On Why Is American Selfishness So Widespread Now?
Honestly I think it's like all the other blame-the-victim stuff: It's a distancing tactic based on fear. I'm not saying "Oh, no, these people are really nice!" They're jerks, but they're jerks because they're scared, and if they can say that this guy "made poor life choices" or whatever, that means that this could never happen to THEM. Empathy requires accepting the "there by the grace of God" or whatever, but times are too scary for that sort of thing. We'd rather think that we're too smart to fall that far.
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On Behind the Franzenfreude
They're definitely big audiences for a particular kind of mystery--more the cozy than the hard-boiled, not that those distinctions are firm lines. But then, women are big audiences for most books because men don't read nearly as much as women. I'd still say, though, that hard-boiled procedural mysteries and thrillers are perceived as a male-written, male-read genre.
But women are a bigger audience, actual and perceived, for romance novels, and certainly are most of the writers of those novels. Romance novels are huge sellers--why aren't those books getting reviewed in the same numbers, or stocked in independent bookstores? That's really the question.
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On Behind the Franzenfreude
You are a cruel, cruel woman and I no longer like you. I also wish there was an edit function here because I noticed the typo ten seconds after hitting submit. But I'm not sure what you think my fingers meant.
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On Behind the Franzenfreude
I think the most interesting point that Weiner and Poucault made is that commercial fiction written primarily by and for women--that is, romance novels and whatever "chick lit" means this week--is almost never reviewed in the Times (or carried in independent bookstores for that matter), while commerical fiction written primarily by and for men--that is, hard-boiled mysteries and thrillers--sometimes is. That's your direct, gender-specific comparison right there.
It's crazymaking how Park Slope/Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens/Williamsburg has become "Brooklyn" because that's where people who five or ten years ago would have been living in Manhattan have moved to.
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On Child of Wandering European Immigrants To Forcefully Deal With Gypsy Problem
I first visited Prague back in the summer of '92 to see my college roommate who had moved there after graduation. I'm biracial (black/white) and a Jewish friend of mine who also has an indeterminate ethnic look and a head full of curly hair warned me to act as self-consciously American as I could without being obnoxious. One night going back to her friend's apartment some neighbors thought she was Roma and there was a lot of trouble--nearly violent trouble--about her coming into the building until they produced her passport and proved she was American.
I managed to avoid that kind of trouble, but not the attitudes of even some of the ex-pats I met toward the Roma. Two American guys my former roommate knew were working a summer camp in Slovakia (this was before the country split) and there was a rash of petty thefts. The other kids suspected the one Roma kid, and when it later turned out he had been behind it the Americans shook their heads and said something about reverting to type. And I said something about having lived in West Philly for a year, with its panopticon grocery stores and bulletproof windows at the KFC, and understandintg that when everyone around you thinks you're a thief anyway it kinda makes you want to steal things, especially when you're like, 11 and what you stole was a pen.
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On In Defense Of The Spanish Inquisition
So he makes this glancing mention of some sort of Judeo-Christian consensus that includes the (reformed) Catholics, but never mentions Judaism again. Is this because (1) he thinks nothing good old American intolerance can do will "fix" Judaism the way it fixed Catholicism (?) or (2) he doesn't think American anti-Semitism is as safely in the past as anti-Mormonism (talk to Romney) or anti-Catholicism (really?) or (3) he's actually smart enough to not open that particular door?
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On Shouting Into The Internet Void Is Pretty Much That
Yeah--that presumes that legislators read any of their mail, ever, when they pretty much don't. Or position papers, or often even legislation itself. That's what the STAFF is for. So someone is logging the emails and letters coming in from the district and then merely reporting, "it's 3-to-1 against."
It's the same with the networks--believe me, they know what people are writing in about. And to be honest, by far most of the stuff they get isn't organized protests by someone upset about show cancellations, but organized email and fax spams about morals. I used to work at the ad agency of "a major advertiser" and the piles of stuff they got every time they advertised a product in Saturday Night Live or a show that took the Lord's name in vain was stunning.
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On Man Grows Pea Internally
Wasn't there a children's book about a kid who was always pushing peas onto his fork with his thumb and then a huge plant started growing out of his thumb? I have a clear memory of it being read on Captain Kangaroo.
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On 'Vanity Fair' 2010 Best-Dressed List Has 'Eclectic Feel,' Claims 'Vanity Fair'
So ... most men want to look like Steve McQueen, and many eccentrically dressed ladies want to look like their grandmothers.
Didn't we already know that?
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On Why Is American Selfishness So Widespread Now?
I was mugged a few months ago, and you'd be surprised how many people said similar things to me in person. Perhaps not as nasty, but you could see their disappointment when they found out it happened at 4pm on a Saturday in the lobby of my building by a perp I hadn't just let in the door. They were so ready to say, "you shouldn't have been out so late" etc but had to settle for "maybe your block sucks." Because "wow, I too could be walking out of my apartment to meet friends and suddenly have a gun to my head" is way too scary a thought to contemplate. As is "I too could lose my house if I get really sick because the social safety net is a joke."
So it's easier online, but people still say plenty of this shit in person, to the victim.