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Hanna, I have a teenager, and I found the study that says kids spend every free moment on electronic devices all too believable. But even if your own kids are too young for them, don’t most of the adults you know spend every free minute on some kind of electronic device? It apparently is common at business meetings for people to place their iPhones and BlackBerries on the conference table and text and scroll while at a meeting. I see people at restaurants and movies in couples and groups where at least one person is absorbed in the phone. Does anyone take a walk, go to the gym, or commute without being plugged into an iPod or listening to the radio? And once dinner is made and the dishes are done (and I bet a lot of people are listening to something while they’re doing those tasks), how many adults then flop in front of the TV or park themselves at the computer for a couple of hours before bed?

Photograph of a teen girl using a laptop by Jim Esposito/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

Tags: children and electronic devices

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I'm with KJ about the main explanation for Scott Brown's win: Washington rage first, manly rage second. But surely Hanna's revenge-of-the-angry-man theory explains why Drudge is swooning over Brown's presidential chances. The Republicans need a savior, now they have one cast perfectly to type. (Brown was even a little-known state senator till recently, a piece of the Obama resume.) Ann Althouse has it: "We've seen conservatism in the idealized female form, the lovely Sarah Palin with her moose. And now, we see conservatism in the idealized male form, the handsome Scott Brown in his truck."

Photograph of Scott Brown by Robert Spencer/Getty Images.

Tags: 2010 Massachusetts senate race, Scott Brown and angry man revenge

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What shouldn’t you have when you’re 20? Alzheimer’s disease—that would be weird. More than five kids—also strange when you’re just toe-dipping into your deuces. Oh, and how about a multi-page Web site highlighting your minor pop career along with at least nine other personal traits, each with their own special section like “The Community Figure,” describing, of course, your charitable performance at a Red Sox game in support of “The Foundation to be Named Later.” Or an “Actress” section, detailing how you twice turned down an offer to star in a local production of Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat but then “finally accepted” the offer. (Reminiscent of that one friend whose Facebook status message is always something like: “Can’t decide between Harvard and Yale. They both really want me! Going to have to break one of their hearts.”) It's Tracy Flick meets the Internet age.

Meet Ayla Brown, the daughter of newly elected Massachusetts senator Scott Brown. She has this personal Web site because she is a budding actress/singer/performer/charitable giver/athlete/judge/communications major/anthem girl. To a limited degree, there’s some quasi-valuable information you can take away from your elected official’s offspring—or at least a way politicians' little DNA soufflés can be played to their political advantage. Before Sarah Palin entered the scene and destroyed all the moderate cred McCain possessed, John wore his daughter Meghan like a badge of moderate pride. However silly the logic, some felt comforted by Megan McCain because her hip, blogger personality meant John McCain couldn't really be that conservative. (Like: "If his daughter goes to Columbia and likes the Decemberists, there's no way he's anti-abortion!") In the same way, Chelsea Clinton’s schooling (Sidwell Friends) and general curly-haired nerdism was constantly held up by Republicans during Bill's presidency as an example of the family's liberal elitism.

And what does Ayla reveal about Brown family, if anything? Well, her Web site paints her as the perfect Northeastern version of a conservative, values-friendly Southern Belle. She has acting and singing ambitions, but you know, nothing too risqué. She sings the national anthem at ball games. She tries out for American Idol, not Real World. You may have seen something like these lyrics from her song “Thanks to You” in your high school guidance counselor’s office:

Nothing, is gonna get in my way,
no one is gonna take my dreams away
Nothing can stop me, I can do anything,
No one can tell me how life is supposed to be
In the meantime I'll hang on to my dreams
and I thank you, for everything
repeat ...

Photograph of Ayla Brown by Robert Spencer/Getty Images.

Tags: ayla brown, political kids, Scott Brown, Tracy Flick

Robert Parker, who died yesterday at 77, wrote his Spenser detective series in two speeds. Fast for the action sequences and for his friendship with Hawk, the bald, black hit man who never fails him. Slow for Spenser’s food, his clothing, and his love for Susan Silverman. It’s Hawk and Susan that I kept coming back for when I devoured two dozen of these novels in high school and afterward. Spenser’s relationship with Hawk let me peer into a kind of brotherhood that I didn’t know anything about firsthand, as one of four sisters. (We all must have felt that way, since we read these books out loud in the car on long trips.) And his long, intimate, sustaining relationship with Susan? It was a model for the companionate marriage we on DoubleX and many others have spent so much time examining recently. Never mind that they never actually got married.

