Jezebel: Slate

"Take Your Workaholism and Shove It," Say Dutch Women—Can We Do This, Too?

Lauri Apple — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:30:00 EST

Fewer than 10% of Dutch women work full-time, and face one of the highest wage gaps in Europe—"and they like it this way," says Slate writer Jessica Olien. American women, put down those Blackberries and take note. More »

"Actually, I DO Have A Right To Child-Free Spaces"

Sadie Stein — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 18:42:00 EDT

Someone writes into XX's "Friend or Foe" column with a question: why does her friend insist on bringing her "bratty and obnoxious" kids — and hubby! — everywhere? After all, "If I enjoyed having kids around, I'd have some myself:" More »

The New Pornography: Competitive Eating?

Katy Kelleher — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:00:00 EDT

In a post titled "The depravity of Major League Eating," William Saletan makes the argument that competitive eating - cramming 68 hot dogs down one's throat in a matter of minutes - is somehow like porn. But it's not. More »

"My Marriage Is Falling Apart Because I'm A Mac, And He's A PC."

Sadie Stein — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:00:00 EDT

A troubled wife consults Slate's peerless "Dear Prudence." Prudie takes care of sensible advice, so we went ahead and asked a bunch of dead people! More »

Which Birth Control Is Best For Fish?

Anna North — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:30:00 EST

Get your mind out of the pond — we're just talking about The Green Lantern's claim that birth control pills may be harming fish. Want to be ichthyoid-friendly? Use condoms. [Slate] More »

Why Celebrities Can't Drive

Katy Kelleher — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 15:40:00 EST

Last night Matt Dillon was arrested traveling 106 mph in Vermont, and this morning Charles Barkley was arrested on suspicion of DUI. Yesterday, Slate asked the inevitable question: why are so many celebrities bad drivers? More »

Happy Heathen Holidays

Katy Kelleher — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:45:00 EST

Torie Bosch has a piece on Slate about the joys of celebrating a godless Christmas, something many of us are probably very familiar with. More »

In Which We Pretend To Be Morning People

Jessica G. — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:00:00 EST

The staffers here are a surly, stinky lot, so it's no surprise that not one of us is a morning person. So when we saw Slate's Michael Agger on a quest for the perfect morning routine, we were intrigued! Is it possible for us to somehow turn our coffee drenched early hours into models of health and productivity? Agger outlines the routine of Leo Babauta of Zen Habits: "1. Wake at 4:30 a.m. 2. Drink water. 3. Set 3 Most Important Things (MITs) for today. 4. Fix lunches for kids and myself. 5. Eat breakfast, read. 6. Exercise (run, bike, swim, strength, or yardwork) or meditate. 7. Shower. 8. Wake wife & kids at 6:30 a.m." Um…yeah. That's ideal if you're a solar powered robot maybe. Want to know what our morning routines look like? Check them out, real and imagined, after the jump. More »

"A Strong Natural Tendency To Escalate": How Mild Spanking Can Lead To Child Abuse

Anna North — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:00:00 EDT

Alan Kazdin at Slate has one more reason not to hit your kids: it may be (sort of) addictive. That is, just as the occasional cigarette can lead to a smoking habit, "there's a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of punishment." In fact, more than a third of parents who use corporal punishment "end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on." That's in part because kids (the crafty little bastards) adapt to each punishment, making parents more likely to choose harsher ones. And, in the short term, hitting your kid may seem to work. More »

Palin-Induced Nightmares? Blame Your Period

Jessica G. — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:20:00 EDT

The specter of Palin, not content to haunt our waking hours, has invaded our sleeping ones as well: the other day, Slate editor David Plotz admitted to dreaming of Sarah Palin. "Night after night, she appears in my dreams, always as a scolding, ominous figure," Plotz wrote. But he's not the only one in the Slate microcosm to dream of Sarah. "One Obama-supporting colleague dreamed she had urged her young son to kill Palin with a string bean. Another dreamed she was at a fashion show and Palin served her crème fraîche on little scooped corn chips," he noted. And no wonder so many of these Palin-ponderers are women: according to the BBC, women are far more prone to nightmares and other sleep disturbances than men are, and that part of those disturbances you actually can blame on your period! More »

