Botox For The Résumé: One Woman's Makeover [WSJ]

All of which is a long-winded attempt at seeming even more long-winded at getting to the point that I think the thing about Peggy Noonan is that it's kind of cool that she's silly, and theatrical, and doesn't take herself that seriously, because it means she doesn't take too many other things too seriously, like opinions — hers or Ted Kennedy's:

All parties, all movements, need men and women who will come forward every decade or so to name tendencies within that are abusive or destructive, to throw off the low and grubby.

Or the the latest whatevergate:

Two things are true in the modern media environment, and they collide with each other and may tend to cancel each other out. One is that a scandal makes its way around the world and into the bloodstream right away and with full force, through the Internet and cable. The other is that a lot of scandals have made their way around the world and into the bloodstream in the past 10 years. Immediacy and broad knowledge collide with sheer glut. Everyone has heard so much about so many. At some point, don't voters start to see all of public life as one big polluted river? And if they do, don't they stop saying things like "That's a busted tire floating by" and "That's an old shoe"? If they're familiar with the principle, as Thoreau said, don't they become less attentive to its numerous applications?

Or her beloved religion:

There is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary. But they are not, and cannot be. They are central. Things seem to be getting out of kilter, with the emphasis shifting too far.

Or the moved by something you're pretty sure she's sincere, and when she bothers to disdain something there's a certain amount of silly emotional credibility to it:

They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.

And you start to think, shit, what is it about this Nicorette addled Pope adoring nonlapsed Catholic half-delusional Conservative that makes me think we'd actually get along?

And um I think it boils down to her being a woman.

I know: barf.

How Peggy Noonan Won The Democratic Primary [WWD]

MOE: Ummmmm is it just me or is today, like, all about POLICY??
MEGAN: It does seem like my jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none brain when it comes to policy issues might come in handy this morning! Where do you want to start?

MOE: Maybe with the incredibly astute words of McCain economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin:

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief economic aide to Republican candidate Sen. John McCain, dismissed the Obama strategy as "classic industrial policy which shows a lack of faith in private markets."

MEGAN: Obama's got this part right though: "How much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is."
MOE: I mean, what have the private markets done to instill faith in you lately? Are we supposed to be like Job with these things?
MOE: right.
MOE: This isn't something I would mind seeing: "Americans with incomes above $2.8 million would see their after-tax income decrease by 11.5%."
MEGAN: Hardly anyone pays the actual income tax rate because of loopholes. If I heard my now former boss say it once, I heard it 15 times, if you eliminate deductions and credits, you could reduce the corporate rate to, like, 25% without losing revenue. You could lower personal rates even further and eliminate taxes for a percentage of the population. It's an incredibly inefficient system.

MEGAN: I did an analysis of the candidates' tax plans on young single women. Obama's is better.
MOE: Did you see this handy graf on the rebirth of the plutocracy? Just before the Great Depression the top .01% of households averaged 892 times the household income of the households in the bottom 90%, and that number of course plummeted and only really began steadily rising in 1980 to the point that it's now 976. These are imperfect numbers, of course — how big is the top .01%? How about the top .1%? Etc. etc. But it's a nice visual aid!

MOE: The income required to make the Top 400 list of earners has tripled since 1992, AFTER ADJUSTING FOR INFLATION.

