"If she has that baby in April and takes off six weeks, she's worthless to us."

That's how an Oklahoma Board of Education member assessed a pregnant, newly hired Jessica Russell. Russell's new job is to represent the state Department of Education's interests in the state capitol, but she's due to give birth in April—right in the middle of the state's legislative session. Those blunt words from the Board of Ed member (Herb Rozell) drew an immediate rebuke from Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin ("demeaning" and "disgusting").

Oklahoma law does prohibit discriminating against a woman because of her pregnancy, either in the hiring process or on the job. But the question of applying for a job while pregnant, or taking a leave immediately after being hired, is one that has long bothered men and women (including pregnant women) on both sides of the hiring desk. Pregnancy is short, maternity leave even shorter, and a woman's career is long—but no woman really wants to walk onto a job and go on leave a few weeks later, and employers can't really be blamed for being less than enthusiastic about the idea. That the Board of Education hired Ms. Russell, visible baby bump and all (presumably without asking about it the forbidden topic) is to its credit. No, you're not supposed to ask. No, you can't take it under consideration. But how can they not?

When I applied for a job while pregnant years ago, I addressed it directly, knowing that my potential employers couldn't. It's probably safe to assume that Ms. Russell did something similar—but the results of that conversation don't seem to have been conveyed to the tone-deaf board member, who says he was just trying to figure out "if we could have her in April and May, because that's when everything gets tied up." It's not an unreasonable question. But it was an unreasonable (not to mention unnecessarily antagonistic) way to ask it. Not surprisingly, some are calling for Mr. Rozell's resignation. It may just be that when he revealed what he thought about pregnant working women, he also revealed his true worth.

Tags: maternity leave, oklahoma board education, working and pregnancy, worthless pregnant woman

“Bill Clinton: Hillary wants grandkids over the presidency.” That is the rather irritating headline on a Politico piece today about some remarks of Bill’s at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday. Having already commented on his own intense desire to be a grandfather, Bill added:  “I would like to have a happy wife and she won’t be unless she’s a grandmother. It’s something she wants more than she wanted to be president.”

The first problem with this story is that Bill repeats himself. He made this exact crack on Letterman back in September, so it beats me why Politico and other outlets (here’s Bloomberg) are so titillated by it now. And then there’s that headline—there is obviously a big difference between what Bill said (that Hillary wants a grandchild more than anything) and what Politico’s headline nonsensically suggests (that being a grandmother and being president might somehow be mutually exclusive).

But what intrigues me more is a little-noted Hillary quote that the Politico reporter throws in. Asked about the grandchild thing, she told ABC earlier this month:  “Well, you know, I will only get in trouble however I respond to that. But let me just say, I love babies, so you know, maybe I’ll have more in my life some day.”

That’s right: I. As Carl Bernstein reported in A Woman in Charge, his biography of Hillary, the Clintons had difficulty conceiving Chelsea, probably as a result of Hillary’s endometriosis. She always wanted more children, and while they never arrived, she was still hoping for one as late as the 1990s. Writes Bernstein, in a little noted passage:

Even during their early years in the White House, she and Bill talked seriously about adopting, and discussed with friends in California who had adopted how they might go about the process themselves. In Hillary’s forty-ninth year, she raised the subject bizarrely in an interview with a Time magazine reporter. “I must say, we’re hoping to have another child,” Hillary said. When the stunned journalist asked if she meant by natural birth she added: “I have to tell you I would be surprised but not disappointed. My friends would be appalled, I’m sure.”

That was in 1996. Before long, of course, the Clintons’ marriage took a sharp turn for the worse, and her hopes seem to have been shelved.

But now she says: “Maybe I’ll have more in my life someday.” Maybe I am getting ahead of myself. Maybe she really is talking about grandchildren. But I prefer to imagine that, at 63, Hillary just might be thinking of giving 54-year-old foster-mama-to-23 Michele Bachmann some competition.

Tags: Hillary Clinton; Chelsea Clinton; Bill Clinton; Clinton grandchildren

Some readers may recognize Jessie Sholl, author of Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding (Gallery Books, $15) as the author of a poignant, brutally honest 2007 New York Times “Modern Love” column about breaking up with a best girlfriend. Dirty Secret will appeal to many because of its prurient details—the heaps of trash and bug infestations and countless fruitless interventions that have lured viewers to shows like Hoarders. But Sholl’s strength in the memoir, her first book, is the same as in the Modern Love column: It’s her ability to pry under the mountains of useless thrift-shop refuse to the issues beneath, and to gently and compassionately bring them to light. And that she is as reflective and frank about her own behavior—even at its worst—as she is about her mother’s, without veering into self-pity or squishy sentimentality.

Sholl’s also done her homework. She reports on how childhood trauma has been linked to hoarding, how adult trauma can trigger it, and how it’s more common than you might think, with an estimated 6 million cases in the United States alone. She describes different types of hoarding, from “clean” (what her mother does), to “squalor” (which involves retaining human waste, among other things), to “animal” (which can lead to the amassing and mistreatment of sometimes hundreds of “pets” at a time).

