Rachael, though I’m of the right generation, my parents aren’t of the helicopter variety. (I wasn’t given training wheels when I learned to ride a bike, to give you the requisite transport-metaphor for their parenting style.) But I certainly would have been terrified if my college had been one that called parents when underage kids were caught drinking. Not because I’m overly attached to the apron strings, but because mine were shelling out quite a bit for me to acquire that college education: I was necessarily attached by the purse strings.

“No drinking, no drugs, no boys. I’m not paying for a party,” were the final words with which my father—lovingly, and not without humor—sent my younger sister off to college. I’m sure he wasn’t naïve enough to think those things played no part in our educations, but he sent a clear signal about where our focus should be and about what he was investing in. Other parents might care less about whether their kids get caught drinking but more about whether their child taking a course called "Celebrity and Spectacle" for major credit (as I did) instead of, say, going pre-med. And if they’re paying (even part), they get a say.

It’s easy, and a little fun, to mock kids like the Harvard freshman who ventured into downtown Boston and called her father in Chicago for advice on whether to turn left or right at an intersection. But the money thing, I think, complicates the helicopter narrative. I know plenty of people my age who still have rent paid by their parents and so still have to answer to them in ways both small and large. So until college is less cripplingly expensive and entry-level jobs more readily available at a decent salary, Millenials have to continue leaning on their parents more financially than previous generations, which makes it a whole lot harder to rebel and a whole lot easier to feel beholden.

Tags: college, millenials

Chef Daniel Angerer is making cheese from his wife’s breast milk (there’s a link to the recipe if anyone’s inspired). This brilliantly combines the lactation and locavore movements, although Angerer acknowledges the result is not complex enough to make it onto the finest cheese tray. What I found most incredible about this, however, is that the chef used two gallons of pumped milk from his wife, Lori Mason, to produce two quarts of cheese. I hope Ms. Mason’s cups really do runneth over, and she simply produces copiously more milk than her infant daughter can consume. Because it’s hard to imagine attaching yourself to an infernal breast pump in order for your husband to create the ultimate in locally sourced fromage.

Tags: breast milk

An interesting confluence in the parenting blogosphere today: Over at Babble, Katie Granju, author of Attachment Parenting, worries that we’re fussing over our children too much (update: I just noticed that this is a 2007 article that jumped to their most-viewed list) and that we’re doing more harm than good in the process. (I enjoy any article that eases my guilt over letting my 3-year-old dress himself in shorts, a T-shirt, and a ski cap this morning.) Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Motherlode blog has a post about how some colleges are taking advantage of the helicopter trend to keep students in line. George Washington University, MIT, and other schools are now calling parents whenever a student is caught drinking, based on the idea that “one thing students seem to fear as much as expulsion is being found out by their parents.” Really?

College students are admittedly at a strange period in their lives—not kids, not quite grown-ups. And our laws contribute to that awkwardness—you are considered an adult and can vote at 18, but no drinking until 21. But one of the purposes of going to college—aside from all that book learnin’—is to force young adults to grow up, to make their own decisions and learn from their mistakes, to help on that path from adolescence to full-blown grown-up status. But doesn’t “I’m gonna tell your mommy on you” lose its ability to induce fear sometime in elementary school? I don’t know if the schools have the right idea, but I don't really blame them for trying. It’s more the parents who enable the schools to think this way. You don’t have to let your kids run wild, but you can foster their sense of independence. By the time you send them away to school, they should know that you're not going to come running every time they need their nose wiped but also that they don't need to fear you. What happens when they get into the workforce and they make a mistake? Should their bosses call Mommy, too?

I’m pretty sure that as long as I wasn’t drinking and driving or causing harm to myself, my parents would have laughed off any call they got from my college. And if I’m the recipient of such a call when the day comes that I have college kids? “He’s drinking beer?” I’ll ask. “Well, I sure hope it’s good beer. I tried to raise him right.”

Tags: helicopter parenting, parenting, underage drinking

This month's Vanity Fair has a thorough article about the David Letterman blackmail scandal. To recap, the married Letterman was having an affair with one of his staffers, Stephanie Birkitt, who was dating 48 Hours Mystery producer Joe Halderman. Halderman found out about Birkitt's affair with Letterman and attempted to blackmail him last fall. Letterman then confessed to the affair on-air in a long-winded anti-joke. In the immediate aftermath, there was some discussion about whether Letterman's behavior—he had a reputation for having sex with underlings—created an environment of sexual favoritism in which only women he slept with got ahead.