MEGAN: I mean, the question is, from a policy perspective, is whether that's truly undesirable and what can be honestly done about it. Given the nature of the international financial sector and personal and currency mobility, would heavy taxation be effective? Can we limit income? Can you create or force businesses to create better oversight and board systems to protect shareholder interests, say, with a mandate that multimillion dollar compensation packages that aren't effectively tied to long-term performance are considered not in shareholders' best interests? I don't think either of the candidates has really talked about serious policies aimed at resolving income inequality because it's such a squishy issue to get your arms around let alone resolve from a policy perspective.
MOE: A few things: 1. Well yeah I think income inequality is truly undesirable from a policy perspective. 2. And the only way to deal is tax the everliving shit out of capital gains and use that money to beef up the SEC and education. Because the people who set executive compensation, the people who "look out for the interests of shareholders," the people who monitor the people allegedly looking out for those interests, the people who kick out executives for underperformance and are charged with luring in a new guy to "clean house" — all those people are part of this racket. And one, their version of "long term" is at most five years. And two, they set the yardsticks, the standards. They're all friends and acquaintances and they all know exactly how much everyone gets paid and they've pushed the baseline up up up.
MEGAN: What is "taxing the shit" out of capital gains? Back up to 25%? Higher? Won't they just try to pull some work around if that happens, the way private equity funds are just an elaborate way around taxation?
MOE: Well every policy creates loopholes, and certainly you'd probably see some money shift to less taxable assets, not that we didn't see that already with the real estate bubble, but none of the hundreds of executives indicted on backdating their stock options worked for a private company, you know? I mean, eventually the big payoff in private equity tends to come from the public markets, right? Or an acquisition? The thing that people need to get through their thick fucking heads is that yeah, there's always a greater and greatest fool losing out here, and we've missed out on a lot of the fundamental zero-sumness of corporate earnings growth because our standards of living are being propped up by artificially low standards in China, which China maintains as part of its INDUSTRIAL POLICY.

MEGAN: Hypothetically speaking, then, not that this is in my personal best interest as a homeowner, one of the ways to keep people from transferring assets into real estate to reap tax benefits would be to reduce the tax preference for home ownership and for real estate more generally.
MOE: Right. Although I don't know if you'd do that in the middle of a housing crisis?
MEGAN: Which, by the way, would probably have helped slow the bubble, and would slow the growth in home prices because creating a tax preference creates a market for people seeking to exploit it and it pretty quickly gets built into the price
MOE: Well yes.
MEGAN: Well, why wouldn't you? I don't know that it could hurt anymore now. If you wanted to be fair you could grandfather it or give some sort of one-time rebate payment or something and call it a fucking day.

MEGAN: The mortgage interest deduction and state and local tax deduction (which includes property taxes) are two of the largest deductions in the tax system, that are taken advantage of almost exclusively by people earning above the median income. They're also, along with having kids, the main reason people in the so-called "middle class" end up paying the Alternative Minimum Tax, though "middle class" is kind of a stretch for someone making $100, $120K/year when median income is $45K, but I'll accept that definition. Obama's willing to go up to $250K.
MOE: I wonder if there is like, a rich folks CPI that tracks the rising costs of… luxury real estate, private education, corian countertops, that sort of thing.

MEGAN: Not, by the way, that this bears any relationship to the conversation at hand, but coffee may be helping us live longer. I'm hoping alcohol consumption offsets that.
MOE: Okay so I'm creeping through his interview and, you know, the Journal basically says "well Clinton said a lot of this stuff but then he became obsessed with the deficit and it's not like THAT'S not a problem right now" and Obama says like "well now we have energy problems too so there's that." Like there's this meme out there that alternative energy is going to become this huge new sector of the economy but like who is going to lead that?

MOE: Ha I like how it ends

WSJ: A lot of folks would say cutting corporate tax rates are equivalent growth.
Sen. Obama: I don't want a distorting effect of our tax code on corporate decision making. But that's different from just saying you know, let's run up the deficit another couple of trillion dollars …

MEGAN: And after all those bonuses, too!
MOE: Yeah they're only on track to get $19 billion this Xmas sad sad world. But I don't know, can we really make the argument that it would be societally optimal for that money to …maybe find other uses for itself?
MEGAN: Ooch, Obama is co-opting the Republican small government ethos, but with a delish Democratic twist — making it, you know, actually effective.

I think the danger is always to equate size of government with effectiveness, and I don't. It's not clear to me that we want a larger government, but we certainly want a government that is setting more intelligent priorities and using taxpayer dollars more wisely and structuring tax policies that are conducive to long-term economic growth. As I mentioned during the speech, there may be programs that no longer work. There's certainly all kinds of previsions in our tax code that are antiquated and are not spurring economic growth. We've got offices like the patent office that are outdated to take advantage of new discoveries here in the United States.

Republicans have gotten so focused at starving the beast or cutting off the snake's head that they've forgotten they can actually do proactive things to reduce gov't. Or, in the case of this administration, they haven't wanted to reduce its size.

