Lorraine Adams is an old friend of mine. She and I worked a few feet away from each other in the Washington Post newsroom (the model for “the room” in the title of her book), and I loved listening to her beat her sources into submission. Over the last few years I have watched Lorraine, with awe and great admiration, turn herself into a first-class novelist, in a way very few journalists manage to pull off.

Lorraine has done this not by leaving her reporting behind, but by using it to layer her novels with rich detail and psychological depth. Harbor, her 2004 novel about terrorism suspects, did not so much humanize them as turn them inside out in a way that made them both more accessible and more mysterious. The Room and the Chair begins, similarly, with a dislocation. Air Force pilot Mary Goodwin has crashed, and we don’t know why or what it’s about. The mystery unfolds the same way it might in an investigative project. A group of reporters piece together different pieces of the puzzle, and we are led around a world still coming to terms with the war on terror. But instead of ending with the predictable gotcha, as it would in a newspaper, we get ever deeper layers of self-knowledge and confusion.

Tags: book of the week, Lorraine Adams, The Book and the Chair

Each week, in collaboration with the Washington Post Magazine, DoubleX contributors debate a new question. This week: What old adage have you found to be most true?

Emily Yoffe: "Never say never." In 1984, I left Washington, D.C., for Texas. I was never coming back. I laughed when I ripped up my notice for $200 in parking fines. 10 years later I was living in California when I met, fell in love with, and married a Washingtonian. One of the first things I had to do when I moved back was spend the day at the DMV paying the fines.

Jessica Lambertson: I always loved "Cheaters never prosper." I was an excruciatingly competitive child, and my sister loved to cheat to drive me nuts. I definitely used this adage more than once over a board game loss. I find myself using the phrase in a catty way now as an adult (my own way to stick it to a friend who steals WiFi or a philandering girlfriend who shares her exploits).

Amanda Marcotte: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." The earlier I get up, the more productive I am. This issue rarely comes up on weekdays, but often I'll plan all this fun stuff to do on weekends—Go shopping! Go to the farmer's market! Check out an exhibit at the museum!—and if I go out to a party and end up sleeping in late on Saturday, none of my best-laid plans get accomplished.

Dahlia Lithwick: I put a lot of stock in good old "Don't cry over spilled milk." I am a huge brooder, constantly trying to rewind and reshoot tape. Nothing is more useful than reminding yourself that what's done is done, so move on.

Dana Stevens: "You can't have your cake and eat it, too." I was about 30 before I figured out what this actually meant, and when I did, it was like an epiphany. I spent a lot of years having a very unrealistic relationship to my cake.

Hanna Rosin: This is not exactly an old adage, but my friend said to me recently, "Life is boring." For an impatient person like me this is a critical thing to remember. As I'm waiting for the subway doors to open, tapping my feet, listening to my mom recount minute details of her irksome commute, trying to parse out what happend in some argument between the kids, it helps me focus. This is not tedious distraction from something more important I have to do. This is life.

Ellen Tarlin: "You reap what you sow." I was getting off the subway once, and we have a rule in New York that you let people get off before you get on, but this teenage boy just plowed right into me. I just kept going and he was pushed back as I got off the train. I guess I injured his ego or pissed him off or something, because as I was walking up the platform, I felt a jolting push from behind, so hard that my back hurt for two days afterward. I've found that any time I push against the world, it always pushes right back.

Laura Moser: Rome wasn't built in a day. Except I think the Senate's been taking this one too seriously of late.

Tags: adages, advice

Tom Downey has an equally fascinating and terrifying article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine about the intersection of the Internet and vigilante justice in China. It begins:

The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel. “This is not a human,” wrote BrokenGlasses, a user on Mop, a Chinese online forum. “I have no interest in spreading this video nor can I remain silent. I just hope justice can be done.” That first post elicited thousands of responses. “Find her and kick her to death like she did to the kitten,” one user wrote. Then the inquiries started to become more practical: “Is there a front-facing photo so we can see her more clearly?” The human-flesh search had begun.

You’ve probably experienced a strong reaction to an Internet video before. A few years ago, there was a clip circulating that captured an Iraqi soldier mercilessly dropping a puppy off a cliff. Not surprisingly, the video ignited massive cries of violence against the soldier in the comments section, on forums, and on blogs. The difference is that in China, the virtual masses go through with their threats.

