If you watched any of the trailers for Ang Lee's recent Taking Woodstock, you'd think that the '60s were a gentle-hearted, kooky time filled with benign cross-dressing and bad haircuts. There has been a thorough pop cultural rewriting of the '60s, which in reality was a time of national chaos, violence, and upheaval—the center was not holding, as Joan Didion said at the time. Two news stories dominating headlines today—about Woodstock-era rock star John Phillips raping his own daughter Mackenzie, and about the death of Manson follower Susan Atkins—remind us that it wasn't all folk songs and love-ins.

Lifestyles like Phillips'—one quarter of the Mamas and the Papas—have been thoroughly defanged, commodified, and romanticized in the intervening 40 years. The legacy of the Manson followers is different, as most people think they're still monsters. But people like writer and director John Waters have stood up for these female acolytes of Charles Manson, even though they brutally murdered Sharon Tate and several others. Of course, not every work of pop needs to be entirely faithful to reality. It's just good to be reminded that sometimes there are really bad acid flashbacks.

Tags: ang lee, charles manson, incest, john phillips, mackenzie phillips, sharon tate, susan atkins, taking woodstock, the mamas and the papas

In her first TV interview since being nominated to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor talked to Susan Swain of C-SPAN and gives the skinny on getting the Big Call from President Obama. Excerpts from the interview transcript:

SWAIN: I’m wondering if you would mind, for history, telling us the story of when you got the telephone call?

SOTOMAYOR: I was told that Monday that the President would—I had been told all weekend that the president would be making up his mind, making his decision sometime on Monday, and I had been sitting in my office from 8:00 that morning waiting for a phone call. ...

It’s now nearly 7:00 in the evening, and I call the White House and say, ‘Well you’re getting my family to Washington, have any of you given any thought about how I’m going to get there?” And they stopped and said, ‘Oh I guess we should figure that out, shouldn’t we?’ Literally that was the response. What I was told was that the president had gotten distracted with some important other business that was going on at the time, and that he would call me at about 8:00 p.m. but that I should go home and pack to come to Washington, and that they would prefer that I didn’t take a plane.

[Sotomayor asked a friend to drive her to Washington.]

And he came, or was on his way, and at 8:10 p.m. I received a call at my—on my cell phone. The White House operator tells you that the president is on the line. … I actually stood by my balcony doors, and I had the—my cell phone in my right hand and I had my left hand over my chest trying to calm my beating heart, literally. And the president got on the phone and said to me, ‘Judge, I would like to announce you as my selection to be the next Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.’

And I said to him—I caught my breath and started to cry and said, ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’ That was what the moment was like.

SWAIN: And then what?

SOTOMAYOR: He asked me to make him two promises. The first was to remain the person I was, and the second was to stay connected to my community. And I said to him that those were two easy promises to make, because those two things I could not change.

[And then banality returned: Sotomayor got lost on the drive to D.C., after a rain storm knocked out the car’s GPS device.]

Tags: Sonia Sotomayor; Supreme Court; judges

Lauren Weber, a journalist and lifelong cheapskate, first envisioned In Cheap We Trust as an investigation into how Americans strayed so far from thrift, that virtue supposedly so integral to our national identity. She discovered that the financially prudent American is mostly a myth. In almost every generation someone—from Benjamin Franklin to Thoreau to that guy who wrote Into the Wild—has proclaimed the virtues of the simple life, but in reality, most of us tend toward frugality only when we have to, mainly during wars and downturns, and a public rhetoric emerges to support it.

In between, we buy more than ever, and plenty of rhetoric has supported that, too. Politicians and business interests consciously orchestrated the shopping spree of the '50s to keep the United States from slipping into another depression after World War II. As that obnoxious multigenerational laundry ad they play during Mad Men makes clear, the American housewife was their primary target.

Just as often as we’ve praised the fiscally prudent, Weber says, we’ve derided the cheap as ungenerous and anti-American—see the role it has played in derogatory stereotypes of Jewish and Chinese immigrants. No wonder Americans are so anxious about our spending and what other people think of it, even in times of plenty. A 2006 pre-recession study Weber cites in the book found that thinking about a big-ticket purchase produced a synaptic frenzy in the part of the brain that registers pain.