The Vanity Fair article doesn't definitively answer whether or not the Late Show With David Letterman is a sexist environment, though writer Mark Seal does note that the only people who would speak to him on record were Letterman's male employees:"The women usually speak only under the cloak of anonymity, or through intermediaries, perhaps for fear of retribution." What Seal's article does definitively prove is an old cliche—sucessful comedians are lousy partners:

Letterman is, by his own admission, one of the most unhappy, insecure, guilt-ridden, self-loathing, self-pitying people on the planet. All of this informs his choices, especially when it comes to women. “He favors unadorned women and at the same time women who are at the reach of his demonically low self-esteem,” says one veteran Letterman observer.

Tags: affairs, David Letterman, merill markoe, regina lasko, stephanie birkitt, the david letterman show

Miss America has been a vagabond pageant for the last decade or so, getting repeatedly booted from several networks until 2008, when it landed a less-than-ideal home on cable network TLC (after a brief stay at the even less desirable CMT in 2007). Just yesterday, thewrap.com reported that TLC no longer wants airing rights of the antiquated contest. Sam Haskell, head of the Miss America organization, insists the pageant has plenty of other options, but as the beauty contest now faces its third network shake-up in three years, the question must be asked: Who actually cares about Miss America?

I wrote about this last year, during the height of the Carrie Prejean scandal and a slew of other beauty contestant gaffes, and in my mind the answer remains the same. What began as a fairly legitimate contest on the boardwalk of Atlantic City in 1921 no longer has a place in a culture wherein showcasing your talent doesn’t come at the price of subversively selling your bikini bod. In other words, Miss America has no relevance as the talent-awarding meritorious contest it purports to be because there are a gagillion multitalented women in Hollywood, in media, and in the public eye for us to admire. And guess what? It doesn’t work anymore as a skin-baring fest, either—compared with what typing “xxx” into Google will get you, the pageant is like watching a church service. Not to mention that in the pages of men's magazines, hot celebrities are usually holding up a sheer sheet to their naughty bits, far more flesh than the contestants of the Miss America Pageant show marching across stage in a swimsuit. The only thing pageants have provided in the last decade has been plenty of viral-video material in the popular misogynist genre of "Look at this stupid girl." (I'm sure you recall the train-wreck that was the Miss Teen USA contestant's "such as the Iraq" answer—yeah, she's now on The Amazing Race.) But that's about it. The relevance of beauty pageants has faded. I'm betting they're not long for this world.

Tags: beauty pageants, miss america, tlc

Emily, I think Paterson actually is a victim—of his own terrible judgement, yes, but also of the collective hysteria that surrounds any accusations of domestic violence. After so many years spent looking the other way, we're determined as a society to hold any man who acts abusively toward a woman (90 percent of domestic violence victims are women) fully accountable. There's nothing wrong with that—but in doing it, we lose sight of the fact that the rush to criminal justice may not always be the best thing for the actual individual woman involved.

If Paterson sent a state police officer to speak to the ex-girlfriend of his friend and aide David Johnson and even spoke to her himself about the domestic-violence allegations she’d made against Johnson, then what he did was unquestionably intimidating. Governors can't do that. But if his message to Sherr-una Booker, Johnson's now ex-partner, was that she would be better off keeping this personal matter out of the courtroom, he might have been right.

I don’t give Paterson any credit for good intentions in trying to use his power to keep the matter private, and I suspect the state police simply wanted Ms. Booker to shut up and go away. I also suspect there’s more to come here. Johnson will be arrested, and if he’s not, we’ll find out why. But I think Paterson's political opponents are seizing on a feeling that their position is so utterly unassailable—not only did he try to discourage a victim from going to court, but she was a domestic violence victim! Of a terrible assault! He's hypocritical demon spawn!—that we're all going to lose the ability to see, let alone say, that there are legitimate reasons why domestic-violence victims might want to avoid the criminal system.

Even if Paterson knew the full story of what Ms. Booker says happened last Halloween (and he claims he did not), he'd also have known that, even while the newspapers are trumpeting "the seriousness of the assault," the actual crime involved isn't that serious. That's not my subjective take on it, it's the law's. If Johnson ripped off a Halloween costume he objected to, choked Ms. Booker and shoved her into a dresser, he could be charged with attempted assault, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail but rarely—in New York’s crowded prison system—sentenced to anything even close to that much time. (If “choking” and “smashing” sound like assault to you, you’re right—but only because you’re using a Webster’s dictionary instead of referring to the New York Penal Code, which requires that there be substantial physical injury in order to actually charge assault.) Even Hiram Monserrate didn't get prison time.

Under ordinary circumstances—minus the press and the accompanying brouhaha—Ms. Booker’s journey through the criminal courts (which see about 350,000 cases a year city-wide) would likely have been long, unpleasant, and ultimately unsatisfactory. If she wanted a court order directing that Johnson stay away from her, then her appearance in family court was probably a good choice. If she just wanted Johnson to actually stay away from her, then the governor's help was probably as good as anything she'd get elsewhere. And if she wanted to work things out with Johnson, then the state police's risible-sounding suggestion of "options, including counseling" wasn't a bad idea.