Dirty Secret has plenty of drama: illness and struggle and stigma and frustration and redemption; central to the book is the humiliating battle Jessie and her husband, father, and stepmother wage against the scabies they contracted from her mother’s house, a condition they hide from friends, isolating them socially while they try ever-more-unusual treatments. But at its core it is a story about what happens when we or the people we love are sometimes unlovable: when baggage threatens to sink not only its owner but anyone willing to help bear it. It is about our darkest secrets and coming clean.

Tags: Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About her Mother’s Compulsive Hoarding, jessie scholl

The latest survey of American college students says freshmen have never been more stressed or less satisfied. Almost one-third of them were nervous wrecks before they even got to college, and 48 percent of them say their emotional health is "below average." So what's everybody worried about? One thing's for sure: it ain't academics. Average study time has declined by 10 hours a week over the last 50 years (to 14 hours a week). And kids are more confident in their academic abilities than ever (66 percent expect at least a B average, and 71 percent say their academic abilities are above average).

In the reporting on the survey, the economy, probably justly, has come in for a lot of blame. Students' parents are unemployed at higher rates than they've ever been (although unemployment among the parents of college students is still much lower than it is in the general population). Young people know employers aren't going to be lined up after convocation with pre-printed business cards, and as early as freshman year, they're worried about getting jobs after they graduate.

But I think Libby Copeland's piece in Slate on the social ills of social media points to another possible culprit: Facebook. As Libby pointed out, someone who's already a little bit stressed, lonely, or sad is likely to come away from a 2-hour 2 a.m. Facebook trawl convinced that she's the only person in the world who is stressed, lonely, or sad. Everyone else is kissing their boyfriend or smiling in a bar with their dozen best friends or whipping up the "best. chocolate. chip. cookies. EVER."

I know that for myself, the "presentation anxiety" Libby describes was never more intense than during my freshman year of college. I went to a school where I knew precisely one person before classes started, and I was sure my Facebook profile would affect the way everyone else on campus saw me, forever. I tended my "favorites" list with more care than a FarmVille vegetable garden, wrote cheeky status updates (but not too often!) and never, ever, let on that I sometimes felt alone in a crowd of 25,000. But somehow, the knowledge that my own profile in no way reflected the reality of my life didn't stop me from taking everyone else's Facebook self at face value.

Significantly, the survey in question didn't ask people to describe themselves with phrases like "happy," "sad," or "about to set myself on fire with a Bunsen burner." They asked students to compare their emotional health to other students', with phrases like "above average," "average," and "below average." That kind of question requires respondents to figure out both what "average" is and where they are in relation to it. Despite Facebook's disconnect from reality, the site has a huge influence on people's perception of "average."  And because Facebook allows people to display all the glitter in their lives, but none of the shit, it's creating a perceived happiness inflation that might be every bit as pernicious as grade inflation.

Photograph by Nicholas Kamm for Getty Images.

Tags: college, Facebook, stress

I have deep love for anyone who subverts the constant stream of mediocrity that constitues our media environment, particularly with regard to the brainless patter that makes up most of TV, even if they subvert it unintentionally, like Kanye West does with his big mouth.  But I suspect that when Tracy Morgan says scandalous things and causes much feigned horror, he's doing it on purpose, and just playing it off like an oops, which expands the joke to make fun of everyone who invests too much in the world of polite TV stupidity.

And so it goes with Morgan's latest non-scandal.  The headlines claim he was "objectifying" perennial wannabe victim Sarah Palin, but if you actually watch the exchange on TNT's NBA program, Palin wasn't really the object of his mockery. Kenny Smith asked him, "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" and Morgan said, "I think Sarah Palin is good masturbation material! The glasses and all of that ... great masturbation material!"  The joke is on the question; by taking it to the next level, Morgan was exposing how objectfying the question is.  The potshot at Palin---and the way she exploits right wing hunger for attractive female validation of anti-feminist beliefs---is secondary, at best.

I'm not suggesting that Tracy Morgan is some subversive feminist comic. I have no idea if he cares one way or another about the objectification of women in the public eye.  But the question put to him was the lowest form of casual dudebro silliness, and it involved a woman who is basically his boss in both the fictional and real world, and who has almost nothing in common with Palin except for her glasses. To make it worse, it had an irritating "wink wink" quality to it, where everyone is supposed to pretend the question being asked is something it's not because no one brings sex up directly.  The job of comedians is to puncture illusions just like that one, and you can't just lay bait out like that for a swift puncturer of illusions like Tracy Morgan, and then get offended when he takes a giant bite.

Photograph of Tracy Morgan by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images; Photograph of Sarah Palin by by Eric Thayer/Getty Images

Tags: pearl-clutching, Sarah Palin, Tina Fey, tracy morgan