Emily B, Hanna: I, too, gobbled up the gossip-rich excepts and reviews of Game Change, but they left me feeling kind of sorry for the people who go into politics. Sure, we are entitled to know as much as we can about those we entrust with our security, freedom, and money, but there is something a little squirm-making about the post-election book frenzy in which staffers unload every embarrassing private anecdote about their former bosses. And while this book clearly fills in a lot of detail, the behind-the-scenes portrait makes a case that the press coverage and exposure to the candidates as they run really does do a good job of telling us what we need to know. Game Change only reinforced my knowledge that we didn’t want Bill and Hillary’s relationship back at center stage at the White House, and that, duh, she can’t control him. That John Edwards is an oily, lying, narcissistic lightweight. That Elizabeth had unhealthily made his election her life’s justification (although her mortification is horrible to read about). That Sarah Palin was dangerously incapable of grappling with the issues of the day. That John and Cindy McCain can’t stand each other. That Harry Reid says stupid things.

Tags: Clinton, Edwards, Game Change, McCain, Palin, Reid

Game Change, the new dishy book about the 2008 campaign, contains an incredibly disturbing portrait of John and Elizabeth Edwards, excerpted in New York magazine. The surprise revelation about him is that his staff considered him virtually “asexual.” Rielle Hunter, his mistress, got to him not through his vanity but through his growing messiah complex. (You are the next Ghandi, the next MLK). The book’s portrayal of Elizabeth, meanwhile, will break your heart. She comes across as haughty, mean-spirited, unhinged—and this is before she knew about the affair. “The nearly universal assessment among [the staff] was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing,” the authors write.

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

Tags: Elizabeth Edwards, Game Change and Elizabeth Edwards

Last month, a Wyoming man ventured onto Craigslist.org and, posing as his ex-girlfriend, posted an ad that began, "Need a real aggressive man with no concern for women." A few days later, his ex-girlfriend spotted it and immediately alerted authorities as well as Craigslist. The ad was taken down, but it was too late—another 26-year-old Wyoming man, Ty McDowell, had already spotted it and was in talks via instant messenger with the woman's ex-boyfriend, who provided him with her address and reiterated that she wanted "humiliation, physical abuse, sexual abuse." A week later, McDowell broke into the woman's house, said "I'll show you aggressive" and raped her at knifepoint.

This isn't the first time Craigslist has come under fire for facilitating crimes. Last spring, Philip Markoff, the clean-cut Boston University medical student/serial killer used Craiglist to lure women to hotel rooms. In 2007, a 19-year-old Minneapolis man posted an ad seeking a babysitter, and when a 24-year-old woman showed up for the job, she was murdered.

The Wyoming case is once again sparking debate about Internet censorship. Current law dictates that site owners are not responsible for their user's actions. As M. Ryan Calo, a Stanford Law fellow, puts it in the L.A. Times: "Craigslist is like a hotel with millions of rooms, but it doesn't have the ability to figure out what's happening in those rooms." But some in favor of imposing stricter regulations are speaking out—Steve Patterson, a spokesman for an Illinois sherrif's department that accused Craigslist of running a "blatant Internet brothel," argues that by not monitoring the listings thoroughly Craigslist creates a specific place for criminal activity to take place."

Both men involved in the rape have been arrested and charged. The woman's ex-boyfriend has been charged with conspiracy to commit first-degree sexual assault, and McDowell is charged with first-degree sexual assault. He contends that he believed he was acting out a rape fantasy, not committing rape.

Tags: Craigslist, internet censorship, Rape

If you have read a women’s magazine in the last year, you have probably come across Robert Epstein, whose specialty is the science of falling in love. Phrases such as “love at first sight” teach us to think of this as a bolt from the blue, a force beyond reason that moves mountains. But falling in love can be reduced to a series of simple exercises, explains Epstein in his cover story in the latest Scientific American Mind. You can breathe together and touch gently or do “soul gazing,” which means staring into each other’s eyes.

The theory is popular because it removes the chance element from finding the perfect partner. But it’s also unpopular because it makes a beautiful thing seem mechanical. Epstein likes to say the average person has 350,000 potential soul mates. He’s also in favor of the arranged marriage, which he argues builds intimacy over time.

Sarah Vander Schaaff, my new favorite mom-blogger, has a great take on Epstein. Many of his exercises sounded familiar to her, and she realized they sounded exactly like standard techniques she learned in acting school. She then conducted an online survey of actors and discovered that yes, 93 percent of them had indeed fallen in love on the set. These romances did not necessarily last but they tended to ignite on stage. Does this mean Epstein’s method works? Possibly. At the very least, it explains the Hollywood divorce rate.

