Pity 7-year-old Willem Da Lyliveira, who had to wait in the limo for 15 minutes as his mother, Essence Fashion Director Billie Causieestko, attended the Ralph Lauren show during New York's Fashion Week, while other well-connected young "fashionistas"—at least according to the WSJ—dotted the audience with their youthful presence (and, in at least one case, the white runway with their crumbs). But as I read the current issue of the Atlantic, I stopped pitying him for missing the show (OK, that wasn't hard) and wondered if I shouldn't be pitying him, and the other kids featured, for being given, along with their limo rides and front-row seats, a sense of entitlement that, in "the new jobless era" is apparently going to be worth something less than bupkis.

"Many of today's young adults," writes Don Peck of the current economic situation, "seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they find themselves." He goes on to quote Generation Me author Jean Twenge: " 'There's this idea that, "Yeah, I don't want to work, but I'm still going to get all the stuff I want," ' she says. 'It's a generation in which every kid has been told ... "You're special." ' " And nothing says special to an 8-year-old like her own seat at the Anna Sui show. But apparently some of those older "special" kids need more direction in the workplace, lack an entrepreneurial spirit, and are turning down jobs that don't meet their grandiose expectations in order to move back in with mom and dad. The Atlantic article goes on to present an excellent and terrifying look at the results of a recession on its graduating generation, but I confess to having been more concerned with my own personal takeaway: How do I keep from raising one of those kids?

You can always find specific examples to indict a generation (I fought the term "slacker" for many years before embracing it), and I found myself less than willing to write off my younger colleagues as unable to moor themselves in the work place—but I get that some some younger adults (though clearly not all—look at at the new, overeducated ski bum) are finding themselves not just disadvantaged by an extraordinarily poor job market, but unwilling—or maybe unable—to put aside big dreams and start in at the very bottom. Maybe they're swayed by Tavi Gevinson, 13-year-old fashion blogger, or have Facebook dreams of, even now, starting a billion-dollar business in their dorm rooms (or their old bedrooms). Maybe they hope to become the next American Idol. But I'd rather raise kids who aspire to a story like that of former Weight Watchers CEO Linda Huett, who started by leading meetings and ended up running the company. If anyone has any ideas on making that happen (besides skipping the Marc Jacobs show, which I think I have covered), I'll take them.

Photograph of Tavi Gevinson by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: entitled children, fashion week, recession

Judith Warner points out in We’ve Got Issues, her just-published book about the epidemic of children with learning and behavioral disorders, that many children are experiencing real-life psychological/biological “issues” that psychotropic medications help control. But that doesn’t mean that the “issues” aren’t overdiagnosed, and that children aren’t overmedicated. As Alison Gopnik notes in her review of the book in Slate, it’s “complicated.” The weakness of the book is that Warner can’t discuss the complexity of what’s causing the epidemic and what can potentially stop it in any meaningful way.

There is a large gray area between the clearly ill and troubled children and their parents Warner profiles and all the others—the ones who can’t always sit still in class, who are having some trouble reading, who are somewhat disengaged, who are sometimes oppositional. I would posit a good chunk of the difference could be attributed to something both Warner and Gopnik give short shrift to—our nation’s education system.

Even as our public schools have, under federal mandate, taken on children who, in previous generations, would have been lucky not to be institutionalized, our boys and girls—particularly in the upper-middle-class circles common to Warner and her readers—are under pressure to keep up both academically and behaviorally at ages that would seem laughable to our parents and grandparents. Reading and homework in kindergarten? State and federal mandated testing beginning in elementary school? Harvard or bust?

It’s not surprising that an increasing number of kids can’t or won’t keep up. It’s also not surprising that our underfunded and overstretched schools would rather believe that these problems can be medicated out of existence since, after all, it’s both cheaper and easier to intimate a child needs medication (it’s illegal to actually suggest it) than offer long range tutoring or cognitive therapy services to a child who won’t sit still or acts out in class because he or she has ADHD or dyslexia or the ever-amorphous sensory integration disorder.

That’s a book that needs writing. I wish Judith Warner had thought of it.

