High school was bad enough when I was a teenager. But reading Wiseman's new book—which expands on the original by discussing technology and why "Mean Girl" culture has filtered down to younger girls—I realized how much trickier being a teenager is today. When I was in high school, if I got in a fight with someone, maybe we'd exchange a couple of bitchy notes. There would definitely be some behind-the-back gossip. But I never had to worry that someone was going to set up a fake Facebook account in my name or trash me on MySpace or unearth naked photos of me on their cell phone.

Still, there are some things that seem to be universal. There will always be Queen Bees, the Regina Georges of the world, who are, as Wiseman so excellently puts it, "a combination of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Barbie." For adult women, learning how to navigate the Queen Bee isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; unfortunately, many adult relationships still seem to hew all too closely to the lines drawn in high school (or earlier).

On her website, Wiseman answers questions from teenagers and parents every day. But she's agreed to answer questions from Jezebel readers who might need advice about how to deal with the bully at work, or the friend who's mad at them but won't say why. Leave your questions in the comments or email them to Doree if you want to stay anonymous. We'll publish her answers in a separate post next week.

Why did you feel like you needed to write a new edition of Queen Bees and Wannabees?
As soon as I'm done with something I always think of things I forgot to put in. I've done that already with the new book. But definitely, about two years ago, I realized that the only thing in the book about technology was email. That is just not acceptable. I started feeling guilty that girls and moms and dads were reading it, and I do feel a very strong sense of obligation to these people. I'm constantly trying to take the things that I see and put them forward and think, what can we do about it. Specifically the things I wanted to change the most about were about technology and some of the more leading questions that I get—people always say, everything that's happening is happening so much younger. I wanted to answer that question.

How do you answer that question?
Okay, yes, girls at younger ages are acting more "teenage-like" and exhibiting mean girl behavior. But it's because we're not teaching our kids to be more mature, we're teaching them to be older. Older meaning getting to sort of typical adolescent behavior earlier, like dressing as teenagers, having them listen to teen music, laughing when they're "precocious," going with moms to get a manicure and pedicure, when they go to dance recitals dressed in hip-hop outfits. All these things we think are "cute."

What do you see on the ground, in terms of how things have changed since you wrote the first edition?
Every day I teach kids between kindergarten and college. And then the kids reach out to me all the time. Every day I get emails from kids, boys and girls. There is no part of their lives that is not connected to technology. But I don't teach on cyberbullying. I think it's complete waste of time, because it's completely integrated into everything that they do. I started out doing stuff on cyberbullying and six months into it I was like, this is ridiculous. We need to integrate it into everything that they do. All this social aggression, dominance stuff. It's exactly why they come to me about it—they say, I have a problem with this person and part of it is how I'm being attacked online.

What do you tell kids to say in that case?
I have a whole sort of system of how you deal. For example—you are hooking up with, hanging out with, however you want to call it, a guy. He used to hang out with/hook up with another girl. You're like, a junior in high school. You start going to parties where every time she sees you, she will start screaming something. It's not your name, but everybody knows it's you. She's screaming firecrotch. Or slut, or whatever. You know it's directed at you. Your boyfriend won't do anything about it. Then you find out she's completely trashing you on Facebook. So how do you handle it? I was giving a talk in Houston, for high school kids. I gave them three options. One, you say nothing and hope it goes away. Two, you talk to your boyfriend and him have to talk to her. Or you start your own Facebook war. All the kids in Houston were yelling, "Three! Three!" And I said, "That's acting like you're 12." Instead, you send one email to this person. You say exactly what you don't like. You admit you cannot control her behavior, but the drama stops here. I always give kids scripts that they can start with, but then they can put it into their own words.

How are adult women affected by Mean Girl behavior?
Some of them have never let go of their being ruled-over personas, never being able to say that they're angry with people. Women need to know how to take seriously their own feelings of conflict and of anger, and then know how to communicate that to people—because what that is is an underlying belief that someone will not take you seriously. Forget the Queen Bees—that's a minority of women. It's just that they have disproportionate power. It's this issue of not being able to express your anger because you don't take yourself seriously. Women say, I can't be the complaining bitch. They don't want to be seen as uptight. You don't know which battles to choose and so you choose none of them. It's also women knowing how to give apologies and accept apologies. If that was addressed we would have substantially less work to do.

This is the reason I prefer working with adolescents. If they're saying sort of crappy stuff to me, I know it's a rationalization of crappy behavior. I can say to them you're full of it, you think I believe that? And they're going to laugh and say, yeah, I was just trying to see how stupid you were. But that's not the way it is with adults. They get really angry with you and get really self righteous. You can't have that really honest exchange.

Is it fair to say women undermine themselves in the workplace?
I wish so much that women would take the risk to take themselves and their feelings seriously. And that means acknowledging your feelings and taking them seriously, and taking the time to think strategically through how to express that to someone. That is a way of being an authentic person of integrity. Of course this relates to relationships. This relates to intimate relationships and relationships in the workplace.

Is that why women bully other women in workplace?
When you're in a position of power and authority, it's so comfortable to you that you don't often know where or what you're doing. I just sat in a meeting with a CEO—and she texted during the entire meeting. She was acting like she was 12. She was texting during the meeting and everyone was deferring to her. It was very much like a clique. That's not the only time I've seen that. It's why I work so much with girls and boys in positions of leadership. What does leadership really mean? It doesn't mean how you perceive yourself. It's how others perceive you. It's, I get to do this and you don't. I get to dismiss people's opinions but nobody else does. It's not just women—I've certainly seen that with men. I think it's an issue of power and authority and how one uses it. And it's exactly the same if you're a 12-year-old girl or a CEO.

How do parents deal with their kids' bullying or being bullied?
I'm a parent. So I can say true stories about my own mistakes. Even to my best of intentions, I find myself doing the things that I tell people not to do. Recently, in a video chat on my website, this parent says, I'm the parent of a fourth grader, and nobody wants to be friends with my daughter. The parent says, my daughter has no friends because she's imaginative, fun and creative. I say, you love your daughter so much but I doubt that people aren't hanging out with your kid because she's imaginative, fun and creative. We define the reason they're being rejected in positive ways. My job is to say to parents, in a way they can hear, you love your child and it's so difficult to hear negative social stuff. If we can do this step by step, we can get your kid to be in a better place. It's taken me a very long time to know how to talk to parents. I bombed when the Queen Bee moms book came out. It was just a disaster. I didn't know how to present the information in a way the parents can hear.

