Here is a sort-of handy guide for young lady lawyers interested in joining firms with other hot women. Sort of! Notes a spoilsport: “This is going to sound crazy, but I find it hard to objectify women once they start talking. Once they open their mouths, I care about things like ‘what they are saying’ and ‘whether or not I agree.’ Women I agree with, I find attractive.” Also the real answer seems to be Cravath.

The Guardian Even Gets Things Wrong Anti-Semitically

“A piece of correspondence on the letters page expressed the view that an attempt by Jewish activists on a sailing boat to break the sea blockade around Gaza this week had been important in “reasserting the Jewish tradition of standing up for the victims of injustice” (30 September, page 35). But due to an editing error, when a version of this sentence was rendered as the letter’s headline a key element, the reference to victims, was missed out, so the heading read: Reasserting the Jewish tradition of defending injustice.”

There’s no real reason why the town where I grew up needed to replace the grass on the high school’s varsity football field with the expensive and aesthetically jarring sport-carpeting known as field turf. But my North Jersey hometown has apparently decided to rebrand itself, from the (incandescently carpeted) ground on up, as a Jersey-accented analogue to “Friday Night Lights”’ Dillon, Texas. The process is going well, judging by the high school team’s wins and losses (and, anecdotally, judging by the increases in reported incidences of high-school bullying and the number of middle-aged males in the local supermarket rocking the windbreaker-reliant Offensive Coordinator Look). That the town is doing this maybe shouldn’t be surprising — no place so ruby-red in its Republicanism could stay fired up about soccer forever — but it feels strange all the same. I may be deep in the weeds of early-onset curmudgeonhood here, but I remember my hometown as, in keeping with its general tone of apathetic idyll, a place that held football and its related manias at a sensible remove. I was raised a knowledgeable but casual Giants fan among other knowledgeable-but-casuals. All of which I suppose makes it strange — and I want to be very careful about how I phrase this — just how much I fucking hate the Philadelphia Eagles.

The strange part is that I’ve never loved the Giants enough to justify hating their chief rivals. And I still don’t care about them much, really: the Giants are my default team, but from their hatchet-faced Savonarola of a coach on down, they’re far too boring for me to really make an effort. But given my (probably unfair) impression of Eagles fans — namely that they are the most bigoted, bilious, and pissily unsatisfiable bunch in the league, thanks in part to a local sports media that’s even more repellent — and despite myself, I do legitimately fucking hate the Eagles. They’ve made this easy for me by employing some pretty loathsome dudes in recent years, too, starting with headhunting safety Brian Dawkins, a true pioneer in the weaponization of the football helmet.

But my (fucking) hatred has not prevented me from liking certain Eagles. Philadelphia’s weirdly, viciously maligned ex-quarterback Donovan McNabb is one of these. And, as faintly unpleasant as it feels to acknowledge, current Philly QB Michael Vick is another. McNabb is coming back to Philadelphia this weekend to play the Vick-led Eagles, which has led to some very predictable sportswriting. Anyway, whether or not Eagles fans — as previously noted, a joyless, bellowing herd of perspectiveless barf monsters — do or don’t boo Donovan McNabb is less interesting to me than how they and the broader football scene have responded to their new quarterback.

Some of the bile directed at McNabb by Philadelphia fans found its source at earth’s largest naturally occurring wellspring of bile: Rush Limbaugh’s fat nightmare face. In 2003, during his brief, inexplicable and predictably disastrous stint on ESPN’s pre-game show, Limbaugh argued that McNabb’s success was a creation of the liberal sports media. “The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback can do well,” Limbaugh said, very loudly, very confidently, and very stupidly. “They’re interested in black coaches and black quarterbacks doing well.” McNabb had played poorly over the first two weeks of that season, and the Eagles were 0–2 at the time of Limbaugh’s comments. Limbaugh, resplendent and gleeful amid his self-manufactured controversy, resigned from ESPN the following week. (The risible idea of a liberal sports media is best ignored, although the fact that Limbaugh floated it is yet another example of just what an unbelievable asshole he is.) The Eagles, for their part, went on to finish 12–4 and won the NFC East before losing to the eventual Super Bowl champs in the NFC Championship Game; McNabb made the Pro Bowl and ranked seventh in the NFL in passer rating.