Game Theory Reveals Why Local Amateur Game Theorist Is Still Single

Moe — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:30:00 EDT

Slate got a philosophy major named Mark Gimein to apply Game Theory to the problem of Women My Age And Older Who Can't Find Husbands. (What an unusual move, couching Tyra-grade subject matter in grandiose academic terminology!) I read it because I never really understood "game theory" and I still don't, but here's the takeaway: dating is like eBay, meaning it rewards freaks who know how to game the system and will Stop At Nothing to nail that pair of rare limited-edition vintage...uh... widgets, and people like me who find eBay profoundly frightening will die alone. Which is all fine, I have accepted as much. But wait! What the fuckery is this? More »

Glasnost, Not Genetics, Made Russian Women Beautiful

dodai — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 17:30:00 EST

Over on Slate yesterday, Anne Applebaum decided to pose the question, "Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russians Come From?" and then offer an answer: The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an era of makeup and Vogue, and, consequently, attractive Russian women! This is a notion of course, that is completely preposterous, perhaps a joke, and subject of a rebuttal on the site of The Economist today, which calls bullshit on Ms. Applebaum's theory. A writer on the magazine's Free Exchange blog says: "I agree that improved access to the means of aesthetic enhancement will generally lead to enhanced aesthetics, but I'd like to think I'd notice a towering Siberian goddess with or without spike-heeled boots and a layer of L'Oreal." Indeed! More »

Women Who Pretend To Be Men Remain Sweet & Supportive

dodai — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:30:00 EST

Sure, Norah Vincent already did it for her book Self-Made Man, but that didn't stop Slate's Emily Yoffe (left) from trying her hand at living as a dude. Today, the writer relates the story of her time as a drag king. (While drag queens are men who dress flamboyantly as women, drag kings are women who dress as men.) After meeting up with a lip-synching troupe called the D.C. Kings for advice, Yoffe chose the name "Johnson Manly" and ordered DVDs of Tom Jones to prepare for her performance accompanying the singer's "It's Not Unusual." Then came the shopping: Yoffe hit up in the boys' department of Lord & Taylor (the pants didn't fit so well); she also purchased a too-small sports bra (to flatten her breasts) and jock strap (which she stuffed with a rolled-up washcloth). But the real "manly" stuff was in the body language. More »

From the Slate review of Crowned: "Some...

Jessica — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:45:00 EST

From the Slate review of Crowned: "Some were veterans of the tiara circuit, and others were rank amateurs, and most were wearing too much blush. Their universe is gynocentric and homosocial." [Slate] More »

Is It Kind Of Funny To Whine About Not Being Portrayed As Funny?

Moe — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:40:15 EST

The great irony of Katherine Heigl getting quoted saying she was annoyed that all the women in Knocked Up were portrayed as "humorless and uptight" is that she did it in the magazine that last year gave Chris Hitchens a platform for arguing that all women were humorless and uptight. (Hey females, you know what's funny?? When you complain about how no one thinks you're funny!!!) Okay, seriously though, now Juno comes along, and it's supposed to be this awesome feminist response to Knocked Up, the only problem is that the dialogue is just a little bit too funny. Not realistic enough! Too caught up in its own cleverness! And then today, we get, only because we've been waiting too long for someone else to weigh in on this subject, a deconstruction of the two back-to-back scenes that define the gender tension of Knocked Up: the part where the dudes go to Vegas and do mushrooms, and the part where the girls go out and get negged from the very club Heigl met the father of her very large fetus, with the bouncer's memorable line "I mean you're too old for this club, not...for the Earth." More »

Transcript from a Washington Post website...

Jessica G. — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 17:10:00 EST

Transcript from a Washington Post website live chat with Slate XX Factor lady politics bloggers Emily Bazelon and Melinda Henneberger: Dupont Circle:"Is this particular chat supposed to be about breastfeeding, or politics?" Emily Bazelon:"Politics, really, but hey, breastfeeding can have its moment." Um, THIS IS WHY PEOPLE DON'T TAKE WOMEN IN POLITICS SERIOUSLY! That is all. More »

All those fans of teen abstinence education...

Jessica G. — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:45:00 EST

All those fans of teen abstinence education can suck it. New research shows that "adolescents who had sex at younger ages were less likely to end up delinquent than those who lost their virginity later." The study also showed that identical twins tend to lose their virginity at the same age, proving that there might be a genetic component to the age at which you give it up. Slate's resident science guy gets major points for the best one liner about the study, "Old advice: Pet your dog, not your date. New advice: Pop a cherry, not a cap." [Slate] More »

Earlier this week we mentioned a recent...

