All hail the czarina

I always wondered why people whose job descriptions entailed overseeing somewhat impossible projects came to be called "czars" (or "tsars"). Johnson, the language blog at The Economist, considers the issue, and proposes an alternative.

Over at The New York Times, science writer Natalie Angier offers these thoughts on why not ma'am.

I wish I could tune out...

Sometimes I envy the people who watch Fox as though it really were Fair and Accurate. I wish that I, too, could stick my head in a hole in the ground where all I could hear echoed back at me was what I just want to believe. Instead, I see as a responsibility of citizenship the need to be informed, whether or not I like the news that is being delivered. So, I even force myself to know what Fox is all about - like the "tea party" in DC yesterday, which I cannot help but see as a fitting end to what seems like a Summer of Hate, during which even the birthright to citizenship became challenged.

Because I did not have my head stuck in a hole, I heard this interview on Fresh Air - with journalist Jane Mayer, who published an article in the current issue of The New Yorker on the two billionaire brothers funding the alleged grassroots "tea party" movement.

The article itself had me in half a mind to boycott products like Dixie cups and clothing made with Lycra - two products in the holdings of the Koch brothers. I mean, why should "my" money become diverted to their causes, which ultimately serve their own interests?

Frank Rich, in his column today, commented:

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

Which caused StraightMan to declare that the so-called Giving Pledge among billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates really might not be such a great idea after all. (For more on this, I now have Ralph Nader's novel, Only the Super Rich Can Save Us! on my to-read list.) Do we want to - can we - trust them to give to the causes that matter most to most people? The "right" causes and not the "right-wing" causes?

(I admit my own partiality. OK?)

For the thoughtful billionaire who wants to do good, but is not certain how to do it, StraightMan proposes a solution: Pledge to give more in taxes, which will go to public works like universal pre-K and school nutrition programs and universal health coverage and infrastructure.

True, you will not receive all the adulation given to the Buffett-and-Gates gang, but you need not defer the good you will do until you pass on - which means you also might reap some rewards, like healthy and skilled employees, which contribute to your bottom line. Win-win!

Here is another take, from Slate, on how to "fix" the Giving Pledge.

Given how the summer went, I dread the coming season of mid-term elections.

Speaking truths

Classes started yesterday. 'Nuff said.

Here are two links to people speaking truths:

Adrienne Martini on the dog days between the start of the college calendar and the public school calendarr. StraightMan and I sometimes think we are just figments of her imagination, and she is scripting our life, but we have been to her house and partaken of her (and the Featureless Saint's) hospitality. Unless that is part of the narrative, too. Hmm...

Frank Rich, aka My Hero, on the spectacle now known as the "Ground Zero mosque." Quoth My Hero - a journalist who has both the commitment to his job and the platform to be able to spread the word and make a difference (when too many journalists today have either one or the other...): "Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool."

Keeping up with the Times

Tomorrow marks the first day of the fall term here at Central State University College, where I teach.

StraightMan will be sitting out the academic year. He is on sabbatical!

To mark the occasion, here are links to two Times features marking the start of the semester that caught my eye:

How American families pay for college today. I have been thinking about this quite a bit, as I had attended a presentation on children and finance during a visit with friends at the Chautauqua Institution. The audience clearly came from a privileged strata of American society: When the question was posed how much families should be saving for college, the rule-of-thumb figure suggested was $500 to $800 a month per child.

Another reason that I love StraightMan is that he is the kind of guy who, when I quoted him this figure, retorted that their kids would be heading to Hampshire and Bennington. Which is an elitist joke in itself, but still funny to me, as we are nowhere near saving what we are "supposed" to - I thought we were doing well just saving at all!

Redshirting in kindergarten. Look, I think there can be good reasons for why parents, in consultation with teachers, might consider delaying a particular child's entree into school, but at least some of the reasons for redshirting might be addressed more systematically - for example, I think the concerns about schooling boys ought to be addressed more broadly, for the good of more than a select few children who have especially engaged parents.

