Hot off the heels of Elizabeth Weil's ode to ever-striving, entirely self-conscious happiness in marriage, Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing reports on Gretchen Rubin's forthcoming memoir, The Happiness Project, which details the year Rubin spent consuming all the scientific research on happiness she could get her hands on and incorporating the takeaways into her life to see whether she could become happier. (Disclosure: Rubin hosted her blog last year on our parent site Slate—ed.) Admittedly, Rubin was starting from a good place—she had a happy marriage, two kids, a successful writing career, and an apartment in New York. But ultimately she wanted to see whether she could learn to appreciate life more, quit her habitual nagging and whining, and stop getting easily annoyed with the smaller setbacks. Her chosen means of incorporating the fruits of her research? A monthly chart (inspired by Benjamin Franklin's 13-point chart for virtuous living) that broke down her resolutions into small steps and helped her learn to value the larger picture on a daily basis. The BoingBoing post has a Word document link to Rubin's chart.

Happiness has been abound lately, though not necessarily as a state of being for anyone. Last year, an NBER study was kind enough to point out how women are quite unhappy these days compared with the happiness heydays of the 1970s (a study, as you probably remember, that was used point-blank to tear down feminism, disregarding a whole bunch of factors, including the obvious point that it was much more taboo for a woman in the 1970s to say she was unhappy). Now we seem to find resonance with the stories of perfectly happy women like Rubin and Weil second-guessing their happiness. Which serves what point, exactly? That we're willing to become unraveled and binge on self-help tokens because some outside force says we couldn't possibly satisfied with our lot? Or just that the very concept of happiness is somewhat unobtainable?

Tags: boingboing, elizabeth weil, Gretchen Rubin, Happiness

Miep Gies, the Dutch woman who sheltered the family of Anne Frank in an annex above the office where she worked for Anne’s father, Otto, has died at the age of 100. We have this tiny, courageous woman to thank for risking her own life in an ultimately futile attempt to save the Franks, the van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer, the Jews who took refuge in the annex. My family and I went to the annex, now a museum, a year ago. In a short video clip, Gies described how one day she went up to bring some food and walked in on Anne at a desk, writing furiously. Anne’s mother, Edith, came over to Gies and asked her not to interrupt Anne’s concentration, explaining that her daughter was a young writer. After the Nazis were tipped off and Anne and the others were sent to their deaths (with the exception of Otto), it was Gies who gathered up the scattered pages of that diary. In the New York Times obituary of this great woman, there is the hearbreaking detail of Gies bringing Anne her first, and only, pair of high heels.

Photograph of Miep Gies by Karl-Heinz Schindler, courtesy of the German Federal Archive.

Tags: anne frank, Miep Gies

Emily, the trouble with the "garden curriculum," as Flanagan's Atlantic piece describes it, isn't that it's a fad or that students are writing recipes. It's that if you're learning math by "measuring the garden," you're not learning math by doing drills or taking math tests and both of those are pedagogical methods with more research and history behind them than the gardening method. I didn't like the way she framed her arguments (she's ever the master of the contrarian polemic) but if I were her imaginary migrant parent—or any California parent—I might object to the garden curriculum, too. It sounds good, especially as you describe it: "Take one thing that makes numbers and letters come alive, and then build on it." But my experience is that the basics of learning can get lost in the more exciting-sounding theme.

My mother taught elementary school for decades and likes to talk about the pendulum of educational theory as it swings from "learning by doing" to "focus on the basics" and back again. Students are in trouble at either end of the swing. You can practice math by measuring a garden, but you probably won't learn it that way (and if you're also in the middle of a trend toward group activities, you may not even have to, provided that some other student in your group can add up the numbers). It makes sense that more "at risk" populations would suffer more, as their families may be less likely to observe or address a gap in their education. (The more elementary schools rely on "experiential learning," the more affluent kids you'll find at Kaplan after school, and how backward is that?)

Personally, my oldest child sat through two years of similarly themed lesson plans and emerged knowing plenty about butterflies (life cycles) and woodpeckers (meadow learning). But he didn't know how to read and he couldn't add or subtract. Like Flanagan, I began to see every minute of his school day—and there were a lot of them—spent on a social agenda and not on actual learning as a terrible misuse of instructional time. It's easy to support these happy-sounding programs and hard to argue against an agenda of healthful eating and physical activity. But you can't add hours to the day, and time spent in those gardens—an hour and a half a week, according to Flanagan—is time not spent on other things. If, as the numbers seem to show, kids aren't testing better in the gardening schools, then all of that money and energy that's gone into the gardens would be better spent on proven methods. The "living classroom" only works if it's not a substitution for the actual classroom.

Photograph of pepper in mantle by John Foxx/Stockbyte/Getty Images.

This post by Eric Morris on the Freakonomics blog wins this week's award in the ongoing contest of Most Egregious Attempt To Pretend Sexism Isn't a Factor. The question at hand is simple: Why is it that when men and women ride in cars together, men are far more likely to drive? The answer is pretty simple: Because letting women take control is considered emasculating in our culture and even pro-feminist men are not immune to feeling that pressure—but Morris expends paragraphs worth of dithering to avoid admitting that's it. He admits that there are such things as "feminists," which implies that there's a reason these "feminists" would exist, but he doesn't quite get to the next step of realizing that it might be sexism, and they're against it.

This bizarre brotherhood (and sometimes sisterhood) of pretending sexism isn't a factor in cultural trends is bad enough because it shuts down honest conversation and hurts women, but it also hurts the people who perpetuate the myth of post-feminism because it makes them sound like honking morons. For instance, Morris comes across like a man who doesn't know you can Google the answer to why the sky is blue:

What else might be responsible? Cultural factors? Social ones? Psychological differences? Logistics? Animal instinct? Historical inertia?