MOE: Thomas Frank doesn't have a new column out yet I guess that happens tomorrow but he changed the name to "The Tilting Yard." Weird.
MEGAN: Is it, like, a Cervantes reference? Is he Don Quixote?

MOE: Well he had the same column name, "Fighting Words" as Hitchens, whose last column on Hillary and sexism is the most Hitchens thing Hitchens has ever written, right down to the Juanita Broaddrick ref:

Posterity may well remember the Hillary Clinton campaign as the nearest that a member of the female gender had thus far gotten to the nomination of a major political party. But the episode will be recalled for many other salient features as well. The first time that the wife of an ex-president had leveraged her first-lady status into a senatorial seat and then a bid for the presidency. The first time that the candidate's spouse (and campaigner in chief) was a person who had been disbarred for perjury and impeached for—among other things—obstruction of justice.
MOE: The first time since the 1960s that a Democrat seeking the nomination had implicitly relied on a "Southern strategy" of appealing to the rancor of the "white working class." The first time since the lachrymose Ed Muskie that a candidate's eyes had welled up with tears in New Hampshire. The first time that a woman candidate was married to a man who had been believably accused of rape and sexual harassment (see my book No One Left To Lie To). The first time that a candidate had said of her half-African-American rival that he was not a member of the Muslim faith "as far as I know." The first time that the loser in the delegate count had failed to congratulate or even acknowledge the winner on the night of his historic victory.

MEGAN: I tried to write something about it, but it's so hard to respond to stupid sometimes.

MEGAN: This is, after all, the same dude that ejaculates at the thought of Bill Clinton. Granted, it's at his humiliation, but I don't think that makes him any less of a gay, S&M fetishist with a hair trigger. I feel sorry for his wife.
MOE: So maybe Tilting Yard was a dig at Hitchens who I bet 1. gets it and 2. has had on more than one occasion, like, epically tilted into something mid-rant at a party or something, but that is just my guess.
MEGAN: Well, if by "tilted" you mean "stuck his small British peen into the vagina of a 19 year old with hero worship in her eyes," then, yes, he's done that at parties.
MOE: So guess what, I totally missed talking about torture again, or the Army official who claims he was fired for refusing to approve a billion dollars in shady fees to KBR, or like, drilling in the wildlife refuge or whatev. Do you have anything to say about this shit?
MEGAN: Oh, McCain doesn't want to drill in ANWR, he wants to drill along the CA/FL coasts, something that Bush and Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist and Arnie and the Republicans from all those states have opposed because it will ruin the views of Republican voters who hate high gas prices and environmentalism but love them their views.

MEGAN: Also, the KBR thing is just confirming what everyone already knew, which is that pressure was applied at some point. I am amazed that no one caught the part where the Administration recently signed a 10-year contract with KBR to provide services to our troops in Iraq. That's, you know, until 2018.
MEGAN: We also didn't talk about the floods will raise food prices or the Chinese expat newspaper article about Obama's skin color, but shit happens.

Like rampant fiscal irresponsibility to the greenback! Which leads me to a stupid but maybe-accurate metaphor that brings into account Maria Bartriomo's opinions on tax policy. Maria Bartiromo argues that people who make $200,000 shouldn't be necessarily described as "rich." This is because she lives in New York, but also because she must abide by the paradox that dictates that successful females invest not only colossal sums of money but roughly two hours extra daily simply to avoid the appearance of being "devalued." Of course, that investment, which is not optional, carries with it not only tremendous opportunity cost, which is devaluing in its own way, but the additional degradation of scrutiny and/or mockery re the process itself (Callan's heels, Bartiromo's Botox) and the additional nuisances of the Boy's Club, sexual harassment etc. It almost makes you want to just have kids and freelance and endure the contempt of people like Linda Hirshman, which is all fine and good, but after all that you're still stuck getting your period. So basically you're screwed either way and no wonder we are all programmed to be somewhat lesbian.

Callan, Gregory Out At Lehman [WSJ]
Becky Quick Teaches You How To "Dress Like A Financier" [Dealbreaker]

Lol.

What can I say ladies, it's a boy's club out there.