In Cheap We Trust is a defense of thrift, but a sincere, inquisitive one. Weber believes that sustainable economic strength lies in achieving a higher savings rate and not being, for instance, $585 billion in debt to the Chinese. But she also rejects the reliance on low-price disposable retail that Ellen Ruppel Shell critiqued this summer in Cheap (DoubleX excerpted Shell’s chapter on outlet malls here) that is bad for the environment and feeds our penchant for instant gratification. Most of all, Weber sets out to prove that a frugal lifestyle is possible. To prove it she goes dumpster diving with the pacifist anarchist Freegans and interviews individuals who live on very little, not for political reasons but because it makes them happier. With admirably little sentimentality, Weber argues that frugality brings freedom. I bought it, guilt-free.

Tags: cheap, ellen ruppel shell, in cheap we trust, into the wild, lauren weber, thrift

So Emily, not complaining for a while sounds nice and all, but I’ve got a more consumerist happiness strategy in mind. Most straight-out purchases aren’t going to boost subjective wellbeing in the long-term, since (as you know) happiness derived from new stuff diminishes over time. But there are exceptions; according to Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Wellbeing: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (which I obviously read in my spare time) the increase in self-reported happiness prompted by some purchases endures. Purchases like ... liposuction.

In addition to satisfaction with [cosmetic] surgery itself, several studies have indicated an overall improvement in psychological health or life satisfaction as a whole,” write Shane Frederick and George Loewenstein in Kahneman's anthology of happiness papers. The data is not ambiguous. In one study, 73 percent of patients reported a higher quality of life after cosmetic surgery. In another, self-reported patient satisfaction actually increased over a four year time period. In still another, “25 of 71 women were receiving psychiatric treatment prior to a breast augmentation procedure, whereas only three continued to do so after the operation.” Women, it seems, do not adapt to their new bodies. It never gets old. Most continue to feel a hedonic boost from breast augmentation, tummy tucks, and nose jobs long after the fact.

The lesson is not that messing around with your glandular organs will automatically make you happy, since presumably one has to have some kind of deep prior insecurity with regard to chest size. But maybe this says something about listening to women when they give specific reasons for their unhappiness. When people say they're made miserable by their bodies, I think we often try to locate the problem elsewhere—they’re in bad relationships, they feel unfulfilled, they’re being too negative. (What, after all, would you say to a friend who claimed that the only thing standing between her and happiness was a facelift?) Findings like these suggest that some women just really do hate specific aspects of their physical beings. And change helps.

Photograph of a woman smiling at her breasts by Stockbyte/Getty.

Tags: Happiness

Sobering words from Daniel Menaker, former head of Random House, about what it takes to succeed in publishing and how hard it is to turn a profit on a trade book (i.e., a book that real people want to read, as opposed to a book from an academic press). One of many cold showers in the piece:

Most trade books do not succeed, financially. Three out of four fail to earn back their advances. Or four out of five or six out of seven, depending on what source you consult. And depending on what kind of accounting shell game is being played in the back office. A medium-strong batting average in baseball—let's say .305—is Hall of Fame-worthy in publishing. Many books that do show a profit show a profit so small that it only minimally darkens a company's red ink.

Will the digital age of e-books turn this around? Oh, how nice it would be to think so.

Tags: book publishing, daniel menaker

This week on the DoubleX gabfest, Hanna, Margaret Talbot, and I talked about the studies showing that female happiness among secular, educated women has declined since the advent of feminism. Hanna mentioned an experiment she and Jess are embarking on. It's simple but radical: They're not complaining. And they're tracking whether that makes them happier. More on that from them soon. In the meantime, a listener wrote in with another strategy:

The suggestion about going a week/month/season without complaining reminded me of something I did several years ago and I think it contributed a great deal to how happy I am now (and I wish I'd been part of that study because I would hope I could have upped the average happiness of the non-"born again," professional woman). My law school roommate (also a woman) noticed that I was way too critical of myself and suggested I give it up. It sounded silly at the time, but I did start to take notice of each time I was telling myself I wasn't smart enough or didn't talk enough in class or wasn't thin enough, etc. (I'm not a mom, but I suppose it could work for any "I'm not a good mother" thoughts, too.) And bit by bit, I stopped saying those things aloud, and then stopped even thinking them. Or maybe that just happens to all women over 30? But given the number of older, anorexic women I see around, I suspect it's not a given.

Who's got another strategy?

Tags: Happiness