Photograph of boy by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: adhd, alison gopnik, dyslexia, judith warner, medication, public school, we've got issues

The biggest nonsecret of television: Sex sells. It's also no secret that NBC is losing money on this year's Olympic broadcast, marking the first time in history airing the Olympics has come packaged with debt. I suppose NBC figured what better way to beef up viewership than with some sex appeal? Olympic viewers already get nonstop footage of firm athletic butts in spandex leggings, but apparently that unspoken token wasn't enough. TV promos for the women's Super-G ski event that aired this past Saturday showed stills of U.S. skiers Lindsey Vonn and Julia Mancuso posed in their ski gear with the headline: "Don't Miss Team USA's Ski Divas." That's right. Ski divas.

Granted, it seems that "ski diva" might be a term thrown around a bit in women's skiing, in the way of "snow bunny." But calling serious Olympians snow bunnies or ski divas reeks of disrespect. (No one's branding the male skiers "Snow Moose.") Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the NBC meeting where some exec decided, "You know how we should sell the women's ski event? Make it sound like an MTV reality show."

Photograph of Lindsey Vonn by Olivier Morin/AFP.

Tags: Lindsey Vonn, NBC, olympics, ski divas

The lawyer who helped John Yoo write the August 2002 torture memos was a law school classmate of mine at Yale. Her name is Jennifer Koester Hardy (when I knew her, it was Jennifer Koester; she has since gotten married). Her name was supposed to be redacted from the Justice Department ethics investigation into Yoo and Jay Bybee, his boss in the Bush Office of Legal Counsel. But a footnote identifies her, as TPM Muckraker tells us. She also co-wrote a law review article with Yoo. And in a July 2002 letter to CIA counsel John Rizzo, about what is necessary to establish torture as a crime, Yoo tells Rizzo to direct questions to him or to Koester.

After she worked with Yoo in 2002, Jen clerked for Clarence Thomas—she was his third Yale clerk, according to this list. Then I think she went back to the Justice Department. Now she's a lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis. In law school, she was hugely involved with the Federalist Society. I remember her as a religious Christian. Also as principled in her beliefs—thoughtful rather than knee-jerk. She had a lot of friends, many of whose politics she didn't share. We graduated in 2000, before 9/11 put terrorism and national security on the radar and I don't remember talking to her about anything related (nor do the classmates I talked to about her today). What we do remember is that Jen was a lot of fun. She helped mock the faculty in the end-of-year Law Revue spoof. She was talkative and smiled a lot. The DoJ investigators from the Office of Legal Counsel conclude that because she was inexperienced when she worked with Yoo, "she should not be held professionally responsible for the incomplete and one-sided legal advice in the memoranda.” Scott Horton disagrees.

Photograph of John Yoo by Melissa Golden/Getty Images News.

Tags: jennifer koester, john yoo

Jessica, I agree that the Stack daughter is deluded in ways neither of us can imagine, but I disagree that her self-imposed Norwegian exile is inconsistent with her father's views. Joe Stack was apparently frustrated because he felt that he was getting nothing for his tax money; he mentions bank bailouts and lobbyists. His complaint, such as it is, concerns government transfers to the rich. His daughter fled to Norway, where, she says, her tax dollars buy something or other. To her, it's apparently the difference between throwing your money into a hole or getting a nice health care package in return. It's not as if the elder Stack was averse to redistribution; he concludes his manifesto thusly:

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

The whole suicide note is available here. A bit of advice for aspiring manifesto writers: Including a large chunk of tax code really blunts the emotional impact.

Photograph of tea party protester by Paul J. Richards/AFP.

Tags: joe stack

Having sex is as bad as smoking a cigarette. At least, that's what a French advertising campaign (image possible NSFW) launched by the Nonsmokers' Rights organization, would like young people to think. The campaign has three different ads, all of which show a teenager kneeling down in front of a clothed man, cigarette in mouth. The cigarette presses against the man's crotch, suggesting that smoking is like performing oral sex. Of the man, we only see the glimpse of a business suit or pants, and a hand, pushing on the teenager's head to encourage the smoking/fellatio. As if comparing smoking to performing fellatio wasn't absurd enough, the tag line adds that "Smoking is being tobacco's slave." So giving head apparently means being dominated.

This did not please a feminist association, which protested the equation of sexuality with a harmful addiction. The ad agency answered in a French newspaper that the campaign was "not comparing the two. The goal was simply to say 'You are subjecting yourself to smoking.' There is no analogy between sex and tobacco."