Downey delves into this phenomenon, called—most terrifyingly—the human-flesh search engine, with a number of poignant examples. Wang Fei, an architect who left his wife for a mistress, and whose wife later killed herself, had to move out of Beijing after his personal information was posted all over the Internet, and his firm fired him. Grace Chang became a target of the human-flesh seekers after she tried to alleviate tension between pro-China and pro-Tibet protesters. She's now too frightened to return to China. Internet harassment is commonplace, but the law is still racing to civilize the virtual world (we still don’t quite know how to deal with trolls, or even sexual harassment in places like Second Life), an effort complicated by the notion that the Web is, in essence, locationless. How ironic that a truly modern technological development can so easily be used to enact an archaic form of justice.

Tags: china, nyt's magazine, vigilante justice

Publishers Weekly is reporting that a debut young-adult trilogy—pitched as "a Percy Jackson for teenage girls"—just sold for a mind-boggling seven figures. Apparently, it's about a young Nantucket teenager who learns that she and a "local heartthrob" are "playing out some version of a weighty ancient love affair." Oh, and apparently said girl—named Helen, natch—is always being dogged by the Fates.

The first book in the trilogy, Starcrossed, is set to publish in the U.S. in the summer of 2011.

As a big myth nerd growing up—and a big fan of high-concept YA now—I find the premise intriguing. (Plus, it kind of reminds me of one of my favorite Buffy episodes.) But the Percy Jackson allusion worries me, because I found that series dull and badly written, in a fling-the-book-across-the-room kind of way. Still, the idea of having a major new fantasy series with a female lead sounds pretty awesome—here's hoping that the romantic storyline isn't too drippy. As EW's Shelf Life blog notes, with "its high school setting, forbidden love, foggy locale, and young female target audience," the Starcrossed series sounds an awful lot like another YA juggernaut we all know and love.

Photograph of author Rick Riordan by Larry D. Moore under a Creative Commons ShareAlike License.

Tags: percy jackson, teen fiction, twilight

The Guardian's food blog is reminiscing about foods from childhood today—or, more accurately, foods from childhood's library. She instantly reminded me of how my mouth watered along with Edmund's for Turkish Delight, and took me back to all the other unfamiliar foods I craved while curled up in the library (remember when you couldn't eat or drink in a library?)—seed-cake and marmalade roll and those "buns" so coveted by A Little Princess, and then "given away to a beggar girl." Fresh fish was everywhere, from Swallows and Amazons to (again) to The Chronicles of Narnia ("You cannot think how good the new-caught fish smelled while they were frying"), and I, who had never eaten fish that wasn't breaded, frozen and fried, longed to try it. And I wanted to taste everything that was ever served in the Little House—remember the maple sugar that froze into shapes on the snow, and the glories of the pig's tail?

But the thing I wanted above all was a meat pie. I was a picky eater, and knew, in my secret heart, that I was unlikely to enjoy anything involving marmalade, and I'd been told that Turkish Delight involved nuts. But meat pie—which I imagined as a hamburger in a pie crust—sounded wonderful. I couldn't find a recipe (and if I had, I would have been appalled by the inclusion of things like parsnips and peas), but I remember attempting, at about age 12, to put well-salted ground beef into a frozen pie crust, which didn't in any way live up to my imagined version. (In retrospect, I was picturing an empanada.)

It was completely lost on me at the time that the reason all of these authors were able to write so eloquently about feasts and times of great bounty was, of course, that each one had experienced times when food was scarce and luxuries like meat and oranges close to nonexistent. All I knew was that they made even hard-tack sound delicious, and I wanted to sample it all.

Tags: children's books, food

Admittedly, you're asking for trouble whenever you happen upon nonironic use of the word "sexploitation" in a mainstream newspaper and continue reading the piece in question. Alas, this Wall Street Journal article by Nancy deWolf Smith on the "ravishing of Robert Pattinson" is much, much more than poorly deployed portmanteaus:

Yet as Mr. Pattinson made the rounds in New York this week to promote his new, nonvampire movie, "Remember Me," the spectacle of his sexploitation—how else to put it?—was grotesque. What's being wrecked is the essence of his appeal, and he's really not old enough to safeguard it.

On ABC's "The View" Tuesday, even the presence of Mr. Pattinson's parents and sisters in the audience could not prevent the lady interviewers of a certain age from instigating talk of intimate body parts, male and female... All this, and worse, is now rushing toward a man whose greatest asset has been not just a handsome face, but an apparent abundance of youthful innocence.