Do Queen Bee girls have Queen Bee moms?
I get that question all the time. But there are lots of kids who have Queen Bee moms who are the opposite. And I know why people say, I know why she's this way. But nobody says that about any other role. Nobody says, oh, she's a complete wannabe or rollover. There are lots of girls who look to their mothers as anti-mentors. Like women who try really hard with plastic surgery, who look like they're 18 when they're 45. Some of their daughters are like, that's awful. It's too easy of an answer for me, though certainly there are girls like that. I guess what you need [for a Queen Bee] is a girl who has a high degree of social skills and also ruminates a lot. She holds grudges and ruminates. Then, you have her mom showing role modeling, that the path to power is based on how you look, where you come from, fitting into that box you talk about so much—and the mom saying, I'm not going to hold you accountable for crappy behavior.

How do you advise people to deal with their Queen Bee daughters?
It's easy for me to get reactive. But it's my responsibility—I've chosen this as my path. I'm trying to get information to all different kinds of people. I've worked really hard to really reach out. I think they're hiding a lot. If you talk to them about being effortlessly perfect—everybody wants to be heard, including Queen Bee moms. There's a couple different variations on Queen Bee moms. They feel like they can really speak for other people. I'm speaking on behalf of all the mothers. The worst is when Queen Bee moms have gone after me—it's usually when a woman feels like she's not being taken seriously in other areas of her life. But it doesn't excuse the behavior. Really, you can see it. They don't feel taken seriously in other areas of their life.

What kind of mom are you?
The barely getting through mom. My boys are six and a half and eight and a half. I really try and aspire to be the person I write about—the loving hard-ass mom. But there are really moments when I'm so tired when I'm like, go ahead and do it. Right now, at this moment, my sister's staying with us. My sons went into her bedroom and opened her computer to try and get on computer games. So their punishment is, they're allowed to watch TV, but they have a trade-in system for good behavior, and they're not allowed to play a game on a phone. Also, I'm teaching them how to fold their own laundry. They drop it everywhere. Socks are like a calling card around the house. Now they're doing their own laundry, but it's tough. I want them to fold it, and instead they leave it in an enormous pile in their closet. It drives me crazy but I have to let it go. They are washing and drying and taking into their room, so the idea of having it in perfect stacks is ridiculous and I have to let it go.

Have you ever had to deal with a bullying situation with your own kids?
I had a really tough time with my older child. He was acting out in school and getting into trouble. I was freaked out. It was completely bad. It turns out he was being bullied really badly by five kids and I didn't see the signs. I didn't pay attention to anything I talked about. There was someone at the school who I had trained, just by happenstance. At the time I trained her my children weren't even attending that school. But she has just been a lifeline for him. Sometimes as a mother you really aren't the person who can fix the problem. Your anxiety is so high. You can't think straight. It was a pretty life changing moment for my family and for me. I was like, oh shit, I can't see the signs of my kids being bullied. There was a lot of social aggression. Boys saying they were going to beat him up at recess. It was quite similar to girl dynamics. My kids are getting in trouble all the time—it's not an infrequent experience.

Are you going to be doing any work at Millburn High School [the high school in New Jersey where the senior girls write a "slut list" of freshmen every year]?
I got an email from the head of the PTO there and I wrote her back and I haven't heard back.

What do you do about something like the Millburn High School slut list? The girls were defending it, saying that it was something that people wanted to be on. How do you teach them that it's actually not okay to make a "slut list"?
I think you talk about it very straightforwardly. You talk about the reasons why a ninth grade girl would want to be on the list. And just because you've done it forever doesn't make it right. Just because people have been treating each other like shit forever, doesn't make it right. You don't just get a pass. That's one of those tricky things about tradition. As soon as you say it's tradition you don't question it. But that should be when you do question it. When i talk to the girls about it, I'm really straight up about it. The senior girls are like, it's so pathetic, she wants to be on it. You really have to put a mirror up to the senior girls. They can be so cold and unforgiving about a position that they were in very shortly before. I do a lot of work when I work with high school kids about that dynamic. I say straight up, some girls will want to be on it desperately. Let's talk about why. There are girls who don't want to be on it. There are girls who will lie about being on it because they're so desperate for attention. I just talk really straight up with them about what's going on. I'm like, if I'm completely wrong, you think I'm insane, you need to back it up.

The principal's reaction to the list seemed, at first, to be very ambivalent—he didn't want to search for the perpetrators because he said no one would come forward and it wasn't fair to punish the whole class.
People feel like, oh, we have a policy about that stuff—but very few people know how to implement a policy in real life. They get co-opted by the system like everybody else. It takes a really gifted administrator to know how to deal with that. It takes a tremendous amount of thought in the midst of a tremendous amount of drama. It's always really disappointing. I was speaking at a conference of superintendents. I was like, look, here's the deal. You can continue to say, if it's done outside of school grounds then we have no jurisdiction. But there is no separation with technology between outside of school and school. Now, I think that administrators are going in that direction.

But what I think is more compelling in a way, is why would girls in a perfect, high achieving school want to do this. Girls haze for social power. In my experience, what I've seen with girls who do that, is those girls are not doing well. They're not excelling in other areas. You have to excel in a school like that in something. You take what you can get. Girls haze. They always haze to dominate socially. It also shows the lack of power that some girls have, if this is the only power they can get. Their capacity is limited in other areas. It sort of goes to the heart of everything we're talking about. In Chicago, girls completely beat the crap out of each other at a powder puff game. That was exactly the same thing.

You have a YA book coming out soon too—Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials.
I'm psyched about the YA book. I'm relieved about Queen Bees, but I'm so nervous about the YA book. I try to do my best to talk about these issues in a way that's more subtle and more graceful. But what's really cool is to look at these YA bloggers. I'm watching these young women write about this stuff and it's amazing to me to watch this. The book comes out in January. It would have been really easy to write something about a really rich kid—but I'm really hopeful that this just reflects all these issues that we're talking about. I just hope this gives people more answers.