Jessica G. — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:45:00 EST

Earlier this week we mentioned a recent study showing that breast feeding could possibly raise IQ in newborns. Slate dissects the scientific background behind the findings, but what's remarkable and icky about the article is when writer Emily Bazelon gets all TMI and says in her intro, "My friends who quit [nursing] at three months seemed like rebels. And when I cut off my sons, after more than a year each, I felt a little heartless because I know so many kids who zealously nursed into toddlerhood." Into toddlerhood?!? I will paraphrase an early Sex and the City episode on this one. If they're old enough to ask for it, you probably shouldn't be breastfeeding them anymore. [Slate] More »

Is There Truth To The "Smart Jews" Stereotype?

Jessica G. — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:30:00 EDT

My Jewish grandmothers would love to read this "Jewgenics" article, where Slate's science guy William Saletan discusses the biological and sociological back-up behind the Jew grandma-approved stereotype that the chosen people's intellectual prowess is above the average and ponders whether Jews are a race, culture or ethnicity. While Saletan never comes to a definitive conclusion about what Jews are, he does quote some impressive statistics such as, "The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 107 to 115, well above the human average of 100," and the Ashkenazis have an average score of "122 on verbal IQ tests." He also notes the Ashkenazi predisposition towards poor spatial intelligence and potentially life-threatening illnesses like breast cancer and Tay-Sachs. But the part I found most interesting as a non-Jew loving Heeb is that "the rate of Jewish 'outbreeding'—procreating with non-Jews—is half a percent. That's the lowest rate of any population in the world today." More »

Slate Scribe in Love with Michelle Obama, the Phrase "Big-Girl Panties"

Jessica G. — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 10:30:45 EDT

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A few weeks after the launch of their barely mediocre no-boys-allowed blog, the XX Factor, Slate has rolled out a new series of articles about the marriages of the Presidential candidates called First Mates. Though the headline might have inspired fears of lady lit ghettoization, Melinda Henneberger's introductory essay is A) not part of the XX Factor (thank god) and B) a fresh take on an issue that's more important than most people realize. "Do presidential unions matter?" Henneberger asks. "Voters think they do. A recent survey found that fully one-third of women voters not only take the happiness of a presidential candidate's marriage into account, but cite it as a significant factor in their decision." More »

Separate But Not Equal: Slate's New Lady Blog

Jessica G. — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 14:00:00 EDT

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In the online magazine arms-race, it's largely accepted that Slate is "fairly manly", especially when compared to Salon's menses-swathed musings on politics, arts and life. Perhaps to steal some lady viewers from Joan Walsh's estro-audience, Slate has launched a blog for its women writers, called the XX Factor. More »

Remember When Magazines Were Actually Good?

Moe — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:00:02 EDT

Lots of stories on the internet on why magazines are irrelevant that I will save you from reading because they just say "they're beholden" in like fifty different ways. (To Advertisers and the whole vomity notion of "aspirationalism", publicists and old ways of doing inventory or something completely incomprehensible like that.) But yeah, it was a nice little walk down memory lane, starting with Forbes' mention of the first "Splurge and Steal" feature, apparently pioneered by Marie Claire in 1996, and Ron Rosenbaum's inevitable mention of Gay Talese's "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold," the best magazine story like ever that you should read now if you haven't so you can prepare for the informal reader survey to come. More »

How Famine-Ravaged Nicole Richie Keeps Her Birth Rate Up

Moe — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:39:08 EDT

The great minds at Slate tackle the brainteaser that is how the fuck Nicole Richie, whose body mass index is apparently a "prepubescent" 16, got knocked up. According to the story, the very lowest a woman's body mass index can fall without losing all the gross bodily functions that make us women is 17, and it should really be more like 24 if you're trying to have kids.

Women need fat to signal the pituitary gland to ovulate—without it, their bodies go into a kind of famine mode and won't use up energy to maintain reproductive processes.