When I ran that by one of my former colleagues at the Manhattan district attorney's office, she fairly howled in outrage. But he committed a crime! He should be punished! And she's right—from the state's point of view. But not always from the victim's. Again, look at Hiram Monserrate, who was sentenced to three years of probation, a $1,000 fine, and a year of domestic-violence counseling—which is probably only available because he can pay for it. Would a result like that be worth the inconvenience and loss of privacy involved, or would Ms. Booker rather just move on with her life? It's not a reprehensible question, it's a practical one. Of course, it's not a question that can be asked by the governor without Sopranos-like implications, and Paterson was a fool not to see that. But until we’re convinced that domestic-violence prosecution perfectly serves every victim’s needs, it’s a question that ought to be asked.

Tags: david johnson, david paterson, domestic violence, Sherr-una Booker

I think I’m probably on Amanda’s side on the whole preachy-foodie question. I’ve been out sick for a couple of days and after a few days of doing nothing, I found an old Jamie Oliver cookbook on Sunday. Then I started to cook: Mushrooms. Then eggplant. Then fennel. Now Jamie isn’t nearly as preachy as Alice (I also adore Alice). But he’s pretty damn righteous about shunning button mushrooms and grinding your own wee spices and buying fish with their eyes all googling around. My husband took one look at the photo of Oliver on the cookbook cover and got so freaked out he had to turn the book facedown.

But I didn’t feel hectored or judged or browbeaten. I felt like I was accomplishing something that was healthy and smelled good. Certainly, my cooking binge this weekend wasn’t about maximizing my time and efficiency. (I was so bored I was ready to set my hair on fire.) But I think one explanation for the popularity of food porn—the reason it lingers up at the top of the Times' most e-mailed list—is that it’s aspirational and yet occasionally manageable at the same time. Nobody cooks like this every night. But if you like to cook, cooking healthy food carefully is like going to a zucchini spa. All that said, I can’t wait to see what Oliver does with his upcoming TV show—in which he allegedly hectors all of Huntington, W. Va, into eating well. If he is as bossy and righteous as I fear, I may join Margaret and Meredith in pitching a sweet potato right through the TV screen.

Tags: cooking; guilt

Truly, this is not the moment for New York Governor David Paterson to call himself a victim. He is accused of intimidating a woman out of pressing a domestic violence claim in court so she could get a protective order against his aide and her ex-boyfriend, David Johnson. If the mounting evidence about Paterson's interference holds up, he should start writing his statement of resignation. Instead, there was Paterson at a breakfast on Monday, assuring his audience that he would not resign by saying, “I think there is an hysteria that I’ve been the victim of over the past couple of months.” Please. The only things you're a victim of, Gov. Paterson, are your own terrible judgment and abuse of power. And hysteria is another unfortunate word choice. It evokes women on 19th-century fainting couches—irrational women. There's nothing hysterical about a woman seeking a protective order when she's been choked and smashed into a dresser, as the woman who is inadvertently at the center of this political scandal says she was.

Tags: david johnson, david paterson, domestic violence

—Several young, attractive Republican women are running in Senate primaries: Jane Norton (Colorado), Sue Lowden (Nevada), Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire), and Cherilyn Eagar (Utah). Linda Hirschman dubs them the "mini-Palins"—"beautiful, impressively fecund, unreservedly conservative, and stonily pro-life." [The Daily Beast]

—In a New York Times op-ed, Harold Ford announces he won't be running for the U.S. Senate. He says New York Democratic party bosses bullied him out of challenging Kristin Gillibrand for her seat. [New York Times]

—Muslim women recently staged a stand-in at D.C. mosque to protest rules forbidding them to pray alongside men. How is it that places of worship in the United States aren't allowed to discriminate based on race but can require women to sit behind men? [The Daily Beast]

—Latoya Peterson calls fat-shaming "the new Millennium bloodsport," as evidenced by Kirstie Alley's new weight-loss show, Kirstie Alley's Big Life. Shouldn't larger women in the entertainment business, which is so unforgiving of their size, fight its promotion of unhealthy weight loss? [Jezebel]

—An all-female U.N. force from India has played an essential roll in fostering peace in Liberia, where sexual violence was a common weapon in a 15-year-long civil war. Women peacekeepers have an advantage in winning female victims' trust and providing them with successful, empowered female role models. [CNN]

Tags: cheilyn eagar, female peacekeepers, Harold Ford, jane norton, kelly ayotte, kirstie alley's big life, Kristen Gillibrand, latoya peterson, liberia, linda hirschman, Muslim Feminists, muslim women, sexual violence, sue lowden, united nations