Anything else you'd like to add?
I feel so strongly the reason why I'm successful is because of women supporting me, laughing with me, buying me a drink when I needed it, sometimes being hard on me, but working with me. For girls to not have that is just unacceptable. I want girls to have that. I want to be able to talk about the ugly stuff so we can get to the good stuff.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and the New Realities of Girl World [Amazon]
Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make—or Break—Your Child's Future [Amazon]
Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials [Amazon]
Rosalind Wiseman: Creating Cultures of Dignity [Rosalind Wiseman]
A Rite of Hazing, Now Out in the Open [NYT]

Although Brennan seems qualified to talk about "feminine brands"—she is CEO of consulting firm Female Factor and has recently seen the publication of her new book Why She Buys: The New Strategy for Reaching the World's Most Powerful Consumers—her definition of what qualifies as female friendly is somewhat confusing. She recalls a recent visit to her mother's house, during which the two women struggle to work the remote controls on her new flat-screen television. After several minutes of pressing random buttons on the remotes, she wonders:

My mother is a smart woman who runs her own business. She values her time and has no desire to spend it configuring devices that should be elegant and easy to use, given their high cost. I couldn't help but think: Why does the consumer electronics industry make things harder the more advanced technology gets? And then my thoughts turned to fantasy: Why doesn't Apple make remote controls?

Why Apple? Apple makes electronics that are easy to use, simple, and sleek. And apparently, only women value these important traits. She breaks down Apple's lady-killing formula into a few simple steps: Apple products are elegant and small, Apple stores are light, bright, and full of helpful employees, and Apple products are incredibly simple to use, even without manuals.

As Brennan notes, women are responsible for nearly 80% of all consumer purchases, and in the "male" industry of electronics, women buy almost half of all consumer products. Somehow, even though women are buying their fair share of electronics, these simple items have remained part of a "masculine" field. While so much of what Brennan says about the Apple appeal is true, the fact that "female friendly" somehow means "made so everyone, even a woman, can operate it" is incredibly frustrating. No one likes products that are difficult to use, and by casting Apple as "feminine," Brennan unintentionally insults the intelligence of women everywhere. I'll concede that this is slightly better than the "pink is for ladies!" trend that painted everything, including power tools, a garish Barbie hue, but I'm not sold on the argument that Apple, with it's something-for-everyone vibe, is really just "discreetly feminine."

Apple: The World's Most Discreetly Feminine Brand? [Forbes]

Here are some gems:

SmackurFavRappa: #urahoe if u have known me less than 7 days & u already want it

Because someone who is attracted to you and want to have sex with you must be a "hoe." Nice girls are reluctant and require extensive convincing.

jCOOP30331 #urahoe if u wear them stretchy pants where u can clearly see ass cheek division and camel foot in front!

Ah yes, the time-honored wisdom that you can determine a woman's sexual proclivities by the way she dresses. So useful in rape trials.

hoecop #urahoe if plan B is really plan A

This is where #urahoe and the Christian right intersect. If Plan B is readily available, women will use it for regular birth control. And become hoes.

womanmarine206 #urahoe when ur phone never stops ringing and u no everyone

Popularity now = hoeness.

EllieLuvVP #urahoe if you have sex on ur period

This one reveals to anyone who still doubted that perceptions of female promiscuity and ideas of ritual purity are linked.

sartastic #urahoe If you're a guy and having an affair with a cougar.

Here's a stereotype we didn't know existed! Apparently guys who have sex with older women are hoes now. Sorry @aplusk.

But this one is the best:

PeteOMalley #urahoe if you are an agricultural tool used to agitate the surface of the soil around plants to remove weeds

As we believe a commenter pointed out last week, ho as in "skanky slutty woman" as in "the kind of woman who would have sex on her period, take phone calls, wear stretchy pants, and use emergency contraception," should really be spelled without an e. A "hoe" is a gardening implement, and we appreciate PeteOMalley's helpful tip for determining if we fit the bill.

#urahoe [Twitter]

Earlier: "I'm Pregnant," And Other "Lies" Twitterers Say Women Tell

She lists off some recent stories from the site's "Entertainment" section to give you some flavor.

This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness-boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

• Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.
• Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."
• Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).
• Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).
• Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here-though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

While Amanda's examples aren't all from the same day, it's a rare day that some coverage of a salacious story about an attractive woman doesn't make HuffPo's "Top Stories." An example, from today:
So, there's an auto-erotic asphyxiation story and Heather Graham opining about her love of Tantric sex. Gotcha. And on the day after Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that she'd like to tell Obama voters, "I told you so," about America becoming a Socialist nation yet not being permitted to speak to a Republican audience, their front page story about her isn't atypical.
Not atypical, if one is running a gossip site.

Amanda acknowledges that the nip slip/hot chick page views are part of Huffington Post's business model, regardless of its politics. But she notes that the entertainment coverage often does have a liberal bent — it's just not often sensitive to women.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With ‘Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence."

Notably, most of HuffPo's bloggers aren't paid — and their coverage isn't highlighted with splash page retail space in the same way that the stories about sex and nipples are.

And while some people might call looking at nip slips a little mindless fun to drive in the viewers HuffPo desires to influence politically, Amanda isn't having it.

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

Somehow, "Come for the nipples, stay for the feminism" doesn't seem quite right to us either.

Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment [Washington City Paper]

#liesgirlstell surfaced earlier today, perhaps as an offshoot of the also-popular and also-icky topics #3wordsaftersex and #3breakupwords. The "lies" seem to fall into three basic categories.

— Scary

It's not the lies themselves that are scary here, it's the mentality of someone who assumes — or behaves as though — these are lies. Like this one:

I_SEYMORE_CAKE #liesgirlstell i dont give head

Even if this is a lie, and she has, in fact, "given head" to other guys, aren't you obligated to take her at her word here? Call us bonerkillers, but we think a woman's statement of what she will and won't do in bed should be taken as gospel. After all, just because she's done something once doesn't mean she'll consent to do it again, or with every partner.

sabret00the RT @ThreeWaysIn: #liesgirlstell I don't want to try anal sex

Um, how did you find out this was a lie? By assuming no meant yes? Creepy.

— Insulting

The insulting category paints women as lying bitches who are out to trap men. To whit:

itsjay_yadigg #liesgirlstell im pregnant

Or, in longer form:

ShivFrost RT itsjay_yadigg #liesgirlstell I'm pregnant .... preach it jay...only suckers get fooled...i wanna see the test turn positive infront me

"I'm pregnant" isn't a liegirlstell — it's a liebadpeopletell. And trust us, ShivFrost, most women are as afraid of getting unintentionally pregnant as you apparently are of being lied to about it.

causticbob #liesgirlstell I'm on the pill

Don't believe her, causticbob? Use a condom!