It was a typical season for McNabb, in that way — both he and his team were successful, and he was nevertheless cavalierly criticized by a self-satisfied Caucasian know-nothing with a chip on his shoulder. McNabb objected to Limbaugh’s comments, which only made things worse — click on the words “weirdly, viciously maligned” above and you’ll read about Eagles fans lobbing racial slurs and, more saliently, blame-the-victim taunts of “Waaa, I’m black!” at their team’s Pro Bowl quarterback after the Limbaugh affair. Obviously Rushbo shouldn’t have been on TV at all — for reasons including but not limited to the curdled marzipan of TV visage to his ugly, ugly brain — but the guy Limbaugh should’ve been criticizing, if he just had to troll it up, was Michael Vick, who was then quarterbacking the Atlanta Falcons.

And not because Vick was pursuing the disgusting off-field pastime of running a dogfighting ring, for six brutal years, out of a home he owned in Smithfield, Virginia. We didn’t know that yet, and Vick was four years away from going to jail for that offense. Still, though, Vick’s play was a challenge to everything that Limbaugh held dear as a race-baiting clown and avowed football conservative. The combination of Atlanta’s wide-berth coaching and Vick’s uncanny football gifts enabled him to utterly upend the aesthetics of the most hallowed position in the world’s most intellectually conservative sport. Vick was simultaneously the cause of and solution to everything wrong with Atlanta’s offense, but it didn’t matter to anyone who watched him play — in my lifetime, at least, there has never been a NFL player more exciting or challenging to watch.

Vick wasn’t the sort of approachable, just-having-fun-out-there playmaker that Brett Favre is — where Favre’s admirers see a pickup-game genius at work even in The Craggy One’s most egregious fuck-ups, Vick played quarterback in a strange, surprising way that hadn’t been seen before. Vick’s play was vicious in the way truly avant-garde things are — where Favre’s just-having-fun creativity flatters his audience’s sentimental understanding of football, Vick shredded and confounded those expectations, using his legs and arm and weirdly manic poise to make plays fans had never even dared to expect. The general-use cliché about Vick would be that he “revolutionized” his position, but that’s not really apt — it had theoretically always been possible for quarterbacks to do what Vick regularly did, but no one had previously been able to do it. It’s easy to see why Limbaugh picked McNabb as his target — because Limbaugh wanted to make a spectacle of himself, and because McNabb is articulate and opinionated and thus Limbaugh’s least-favorite type of minority, and because Limbaugh is an unbelievable asshole and knows nothing about anything and I know I’ve emphasized that enough but it just feels so right. But for a true football conservative, which I’d have to imagine Limbaugh fancies himself to be, Vick was an awesome nightmare.

His semiotic payload, we now know, was the least-literal component of Vick’s manifest nightmarishness. Everyone knows about all this, now — the otherworldly awfulness of what went on at Bad Newz Kennels, Vick’s ensuing jail sentence and richly deserved humiliation and bankruptcy and NFL suspension. And, finally, the tenuous redemption that Vick has earned by coming back as a backup and then coming off the bench to play better than basically any NFL quarterback not named Peyton Manning over the first three weeks. It’s currently received sport-pundit wisdom that the 30-year-old Michael Vick currently starting for the Eagles is different from the one who used to start for the Falcons. I can’t speak to whether or not he has matured or not as a person (and neither can the people who sorta-covered him for years while Vick was devoting his personal time to exploring the further reaches of sadism) but I’m not really sure it matters.

I also don’t know that he’s gotten any better as a player. Vick has run up his numbers against the flubby defenses of the Jacksonville Jaguars and Detroit Lions. He’s also surrounded by a better supporting cast than he ever had in Atlanta — and, for what it’s worth, a better crew of receivers than McNabb had in any of his Philadelphia seasons before last year — and… and whatever, really. Who gives a shit if the Eagles beat the Redskins on Sunday, or that Vick has put up mindbending stats against the 29th and 30th best defenses in the NFL. I, for one, do not give a shit about that.