As an aside, Bubbie, age 3, just started his first week in the "pre-school" room at his child care - I feel a little like he is just too young (i.e., immature) for it, but the other boys (all 14! and only 2 girls...) seem equally too young.

Keeping up with The Times

Just interrupting my stream of thought on horses to wonder whether or not Mark C Taylor is a tenured tool of corporate academia / higher ed?

Here is his August 14 op / ed piece proposing that universities and colleges ought to look at their bottom lines and act toward economic sustainability - through such measures as merging departments of philosophy at institutions like Columbia and NYU. I take it that the point here is largely rhetorical, as Taylor, a professor of religion, uses his own current affiliation (at Columbia) as an example.

In today's Room for Debate blog, Taylor, who is currently professor at Columbia and a professor emeritus at Williams College, calls for mandatory retirement of faculty.

Not that I do not see informed debate as vital - and the rethinking of academia / higher education as critical - but I do not see what Taylor says as especially imaginative. Yet because his is Mark C Taylor, his ideas find a forum in The New York Times and become part of the discourse.

Keeping up with The Times

As though in answer to my post yesterday on The Wellfleet Oyster Diet, the Times today is previewing a book review of Paul Greenberg's Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. Reviewer Sam Sifton, the Times restaurant critic, on his blog, also poses the question of what fish should we eat, given the concerns both that overharvesting in the wild and farming fish both pose.

Four Fish sounds like a terrific read that I plan to load onto my kindle. Featured at the tales of tuna, cod, sea bass and salmon. In book publishing parlance, it sounds like a Michael Pollan treatment, but Pollan himself, in The Omnivore's Dilemma, acknowledged the significant contribution of anthropology to thinking about what and how and why we eat as we do.

Sifton's review itself resonates with me:

In a bite of that absolutely fresh tuna from New Jersey, I experienced a taste of truly wild food, a majestic flavor, something incredibly rare.

And as it melted on my tongue and receded into memory, I felt guilt and doubt and fear. Will my children, who demurred in eating the fish that day, ever have a chance to eat bluefin tuna? Will their children? Will anyone? Should they? What are we really to do with these fish?

I still have the taste of Wellfleet oysters fresh in my mouth. It is indeed an experience that I hope Beanie and Bubbie can come to savor also.

Language matters

StraightMan was devasted by the following post on The Chicago Manual of Style's Facebook wall:

CMOS 16 Sneak Peek: In author-date citations in reference lists, put article titles in quotation marks and use headline capitalization. With this change, the two systems of Chicago documentation (author-date and notes-bibliography) become easier to learn and use, since the stylings of elements will be the same in both systems. Only the order of the elements varies, as before.

In fact, he just had spent part of his morning "fixing" the citations in an article that he has been writing. We have a CMOS 15 on our shelf. The purchase of which we invested $55 during the writing of my dissertation. It is a little disconcerting to think that it might be obsolete: I thought good style never went out of fashion?

***

Is it just me or does there seem to be a growing interest in linguistic concerns? Arguably, language and all its uses and effects matter all the more with the use of technologies and social media, like the Internet and Facebook. The fact that the folks at CMOS are hip on Facebook seems to prove this point. Also, the point that a lot of people who engage in writing for at least some part of their day are spending too much time on Facebook - 9,508 people "like" CMOS.

In addition to the revival of the On Language column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, a blog on language has been introduced on The Economist's Web site. It is called "Johnson," which no doubt causes much snickering in certain quarters, but which the blogger helpfully reminds us is named for dictionary-maker Samuel Johnson. Were The Economist based in the U.S., it might have been called "Webster." (See above.) I esp. like Johnson's reaction to Sarah Palin's "refudiation" of critics of her inventing the term "refudiate."

Much as I enjoy them, however, these erudite essays cannot be all there is to press coverage of language matters.

Language is the news. In the early days of the Iraq invasion, the need for Arabic specialists was much discussed - the college where I teach is in the process now of developing a minor in Arabic, which students themselves are demanding. The proposition to make English the nation's "official" language has been afoot for some time, but there seems to be renewed attention to the English-only movement, esp. with anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona.