The argument, I gather, is that Pattinson came to us through a story of sexual restraint. And now that he is promoting a movie in which sexual contact will not transform his partner into a folkloric being driven to feed on human blood, the women of The View feel free to discuss his man parts. There is perhaps something interesting going on there, but an actor who started modeling when he was 12, who has been repeatedly named "sexiest man alive" by those who keep track of such things, and who has profitted off the budding sexual awakening of millions of prepubescent girls, is probably more savvy about sexual messaging than Smith gives him credit for.

In a strange way, this kind of handwringing intersects with our earlier conversation about "helicopter parenting." In what other place, in what other age, would a 23-year-old man be asked to safeguard his "sexual innocence?" I've no idea whether Pattinson's "greatest asset" is his perceived lack of carnal knowledge, but it seems perverse to ask him to stay forever trapped in the bloodless fantasies of 15-year-olds.

Photograph of Robert Pattinson by Dave Hogan/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: Robert Pattison, Sexual Hysteria

Slate’s health care reform guru Tim Noah takes an interesting look at Bart Stupak’s opposition to the Senate health care bill on the grounds that (Stupak claims) it funds abortion. Noah drills down and suspects that, among other issues, what bothers the pro-life House Democrats is that the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortions, is not a law onto its own but “merely a rider routinely attached to annual appropriations bills.”

The left is complaining that Stupak and the Catholic bishops are holding up health care over abortion. But if health care reform is that important, why not offer Stupak this concession? Permanently codify the Hyde Amendment. It would probably be, as Tim has mentioned to me, impossible to get such a provision into the health care bill under reconciliation, as reconciliation is supposed to be budget-related, and this doesn’t fall under budgeting. But is there anything stopping standalone legislation that would permanently bar the federal funding of abortion?

More than half of Americans identify as pro-life, a number that has steadily increased since 1995. Those who are both pro-reform and pro-choice are not winning pro-lifers over on the health-care reform front by leaving this ambiguity in place. Plus, such a move would put the ball in Stupak’s court. But if pro-choicers aren’t willing to make this concession, then it’s not just the pro-lifers who care about abortion more than they care about health care reform.

Photograph of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) by Tim Sloan/AFP.

Tags: abortion, health care reform, Stupak

The first hourlong episode of the Jerry Seinfeld-created show The Marriage Ref ran last night with special guests Tina Fey and Eva Longoria, and boy, was that an endless 60 minutes. NBC aired a 30-minute long preview version of the show last Sunday, and Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker thought that was a better fit for this format—the show runs videos of couples' spats, and then three celebrities comment on the fight before voting for the husband or the wife as the "right" one. I must disagree with Tucker. Regardless of length, the premise of the show is unappealing.

In the Nora Ephron book Heartburn (which, of course, is about a marriage falling apart) the heroine talks about how she loved the everydayness of being married—deciding what to eat for dinner and picking out socks and figuring out who's taking junior to day care. While this is certainly the stuff that good marriages are made of, its details are a snooze. Even the couple living through it sometimes finds it tedious and passionless to the point of being soul-killing, which can explain why some people have affairs (as it does in the book Heartburn). To build a show around the quotidian arguments of "normal" couples, when I'm sure the couples themselves find an ongoing argument about flossing in bed boring, is a phenomenally bad idea.

As EW's Tucker wrote, guest commentators Longoria and Fey, "passed judgments without seeming to really care one way or the other. And why should they?" The stakes are pretty low when you're deciding who's right in a fight over table settings. But the saddest part of The Marriage Ref is that it managed to suck the humor out of Tina Fey. One of the best parts of her comedic persona is what Fey calls her dash of "high-school bitchy." The Marriage Ref is not meant to be edgy, it's meant to be sweet, so Fey was effectively defanged. Watching her force laughs at Eva Longoria's lame jokes made that long hour almost unbearable.

Photograph of Tina Fey by Robyn Beck/AFP.

Tags: marriage, the marriage ref, Tina Fey

—As the rest of the industrialized world gets fatter, Japanese women bully each other into getting skinnier. [Washington Post]

—How do we build better teachers? [NYT Magazine]

—A study in Britain reveals that 73 percent of young people believe frank discussion of sexual disease is key to a long relationship. [BBC News]

—Students, parents, and educators in California protest cuts in the state education budget. [New York Times]

—Americans know nothing about birth control. [Feministe]

—Utah lawmakers remove “reckless” terminology from new abortion bill. [Salon]

Photograph of woman by Junko Kimura/Getty Images News.

Tags: abortion, anorexia, birth control, california, education, Japan, relationships, sex, utah, weight