But Michael Vick is interesting in a way that Sunday’s game isn’t. As an admirer of what he does to simultaneously explode and expand the game of football, I’ll watch Vick play whenever I can. But that means accepting the moral challenge inherent in making Michael Vick one’s Sunday entertainment. Everyone knows what Vick did, and no one is pardoning it. His horrific past behavior makes a turd-in-punchbowl appearance in everything written about him — even in this fluffy style-section piece about his fiancee’s costume jewelry line — and it should. It will be part of his epitaph, and it deserves to be. That the NFL offers numerous other political and ethical irredeemabilities and outrages, and that Vick is not alone in his sociopathy — Arizona pass rusher Joey Porter, for one, has a dodgy history with vicious pets that once led him to issue a statement containing the sentence, “I am saddened to learn that my dogs escaped from my yard and attacked and killed a horse” — excuses nothing.

Vick is a challenge to fandom’s (and indignation’s) simpler comforts. So much of what gets said and read about the NFL is stupid, facile stuff — the idiotic Modern Gladiators pomp and armchair tough-guy rip jobs in the media; the sour macho dullardry of the Winning Is The Only Thing catechism. And fans are conditioned to pursue a stupid, facile experience from football — the too-easy sentimentality; the giddy imperviousness (“Waaa, I’m black!”) of demanding from a safe distance things of thoroughbred athletes which we wouldn’t demand of ourselves; the mostly innocent awe. As surely as he did to the NFL’s old Quarterback In The Gray Flannel Suit ideal, Vick explodes and problematizes all that.

Watching Vick is a complicated experience. His transcendent talent makes him impossible to resist — he’s just too beautiful out there — but his brilliance is tough to enjoy alongside the knowledge of who he is and what he did. But the challenge Vick presents is the NFL’s broader ethical challenge in microcosm — both are fascinating and even exhilarating to watch, and both beg the questions of how much cruelty you’re willing to accept with your genius, and how much you’re willing to forget in exchange for seeing something memorable.

As for the picks… I don’t know, I’m sorry? I’m sorry that I’m going to need a bunch of 10–6 weeks just to get back to even, and that between me and the foreign currency involved in these predictions, only the currency has shown the ability to put up a 10–6 week. I’m tempted to make all the same picks as Toonie this week, just to ensure that the coin finally goes 6–10, too. But I’m going to stick with my fraudulent expertise for one more week. And when they come back from their bye, I am not going to pick against Kansas City at home again this season.

Week 3 (and overall): David Roth: 6–10 (18–27–3); Al Toonie The Lucky Canadian Two-Dollar Coin: 10–6 (29–16–3)

Sunday, October 3
• New York Jets (-5.5) at Buffalo, 1pm — DR: New Jersey J; ATTLCTDC: Buffalo
• Detroit at Green Bay (-14.5), 1pm — DR: Green Bay; ATTLCTDC: Green Bay
• Baltimore at Pittsburgh (-1), 1pm — DR: Pittsburgh; ATTLCTDC: Pittsburgh
• Denver at Tennessee (-6.5), 1pm — DR: Tennessee; ATTLCTDC: Denver
• San Francisco at Atlanta (-7), 1pm — DR: Atlanta; ATTLCTDC: San Francisco
• Cincinnati (-3) at Cleveland, 1pm — DR: Cincinnati; ATTLCTDC: Cincinnati
• Carolina at New Orleans (-13.5), 1pm — DR: Carolina; ATTLCTDC: New Orleans
• Seattle (-1) at St. Louis, 1pm — DR: Seattle; ATTLCTDC: St. Louis
• Houston (-3) at Oakland, 4:05pm — DR: Houston; ATTLCTDC: Houston
• Indianapolis (-7) at Jacksonville, 4:05pm — DR: Indianapolis; ATTLCTDC: Jacksonville
• Washington at Philadelphia (-5.5), 4:15pm — DR: Philadelphia; ATTLCTDC: Philadelphia
• Arizona at San Diego (-8), 4:15pm — DR: San Diego; ATTLCTDC: Arizona
• Chicago at New York Giants (-4), 8:20pm — DR: Chicago; ATTLCTDC: New Jersey G

Monday, October 4
• New England (-1) at Miami, 8:30pm — DR: New England; ATTLCTDC: Miami

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is “Hot For Teacher.”

Here’s advice on how to get jobs for which you may be wildly overqualified in case you have a useless college degree-jobs as diverse as running salad bars and stamping envelopes. The watchword is: Dress For the Job You Need, Not the Job You Totally Don’t Have Right Now and Oh Man You Are So Screwed. Also don’t tell them that you’ve had good jobs, in case you ever actually have. Pretend you’ve been at home taking care of some kids, in case you haven’t been.