— White

Many of the liesgirlstell on the list are white lies, meant to make guys feel better about their — usually sexual — deficiencies.

MicaDsGirl #liesgirlstell its not too small

First of all, women say this truthfully all the time. And second, is MicaDsGirl really advocating that women laugh uproariously every time we see a member that's not up to our standards? Or that men second-guess every compliment about their penises? What good does it do to add more insecurity to the world?

causticbob #liesgirlstell I love the way you taste

Again, quite possibly true. And even if not, why look a gift horse in the, um, mouth?

Nicki_Diamond #liesgirlstell "No! I don't think your mom is overbearing"

This is a classic white lie, one intended to keep the peace and avoid insulting a partner's loved one. Obviously honesty in relationships is important, but so is diplomacy. If women uttered every single uncharitable thought they were thinking, they wouldn't have any friends, let alone boyfriends. And the same, of course, is true of men. Probably the smartest tweet on #liesgirlstell is this one:

sarahinrainbows #liesgirlstell - the same bloody lies that boys tell; this is the 21st century,! What's with all the misogyny, and girls joining in too!

While women may not tell exactly the same lies men tell (men can't say they're on the pill — yet!), the sad truth is that people of both genders lie to each other from time to time. We lie to make people feel better and we lie to cover up our bad behavior. Anyone who thinks lies are solely the province of women is not only a misogynist but a poor student of human nature. Current.com cites a twitterer who says, "the topics #liesguystell and #liesboystell exist but funnily enough neither are as popular as #liesgirlstell." We're not sure it's all that funny, and maybe the relative unpopularity of #liesguystell is just an example of men getting a pass while women get criticized, but one thing's for sure — both sexes tell lies, and no one Twitter tag could ever list them all.

#liesgirlstell [Twitter]
#liesguystell [Twitter]
#liesboystell [Twitter]
Twitter Outs All Lies Girls Tell [Current.com]

When Della launched earlier this week to promote the computer manufacturer's line of Inspirion Mini 10 netbooks, the site included a video on shopping for vintage clothing and "Tech Tips" explaining how ladies could use this strange device, as of course, we don't know how to use real laptops.

Joanna Stern summarized on LAPTOP magazine's website:

The Tech Tips page, with its patronizing "Seven Unexpected Ways a Netbook Can Change Your Life," is full of stereotypes of how women's lives can be changed with a mini-notebook... "Track your exercise and food intake at free online sites like Fitday," is Tip Number One, like any self-respecting women's magazine would recommend. Number two: Find recipes online (just because we have laptops doesn't mean we don't still belong in the kitchen). Dell, is this all you think us women do with our laptops? Or do you think women are that slow at the technology uptake that we don't know that a netbook is capable of these activities?

In response to the huge amount of criticism the site received online, yesterday, Dell revised the site, adding the message, "Some of you have read this article over the last several days & will notice a few modifications. You spoke, we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback." The "5 Ways to Use a Netbook" section now boasts that the product can help women get organized, read eBooks, track workouts, and is easy to take along when traveling. The page on "featured artist" Robyn Moreno and her video on vintage shopping are still up.

"Some brands go too far with the girlie stuff, and that's when they start getting into trouble," said Andrea Learned, author of Don't Think Pink - What Really Makes Women Buy in the New York Times. Learned said Della emphasizing netbook colors and computer accessories, but burying price information and specifications, seemed condescending to women. "Della's marketing strategy sounds like it's advertising a purse," Ms. Learned said. "There's a level of consumer sophistication they're missing."

"There was certainly no intent to offend anyone and if we did, we apologize," said Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman, according to MSNBC, adding, "Many people do see their laptops and netbooks as a style statement, and we want to be part of those conversations." Style is an important consideration, especially since you'll hopefully be staring at the computer for several years, but it isn't the most important factor in purchasing a computer, nor is it something only women care about. As several of our commenters pointed out earlier, Apple and many PC manufacturers have used style as a selling point to both male and female consumers, but don't assume in their commercials that people don't care about the product's performance as well.

Though Dell revising the more egregiously annoying aspects of the site is a step in the right direction, it still takes a few clicks to find any specifications on Della. The section about Mini 10 Netbooks on Dell's main page seems to include a comparison of the three netbooks' prices, processor speeds, and display sizes. We're not sure what all those crazy numbers mean, but we still don't want a Dell netbook, even if it does come in pink.

Dear Della, Sexism Doesn't Sell Laptops [LAPTOP]
5 Ways To Use A Netbook [Della]
What Do Women Want In A Laptop? [The New York TImes]
Let's Market PCs Like It's 1959 [MSNBC]
Mini Notebooks - Products [Della]

Earlier: Marketing Madness

After a breakup, it's natural to want to email your friends so they can commiserate with you. And according to Google, it's also natural to bombard your fragile soul with opportunistic ads. Like this one:

Get Your Man Back Now - [link redacted] - Avoid Breakup & Learn to Bring Him Close. Get Over Breakup!

Somehow, looking at a website that promises to Get Your Man Back doesn't seem like the best way to Get Over a Breakup.

Or how about this:

Relationship Tips-Advice
5 Relationship Mistake That Destroy Even Remarkble Relationships-Survey

Because rather than getting advice from my friends, who I'm actually emailing, I'd like some tips from someone who can't spell "remarkable."

Perhaps the most heart-wrenching, for the recently broken-up, is this self-esteem torpedo:

Are You Boring?
You Probably Are! Take Our Quiz

But GMail ads, like breakups, can also remind you of the randomness and unpredictability of life. Like this one, found by typing 'breakup' into an email window:

Table Saw Accident?
Have you been hurt in a table saw accident? We can help.

While the others represent the worst side of advertising, exploiting the insecurities of people who are most likely feeling lonely, unloved, and upset, this last one might sort of help breakup victims count their blessings: you might not have a boyfriend anymore, but at least you still have hands.

Writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek, "From the beginning, Nikki's death had all the makings of a sensational story. She was gorgeous; it was Halloween, and she was driving a $90,000 sports car." But why did the nine photographs leaked from the scene of her accident become a sick, twisted internet phenomenon? [Warning: The pictures, should you search for them, are VERY graphic, and the family wishes you would not see them.]