A critical point that I tried to make in my linguistic anthropology class is that no language is inherently better or worse than any other for human communication: French is not more beautiful than German. Arabic and Chinese are not in any objective sense the hardest to learn in the world. The dominance of English results not from some kind of linguistic superiority - for example, it is argued that it is more efficient and therefore a better language for science and technology - but from processes of standardization and planning, which continue today.

It is interesting to consider how the "policing" of language works. It is for this reason that I feel as half-hearted about so much talk about Palin or George W. Bush before her: You say plain talk, I say linguistic gaffe. Is plain talk really plain? Or is it the appearance of being plain? Who among us does not commit such gaffes? Can a person's proper or improper use of language really tell us all that about him or her? What is proper and improper use of language in the first place?

More important, what are the stakes involved here? Now we have ventured into assumptions about what language is all about - and they need to be examined.

I wonder whether or not leaving language matters in the hands of the pointy heads in fact might trivialize their significance and more importantly, deflect attention from the consequences for We the People in our everyday lives.

There seems to be a need today for linguistic journalism, along the lines of science journalism, to help interpret what everyone is talking about, from so-called political correctness to Palinisms and back again.

***

On a related note, Lexington's column in the July 15th issue of The Economist offers the immodest proposal of banning the use of "great" and "exceptional" (and their variants) in political speeches in the U.S.:

Just think what a relief it will be, once Lexington’s ban comes into force, to be able to debate the role of government on its merits, without bringing providence into it.

The ban will also liberate America’s politicians to speak like normal people. At present, failing to lard their speeches with God and greatness can get them into serious trouble.

For me, another reason to like Lexington - aside from the quaint and lovely practice of having an individual assume the column's identity (versus the column assuming an individual's identity - is his? / her? assessment of David Brooks, a columnist whom I love to dislike:

In 1997 David Brooks, writing then for the Weekly Standard and now at the New York Times, wrote an essay called “A Return to National Greatness”, complaining that America had abandoned high public aspiration and become preoccupied with “the narrower concerns of private life”. It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, Mr Brooks said, “as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness”.

If that was ever good advice, it is rotten advice now. Americans are not unhappy because they lack an energetic government; many think Mr Obama’s administration too energetic by half. The last thing the country needs is to be distracted from its practical problems by the quest for an elusive greatness. Put such language away, says Lexington. America is indeed a great and exceptional country. But it isn’t talking about it that makes it so.

About a teacher

A friend on Facebook posted this obituary for Clara Claiborne Park, who wrote two memoirs about raising a child with autism - The Siege and Exiting Nirvana. Her daughter today is an acclaimed painter.

Professor Park, which is how I remember her, taught a class on Dante that I took as an undergraduate. I remember that she talked with feeling, but also articulately and precisely. I think I must have said hardly a word in the class. At the time, I had some vague knowledge that she had written a book about her daughter. Years later, I bought a copy of The Siege, which was published originally in 1967, long before there was "autism awareness." I started to read it several times, but never could continue, due to some distraction or another. After learning about Professor Park's passing, however, I retrieved it from the shelf and sat down with it.

Just like in her Dante class, I think I must have felt out my depth the first few times that I started the book. This time, it has caught me completely. The book describes with feeling, articulately and precisely, what it is like to be a mother, including the fears and misgivings, which in Professor Park's story become confirmed. "It is hard to remember the first stirrings of doubt about a baby, but I remember a day when I took Elly to the supermarket," she writes, describing how, as she watched a friend's child, also 19 months old, point to a box of candy, a realization comes to her: "I thought then that I had never seen Elly point."

To point is so simple, so spontaneous, so primary an action that it seems ridiculous to analyze it. All babies point, do they not? To stretch out the arm and the finger is, symbolically and literally, to stretch out the self into the world - in order to remark on an object, to call it to another's attention, perhaps to want it for oneself. From pointing comes the question "What's that?" that unlocks the varied world. To point, to reach, to stretch, to grab, is to make a relation between oneself and the outside. To need is to relate (6).

