Has everyone noticed the uncanny parallels between the biographies of Barack Obama and Scott Brown? Both had parents who split when they were toddlers, and the parents went on to have multiple subsequent failed marriages. Both spent time during their rather chaotic childhoods living with their grandparents. Both had a "troubled, alienated youth" period (drugs for Obama, shoplifting for Brown). Both got serious as college students and went on to law school. Both are obsessive about working out and love basketball. Both found a calling in service to others (community organizing for Obama, the National Guard for Brown). Both married women with prominent careers and have two daughters. Both emerged from obscurity in the state Senate to be elected to the U.S. Senate. Sometimes politics is like show business—out of nowhere comes the next big thing.

Photograph of Barack Obama by J.D. Pooley/Getty Images.

Photograph of Scott Brown by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: Barack Obama, biography, childhoods, Scott Brown

Rachael, I think the lesson we can draw from the Brown family is that some people, when they’re young and hot and are presented with the opportunity to memorialize it, will do so. I totally agree with you: So what? I hope they all laugh off the mockery, especially since senator-elect Brown and his wife, TV reporter Gail Huff, still look great. You can’t haul the Brown family into the court of hypocrisy, unless we turn up some speech he’s given or story she’s reported in which the lesson is, “Kids, even if you’ve got a great body, the worst thing you can do is pose in a state of undress.” It’s true, their daughter Ayla has a self-loving Web site, but I clicked on a few of her songs and she actually can sing (and is also young and hot), so her show-business ambitions are not delusional. And if she doesn’t make it, she surely will go on to have a productive life, as her parents have, even if her silliest self-displays can be tossed back at her decades later.

Tags: ayla brown, Gail Huff, nude photos, Scott Brown

A confession: I've never paged through an issue of Playboy, whether by dint of my sex or age. So it's to Elizabeth Fraterrigo's credit that she managed, in Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in America, to interest me for 216 pages in "a titty magazine that has been culturally irrelevant since the late 1970s." She did so by arguing that Playboy was about far more than breasts; it helped shape the consumer desires of the midcentury man as much as it shaped his carnal tastes. And, it turns out, a book about Playboy's history is also a corollary history of American gender roles in the second half of the 20th century.

Hugh Hefner, long before he was an old man escorting pretty young silicone things around cable TV, was an unhappily married, disatisfied-with-his-lot Chicago desk worker. Before leaving his wife, but perhaps indicating what was to come, he struck out to create a magazine that glamorized the life that he felt was of the philosophically highest order: that of an urban single man with a lot of disposable cash that he spent on a certain kind of sports car, a bachelor pad in the city, a hi-fi, just the right cut of suit. Intended as a challenge and update to more staid Esquire, Playboy redefined and became a global symbol of all that it meant to be American, claims Fraterrigo. In 1967, David Halbestrom was asked by a Polish intellectual to whom he owed a favor simply for a copy of the magazine: " 'It doesn't matter that all American young men don't live like Playboy heroes; what matters is that we think they do. For us Playboy is the symbol of your good life.' "

The magazine started losing readers and cultural caché when Penthouse, Hustler, and the more "worldly" Oui entered the market and ratcheted up the standard level of graphic nudity. This was also the moment when the women's movement took serious hold. Though Hefner had long publicly advocated for women's sexual freedom (Gloria Steinem once credited the magazine with helping jump-start feminism's so-called second wave), the magazine was clumsy in adapting to a new world order, running screeds against frightening man-haters and struggling to make sense of the inherently anti-consumerist hippie movment. The formerly suave Playboy man looked just a little more like Archie Bunker every year.

Be forewarned—Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in America is an academic work, and the prose gets bogged down in places. Despite the subject matter, the book is not remotely titillating, or meant to be. Fraterrigo also skims over a lot, particularly how the magazine shaped sexuality and notions of female beauty (she prefers ruminating on the social lives of Playboy bachelors and Helen Gurley Brown's single girls; it's more about materialism and the city than sex and the city). But it helps parse exactly how sex, money, goods, and urban living got mixed up together into a certain idea of the good life that’s still poured out, no longer in Playboy but on, yes, Sex and The City—or Mad Men, the current vogue of which perhaps proves how strongly Hefner’s original vision shaped our culture.

Tags: book of the week, Playboy

As someone who spent a good swath of her 20s happily trolling online dating sites, I was intrigued by this post on OKTrends, the stats-tastic blog from the founders of romance-and-quizzes site OKCupid.

The founders—all math majors from Harvard—dipped into their dataset and analyzed 7,000 profile pictures to figure out which images were the most successful. Some of the most interesting tidbits:

—For women, eye contact is better than no eye contact, and a straight-on “flirty-face” gets more attention than a smile. Weirdly, men get the best results when they don’t smile and they look away from the camera.