California Highway Patrol apologized for the leaked pictures; two CHP dispatchers were to blame. One man's attorney said that he sent the images to relatives and friends "as a cautionary tale" to warn them of the dangers of the road. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly-that's a public service."

Whether or not the pictures did any "public service" is debatable; what did happen was that they popped up on websites specializing in morbid stuff. A fake MySpace page was set up in Nikki's name, where she was called a "stupid bitch." Commenters wrote things like, "That spoiled rich girl deserved it," and "What a waste of a Porsche."

Nikki's family sued the CHP for negligence, privacy invasion and infliction of emotional harm, but a judge dismissed the case. The Catsourases are appealling. Jessica Bennett notes: "But while libel and slander are regulated by law in the real world, in the cyberworld almost anything goes… Legally, anyone can post bloody images of Nikki Catsouras." The real question is: Why do people want to? Rubber-necking at a traffic accident when you're actually on the road is one thing, but setting up a fake MySpace for a dead girl is another. What possesses a person to email a father bloody pictures of his daughter? And do you think it should be illegal?

A Tragedy That Won't Fade Away [Newsweek]

The first entry, entitled Christie Hefner on the Difference Between Playboy and Porn, Hefner doesn't talk so much about why Playboy isn't porn, but about how it is a lifestyle. She says:

I think what Playboy aspired to from the beginning was to represent the good life, and part of that was the attraction between men and women and the romantic part of life.

See, while it's true that mutual attraction is important, there isn't a lot of mutuality about wanking to pictures of naked women that will likely never sleep with you.

Hefner also talks about why it's important to make sure your branding is coming across the way you want it to.

So I think the lesson is to actually understand what you believe your brand mission is and then to be true to that in terms of how the consumers see it. And that's a combination of your own standards and some regular research into whether the consumers are perceiving your brand the way you want them to.

Do you think Hefner's looked into what the Playboy brand is selling folks these days? I don't know how "sexy" union suits connote the good life, but then, perhaps I'm jaded.

In Christie Hefner on Playboy's Next Online Play, she talks about re-launching Playboy's online presence based on all these new and exciting things like social networking, widgets, personalization and video content. She says "I think the days of the walled garden approach are in the past." Actually, they were in the past a couple of years ago, but it did kind of made us pity her tech people, who have likely been pushing for these changes for years.

It was, however, in the segment Christie Hefner on Management vs. Leadership when she talks about her father, that we became just a little concerned about how far removed from reality Hefner might be:

I think more than anything else he has been instrumental in developing just a sense of perspective and balance. So, as hard-driving as he is — and I think that there are no entrepreneurs that are successful who are not hard-driving — and I think he would admit he gave up basically having and raising a family to make Playboy the success that it is. At the same time, I think he has the right kind of perspective on life as to what the truly important things are, and that's probably the best lesson that you can give, particularly to your children.

Umm, let me get this straight. Christie Hefner has been running the company for 20 years while her father slept with countless women on her payroll who are much younger than her (something he undoubtedly did instead of raising her, his daughter, when she was a youngster), reportedly kicking his 18-year-old son out of the house so he didn't have to share his female roommates, and doing goodness knows what about the other 2 children he has with his wife (they're not divorced) who he separated from in 1999, but he knows what's important in life and communicates that to his kids? Good to know someone out there has some perspective.

Christie Hefner On The Difference Between Playboy And Porn [Big Think]
Christie Hefner On Playboy's Next Online Play [Big Think]
Christie Hefner On Management vs. Leadership [Big Think]

Related: Naked Ambition [Radar]

Earlier: The Playboy Store: An Assault On Good Taste

Okay, ha ha ha, right? But like, who'd wear these shirts? My first inclination is to say your mom, if you were an investor in VC Wear! Unless venture capitalists are really this cheesy? In which case, is that a boy's club in which you'd want to be a member no matter how great the pay/desperate the dudes were? Also, this one:
Okay, even as I knew that Sand Hill Road was like the Wall Street of Silicon Valley, I still did not quite get the non-blowjob entendre of this joke until Owen of Valleywag explained it to me.

And, VC dudes of the world: Coed naked lacrosse and "I may be drunk but you're ugly" shirts are probs better bets.

1. This is a rather productive way to employ one's biological date rapey tendencies. Might evolutionary biologists learn something about the intersection of masculinity and capitalism from the case of Henry T. Nicholas? Oh probably, but more importantly
2. Dude, 1999: so much money, so many drugs, such terrible dressers. Parachute pants and Prada mini backpacks actually put shoulder pads and perms to shame. Does prosperity just naturally beget awful fashion trends?
3. What is it about geeky billionaires? Why is it always the finance billionaires that turn pervs with underage sex dungeons, while the geeks start underground sales dungeons? You would think that the demographics of the tech world vs. the finance world would make the tech guys more desperate and therefore likely to date rape. But the opposite is true! Is this just another chapter in my "New York Is A Warped And Poisonous Place That Kills All Love" manifesto? Probably!

4. Oh, but he had a thing for hookers. Naturally. Well, who doesn't I guess.

New Sales Tactic: Drugging Customers? [WSJ]
Broadcom Exec Accused Of Spiking Tech CEOs' Drinks; Has More Blow Than Scarface [Gizmodo]
Former Chief Of Broadcom Is Indicte
Drugs Grab Spotlight In Broadcom Case [WSJ]
Sex, Drugs and Microchips: Highlights From Broadcom Complaint [WSJ]

Because America is not part of Europe. You know what would happen if we joined the European Union? Let's "mark to market" our economic figures to Euros for a second. (This is not a particularly meaningful exercise, but when the Gross Domestic Product is passing for the ultimate barometer of economic health I feel entitled to dabble in the absurd.) In the same amount of time that our economy cracked the $14 trillion mark, it would have shrunk 10% to 9 trillion Euros. In other words, no one would be lining up to buy cheap American exports. Of course, not that that much stuff is made in America anymore, which is why our 13% increase in exports of goods only contributed 0.2% in the way of GDP growth. But 0.2% can make all the difference!