The book, then is, about more than autism or a mother and daughter. It is about the needs and encumberments that after all make us who and what we are. Professor Park describes Elly's autism as a perfect kind of "aloneness" that has been created, sought, and guarded, and that requires dismantling:

She dwelt in a solitary citadel, compelling and self-made, complete and valid. Yet we could not leave her there. We must intrude, attack, invade, not because she was unhappy inside it, for she was not, but because the equilibrium she had found, perfect as it was, denied the possibility of growth (12).

Disquieting as it seems, I think Professor Park quite deliberately chose the images of the citadel and of intrusion - the book is titled The Siege. She acknowledges that there is something aggressive, even hostile, afoot:

We had not demanded; now we must. We had accepted; now we must try to change. A terrible arrogance, for what had we to offer her? Which of us could call ourselves as content as Elly was? The world we would tempt her into was the world of risk, failure, and frustration, of unfulfilled desire, of pain as well as activity and love.... Confronted with a tiny child's refusal of life, all existential hesitations evaporate. We had no choice. We would use every stratagem we could invent to assail her fortress, to beguile, entice, seduce here into the human condition (12).

What this story calls to our attention, then, is that to be and become human is a struggle. It is not a condition to be taken for granted. This is a lesson that we can learn from the poetry of Dante, from anthropology, from our mothers and fathers and our children, and from the passing of a teacher.

What you can learn from books * and * reviews

David Brooks: How I love to dislike him. He will start with an observation that makes sense to me - then blow it. Like in today's column, "The Medium Is the Medium."

Brooks begins the column by reporting on a study that found that disadvantaged kids who received books at the end of the school year - in other words, the kids typically affected by "summer slide" as measured in tests and grades - maintained higher reading scores than the kids who received no books. The results held even when they did not read the books. How and why? Here is the bit of sense:

But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

After this point is when Brooks blew it, at least for me.

I do not disagree entirely with the observations underlying a statement like this: "The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students." I teach college students, and I lament the fact every single day that too many of them are not better readers. I believe that were they better readers of books, they also might be better citizens and - gasp - better users of the Internet.

However. Brooks' exposition on the "culture" of the book versus the "culture" of the Internet makes me cranky as an anthropologist. Here again, "culture" or rather "cultures" become talked about as bounded and singular and consistent. Books and the Internet emerge from and coexist (and might or might not compete) in what we might call the one and the same "culture." In a book that I currently am perusing, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, linguist Dennis Baron reminds us:

The World Wide Web wasn't the first innovation in communication to draw some initial skepticism. Writing itself was the target of one early critic. Plato warned that writing would weaken memory, but he was more concerned that written words - mere shadows of speech - couldn't adequately represent meaning. His objections paled as more and more people began to structure their lives around handwritten documents (Baron 2009:x).

"Culture," and history, aside, Brooks' description of books as representing "a hierarchical universe" with "classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom" is exactly not the buzz that reading deserves or requires, esp. for the disadvantaged kids who likely already understand themselves as the beach reading of society.

His primary objection to the Internet is this:

Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.

I have to wonder whether or not Brooks has any self-awareness of his own position in the old media - on the "important" and "prestigious" editorial page of the Gray Lady - because this sounds like his own crankiness as a columnist in a snit about the respect that he believe he should be shown?

However. Now I have placed my own snittiness on display.

I do not think there is anything inherently anarchical about the Internet. (In its own ways, it is also hierarchical.) It is a technology, like books are a technology, and it is what we make it to be.

***

While there might be nothing like reading Brooks to raise your (my) ire in the am, but I esp. learned much from reading this recent essay on "The Death and Life of the Book Review" in the June 21 issue of The Nation.

In it, John Palattella considers the past and present state of newspaper journalism and of the book review in particular:

Claims that books sections are eliminated or downsized because they can't earn their keep are bogus. It is indisputable that newspapers have been weakened by hard times and a major technological shift in the dissemination of news; it is not indisputable that newspaper books coverage has suffered for the same reasons. The book beat has been gutted primarily by cultural forces, not economic ones, and the most implacable of those forces lies within rather than outside the newsroom. It is not iPads or the Internet but the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers themselves.