Here is how Spenser introduced Susan in 1976: "Susan Silverman wasn't beautiful, but there was a tangibility about her... It was hard to tell her age but there was a sense about her of intelligent maturity which put her on my side of thirty." The teenage me already knew that when you get to the other side of 30, that’s what you aim for. A dozen years later in book years, Susan left Spenser for a while for a new job (she got a psychology Ph.D. at Harvard). He found another woman for a time. A bit of lonely bitterness crept into the series, but not enough to throw off the rhythm of these books, which are plotted as well as anything I’ve read by Scott Turow or Tony Hillerman.

Eventually, Spenser has to rescue Susan. This occurs in the only book in the series that I remembered the title of when I heard that Parker died: A Catskill Eagle. It came out in 1985. It threw me. Susan had become helpless, cold, selfish, no fun. I hardly knew her. I got mad and stopped reading Spenser books for a while. It soured me on the TV show, too (though the casting of Hawk was masterful).

Every profile of Parker points out that he himself is the basis for Spenser (except Parker was shorter) and his wife Joan is Susan. I don’t know what fissure opened up between the real couple in the mid 1980s, but it produced what reviewers say is the only bad book in the series. The Parkers’ marriage recovered, and with it the novels. There are a couple of missteps over the years but considering the man lived with his characters through 37 books, it’s remarkable that his affection for them persisted undiminished.

Louis B. Park of the Houston Chronicle (whom I trust because he hated A Catskill Eagle, too) wrote in 2003 that “Spenser readers are pretty much divided into two camps: those who love Susan Silverman and Spenser's dedication to her (not to mention constant mooning over her) and those who wish she would fall out a window.” I’m clearly in the first camp. I guess you can read the Spenser novels and skip the slow Susan bits without missing much of the plot. But it’s Spenser’s loyalty to Susan that explains why he’s the private eye you’d most want to hire.

(Cross posted on Slate's culture blog, Brow Beat.)

Tags: robert b. parker, spenser, susan silverman

Lauren, I’m glad you posted about Clay Shirky’s “A Rant about Women”—his blog post asking whether women may not be narcissistically self-aggrandizing enough to get ahead. In a sense, I’m one of the women Shirky talks about. I find it hard to boast in print; when I read his rant, I’d just written a personal statement designed to persuade a committee to give me an honor I want. When I showed a draft to a friend (and DoubleX contributor), her response was, “You’re not being self-promoting enough. You’re being a woman about this. Stop doing that.”

But I think Shirky misses something important when he assumes that finding it hard to promote oneself on the page translates to being averse to risk-taking in the workplace, or calling out “Me!” Me!” in the classroom. It may not. My theory is this: Women falter when they’re called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they’re called on to enact them. Think of it this way: Writing a self-evaluation is a narrow form of highly self-conscious self-presentation; risk-taking and raising one’s hand are a form of engagement that is more self-forgetful, integrated into the rhythms of work and study. Many women I know (and many men) find the first hard but not the second.

Finally, as you rightly point out, Shirky doesn’t spend much time on the studies that show people are often put off when women self-promote. The problem isn’t simply (or even mostly) that women don’t raise their hands and say, “Me! Me!” It’s that when they do, they’re often met with a turned back or an eyebrow raised in subtle annoyance. Consider this comment from a reader of Shirky’s post (I thought it was a joke, but it seems not to be): “Dunno, the women I’ve worked with in the past that try to be all masculine and cocky, etc. are usually a total pain in the ass. It’s like they overcompensate and get it all wrong. I’m a dude BTW.”

This damned-if-you-do-self-promote, damned-if-you-don’t is one of those predicaments that can make you despair. I draw the line at taking Shirky's advice that women emulate narcissistic assholes. A wholesale embrace of a world in which women get ahead by behaving more ego-centrically would, after all, just be another version of listening to male authority instead of claiming it for oneself.

Tags: clay shirky, gender neutrality, women at work

Sorry, Hanna, I'm going to stick with political explanations for that Scott Brown victory. I'm no Massachusetts voter, but I am that much-sought-after independent, and I'm disappointed and frustrated with the Senate right now. I wouldn't have voted for Scott Brown, but I can see why a Massachusetts voter would have voted not against Coakley, but rather against the filibuster-proof Dem majority in the Senate. Brown may be a disaster for health care reform, but if health care reform weren't looking like such a disaster at the moment, he wouldn't have been able to take that seat.

The level of frustration everywhere—Republicans, Democrats and in-between—is enormous, and it comes from things like the perception that a hold-out senator can ensure that his state won't pay for health care reform, and a general sense that whatever's in whichever bill the House or the Senate or somebody is trying to pass now won't really do what most voters wanted: provide (somehow) health care coverage for everyone. I'm intentionally not getting specific because I don't think many voters did.