Because The Rest Of The World Is Starving Thanks to land and pork barrel politics, agriculture remains a thriving (if small) sector of the American economy, and thanks to those same pork barrel politics we decided to drive food prices higher than oil prices would have already rendered them by paying people to use perfectly good corn to run cars or somesuch. Well, we make corn in America! And soybeans, and lots of other things that will make you fat if you aren't living on $3 a day in Nairobi.

Because The Rest Of The World Is Still Coming Here (And Fewer Than Ever Are Sending Their Money Home) America's growing population helps our GDP numbers sound good even when everything is actually getting harder for the average person! Between 2003 and 2007, for instance, our per-capita GDP grew less than 1.9% a year on average; Japan's per-capita GDP grew 2.1%! But thanks to our swelling immigrant class (and possibly, the celebrity baby boom) we have a growing populace that pumps that number up to nearly 3% annualized growth when we pool our funds together!

Because Everyone Is Sick, And Getting Sicker Health care a very important sector of the American economy — in fact, it's the only sector that's created any jobs since the nineties — and the costs — hey, every cost has a "benefit," hah! — just keep rising! That means lots of profits for all the companies working hard to remind us how bad heartburn can make you feel. And all the accountants and managers and lawyers responsible for figuring out how hospitals can add treatments and procedures to routine hospital stays so the insurance companies actually pay them; they are drivers of economic activity too! In this most recent quarter, medical care might have been the single brightest spot of a very unhappy chart: costs rose 12.1% over the quarter.

Because banks control all the money. The financial sector might seem like it's a mess right now, but they didn't get to represent more than a fifth of the whole GDP by being unclever. After getting the government to set up a special body giving them "immunity" from failure in the wake of that touching Jimmy Stewart movie, bankers quickly set about figuring out how to control all the money in the universe and take a big a cut possible each year in fear someone would figure out what they were up to and shut the whole thing down. Over time, of course, they realized that they controlled too much money for the government to ever shut any of it down, so at that point they just overpaid themselves because that's what they did last year, and because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if they didn't do it they were the greater fool. By 2005 the average finance worker earned 50% more than the comparable worker in any other field — and a lot of them made a lot more than that. But it's hard to blame them — absurdly profitable ideas like $3 ATM fees and selling repurposed mortgages to old people literally on a "fixed income" are all in a day's work for these guys.

Because "information processing equipment and software" sales increased 10.3%. And they haven't even released the new iPhone!

Because They Hate Us. These are serious times, Americans! We have a beautiful country to defend, and defense spending was perhaps the brightest spot on the latest GDP report of all. The Pentagon spent nearly $700 billion defending our freedoms last year, a 7.5% increase from last. And we haven't even started bombing Iran!

Image grabbed from Refacing Government Tender via Metafilter

BEA Press Release: Gross Domestic Product [Bureau of Economic Analysis]
Economists React: Recession "Still Likely" [WSJ]
Food Firms Profit As Demand Soars [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
FDIC Seeks Hires, Braces For Trouble [WSJ]
Gross Domestic Product By Industry, Winners & Losers [Visualizing Economics]
What's Really Propping Up The Economy [BusinessWeek]
One Guy Who's Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees [WSJ]

In the heady era of dotcom fanaticism, Dov Charney founded the quintessential Old Economy company.

American Apparel is a mass manufacturer. The dawn of mass manufacturing is what enabled the rise of the working class, but by the 1980s America had decided manufacturing, what with its unions and their irksome habit of reminding the market that they are human too, was something less idealistic countries should deal with, and most factories in America had closed. This would not have been of concern to Dov Charney, a Tufts dropout reared in Montreal, had he not been reared North America's Protestant talent for investing in inanimate objects an extraordinary degree of esteem, as in, the T-shirt: Rebellion.

By the 1990s that talent, the knack for Want Creation, for appealing to the desire of people to buy things they don't need in some hope of proving they Are Someone, had begun to eclipse all other talents/knacks involved in propelling the modern American economy. The result was that no one was paying attention to how their T-shirts were made anymore. No one was paying attention because T-shirts were all being made, for pennies on the benjamin, 12,000 miles away. Llike Americans themselves the shirts had become bigger, thicker, rougher, coarser. Dov hated the T-shirts presently on the market. He did not find them sexy. After wading through a few different layers of detachment from labor, Dov found a factory in China to manufacture T-shirts to his liking, but nothing they sent approached his liking, in part because the factory sewing the T-shirts often don't communicate with the factories weaving the bolts of knit cotton. Perhaps the Chinese could simply not intuitively understand the nuances of How Dov Charney Felt A T-shirt Ought to Look; perhaps they simply did not care to, either way Dov decided something radical needed to be done.

Dov Charney found his efforts lionized in a positive, and weirdly prescient New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first of many more media stories that would make mention of Dov's "boner."

He opened a factory in the Los Angeles garment district. He decided his factory would weave its own textiles in addition to the more common business of sewing shirts. Dov's command over the intricacies of needle-spacing and fabric finishing and the various manufacturing quirks that represent his "artisan's sensibility" was well-documented in a 2000 Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker.

2000 was the era of the "New Economy," Gladwell chose to profile American Apparel because, like Dov and most Candians, he likes to think of himself as a rebellious thinker. Don't we all? Dov had started an "Old Economy" company.

We live in the age of the entrepreneur, who responds rationally to global pressures and customer demands in order to maximize profit. To the extent that we still talk of Gloversville—and the glove-making business there has long since faded away—we talk of it as a place that people need to leave behind. There was Lucius N. Littauer, for example, who, having made his fortune with Littauer Brothers Glove Co., in downtown Gloversville, went on to Congress, became a confidant of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and then put up the money for what is now the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. There was Samuel Goldwyn, the motion-picture magnate, who began his career as a cutter with Gloversville's Elite Glove Co. In 1912, he jumped into the movie business. He went to Hollywood. He rode horses and learned to play tennis and croquet. Like so many immigrant Jews in the movie industry, he enacted through his films a very public process of assimilation. This is the oldest of American stories: the heroic young man who leaves the small town to play on the big stage—who wants to be an entrepreneur, not an artisan. But the truth is that we always get the story wrong. It isn't that Littauer and Goldwyn left Gloversville to find the real culture, because the real culture comes from Gloversville, too; places like Washington and Hollywood persist and renew themselves only because Littauers and Goldwyns arrive from time to time, bringing with them a little piece of the real thing.