.... In a news context, "anti-intellectual" does not necessarily mean an antipathy to ideas, though it can mean that too. I use the word "anti-intellectual" to describe a suspicion of ideas not gleaned from reporting and a lack of interest in ideas that are not utterly topical.

So, in Palattella's perspective, there is more at stake in book reviews than a particular book or even books and reading at large. As, dare I even suggest, Brooks also contends, it is "culture" and history.

Brunch for thought

Just read Thomas Friedman's Sunday column reflecting on the BP catastrophe and the question of "responsibility." In it, he quotes from a letter to the editor that appeared in The Beaufort Gazette in South Carolina. "It is the best reaction I’ve seen to the BP oil spill — and also the best advice to President Obama on exactly whom to kick you know where," Friedman writes.

The letter is sincere. It resonates. It expresses sentiments that I think a lot of thoughtful people share right now:

It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame and I’m sorry. It’s my fault because I haven’t digested the world’s in-your-face hints that maybe I ought to think about the future and change the unsustainable way I live my life. If the geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts of the 1990s didn’t do it; if the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 didn’t do it; if the current economic crisis didn’t do it; perhaps this oil spill will be the catalyst for me, as a citizen, to wean myself off of my petroleum-based lifestyle. ‘Citizen’ is the key word.

I especially like the emphasis on citizenship.

However. (You knew it was coming.) I think about the terrifying speed at which an assertion like this, which I read as the attempt of a citizen (and the other citizens who share it) to take control of the public discourse and direct our efforts and energies in directions like an energy climate bill, financial regulation, and immigration reform (as Friedman suggests), instead will become appropriated or co-opted by, say, BP, Transocean, or whomever has an interest, frankly, in not seeing an energized citizenry.

Is there a way that We the People can take control over the terms of discourse and the agenda for action without (at least rhetorically) blaming ourselves? In part because I fear the hijacking of this narrative and the control it is meant to assert on behalf of citizens. More important because I think it is not in itself the irreducible truth of the matter: I mean, think about the ways in which, as individuals, the decisions we make in our day-to-day lives are structured.

The point is not to recuse ourselves from these proceedings or absolve the actions that we take. I think the impulse to take the blame comes from the desire and the ability that we have to understand what is happening, even when it is painful and unflattering to ourselves. So, let us continue to take that hard look: We tend to see ourselves as people with biographies, or our own life's stories, or to use another word, memories. We fail to recognize ourselves as people with and in history, which apparently happened somewhere "in the past" with little to do with individuals. (Unless you happen to be one of the Great Men or Great Women of History.)

So, I want to stop talking about "blame." I want to talk about history. We need to see ourselves as the people who have been making histories that we do not approve or even especially wish to claim, much less control, and the the people whose histories have made us what we are.

As an aside - this reference to the difference between memory and history has haunted me for the last two days since I read it in the June 7th issue of The New Yorker, in a review of Hirsi Ali's Nomad: From Islam to America - A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. The review tells us that Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Somali woman who has rejected Islam. I appreciated this observation in the review, in response to Ali's comments on visiting a neighborhood of Muslim immigrants in London:

Whitechapel has much in its past - oppression, bigotry, poverty, radicalism - that would have helped Hirsi Ali understand not only the neighborhood's newest inhabitants but also her own family. But "Nomad" reveals that her life experiences have yet to ripen into a sense of history. The sad truth is that the problems she blames on Islam - fear of sexuality, oppression of women, militant millenarianism - are to be found wherever traditionalist peoples confront the transition to an individualistic urban culture of modernity.

The last bit I find to be rather a sweeping statement that could be explained further - like, how individualism and modernity are never quite a done deal, but constantly being claimed and asserted, and that the problem is not a retreat in "traditionalism" in the face of modernity, but that the so-called confrontation or more precisely the process of modernity can be seen as itself producing such effects. For example, social anthropologists over the decades have suggested that "witchcraft" and "sorcery" become reintroduced and reinvented in moments of historical instability. Tradition is not the problem per se. "Modernity" - and this concept, like tradition, needs to be unpacked - is.

The BP catastrophe, including the laying and claiming of blame, clearly represents the problems of modernity.