I talked this morning to a friend who's active in local Democratic politics, and she put Brown's victory down to Coakley's failure. I think that's a mistake, although, as Christopher Beam pointed out in Slate, without exit polls we'll never know. But thanks to the magic of imprecise television advertising targeting, this New Hampshire resident can tell you that there's no way any Massachusetts voter who watched, say, American Idol didn't know what was at stake here. Those Democrats and independents knew that there was a lot riding on this for the president and the Senate's coming agenda—and they either stayed home or they actively got up and voted no.

Did Tamar Lewin’s New York Times story actually say kids spend "practically every waking minute" using some electronic device? Every waking minute? Apparently that’s what a new Kaiser Family Foundation study shows. My kids are still too young for this kind of electronic addiction, so I have to ask: Parents, is this true? If so, anyone out there have any creative system for limiting gadgets? Best idea will win you a  ... free iPod (just kidding).

Tags: children and electronic devices

I've rarely agreed so strongly with a fellow writer, but Jennifer Steinhauer hit it perfectly in the NYT's food section: We give kids too many snacks. The average 3-year-old needs 1,300 calories a day. There are 360 in that bag of Doritos that kept her quiet in the grocery cart and another 420 in that six-pack of Oreos from the gas station. Toss in a 120-cal Juicy Juice and a few bites of sandwich and she's pretty much good for the day. A nation of parents complaining that our kids are "picky" eaters who barely touch their dinners need look no farther than the mandatory after-school snack. But at least there are three hours between a 3 p.m.school release and a 6 p.m. meal.

Like Ms. Steinhauer, I've provided snacks for hourlong toddler programs and two-hourlong field trips, and every one of my kids has a daily morning snack between their 7 a.m. breakfast and 11:30 a.m. school or preschool lunch. When did this start? There was absolutely no morning-snack routine during my '70s/'80s schooling. Suddenly, we're convinced that any child who goes an hour without a food hit will enter blood-sugar meltdown, so we sate them constantly with our little offerings. Last week I took a kindergartner home from school to play, and had to stop her mom, who was leaning into the car, from giving her a orange for the (five minute) ride. She rolled her eyes a little at my no-food-in-the-car rule but let it go. At last check, mother and child survived the ordeal.

The parents quoted in the Times piece offer various excuses. One mentions the 7:30 p.m. snack, offered because "our kids didn't care much for what we provided for dinner." Another notes that she let the kid buy something from a post-activity vending machine once, so, of course, now she has to say yes every time. Can anyone out there imagine her mother saying either of those things? I know what my mom would have said (it's what I try to say now). A little hunger won't kill you. You'll spoil your dinner. You had dinner, now wait for breakfast. I don't care what we did last week, I said no. Because that's what she said, when I wanted something she couldn't afford, or I didn't need, or she didn't want me to have. No. Why? Because she was the mom, and she said so. My mom wasn't perfect, but this article reminded me that there are times when we all need a little piece of that.

Of all the global meanings that have been laid on to Republican Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, here is one I have not heard discussed yet: Brown as the angry man’s revenge against the rise of the working woman. Remember that great Pew study released yesterday, called the “Rise of Wives?” The study quantifies how women are increasingly outpacing men in college degrees and even outearning their husbands in many cases. This phenomenon is especially stark in the white working class, where women tend to be better educated and have higher salaries than their husbands.

Jessica, you drew out of that study the notion that men are getting more out of marriage than women these days. But I read between the lines to see the growing resentment of men at being overthrown from their traditional roles, and looking forward to only bleaker times ahead.

Scott Brown is a man’s man. He is clearly the head of a thriving household of women. He had a tough childhood which made him a “jerk” and a thief, he’s said. He often says un-PC, inappropriate things about women and gay marriage. A mini campaign scandal involved a video in which Brown, seen campaigning with his coat open in the cold, possibly nods when someone in the crowd yells “Shove a curling iron up her butt”—referring to a sexual abuse case Martha Coakley was accused of not prosecuting aggressively enough.

Coakley, meanwhile, is the poster girl for that Pew report: more educated, accomplished, and prominent than her husband. She is a longtime prosecutor with political ambitions married to a retired police superintendent. They have two dogs but no children. During the campaign, she complained about the cold and couldn’t even get her Red Sox facts straight.

The press has analyzed Brown’s victory entirely in political terms, about its implications for health care reform and as a referendum on Obama. But given the dismal state of the economy, it’s possible those are entirely too arid concerns for the average Massachusetts voter. It seems just as likely that the voters see the rise of wives like Coakley, and they don’t like it.

Tags: martha coakley, Scott Brown, Scott Brown and angry man revenge