• “When you’re applying for a crap job you’re only planning on holding long enough to make progress on paying off debt, you don’t give them a complete resume, just your high school graduation and any other filler jobs you might have had.”

• “Don’t dress up like you’d dress up for a professional interview: go for business-casual and avoid wearing higher-end brands. You don’t want to tell any overt lies, but you don’t want to set off any socioeconomic-indicator alarm bells that might lead the hiring manager to suspect sneakiness on your part. Be good at being sneaky. (I worked minimum-wage and low-wage jobs in college, due to not getting a work-study award (despite needing one) and therefore being ineligible for a lot of the on-campus jobs. Whenever I listed my student status, I would never get called in for an interview. When I didn’t list my student status on my application, I would get called in for an interview about half the time. I would wear a pair of khakis and a polo shirt I got at the local Target, and I would usually get hired.)”

Hello, old nerds. The reunited “classic lineup” of Guided By Voices played their first show in 16 years last night in Dallas. (On their way to Matador Records’ 21st anniversary party in Las Vegas this weekend.) From the looks and sounds of things and reports of the 39-song-long set list, I sure wish I was there. This, after last week’s Pavement concert, it’s almost too much. Can’t they just let us grow old in peace? Must we rock forevermore? Eh, there are worse things, I guess.

Remember when I was all, “oooh, someone who works for Senator Saxby Chambliss is gonna get fired” for leaving blog comments that say “all faggots must die”? Well that someone got fired. October 1, 2010: The Day There Was No More Homophobia Ever. Ha, kidding. Oddly, the name of the now-unemployed person who thinks faggots must die was not released, but it’ll be out soon enough I’m sure.

by Matthew Wollin

Each day I pass the glossy posters vaunting that actor’s face who I recognize from somewhere as a prettified stand-in for the CEO of that company that’s supposed to be changing the way I think, his visage of slack-jawed moronism a lame-ass stand in for profundity as decided by some group-tested marketing-teamed tautology of whatever it is that passes for brainstorming nowadays, covered in words that purport to represent the names he has been called by his (or my) peers, to be played by earnest, attractive actors who also call up feelings of vague recognition, actors conversing intently with each other in topical settings that show the world I inhabit in roughly the same way that “Jersey Shore” shows the actual Jersey shore, words whose variety and brevity (Punk. Genius. Douchebag.) claim to indicate the strength of emotional response generated by this simulacrum of somebody I have never met and give, at best, a damn about, I feel intensely ticked-off and spurred to action both, to a degree that hits and surpasses the level of guileless eagerness to shell out $12.50 that the film seeks to find in me and so wholly misses, in tandem with my sheer fed-up-ness with the presumption that this is what I most deeply care about, and hand in hand with the suspicion that not only are they missing the point, but that this shit blows.

Yes, I am on Facebook. I am part of the 176% on twentysomethings who exist online, who have friends and post on each other’s walls and have status updates and stuff. Now let’s talk about something else.

The complacency this film assumes that I have grates on me, hard. It’s like a suggestion of what I would find interesting, one that is all the more frustrating for the laziness with which it wasn’t developed. The thought process behind the movie, the one all the way at the back-because I bear no ill will towards Aaron Sorkin or David Fincher (though guys, I thought you were awesome but you have seriously let me down here man) or even Mark Zuckerberg, whose legacy is so far up in the air that my computer-trained eyes can’t even find where in the sky it was flung-is painfully, insultingly apparent: young people are on Facebook. No, young people like Facebook; young people go to see movies about things they like; QED, The Social Network. The sheer and blind underwhelmingness of this idea, its power to cajole some of the cultural power players with greater caché and artistic cred is evident in every frame of the film’s immaculate and preposterous trailer. It is an alluringly simple pitch, almost seductively thoughtless. I cannot blame the people involved. They have careers to support. I try to refrain from placing blame, because I feel guilty about it afterwards.