Keeping up with The Times

Just read philosopher Peter Singer's contribution to the Opinionator, "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

Which on the one hand brought to mind a joke that StraightMan likes to make about teaching and parenting: That had he known in advance what they both involved, he might have reconsidered one of them.

The exact wording, the brevity, the delivery, and with them, the impact, might be lost, but I think you get more or less the idea.

On the other hand. I found Singer's piece interestingly provocative, as it clearly is intended to be, but I admit that I also thought: Written like a man.

I mean that without essentializing either "man" or "woman." Of course. Mindful of the gendered existences and experiences that "we" have. That said, I think men and women build their relationships to / with a child rather differently. Having a child, or not having a child, becomes attached with importances and meanings. How we feel about having children and what we do about it, in fact, genders us.

It might be just my disciplinarily-bred defensiveness or my crankiness with the field of "ethics" - I has less problem with ethics themselves - but I disagree with Singer's contention that "very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself. Most of those who consider that question probably do so because they have some reason to fear that the child’s life would be especially difficult — for example, if they have a family history of a devastating illness, physical or mental, that cannot yet be detected prenatally."

Given that at least some kind of testing has become routine in the medical management of pregnancy in the United States - and this includes fetal ultrasound imaging, which has become more or less a ritual for "seeing" the baby - I suggest that the question of coming into existence haunts a lot of women in the family way.

Anthropologist Rayna Rapp wrote a compelling ethnography, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, documenting women's decisions to have or not have an amniocentesis performed to test for chromosomal anomalies. Again, given the common use of the test, which is strongly recommended, almost required, for women over age 35, I think it is not unfair to say that a lot of American women face the dilemmas of do I test or not, do I want to know or not, what will I do with this information, what will I decide? Their, or I should say our choices might have been "either / or," but their / our questions and answers were far more complicated, including not only notions about the child's own "good," but also the good of their other children, who would be the siblings and possibly eventual caregivers of children with disabilities.

There is no "bracketing" or leaving aside "for the sake of argument" their experiences, expectations, and identities as women and particularly as mothers making choices for their children. I almost feel as though Singer were asking me, as a woman and mother, to inhabit his perspective without his making a similar attempt to challenge his own imagination. At risk of sounding like a stark raving feminist, I confess: I have begun to see this storied philosophic strategy of "just supposing" as an important means of universalizing a particular gendered perspective. Women constantly are asked, persuaded, pressured, and forced to accommodate men's arguments, ideas, and perspectives. Try asking men to "take on" women's ways of seeing: Become accused of being political or worse - soft, subjective, unscientific, not so smart.

The questions that Singer poses to readers are intended to be provocatively interesting, but I do not find them exactly that. I mean, are they not the questions that guide the ideas and practices of women and men across cultures and societies, in the past and in the present?

If a child is likely to have a life full of pain and suffering is that a reason against bringing the child into existence?

If a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life, is that a reason for bringing the child into existence?

Like so many other decisions that we as human people make in our lives, the "choice" to have (or not have) a child is itself constrained and conditioned and culturally mediated and socially policed and historically and politically / economically situated and gendered.

Keeping up with The Times

This past Sunday, the Times reported on an anthropological study based at UCLA. The Center on the Everyday Lives of Families amassed a video record of 32 dual-earner, middle-class families totaling 1,540 hours. They just finished transcribing and coding it. Wow.

Disclaimer: As a graduate student, I was affiliated with a sister center at the University of Michigan.

Among the findings that the Times reported in its article:

Mothers still do most of the housework, spending 27 percent of their time on it, on average, compared with 18 percent for fathers and 3 percent for children (giving an allowance made no difference).

Husbands and wives were together alone in the house only about 10 percent of their waking time, on average, and the entire family was gathered in one room about 14 percent of the time. Stress levels soared — yet families spent very little time in the most soothing, uncluttered area of the home, the yard.

...

In addition to housework, mothers spent 19 percent of their time talking with family members or on the phone, and 11 percent taking occasional breathers that the study classified as “leisure.” The rates for fathers were 20 percent chatting, and 23 percent leisure — again, taken in fragments.