Within a few years American Apparel was the largest apparel factory in the country. The biggest surprise was probably that he didn't have to price the T-shirts any differently. Americans were so used to paying way too much money for T-shirts — because of logos or brand names or symbolism or sheer price insensitivity — the ones made by $12-an-hour tailors working under strict California labor laws did not have to cost bulk customers more than $3 or $4, and all the rock bands and small fashion labels could attach their symbolism to Dov Charney's softer, better-fitting T-shirts with a comfortable markup.

The founding innovator got bored with producing supply and fascinated by producing demand.
Somewhere along the line I think Dov got greedy and/or envious of his customers and friends in the industry, the rock bands and indie fashion labels. He wanted to be a brand as well, to create demand and desire and iconic symbolism. He wanted his iconoclasm and rebelliousness to be noticed. So he began opening retail across the country, manufacturing trendier items and masturbated in front of a magazine reporter. He staffed his new retail business with the cutest youngest coolest kids, kids immersed as he had been in the nuances of the ephemera and nothingness — the drape of a shirt, the taper of a pair of jeans, the razor-cut arrangement of the tendrils — that had come to represent the "rebellious" school of American coolness. To expedite his staffing choices he even retained the services of a friendly coke dealer in the Lower East Side. If there is a Cliff's notes guide to Dov Charney's interpretation of that which was truly cool, it was doing coke on the Lower East Side.

Dov also made his own lifestyle and practice of taking employee concubines a centerpiece of his marketing strategies, keeping apartments throughout the country for the wild parties that doubled as photo shoots for company ads, and to house the employees who best represented the company image. The possibility of getting evicted from one of the apartments at any time kept favored employees' standards in line — not that anyone knew what the standards were. There was no handbook. It was all visceral.

The company grew way too fast, driven by momentum and the geometric growth prospects of the demand business.

Charney opened 187 stores in the space of four years. The process was almost comically hurried, sloppy, and exacerbated by the presence of all the cokeheads and the employee turnover that resulted from coke, low wages and a severe detachment from anything that felt like labor resulting from the fact that work was intended to serve as an extension of a "lifestyle," which left hours upon hours open for pointless alliances and rivalries to form. He got sued for sexual harrassment a few times, a consequence of having sex in the office and, in the absence of rigorous quantifiable achievement standards, often favoring employees he had fucked, was fucking, had some complex about fucking.

At the height of the real estate bubble Dov picked his real estate in the riskiest, most foolhardy fashion, spending millions to refurbish high-profile urban locations that were neither outfitted to handle retail stores nor generally owned by landlords that might give him a good deal on a leases elsewhere.

For driving desire and demand to the company's wares the cool kids who staffed the stores and starred in Dov's gigantic billboards were just as important to the company's sales as the factory workers themselves, but they were not remunerated as such, generally because businesses find it easier to deal with young unskilled recreational drug using hipsters as a consumer than as a human resource. The low wages translated to high rates of shoplifting and employee theft. The first fellow employee I ever liked got fired for stealing from the till.

After trying to make up for its sloppiness with momentum, the company encountered its cash flow problems with a combination of sloppy accounting standards and the perception of momentum. It was tough on the poor Chief Financial Officer!

In early 2005, chief financial officer Mark Schlein died unexpectedly of heart failure, and Mr. Charney and others say a replacement wasn't found for a year. An interim CFO was later hired, though Mr. Charney only remembers that "he had gray hair and quit after a week." Mr. Charney delegated bookkeeping to a few younger staff members and continued to open stores.

Problems developed. According to a chronology of the company's financial history provided by American Apparel executives to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Bank, a Minneapolis-based bank that was backing American Apparel's growth, urged Mr. Charney to secure additional financing amid the company's rapid store openings.

Which is when the real financial wizardry came in.
Adrian found a guy named Jonathan Ledecky who had just pulled off something interesting: he'd gotten a bunch of investors to pretty much write him a $200 million blank check he then took public on the American Stock Exchange, so speculators could trade his shares on its shares before he even did anything with the money. Luckily for Dov, Ledecky decided to buy American Apparel, thinking it might be a good fit for the types of big financial funds that need to buy into nebulous concepts like "Corporate Social Responsibility," which American Apparel, by treating its predominantly Mexican base of factory workers so well, still, despite everything, very much espoused. Thus American Apparel became a publicly traded company using the unaudited 30%-inflated earnings statements someone had been pulling out of their asses.

And Ledecky saved the day!
Dov Charney was now worth more than $580 million! He had to hire a new CFO, however. The new CFO found that American Apparel had "no sense of American accounting standards." Join the club right?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dov referred to the CFO as a "loser."

Earlier: American Apparel Is All It's Coked Up To Be
Why Retail Breeds Sexual Harrassment
Related: Living On The Edge At American Apparel [Business Week]

Another of the friends in the picture is a high-powered producer for a top television network who owns a Brooklyn condominium, another is in law school, and the last is independently wealthy. And where is Maureen Tkacik? Why, living in a tiny fifth floor rental apartment with the selfsame roommate — and, we hear, the selfsame Judas Priest photo —with whom she lived in the picture, which was taken ten years ago; a cautionary tale in downward mobility if there ever was one. She doesn't so much as recall meeting the future billionaire, and why would she? Her most salient memory from the house in which Ms. Southworth was photographed is being rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.

Ms. Southworth is not alone; Ms. Tkacik crossed paths in school with numerous other individuals who proceeded to achieve things in life: Donald Trump Jr., one half of the screenwriting/production duo behind the Harold & Kumar films, New York Observer reporter Doree Shafrir. In fact, her entire life might be considered a case study in how not to climb the social ladder, and, the photo below, wherein she sits next to Kretchmar and her present roommate, goes much of the way to revealing why: that ensemble.

The email:

You all know that I love you. I try to help you out where I can and I jerk off to your successes but when I saw a Disney Ad next to the Kristin Davis Blowjob pictures on Egotastic, I had no choice but to do a post. Reality is that I have no issue with his site, sure he's a virgin, but I love virgins, just ask my stepdaughter's friends.

I thought it was funny and newsworthy and hope you can link it because I am in the mood to get someone at Disney fired....I want to see this story on CNN so help.