Photograph of hands in mantle by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: robert epstein, science of falling in love

Data point No. 856 on the weirdness of Hillary and Bill Clinton's marriage: In Game Change, the new book on the underside of the 2008 campaign, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin report that Hillary “couldn’t bear to confront her husband directly” when he went after Obama like a crazy man in South Carolina. She had to ask her aides “to implore him either to leave the state or to pipe down.” (Quotes are in the NYT review.) In another new book on the campaign, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling, Anne Kornblut resurrects the question of whether young women didn't vote for Hillary because she's Hillary or because they're not feminists. Answer: because she's Hillary and because he's Bill.

Tags: hillary clinton; bill clinton; game change; notes from the cracked ceilling

Virginia Heffernan says she's singing the praises of telecommuting "in a feminist key" in her Sunday NYT Magazine column The Medium: Home Tool. Her thesis: The Internet is, for women, the greatest thing since sliced bread. But based on her description of the life of a "WAHM" or any telecommuting woman, the real "Home Tool" in the piece is the one on her "mangy floor wearing 'yoga' pants with 'Judge Judy' on mute." (And that's before her hapless feminist heroine downloads school forms, pumps breast milk, loads the crockpot, and straightens the kitchen, all with BlackBerry in hand.)

I get that Heffernan's tongue was firmly in her cheek, at least for the body of the piece. For the first three paragraphs, I was laughing too. I work at home, I love the Internet, I have always loathed "face time." But her final claim that women benefit more than men from the Internet depends on an assumption that the responsibility for all of those things—the crockpot, the school forms, the kitchen—rests with her otherwise working woman. (I have to give her the breast milk.) That may, on a practical level, be true in many cases, but it's not a solid basis for declaring the Internet a victory for feminism. In fact, making those things arguably easier, or at least more possible, to juggle alongside a career may slow up any societal realization that dads share a responsibility for feeding, schooling and cleaning up after their young. I'd argue that's no victory for either sex.

But worse, by implying that any day a woman spends working at or from home is really a day spent mostly working on the home and avoiding the real world of work, Heffernan manages to undermine exactly that which she claims to praise. At the same time, she adds an insidious suggestion that the whole telecommuting thing really serves to help women avoid a masculine work world full of broad shoulders and baritones—that it benefits women more because we're the ones who least want to put in our time in the "unpredictable world of vice-presidents and printer hubs." Ouch. I think there is an argument to made for the Internet as a liberating household technology, but this isn't it. Instead, it's a song of praise (from a writer I usually enjoy) that's remarkably tone deaf.

A few years ago, this would have been hard for me to say but now it's easy: Thank the stars for Nicholas Kristof. He proved his pricelessness as a voice of real reason on the NY Times op-ed page yet again by tackling the nuclear question of the role that religion plays in human rights abuses around the world. Of course, since said human rights abuses involve oppression of women, they're often not seen as human rights abuses, but from American purity balls that imply that men own their daughters to female genital mutilation, women's rights are being oppressed, with religion and tradition as the excuses. Kristof doesn't pull his punches but directly describes this uncomfortable reality in which one culture after another hates on women while blaming God or gods for hating women.

The politic line on religion's role in misogynist cultural practices is to claim that it's not religion's fault, but that it's being "misused" by people. To Kristof's credit, he ignores this intellectually bankrupt idea and points out that misogyny isn't a distortion of religion but built right into the original texts and practices of many religions, including Christianity. To suggest that religion is being misused when it's used to oppress women is like arguing that hammers aren't meant to be used to bang down nails, just because they can also be used to pull out nails.

Still, just because religion has always been used to justify male dominance over women doesn't mean it has to be that way, as Kristof points out. Religion has changed its tune on many grave injustices it has traditionally supported, including slavery, genocide, and even the divine right of kings. And now many political and religious leaders are insisting that religion change its tune about women and start recognizing women as full individuals in their own right and not just appendages and servants of men.

As an atheist feminist, I find this entire debate interesting, because I both fully support the movement of religious leaders toward feminism and think they're mistaken if they think that religion is going to survive this march to justice as intact as they like it. They underestimate the importance of justifying oppression as a reason for religion to exist. Not that this is the only reason religion exists—it satisfies needs for identity, community, and spirituality as well—but one major reason that religion has persisted in the face of natural skepticism of magical claims is that people with power cling to it as a means to justify their power. If we guilt oppressors into relinquishing their arguments for oppression, religion won't be as attractive anymore and will lose its potency. After all, if the need to bang down nails disappeared, we'd probably stop making hammers even if we still had a need to yank nails out of walls. We'd just invent something else, something more efficient, for this task. And so I suspect will happen with religion if drained of its usefulness as a tool of oppression.

The evidence for this assertion is easy enough to demonstrate—look at Western Europe and America. As our cultures become more married to the ideals of justice and equality for all, the enthusiasm for religion dries up. The strong inverse correlation between a nation's religiosity and its standards of living is hard to deny, but the question is why. Does indifference to religion promote more humanitarian social policies, or do people stop caring about religion once they stop wishing to oppress their neighbors? I'd argue that it's probably a little of both.

Tags: Religion, women's rights