Hmm. What is this leisure "in fragments" of which the Times speaks? Is this the few minutes I took after supper, while Beanie used the potty and Bubbie tried sitting on his (I am happy to see him exhibiting "potty-readiness"), to read Katha Pollitt's column in the issue of The Nation that just arrived b/c I really just did not feel like, for example, folding the basket of laundry that was sitting at my feet?

Interestingly, the researchers also reported this:

The couples who reported the least stress tended to have rigid divisions of labor, whether equal or not. “She does the inside work, and I do all the outside, and we don’t interfere” with each other, said one husband.

That makes sense to me. StraightMan and I divide our care of kids and home more or less right down the middle. The moments when things feel like they are breaking down are the moments when one of us messes with the other's schedule (I attribute the stress of this more to having to manage a change at the last minute) or worse, meddles with the other's plan or method. I think we basically parent by two rules: (1) We back each other in the moment and avoid disagreement or contradiction in front of the kids (but we admit when we have been mistaken and apologize, to the kids as well) and (2) When one parent is solo in charge of the kids, the other parent does not criticize how he or she manages (like letting kids watch TV).

Actually, now that I have articulated them, I realize they are less rules to parent by and more rules to maintain marriage by.

On my Netfllix queue

A few months back, a few students had begun mentioning rather excitedly to me seeing the trailer for a new feature-length documentary, "Babies." They said it made them think about me. Hmm.

This line at the end of A.O. Scott's review of the film (in The New York Times) caught my attention:

“Babies” is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). Breast feeding.

Because like the "intense, horrific violence and appropriately profane reactions to the prospect of same" that are featured in "The Hurt Locker," audiences need to be advised!

The above, I admit, is a cheap shot. In fact, the line caught my attention mostly because it makes me wonder about how and why audiences could not expect breast feeding to be exhibited in a documentary called "Babies." Or is this an anticipation or expectation of the Times editors that might or might not reflect the reactions of audiences themselves? I mean, could we not give each other a bit of credit.

BTW, after viewing the trailer for the film, scroll down and view the third clip from the film. I see college students do this in class more often than I like to admit - c'mon, people, I am not as boring all that, and I teach cultural anthropology, which is fascinating! - but of course they just are not as adorable as this little kiddo.

Keeping up with The Times

While it is true that they occasionally say things that seem to make sense to us, as far as StraightMan and I are concerned, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, John Tierney, and Nicholas Wade are the Gray Lady's own Evil League of Evil.

As anthropologists, we reserve our particular ire for Wade.

Recently, Wade discovered culture, which he describes as an "evolutionary force" that has been in effect for the last 20,000 years or so.

Today, Wade reported on a study of the possible consequences of cousin marriage in the Darwin family.

The topic of cousin marriage is one that I happen to teach in ANTH 100. For example, I screen the ethnographic film "Masai Women" (a "classic" documentary that helps students connect the practice of polygyny with ideas and practices about women and property) and also assign chestnuts like Melvyn Goldstein's "When Brothers Share a Wife" (an article about fraternal polyandry in Tibet that appears in a number of textbooks).

This is all done in the service of impressing upon students the idea that there is no universal definition of marriage. It can involve more than two individuals who need not be different sexes / genders and it is not assumed that first comes love.

I also like to talk about marriage in ANTH 100 to illustrate the point that it can be difficult to cultivate a stance of cultural relativism about activities, behaviors, and attitudes that "we" consider fundamental experiences of everyday life.

Given that cousin marriages, cross-culturally and historically in American and European societies, have been preferred, I make rather a strong case for how and why such marriages ought not be seen as "unnatural." I always anticipate that at least one student will ask the inbreeding question. So, I plan to read the study that Wade cites more carefully. It sounds like an interesting approach, but I feel a bit doubtful about whether or not this particular analysis is all that robust.

PowerPoint-less

The mind boggles.

A colleague in my department forwarded the slide, which I initially thought came from The Onion.

Then I followed the link to this article in The New York Times today.