—The much-maligned “MySpace shot”—a self-portrait snapped with a camera held above your head—was far and away the most successful photo strategy for women, even when said photo didn’t include gratuitous peeks of cleavage.

—In general, though, showing your boobs is a good idea. (No, that’s not the surprising part. This is:) The older you are, the bigger the benefits of flashing your Hidden Valley.

—Photos in which you’re doing something interesting increases your chances of actually having a conversation with someone.

Profile photos say a lot about who we think we are and how we want to be perceived. But the online dating photo offers so much more delicious psychoanalytic potential, because now we’re not just talking about your neuroses, but also those of everyone who’s looking at your photos. (Surely someone out there has written a media studies thesis on profile photos by now, yes?)

Anyhow, I’ll offer myself up as an illustrative example here. The photo on the left, with the goggles, is the one that accompanied my dating profile for a long time. To me, this photo says: I’m fun! I’m a conversationalist! I’m ready to do wacky experiments with you! But when I posted the photo on the right, my response rate really shot up—without any changes to the text of my profile.

Perhaps OKTrends can shed some light on this uptick. This second image, as we can see, showcases the third-most successful of six possible "facial attitude" (no eye contact and a smile), while the first uses the second-least successful (no eye contact and no smile). No. 2 is also a self-shot, though whether it’s a classic "MySpace shot" is debatable. No word from the OKCupid team on whether black-and-white is better than color.

What about you? Which of your online dating photos have gotten the best responses? And which photos do you find yourself being drawn to?

Tags: data, dating, okcupid, online dating, profile photos

The big buzz on the Internet today surrounding Scott Brown isn’t about his victory over Martha Coakley, his policy positions, or even his truck. No, instead it’s a music video made more than 25 years ago by his wife, in which she apparently loses her bikini top and squirts a bottle of suntan lotion in a sexually suggestive way. OK, I get it. It’s an easy target. Fun for everyone! But the attention on that, combined with the attention that Ayla Brown’s Web site is getting, leaves me with a serious question. Is being the wife or daughter of a politician an almost impossible proposition?

If they take on the twinsets-and-pearls persona of a dutiful supporter, we call them Stepford wives and mock their lack of individuality, their inability to be themselves. If they have any unconventional aspirations (like Ayla) or skimpily-clad skeletons in their closet, we just mock them. (Shame on Gail Huff for not knowing in 1984 that she was going to grow up to marry the man who would take over Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat!) Hillary Clinton was too ambitious; Laura Bush wasn’t ambitious enough. Silda Spitzer was wrong to stand by her man, and Jenny Sanford was wrong to turn her public embarrassment into a book deal. Granted, Michelle Obama, despite her recent drop in approval ratings (and, by the way, is there a reason the first lady is subject to approval polls?), has thus far pulled off this delicate balancing act. But not every politician’s wife is going to be a powerful lawyer with multiple Ivy League degrees. What are mere mortals to do?

Tags: Gail Huff, Gail Huff racy video, Massachusetts Senate race, political wives, Scott Brown

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann was doing a decent job of laying down Republican talking points on a Philidephia radio show. (What did she vote for? She voted for "prosperity.") Sen. Arlen Specter, her sparring partner, felt stepped on. There are a lot of things one might think to say in such a situation; perhaps "let me speak," or "don't interrupt," or "I voted for destitution." Specter decided on: "Act like a lady." He thought this advice so apposite he gave it twice:

Specter: Now wait a minute. I'll stop and you can talk. I'll treat you like a lady. So act like one.

Bachmann: I am a lady.

A bit later:

Specter: She said 'I voted for prosperity.' Well prosperity wasn’t a ... a bill.

Bachmann: Well, why don’t we make it a bill.

Specter: Now wait a minute, don't interrupt me. I didn't interrupt you. Act like a lady.

Bachmann: I think I am a lady.

Host: I think she is Senator.

Specter: I think she is too, that's why I'm treating her like one.

The transcription doesn't do justice to the weirdness of the exchange, since on air Specter actually sounds like Bachmann's gravelly voiced grandfather. But this dialogue brings up some interesting semantic issues. What does it mean to "act like a lady?" Apparently it means to be quiet. And what does it mean to "treat someone like a lady," as Specter insists he is doing? It would seem to mean to remind said person to "act like a lady" with some frequency. This is not a promising set of norms for political debate. Also fascinating is the way Bachmann seems to lose faith in her own lady-ness. First she says she is a lady, then she thinks she is a lady? That's the kind of confusion you get when you let women attend congressional hearings rather than finishing school. Figure it out, Michele.

Photograph of Michele Bachmann by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Tags: arlen specter, ladylikeness, Michele Bachmann