Journal Women [WSJ]

One bride who spoke with the WSJ says that her only regret on her wedding day was that she wishes she "had done more polls." Some, however, continue to resist this philosophy. Etiquette writer Anna Post says, "It's a little bit of an imposition if you are sending [guests] every question that comes in your head." Fellow ettiquetrix Letitia Baldrige adds, "To have to ask your friends, many of whom have terrible taste anyway, is ludicrous."

On one hand, as a bride, what makes your friends' taste any worse than a wedding planner you hardly know? (And really: Why the fuck are they your friends if they have shitty taste?) On the other hand, it is a day to celebrate with those nearest and dearest to you; if you find out that 92% of them prefer chocolate icing, isn't that the least you can do? And to FOTBs (friends of the bride): She's gonna ask for your opinion on all this crap anyway. Wouldn't clicking a button in an online poll be easier than having to have the "the flowers you've chosen are hideous" discussion?

iDo [WSJ]

She's had to learn to draw boundaries on what she writes, to avoid hurting loved ones. An "aching and bleeding diatribe" she posted a few years ago against her parents' faith, Mormonism, alienated them so badly that "it was like a bomb had gone off in my family," she says. "My dad didn't speak to me for several months, and my mom was devastated." She took down the posts, thinking, "OK, this is a little bit more powerful than I'd thought it would be," she says.

Maybe because he's been taking Prozac, or maybe it's because of all that HOT HOT SEX, but when I told Jon what I wanted the wall to look like, he said something like, why aim for perfection when approximation is so much easier? Which is the most romantic thing that has ever come out of his mouth, so I pushed him down on the floor and ripped off all his clothes.

The Blogger Mom, In Your Face [WSJ]

• For some inexplicable reason publishers seem to think Michelle Obama could write a bestseller. Perhaps it was that college thesis? The admirable physique? Just hard up for cash in a challenging credit environment? [Observer]
  
• McCain: the "first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency." ? [NYT]
  
• Why would you assume our passports were made in U.S. America? [Washington Times]
  
• Sigh of relief for society! Jamie Lynn Spears is engaged. [US]
  
• Boycotting the Olympics: actually a pretty powerful condemnation of repression, when you think about it. Oh, well. [Slate]
  
• Some guy made up a story about how Diddy knew about Tupac's assassination plot and the LA Times totally bought it but the source turned out to be a "wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as 'a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.'" [TheSmokingGun]

• I am fucking sick of all these polls saying 28% of Hillary supporters would vote for McCain if Obama is the Democratic nominee and 19% of Obama supporters feel the same way, especially when the national matchup polls prove they are talking out of their asses. [Gallup
• Wait, let's broaden that statement: I am fucking sick of all of it. And: what he said. [Politico]
• Also, what Nancy said too. I think. [CNN]
• Foreclosure bus tour! [Breitbart]
• Wall Street losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market may amount to $460 billion, which is half a trillion dollars. (Wow, Moe, way to put shit into context there.) [Bloomberg]
• Jezebel in the news: our very own commenter RyanB writes about being a tragic mulatto like Barry and how she's — scandale! — still registered to vote in Pennsylvania. If you ask me, the real tragedy is that there are no jobs in Philly.
• The Hills premiere was the highest rated thing on cable all year, which isn't really saying much, although it's saying something, and whatever that is is sufficient to depress me. [US]

I missed having a life companion. I missed the emotional and physical closeness. I missed the sharing and the caring. But, as time went on and I watched my contemporaries struggling with the ill health of their spouses or partners, I realized that I was actually in a relatively good position. Maybe the last thing I needed at this age was commitment.

The Turning Point

And that became the magical turning point. The less I genuinely wanted a committed relationship, and sent out those signals, the more offers I began to receive from men who wanted to date me.

Appearing needy — at any age — is known to be a turnoff.