The reason that he won't entertain the idea that sexism might be a factor is pretty obvious, though, and that's because he appears committed to the idea that women are inferior to men physically and mentally. His ideas about why women don't do as much driving drift back to the idea that it's because we're just not as good as men:

In the past, physical factors were important. My grandmother learned to drive only after the introduction of automatic transmission and power steering, which made the task much less physically demanding. But driving today’s cars requires little strength. In addition, our roads are engineered to be quite forgiving, for example with very long reaction times permitted by the system.

I was impressed to discover there are still men around who believe that I, by virtue of having girl bits instead of boy bits, am so slow-witted that I can't figure out that when the light turns red, I need to hit the brakes. I was under the impression that a lot of traffic safety design is due to the fact that designers know most people drive so much that they tune out and need to have more time to react, but I guess that's because I'm a dumb, slow-moving female. Of course it's because the government was stupid enough to let women drive, and they have to design the roads now like they're a romper room! And thank God they invented automatic transmission, since women, you know, have trouble counting to five gears, bless their tiny little lady brains. It's a shame Morris didn't get to my father before he taught me to drive on a standard; since both student and teacher were ignorant of the fact that I shouldn't be capable of handling five whole gears, I learned how to do it without knowing that I shouldn't.

And that's not even accounting for the idea that women are so naturally weak that we can't even handle a car without power steering. (If I'd only known for the first 10 years I was driving a car that I should have been incapable of turning the wheel!) This issue, that women are naturally too weak to lift anything heavier than a penis, was put to rest by Sojourner Truth over 158 years ago, and yet it still keeps cropping up. It is funny how our supposed weaknesses are so context-dependent. Women who are considered too weak to turn a wheel are somehow still expected to be able to exert enough muscle force to carry a toddler in one arm while pushing a grocery-laden cart with the other, or haul heavy laundry baskets up three flights of stairs. Perhaps Morris can start to work on some hormonal theories about women's super strength that only exhibits itself when household chores stimulate our adrenal glands. Anything but suggest that perhaps sexism is in play.

Tags: freakanomics, women drivers

Caitlin Flanagan may be right that Alice Waters' school garden movement in California is an undeserving fad. But I don't see the evidence in her Atlantic essay, acerbic whirl of a read that it is, as usual. Actually, the only specifics about how the gardens affect student performance that I could find sound pretty good, even if Flanagan cites them mockingly:

In English class students composed recipes, in math they measured the garden beds, and in history they ground corn as a way of studying pre-Columbian civilizations. Students’ grades quickly improved at King, which makes sense given that a recipe is much easier to write than a coherent paragraph on The Crucible.

Isn't this how teachers are supposed to build a curriculum—take one thing that can make letters and numbers come alive and then build on it? I don't see why we should think that the students' grades improved because they were writing recipes instead of about Arthur Miller plays. Weren't they just using the garden as a jumping-off point for math and history lessons? Which could have been substantive or not; Flanagan doesn't tell us.

I did like Flanagan's quote from George Orwell to make her point that poor people don't eat well because they'd rather have a sugar pick-me-up than a dull nutritious meal. The rest of us too, much of the time. Alas, alack that evolution cast us adrift here—the fat-storage survival strategy of old, come back to haunt us.

Tags: alice waters, caitlin flanagan, school gardens

Hanna, when I read the excerpt about John and Elizabeth Edwards from Game Change in New York magazine, I winced nearly the entire time. Not because I did not believe that Elizabeth Edwards had been pretty nasty to her subordinates. I believe that. But because the narrative of John's affair was the typical sexist narrative—unsympathetic, overweight wife drives husband into the arms of a more attractive younger woman who soothes his ego. I'm not even saying that I believe this account of the Elizabeth/John/Rielle love triangle to be untrue. It's just so unfortunate, especially when one considers the extenuating circumstances of the Edwards' marriage—a dead son, the terminal cancer.

And I am not the only one driven to defend Elizabeth. The Daily Beast's Lee Seigel wrote a good column about it in which he presents a counter narrative for the Edwards' relationship:

The death of their oldest son in 1996, when he was about 17, changed the Edwards’ lives. They blamed themselves; they blamed each other. Politics kept them together; politics drove them apart. The more John triumphed, the further he drifted away from Elizabeth. His triumphs made Elizabeth satisfied; they also made her desperate. Her cancer brought death back into their lives. He grew distant; she became enraged. He found a new image of himself, a new woman who bought it, and started a new life with her, free of death: his son’s, his wife’s. Elizabeth kept him with her to console herself with an imaginary future, and to punish him. The lying, the delusion, the denial—they were all honest falsehoods pouring out of real emotions. John’s self-destruction was how he almost consciously paid himself back for his delusions.

Commenters in Hanna's post also took up for Elizabeth, most notably elisabeth51, who is also a cancer survivor, and who has a Barbara Ehrenreich-like anti-pink ribbon take on Elizabeth Edwards's life with cancer:

Everyone is different in her response, but my own experience has been that no matter how much you put on a good front in public, having had a lot of cancer treatment only to find out that you have metastasized, does make you a little more impatient about some things, a little more frustrated than you may have been before, a little more-than-wistful about the ways in which you wanted your life to work out that are now probably not going to happen. And, so yeah, despite what the pink-ribbon narrative predicts, you may indeed lash out sometimes or often!

No matter what sort of person Elizabeth Edwards is or how much money she has (and the New York excerpt goes out of its way to point out Elizabeth's wealth: "The people around them marveled at Elizabeth’s callousness—this from a woman whose family had multiple houses and a net worth in the tens of millions"), her circumstances are deeply unhappy.

Photograph of Elizabeth Edwards by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: Barbara Ehrenreich, breast cancer, Elizabeth Edwards, Game Change, John Edwards