And part of his post:

The most wholesome family corporation fucks up again. First, Walt Disney was caught molesting kids after taking them to his magic kingdom and showing them special cartoons he drew for them on his penis, true story my grandmother told me he did it to her. Then they made Nazi propaganda videos for Hitler to help kill the jews who were stepping on Disney's Waspy toes in Hollywoo. Then they were accused of subliminal messages in they movies trying to program kids to hate black people and gays and now they advertise next to porn.

I was scoping out some celebrity smut site that pretty much only posts celebrity nudity, sex tapes, nipple slips and upskirts next to some seriously desperate, virginal commentary and I was pretty shocked to see Goofy staring back at me.

Today the Federal Reserve, hot on the heels of saving Wall Street, elected to cut interest rates once again, by 75 basis points. And while the stock market had a screaming orgasm over this, I did not personally think it was such a great move. Herewith, a dissenting opinion.

And by "us," I mean Bear Stearns, because I personally have weighed the odds and I'm pretty sure I personally have nothing at stake here, no matter what you do, Ben Bernanke. My balance sheet, while admittedly lacking much in the way of assets, is also blissfully insensitive to short-term market and/or interest rate fluctuations.

Thanks to my industry, indeed, my own financial situation has been governed by a recessionary state of constant layoffs and downsizing for years and years — and I'm lucky enough to have one of those jobs they haven't figured out how to do better in Hyberabad. And I'll let you in on something, Ben Bernanke; my finances have zero correlation with those of the stock market. I'm not alone in this; most Americans are actually earning less than they were in real terms than they were in 1999. They can handle a few quarters of recession because they've been handling it.

Some of my morning commenters would have me believe bailing out JP Morgan is the only way to minimize "collateral damage on Wall Street and thus the economy," but really, whose economy are we talking about here? The buying power of the minimum wage employee is at a 51-year-low.

So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them. People are eating dirt for dinner in Haiti, Ben Bernanke; you can let Bear Stearns go to bankruptcy court.

Sure, some financial institutions might get pissed for a minute. They didn't lend Bear Stearns all that money to leverage the shit out of their delusional bets that the housing market would keep going up up up only to spend years in bankruptcy court for the sake of reaping fifty or sixty cents on the dollar. But you know what? They probably also lent money to Goldman Sachs and Jeff Greene and John Paulson to leverage the shit out of the lucky hedge funds that bet it would all end in failure. They lent money to all those short-sellers who bet the price of Bear Stearns stock from $67 all the way down to $2. Sure, that's what makes our economy so "dynamic", Ben, but does that make it any more virtuous than a legalized Ponzi scheme?

What if there were some sort of cascading ripple effect? everyone wants to know. What of all that IRRATIONAL FEAR? But you just tell them, Ben Bernanke, that they should maybe sit quietly in their illiquid asses and reflect on what the fuck made them think it was rational to buy into all this fancy housing market bullshit in the first place. Just ask them, Ben Bernanke, what they thought was rational about people in Southern California taking out mortgages with monthly payments equivalent to five months' rent?

Because the housing market never made much sense to me, Ben Bernanke. I mean, there we were a couple years ago, with a war on, a slowing economy, oil roaring up toward $100 a gallon or whatever, skyrocketing energy prices sending other commodity prices through the roof... just where were the buyers who were supposed to keep bidding up those houses so everyone could continue pumping the economy with home equity loans? I'll tell you where a lot of them are now: sitting at home, watching network TV and avoiding opening their mail. Sort of like Bear Stearns with that portfolio of mortgages, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities no one wants to put a value on just yet.

But you know? Eventually they'll open the envelopes, see what they've got, realize it's probably not the end of the world and start moving money around again. Assets are only "illiquid" till someone — the market? — figures out how to make them liquid again!

And if it is the end of the world, there's always the hope of an early death a la Ken Lay. Right?

Working for a man is probably the only thing less fun than working for The Man. Both are probably going to end badly. But look: You're still trying, penning inflammatory columns to try and ramp up the Google Analytics score so you can get back into the career columnist game that just months ago left you abandoned and alone. Glad to see you've still got all that audacious hope! But here's the reality: look around. How many people do you really expect to die fully satisfied with their lives? One? Three? Now, what about the ones who are freezing their eggs. Do they probably have the worst odds of all of them? Yeah, like we discussed last week, a recession is coming. Everyone just needs to lower their standards. Life is pain! XOM

Want To Have A Baby? Now's The Time [Boston Globe]
Earlier: Want A Better Job? Stop Working Right Now And Get Your Nails Did

"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women," Gates said.

Anyway, there is an abiding school of thought — and I am for once going to admit that I have not read nearly enough to know how true this is — that it's all the influence of his wonderful wife Melinda, who rejected him on grounds of lack of spontaneity the first time he asked her out for "two weeks from Friday." From a recent Fortune profile, Melinda sounds kind of like Michelle Obama, in the sense that she sounds AWESOME, and also in the sense that she not only made her husband a better person but that in that process, she became a better person herself. (Isn't that sweet? Don't you wish that happened more often?) There are all sorts of things we learn, such as the fact that Bono thinks she's the coolheaded rational counterpart to Bill, and that it was her idea to eradicate malaria. But this is the part you'll find really poignant if you're that type. It's from her high school valedictory speech, given in 1982:

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

Bill Gates' New Project: Farming [CNN]

Melinda Gates Goes Public [Fortune]

We've seen the perils of tech-obsession firsthand: Earlier this month a reader emailed to complain about a business dinner she attended, where "there was music, champagne, the food was amazing, the setting lavish. But did the men at my table pay any attention? No. They were all playing with their iPhones." And she's not the only one to forfeit male attention to Steve Jobs. Our very own guest columnist, Heather declared herself an iPhone widow last year. "Wherein we used to actually interact with one another during cab rides or walks or, you know, dinner," Heather lamented, "Now I sit there and watch him make love to that damn phone, his unblinking eyes glazed over with rapt-geek puppy love."

But guys aren't the only ones with geek love to go around. My own boyfriend tried to ban laptops after work hours in our household. The first day he made me go cold turkey and I was relegated to answering emails on my BlackBerry in the bathroom. Since then I've maybe gone one night without perusing the internet for at least ten minutes. But I'm not addicted at all! Though if someone destroyed my wireless network I would cut them in a hot second.

"Technology Overload" Can Ruin Relationships: Expert [Reuters]

Earlier: The iPhone is Cool and All, But Can You Stick Your Dick in It?