I use PowerPoint in my teaching, mostly as an organizing tool to help me keep my thoughts connected as I talk and to provide a "map" for students to follow - I think it helps them maintain focus. Also, I admit, I sometimes like to have them look at something other than at me.

I do not, however, regard PowerPoint as imaging information any more than I imagine myself necessarily conveying information. I see myself as a guide in the process of learning how to ask and think and answer. In other words, I see part of what I do in my teaching as arguing and persuading. So, I found this striking in the Times report:

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.

As a college professor who received an undergraduate degree in English and aspired (and still aspires) to write, it warms the cockles of my heart to read such complaints, coming from the military chain of command.

Keeping up with The Times

I took this weekend "off" (i.e., a quick trip there-and-back for Beanie and Bubbie to visit their cousins) - I am paying for this now (i.e., prepping classes, writing an exam, offering extra help to students confused about material for said exam).

Never got around to reading last week’s magazine story, “Can Animals Be Gay?” Let me take a guess: Yes.

However. I understand how and why it might contribute to thinking about human sexual behavior to look at the range of behaviors among non-human animals, but I also question whether or not it helps us to talk in particular about animals as "gay." Human sexual behavior can include a range of activity. Homosociality (e.g., same sex / gender friendship) seems to be as much if not more the rule in history and across cultures and societies. Not to mention that “gay” and for that matter “straight” identity is constructed.

All of which is a long way of getting around to saying that I just started reading this week’s magazine story, “The Estrogen Dilemma.” Before I even realized it, I found myself at the bottom of page 2 of 7, about to click on Next Page. Then I remember about having to teach class.

The article is about the science and experience of being a woman of a Certain Age. For the record, I am not yet at that Certain Age. I believe that I am at an Uncertain Age. Not young, I guess, but not old enough even to be Middle Aged. So, I apologize to every person over the age of 35 to whom I ever referred, in my youthful ignorance, about a decade ago, as Middle Aged. (For more on this, see the George Clooney movie, “Up in the Air.”)

I liked this observation:

I managed a surprising level of public discretion about what was going on; competence at the cover act is a skill commonly acquired by midlife women, I think, especially those with children and work lives. If the years have taught us nothing else, they have taught us how to do a half dozen things at once, at least a couple of them decently well.

Ah, covering. I feel like that is a lot of what I do as a parent. Also as a scholar / teacher.

Keeping up with The Times

I knew it, I knew it! In her "Well" blog today, Tara Parker-Pope confirmed what StraightMan and I long had suspected:

Working parents perpetually agonize that they don’t see enough of their children. But a surprising new study finds that mothers and fathers alike are doing a better job than they think, spending far more time with their families than did parents of earlier generations.

As half of a dual-full-time-academic-career couple with two kids, I feel vindicated.

With all due respect and affection to my parents (in particular to my mother, the primary caregiver) - and meals together in our house were the rule, not the exception - I remember a lot of the time we spent together as benign inattentiveness. For example, my brother and sister and I were encouraged to play together, in the backyard, or to read in our rooms on our own.

We kids had our own ways of getting along (or not). Something that I encourage Beanie and Bubbie to develop and explore, too.

Keeping up with The Times

In today's Opinionator, Olivia Judson explains what "sexual tension" means for evolutionary biologists:

Normally, it’s not possible to free one sex from the constraints of the other, because the two are condemned to evolve together. But again, fruit flies are an exception. In the laboratory, it’s possible to let one sex to evolve while holding the other still.

In other words, it is not what was happening between various male and female characters on "Firefly." Yet, fascinating nevertheless.

Keeping up with The Times

The pep talk that anthropology ABDs receive when, for example, they do not receive an invitation for a job talk (or they happen to glance at a bleak report in The Chronicle of Higher Education) is that academia is not your only option: More than half of PhD's work "outside" the ivory tower. To be frank, it did not always make you feel peppy to hear this.

I was filled with thrill and envy, however, to learn that a linguistic anthropologist has become the new columnist for "On Language." I like that he starts with a consideration of "no." He even talks about anthropologists and kinship to boot! (Not in connection to "no.")

What a nerd am I.