Since at least the 1980s, Evanston Township High School—the only (and extremely large) high school serving the suburb directly north of Chicago—has been both incredibly diverse and incredibly two-tracked. There was a lunch cafeteria for white people and a lunch cafeteria for black people—also, to its credit, an (at least somewhat) more integrated cafeteria for the freaks. That is where the smoking courtyard used to be, today's young people may be astounded to hear! Likewise, in classes there's a track for white people and some other non-black people and then a track for pretty much everyone else. Summer school classes, for instance? Nearly entirely black. Now, the school's [...]

Perhaps you've heard that there's been some… disagreements between certain feminist blogs and The Daily Show recently. If not, let me recap! A couple of weeks ago, Jezebel's Irin Carmon (a hand-to-God Real Journalist, with non-blog bylines!) wrote a piece examining what she termed The Daily Show's "Woman Problem." She largely defined the show as being a hostile environment for women as evidenced by the perennially low number of female correspondents and the testimony of some named and unnamed sources. The piece didn't really go too far, other than apparently being widely linked on Facebook. Olivia Munn, the Daily Show's but-one-month-old lady correspondent may or may not [...]

75% of the editorial staffers whose careers at the New York Observer predate the current editor that have since departed the paper are women or gay men. The current editor, Kyle Pope, was hired eleven months ago. As of this week, there are zero women editors at the paper, excluding the managing editor, Una La Marche. There are two women on the masthead's list of ten "writers" and two women on the masthead's list of 14 "contributing writers."

Rest easy, America! After our long march through the spiritless battle to prop up our inflammable paper economy, David Brooks has identified the true cause of our distemper: we have been lulled into a terminal state of civic distrust by an overly porous power elite.

Yes. The recruitment of our upper-class leaders has become more demographically open, Brooks notes, with the old WASP establishment giving way to a "meritocratic" scrum of other-than white male power brokers. And as a result, "we've changed the criteria for success. It is less important to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working." But there's a twist! "As [...]

Time's recent declaration of the obscure and notoriously media-shy writer Jonathan Franzen as our "Great American Novelist" was met, at first anyway, with shocking equanimity, it seems to me. Sure, he has a new book, Freedom, coming out. Sure, Sam Tanenhaus declared said novel a "masterpiece of American fiction" in the New York Times, though he did so nearly a month before regular readers would be able to challenge that view. Sure, such is the confidence of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in this book that it is pre-selling as an ebook at the unusually-high price of $14.99. Me, I read The Corrections, enjoyed it, and promptly [...]