A friend seeing one of the pictures immediately thought it was about sexual submission: the business attire, the young and worried look of the teens—it all screamed "forced sex act" to her. In an interview with 20 Minutes, another French paper, the ad-agency director assured that the idea wasn't that the teens were acting under duress. "What we're showing is not a rape, it's a fellatio," he said. The teen is "legal" and "accepts obediently to submit to an adult, just like when smoking," and "nothing proves that the teens are performing this act against their will," he said.

So let me just make sure I've got this right. The ads depicts teenagers giving head, except that instead of a penis, it's a cigarette they hold in their mouth. But there is no analogy between sex and tobacco. The teenagers seem young and innocent, a hand forces their heads down as the tag-line talks about submission and slavery. But, hey, there is no comparison drawn between sexual submission, oral sex, and tobacco. Anyone in need of a cigarette break?

Tags: anti-smoking ad, feminism, french ad, smoking

Hanna, your post about Amy Bishop's husband James Anderson makes me think about another deluded relative of a murderer: Joe Stack's daughter, Samantha Bell. Stack is the man who flew a stolen plane into an Austin, Texas, IRS building last week because he was angry about paying taxes. Samantha Bell went on Good Morning America today to call her father a "hero." She said, "His last actions, the suicide, the catastrophe that caused injuries and death, that was wrong ... but if nobody comes out and speaks up on behalf of injustice, then nothing will ever be accomplished. But I do not agree with his last action with what he did. But I do agree about the government."

Bell now lives in semi-socialist Norway. As GMA anchor Robin Roberts pointed out, what Bell says makes little ideological sense: Her father was angry about having to pay taxes, and Bell defends him though she elects to live in a nation where people are more heavily taxed than in the United States. Both Bell and Anderson have deluded themselves. They separate their image of their loved ones from their actual, deplorable behavior. Bell says, "The father I knew was a loving, caring, devoted man who cherished every moment with me and my three children, his grandchildren. ... This man who did this was not my father." While Bell's statements are ridiculous, psychologically it makes sense: It's going to take her time to reconcile this heinous act.

Photograph of Austin IRS building by Jana Birchum/Getty Images News.

Tags: Amy Bishop, joe stack, samantha bell

Since we spend so much time scrutinizing the wives of famous (and infamous) people I have to ask: What is up with the husband of Amy Bishop, the Alabama professor/shooter? James Anderson was clearly her partner and co-conspirator in all things. In this picture of them together, he sits shoulder- to-shoulder with her, smiling ambivalently, holding half of her Petri dish invention. What’s still unclear is what model of husband-conspirator he represents. Was he more the tragic, clueless ennabler (the husband of child-drowner Andrea Yates left her alone against doctor’s orders and encouraged her to have more children for religious reasons). Or was he more in the Bonnie and Clyde mode, thrilling to her insane adventures?

What we know so far puts Anderson, a computer engineer, somewhere in between—a loyal partner who mirrored her rage and delusions. He was already dating Bishop when she shot her brother. He was questioned with her in the 1993 attempted mail bombing, and he lied to the New York Times about having gotten a letter that cleared their names. If he wasn't with her at the IHOP the day she punched a woman who took the last booster seat, he has surely seen similar things before. In a recent ABC interview, he presented her latest shooting as a sane response to the secretive world of academic tenure, which he called on the media to investigate. "Only someone who's been intimately involved in that fight understands," he said. "It's a tough, long, hard battle." One can only imagine what he's telling thier four children. Now there’s a companionate marriage gone totally off the rails.

Tags: Alabama professor shooter, Amy Bishop, James Anderson

Leave it to Americans, a people entranced by extremes, to turn a straight-up mental illness like anorexia into the mental framework by which we approach serious but boringly complicated issues, like obesity and related health problems in America. Michelle Obama can go on TV all she wants to talk about "food deserts" and encourage physical fitness, and responsible doctors can repeat the tedious phrase "lifestyle change" until they're blue in the face, but we as a nation do not care. Far easier to declare calories the enemy and wage a scorched-earth campaign on them, while of course being unable to live up to our own insane standards.

