by grown men who were diagnosed with some form of Asperger’s syndrome as adults. The latest is Parallel Play: Growing up with Undiagnosed Asperger’s, by Tim Page, who was a Pulitzer Prize winning music critic at the Washington Post. This is a beautiful book with heartbreaking images from a misunderstood childhood. There is no particular “cure” for Asperger’s, nor do the men seek it. Instead they choose to remain the slightly unreliable narrators of their own emotional state. In Page’s memoir, this passage slayed me.

From early childhood, my memory was so acute and my wit so bleak that I was described as a genius by my parents, by neighbors and even, on occasion, by the same teachers who handed me failing marks. I wrapped myself in this mantle, of course, as a poetic justification for behavior that might otherwise have been judged unhinged and I did my best to believe in it. But the explanation made no sense. A genius at what? Were other geniuses so oblivious that they needed mnemonic devices to tell right from left, and idly wet their pants into adolescence?

Another recent memoir is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World, by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution fame. It sounds like an economics manifesto but it’s not. One of Cowen’s readers suggested he might have Asperger’s. Cowen embraced the diagnosis and, in this book, argues that it's an advantage.

Tags: Asperger's, Parallel Play, Tim Page

I want to echo Hanna’s sense of ambivalence about Caster Semanya, the South African runner who may have to stop competing against those deemed unambiguously female. It does seem like gender ambiguity is among the few natural advantages that violate our sense of equity in competition. Maybe it’s not quite fair that Semanya’s opponents will be up against someone with a genetic advantage. But Lance Armstrong’s heart happens to be 1/3 bigger than the average male heart. Is this fair to the regularly-heart-sized guys up against him? Nobody suggests that he ought to be disqualified, or perhaps forced to compete only against people with freakishly sized hearts.

The difference is that gender, as opposed to heart size, is one of the ways we traditionally demarcate classes of people we want to see compete with one another. It’s pretty clearly in the interest of those of us clustered on one side of the gender continuum to support that demarcation. We don’t want Serena Williams to have to forego a tennis career because she doesn’t stack up against Roger Federer. It’s also inevitable that women who are similar to men by some physiological measures, but not on the “wrong” side of some arbitrary male/female line, are going to dominate games based on speed and strength.

These distinctions all seem somewhat random and arbitrary, but at the end of the day most sports just require submission to an arbitrary system of rules. We’re trying to create conditions of perfect competition among people with radically different bodies. Caster Semanya reminds us of just how impossible that is.

Photograph of Caster Semenya by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Caster Semanya

Unicef is rightly celebrating new figures on child mortality—down below nine million a year for the first time in two decades. That's 10,000 fewer deaths a day, says director Ann Venemen, and that's the number that got the press—but when I heard it, all I could think was that if "10, 000 fewer" is the good news, what's the bad?

I heard the 10,000 fewer figure on NPR while driving to a board meeting for a local museum, and as I sat there, listening to descriptions of the next capital campaign and the need to raise a few hundred thousand dollars for a shade structure in the outdoor park, I kept wondering about that second figure. I had to work a little to get the answer—24,000 kids still die every day from poverty-related, preventable causes, most from pneumonia and diarrhea.

In principle I agree with ethicist Peter Singer, who's said that "philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious." In practice, I still find myself making donations that will help the less-well-off in my well-off community. I contribute to charities like our local theaters and my kids' school for many reasons—social pressure, personal benefit, the fact that the need, or the solicitor, is staring me right in the face. I don't manage to remember to give where it's truly needed as often as I wish I would. I'm glad we're celebrating 10,000 fewer deaths a day. But I need the media to remind me about the other 8.8 million kids a year who still don't make it past their fifth birthday a lot more often.

Tags: charitable giving, peter singer, poverty, Unicef

This is a guest post by crime novelist Laura Lippman, in response to the Dahlia Lithwick's fabulous attempt in Slate to write a chick-lit novel in less than a month.

Dear Dahlia,

Welcome to the world of fiction writing. And while I know you have already offended some writers with your blithe assumption that you can write a chick-lit/mommy-lit book in a month, you might well be able to do it. Joyce Maynard wrote Labor Day in about that much time, although it's worth noting that she was at a writer's colony at the time. Lawrence Block can write a novel in two weeks, but then, he's part of a generation of writers, including the late Donald Westlake and Evan Hunter, who came of age at a time when prolificity was the only way to make a living. Every year, the Internet hums with people trying their hands at NaNoWriMo, trying to write a novel in November. And it has only 30 days! It can be done. Not by me; I average nine months to write a draft and this year I'm actually taking 12, to which most people say: "Wow, you really churn them out."

But there are a couple of things you need to know. First of all, readership is not as strictly divided between genders as you seem to think. There's not a #1 best-selling author alive who doesn't have a big share of women readers. Trust me, Lee Child is not selling millions of books to men alone and it's not men who are showing up at his book-signings with fresh-baked cookies and Reacher Creature t-shirts. In a recent New Yorker profile, Ian McEwan recounted how he and his son tried to give away novels in a public park and not a single man would take one. "When women stop reading," McEwan concluded, "the novel will be dead." And there are men who read female-centric books. I know a guy in Michigan—father, Detroit Lions fan, handy with tools—who is beside himself when Jennifer Weiner publishes a new book.