Okay, guys, but speaking of famines, "explainer" us this: why is it that North Korea, a country stricken by decades of actual famine has a birth rate higher than that of the United States? Is it just because they're so good at keeping the paparazzi at bay over there? More »

Angelina Jolie: A Woman For All Seasons (And Sexes)

Anna Holmes — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:40:03 EDT

Ron Rosenbaum's critique of Esquire magazine's story on Angelina Jolie got lots of press, but his slam of celebrity magazine profiles missed one particular point: That it's just as often the readers as the publicists who demand those "received myths of Celebland" in their magazine profiles... and that those myths are often, like, totally at odds! Take Esquire's sister publication Marie Claire (the two magazines like to swap sex surveys!) which also features an interview with Jolie in its July issue, one with a completely different — albeit just as snooze-worthy — take on the actress. In fact, if the content (not to mention the covers) of each title are any indication, college-educated, fashion-minded young women want their Angelina accessible (sincere, smiling, clad in hues of virgin-white) and college-educated, masturbation-minded young men want the exact opposite (a modern-day Joan of Arc, if you will, if the martyr was clad in matelasse instead of chain-mail). It's so confusing!!! After the jump, Angelina Jolie's duality, as explained in the details. More »

Trashing On 'Trash The Dress'

Jennifer — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:35:26 EDT

After spending months and months searching for the perfect wedding dress, a woman obviously wants to document its beauty for all posterity to see, relish, and honor. Or does she? Yesterday, the New York Times ran a curious piece in its "Weddings and Celebrations" section — because, you see, while the straights just get married, the gays also celebrate! — on the "Trash the Dress" phenomenon. "TTD," as it is annoyingly abbreviated, is a "trend" among also-annoying alterna-marrieds who think that nothing says "Fuck you, Martha Stewart!" quite like a bride submerging herself in water or setting herself on fire with her wedding dress still firmly pinned to her body. More »

Did Religion Make Us A Slut? 'Slate' Helps Us Ponder

Moe — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:17:10 EDT

When we were in college, we used to feel kind of slutty compared to most of our friends who, being mostly Jewish, had not grown up Catholic and thinking that sex before marriage was a Mortal Sin. We thought we would learn a little more about this discrepancy in a Slate story today about sex and religion, but, as it turned out, the piece was actually less about sex and religion and more about a book called Forbidden Fruit by Mark Regnerus (not to be confused with the batshit conservative publishing imprint Regnery). Anyway, the book's conclusions — Evangelical teens are way sluttier than we ever were in high school, Asian Christians are definitely big prudes, and Catholics are sluttier than Jews, but Jews have a better time in bed — kind of left us wanting more, and so we decided instead to poll 50% of the people on our buddy list to get more answers about the sex differences between the believers... More »

Antonella Barba: Undressing Slate's Naked Thoughts

Moe — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 11:23:25 EDT

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It only took Slate's American Idolator blogger Jody Rosen, like, 11 days — just an Ice Age in blogtime, Jo-Doll — to address the issue of our fresh-faced defender of the American tit-ocracy Antonella Barba. So why does it feel strangely empty? Let's read between the lines, shall we? More »

Dove Tales

Anna Holmes — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:49:10 EST

According to today's Slate, Unilever, the company responsible for the above atrocity, is also responsible for the "love-your-body" ads produced for Dove's Campaign For Real Beauty. More »

It's mid-afternoon. Time to get annoyed with Slate!

Moe — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 15:35:26 EST

In the wake of Scarlett Johansson totally robbing the spotlight from the historic blah blah first female president of Harvard...not to mention the demise of an illiterate beauty queen, Slate's inimitable Undercover Economist asks the timely question, does beauty make you smarter? (Of course, in true Slate fashion, the question is answered — why yes! Of course beauty makes you smarter! We'll show you why! — on the front page, only to serve up polemical blueballs when you get all angry and click on the fucking thing — well, actually, no, beauty doesn't really make you smarter, in fact, we have some evidence on the subject, and just like the last time we went there and regretted it (Why Women Choke Under Pressure, which is to say, Slate has no evidence they choke under pressure) the whole story is based on maze studies (oooh! new Slate slogan: How Maze Studies Explain The Global Economy, and also the Human Condition!!! ), and what it says is that attractive people only think they're smarter, and express more confidence that they will solve the mazes, even though they can't actually do it, which is just how all the good-looking jackasses who think they know how to give head get through life, isn't it? Confidence. Ugh. For everyone else, at least there's cocaine! More »

Tabitha Soren Suffering from Postpartum Depression, Headstrong Children

Anna Holmes — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:56:08 EST

Poor Tabitha Soren. First her former colleagues at MTV get laid off; next, her husband, Michael Lewis, tells the world that she's an emotional mess. According to her husband's online essay in Slate today, the flame-haired former VJ isn't faring so well after the birth of her third child: More »