Example No. 1: Clients From Hell is a blog on which anonymous designers express frustration with their clients. In a recent entry, a designer working on bottles of mineral water reports that the client argued, "Well I think 0 calories still sounds like too much. The target group should drink it cold so it has negative calories because the body has to heat the water." Sadly, I can imagine there are many desperate people willing to believe drinking lots of very cold water will help them lose weight.

Example No. 2: The mere existence of "The Biggest Loser," a show that requires contestants to work out five or six hours a day, punishes you if you don't lose huge amounts of weight, and gives out awards to people for losing weight at unbelievable speeds, including 34 pounds in one week. For comparison, remember that the Mayo Clinic suggests that you lose 1-2 pounds a week when you make the move to healthier eating and exercising.

Example No. 3: That MeMe Roth gets to go on television on present herself as an "expert" on obesity. No one wants to diagnose a person from afar, but Roth—who is the head of one of those one-person-seeming organizations, the National Action Against Obesity—has a disturbingly unhealthy attitude about food. In an interview she did with the Guardian, she compared eating food to being raped, went out of her way to avoid having to eat a meal with the interviewer, and confessed that she goes out of her way to avoid eating all day a great deal of the time, though she tried to play it off like it was just because food is too much of a hassle.

I could go on, pointing to the ever-more-fragile bodies of fashion models, for instance. But for whatever reason, the cultural response to the constant cries about the obesity epidemic is to admire the anorexic framework as some sort of moral ideal. Or no, not for "whatever" reason. There's a lot of money to be made in encouraging people to buy into programs to starve themselves, and then to sell them the calorie-dense food they want to binge on like the starved human beings that they are.

Photograph of woman by Photodisc/Getty Images.

Tags: biggest loser, dieting, meme roth, obesity

In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams imagined a cow that wanted to be eaten and presented itself at the diner's side, murmuring ingratiatingly. If memory serves (and I'm nerdily afraid it does), Adam's anti-hero Arthur Dent recoiled in horror. Dent didn't want to eat an animal that was standing there asking him to eat it, even if he had to concede that on some level it was better than the alternative.

And "better than doing nothing at all" is all Adam Shriver could muster on the NYT's Opinions Page to support advances in neuroscience that might allow scientists to "genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less" when farmed for their meat. The idea could best be summed up this way: A poorly aimed stun gun will still mean the animal goes to a painful death. It's just that, thanks to the genetically altered operation of its anterior cingulate cortex, it won't care. Mice bred with this mutation feel pain. They still snatch their paws away from a hot surface. They just don't worry about it (which they show by not bothering to avoid the hot surface in the future).

Shriver's argument is that as a meat-eating country, ringing in at an average 100 pounds of red meat a year each, we're probably "stuck with" factory farms. And no one who's read anything about a CAFO (Controlled Animal Feeding Operation) (you could start here or here) could argue that it's a kind way to treat an animal. Therefore, genetically altering the animals so that they feel pain but are not disturbed by it would be more humane than what we're doing now. And this is what brings me back to Arthur Dent—because, while I do follow Shriver's logic, I have to pick my jaw up off the floor in order to argue with him. Have we, as a society, really sunk so low that we would consider genetically altering farm animals instead of finding a way for them to lead what were once ordinary farm-animal lives, even if that meant a few pounds less of meat each per annum?

I'm all for eating meat. Pigs in particular are tasty beasts. I try to seek out locally raised meat and I talk to the farmers about how the animals were treated and slaughtered. But what I do is an expensive, time-consuming luxury. Most people can't do it, and most people won't, and that's where Shriver starts his argument. But as awareness of factory farming grows along with evidence of the health benefits of eating animals raised as animals, rather than as a product, demand for healthily raised meat will increase, as it has for local produce. There will be room for things to change. This month's Atlantic Monthly has a great article on the ways Wal-Mart is challenging Whole Foods at the locally farmed game. With enough consumer demand, making humanely raised meats available to everyone could be Walmart's next frontier. (Laugh if you want, but note that Temple Grandin consults at McDonald's, and that their changed policies about what's acceptable in the slaughterhouse have meant big improvements in a few areas.) I'm reminding my grocery store tomorrow that I want them to carry meat raised on local farms and treated like cows, pigs and chicken instead of "meat." Because suddenly, it looks like apathetic consumers may lead, very weirdly, to apathetic cows.

Photograph of cows by David De Lossy/Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.