But has the creation of our own heroes (and villains and villain-heroes) been taken out of our hands entirely? Do we no longer rise to the occasion? Is the premature canonization of someone whose nominal status as a prophet for the young springs almost entirely from the pens and minds of thinkers whose most immediate tie to that generation-no, to me, because this is more than abstract when you’re one of those twentysomethings we hear so much about and happen to have something to say and the wherewithal to know that even if it doesn’t link to Foursquare, sometimes it just doesn’t matter-when their immediate tie is hereditary, is that all there is? I would hazard a “no,” but emphatically: perhaps it is all that has been given to us, but we are better and more complex than that, and if we are only just finding the adamance and defiance that push our talent from sanctioned accomplishment into the realm of getting shit done, it is because only now have we found the thing that we can be against wholly and with every ounce of audacity, with all due respect: this notion of the future. Not so much that we will Facebook and tweet and whatnot (I appreciate a well constructed series of 140 characters as much as the next aspiring intellectual), but that we can be told what defines us. We reserve that right, even if we have not yet used it in full.

If this claim seems overblown, well, there may be some truth in that. There is no blame to be placed, because it is just a movie, after all. No lives will be unmade, no tectonics will shift, just because a shiny cultural product from the world’s leading producer condescends to its audience; that is nothing new. Nothing is to be gained by seeking a foothold for attack when the geography doesn’t permit engagement.

We cannot expect the professionals to be the revolutionaries. Pros (which actors and filmmakers often are) are too dedicated to the thoroughly excellent completion of the task at hand to partake in the extravagant sacrifice of talent that leads to new things. Here perhaps is part of Zuckerberg’s appeal as a deeply fictionalized biographical subject, particularly by a group of seasoned professionalss, one that contains some truth: he seems insistently and alluringly amateur. Amateurs exude in full the inefficiency necessary for invention, while pros tend towards innovation’s efficiency. In the context of people who know exactly where they are headed, the ambiguity and superfluousness that are a part of invention seem deliciously exotic.

Both Sorkin and Fincher are filmmakers whose past work has something of a top-down aesthetic, consisting of sensational pieces of mass entertainment in which their will is always present, and often subtle, elegant, and thoroughly convincing. They deal largely in ideas and moods of their own that find a place in created worlds, rather than finding worlds ripe for the recording. That’s happened here again, but because this time it’s about the now instead of the then, news instead of history, and the usually subtle superimposition mutates into a mesmerizing disconnect between speaker and subject, infusing the story with an epic, overwrought, even Grecian air that feels fascinatingly inappropriate for its subject. They’re calling down from the peaks to all those kids at the bottom who haven’t decided if the mountain’s worth the climb, totally missing the point that this heroic narrative is rendered insufficient by the very thing they purport to understand. It’s old-school marketing meets new-school possibilities: to quote Joey Lucas quoting a French revolutionary, they did their best to figure out where we were headed so that they could lead us there. In classic fashion, they’ve made the guy a hero, when the term doesn’t ring true anymore.

It is perhaps not the responsibility of the young, or their culture, to consciously manifest the values that will lead us forward; that tends towards the canonical in a way that defeats the fundamental inventive impulse. But it is clear enough what we should be against, where we are coming from and what we should leave behind, if not where we are headed. I may see The Social Network. I am not sure if I want to, and depending on how much pocket change I have in October I may find myself in a theater, watching a film that I am sure will be better than I would wish. But still, the question I ask now, heedless of the film’s quality and to spite the notion that it matters: is this the best we’ve got?

Matthew Wollin lives in New York. He has no other pertinent personality traits.

I guess this will at least provide more of an incentive to get kids reading: “[A]ds for local ice cream shops or hair salons could soon be appearing on permission slips, class calendars, and school notices sent home with Peabody elementary school students after a unanimous School Committee vote this week. The novel plan to sell ad space on school communications marks the latest twist in how commercialization of schools — from the sale of billboard space to ads on buses — is generating cash in lean times.”

Here is a video of the famous langur monkeys that have been deployed to patrol next week’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. They look pretty effective. But, as the broadcaster from Sri Lanka’s ITN news channel notes, “It’s doubtful if Olympic officials will be considering a similar approach for the London 2012 Games.” He’s right. Monkeys won’t work in London. The problems there will have to be solved by recruiting bigger, drunker yobs than the normal drunken yobs-langur yobs, if you will-and arming them with even sharper shards of broken glass.

1. Probably not, seeing as the people who own the houses are retaining titles left and right because apparently few financial institutions can actually follow the foreclosure guidelines. Bad news for Nevada, Arizona and California, where about half of home sales are of foreclosed houses.

2. Also you probably should not buy a foreclosed house if you already have one that you’re living in and the marshals are banging at the door. (You should, however, get a lawyer!)