And while I suppose there are women who read only one type of book, I don't know any. In the past month, these are the books I have read or listened to on my iPod: Assassination Vacation, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Too Fat to Fish, The Slippery Year, Dark Places, Liberty, Diamond Ruby (a galley of a book to be published next year), Dark Entries (Ian Rankin's first graphic novel), Trouble, This is Where I Leave You . . . can you find a pattern there? The only thing I see is that I like audiobooks read by people with distinctive voices (Sarah Vowell, Artie Lange, Garrison Keillor), and I tend to avoid crime fiction when I'm in the throes of writing one of my own, although I made an exception for Gillian Flynn's Dark Places.

So when you ask women why do "we" like to read this or that, it's almost impossible to answer. I like a good slit throat now and then, although I have never read as much spy fiction as I should. (I recently shocked my husband by revealing that I have yet to read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.) Some of my best friends write about vampires, but I find myself hugging the wall at that particular dance, just not getting it, although I am completely unambivalent about my pride in Charlaine Harris, one of those overnight sensation twenty years in the making.

And here's the thing you should know about Charlaine, who writes the Sookie Stackhouse books that inspired HBO's new hit, True Blood. Charlaine didn't start with a type or a genre. She didn't say, "I'm going to do Anne Rice but with a dash of crime fiction and a sprinkling of the paranormal." She started with characters and a situation that intrigued her. At the time, no one believed in what she was doing, not even her agent, if I've got the story straight. But Charlaine, who had already written two excellent mystery series, persevered.

One of my heroes, James M. Cain, was always being compared to Hemingway and Hammett. Eventually, he bristled, and wrote these words in his introduction to The Butterfly: "You're being a little naive, you know. We don't do it that way. We don't say to ourselves that some lucky fellow did it a certain way, so we'll do it that way too, and cut in on the sugar. We have to do it our own way, each for himself, or there isn't any sugar."

A character, a situation. That's what you need to write a novel, not a pinch of Bridget Jones and a dash of Slummy Mummy. How fast you can write it will depend on your own build, whether you're a fast-twitch or slow-twitch writer, if you will. But here's a little math: Your first installment—a size 8 is shameful? Oh, dear—came in at 1,700 words, give or take. To write a novel in a month, even one with 31 days, you'll need to average 2,500-3,000 words a day.

Tags: Dahlia Lithwick, Laura Lippman, Saving Face

A guest post from law student and former Slate intern Morgan Smith:

This Forbes article, which recently whipped through my Facebook feed, is the latest iteration of the lame defense that is often marshaled on behalf of women’s colleges. The lead character in these articles is familiar. She was a timid smart girl fearful of speaking up in high school, ridiculed by classmates as a lesbian or feminist for her choice of all-female higher education. Then she is transformed by the powers of the single-sex classroom into a poised, successful adult.

The problem is that this defense is actually derisive. It implies that only outside of a coeducational classroom can women trade timidity and lip-gloss for assertiveness and a scholar’s pilled cardigan. The notion that having men around distracts women from academic pursuits and that professors at coed institutions don’t take women seriously is not only dated, but patronizing. If women’s colleges want to survive the 21st century, they need to stop being defensive and reflexively attacking the inadequacies of coeducation. Otherwise, they’ll fulfill the prophecy they seek to avoid—they will become irrelevant to women’s education.

The traditional argument for women’s colleges used to seem airtight. It comes from a series of studies physiologist M. Elizabeth Tidball started in the 1960s. Her seminal 1973 study, which used the Who’s Who in American Women registry and the Doctorate Records Files as indicators of career success, determined that women’s colleges graduated two to three times as many high-achieving women than did coeducational institutions. Her findings were well-timed. A year after the passage of Title IX, they helped buoy flagging support for women’s-only higher education.

But subsequent studies have challenged the Tidball research. One, conducted in 1991, identified a possible methodological flaw in her work. This second study, which the Journal of Higher Education published (subscription required), indicated that if she redid her research while controlling for students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, before they went to college, there would be little difference in career achievement between female graduates of women’s colleges, which had more daughters of well-heeled families, and coed colleges, which had fewer. Tidball hotly disputed this, and the authors were careful to say that they hadn’t fully disproved her findings. But they called for more investigation. And in the decades since then, researchers have completed a few studies that accounted for students’ backgrounds, and confirmed Tidball’s achievement gap putting women’s colleges ahead of coed ones—but to a much smaller degree than she found.

And you know, that’s OK, from the women’s college point of view. The long-term viability of single-sex ed depends upon these schools reimagining themselves first as fine academic institutions and second as colleges for women. I graduated from Wellesley in 2007, and there’s no place I would have rather have studied, as an English major, Charlotte Bronte’s deep and highly personal examination of female depression in Villette. But that’s not because I wouldn’t have been taken seriously if there were men in my classes. It’s because of Wellesley’s excellent professors and dedicated students. That’s why I can’t stand to hear women’s colleges justified by the faults of coed classrooms, or the wage gap, or their ability to churn out Secretaries of State.

Tags: m. elizabeth tidball, single-sex education, wellesley, women's colleges