Playing the Field [WSJ]

MOE: Hey hi what's up shit is pretty fucked huh.
MEGAN: It makes me a little glad I never leave my house. Hooray for blogoraphobia.
MOE: Okay, first things first: there are violent protests in Tibet, and China has to quell them in a way that doesn't make Stephen Spielberg look good, and now the protests have spread to other provinces.
Tibet has long been a pretty sweet separatist province to have, what with the exiled leader advocating nonviolence and spending most of his time with Beastie Boys etc. etc.
MEGAN: And getting to meet practically every head of state in the world, albeit unofficially...
Except for, obviously, those countries in Africa rapidly becoming Chinese client states.
MOE: China has a whole other separatist province called Xinjiang and no one pays attention to those guys. Because they're angry Muslims. Hey Sudanese Islamofascists? How's about some CONSISTENCY??
MEGAN: Wait, didn't we care about that for like 2 seconds last week when Al Qaeda did a video of training there? I didn't realize that we'd forgotten to care about that.
MOE: Hey, look, a story about a recent thwarted hijacking attempt by a Uighur Al Qaeda girlbomber! I think the Chinese government thinks you should care again.
MEGAN: Oh, thanks nameless Chinese propagandists newswriters!
Anyway, so, how soon until they start beating monks in the streets and we issue some sort of vague milquetoast protest about it that in no way compares to our reaction to the monk beatings in Myanmar? Or did I blink and miss it?
MOE: Oooooh, think Laura Bush drop her cookie sheet again and get on the phone with Hu Jintao?
MEGAN: Maybe she could send him cookies? I'll bet some chocolate chip ones could go a long way toward repairing US-China relations
MOE: I
Yikes, that disappeared.
MOE: Okay yeah so, it's very tricky what is happening with Tibet, but either way, it led to an incredibly cerebral discussion of Bjork on the comments over the weekend, did you see? My father was impressed with Bjork's timing on that one, but perhaps if he knew Bjork's tears cure cancer (too bad she never cries) he wouldn't be so surprised. Interestingly, this week Taiwan is holding elections, and he's headed out there. Taiwan is interesting because, you know, they really have it best, as "splittist" provinces go. Elections, democracy, a decent standard of living, no painful shared history of, like, cannibalism or Cultural Revolution or any such thing. The pro-China Kuomintang party is supposed to win though.
MEGAN: Interesting. Wait, now, Taiwan's pro-China even though China considers them a rogue provice? Taiwanese politics are so hard to understand. Is it possible that China's financing the Kuomintang or something
MOE: hahahaha well China's financing the entire economy, sort of like ours. The thing is that the Kuomintang came from mainland China and fled to Taiwan, with numerous palace treasures and such, in 1949. There they found a happy population of ethnic Chinese who spoke another dialect and also, Japanese because the Japanese colonized it, and proceeded to pretty much subjugate them until the seventies, when a democracy movement began burgeoning and our relations with the mainland made it a lot easier for Jimmy Carter to pressure the Kuomintang to treat the "ethnic Taiwanese" better. Somewhere in there Chiang Kai-shek died, his much nicer son Chiang Chingguo took over, and a kind of slow, steady democratization took hold. The thing is that most Chinese, no matter what dialect they speak, are pretty pragmatic and rational and no one wants war with China, but while they have us around a lot of them also don't feel like taking shit from China. On the other hand, of course, Taiwanese control most of the factories in China. It's complicated.
MEGAN: [Awkward segue alert] As complicated at Dina Mattos McGreevey's sex life?
MOE: Hey, good call. That conversation was certainly venturing into prurient and meaningless territory so I'm glad we can now focus our attention on The McGreevey-driver threesomes. I think my favorite part is that they were described as "intense" "hard-core consensual sex orgies".That sounds so...cardio! It's a good thing too I guess if they all started with get-togethers at T.G.I.Fridays.
MEGAN: Like, taking a date to TGI Fridays is so Jersey and let us not pretend that it is not because it is. Also, their intense 3-way orgies (which, can an orgy really only involve 3 people?) always involved one of the guys jacking off while one of them fucked Dina.
But what's sort of really interesting to me is that in earlier publications, he's said not to have started working for McGreevey until 2000, which throws off his timeline I think, and that Dina's divorce lawyer wants financial records about financial records and correspondence with McGreevey's rich boyfriend. Also, apparently, they're due in court soon to litigate over the money McGreevey is hiding from Matos so that he doesn't have to pay as much in child support and alimony. Fucker. Like, aren't gay men supposed to be the good ones?
MOE: Um yeah they shared a room at the TRUMP PLAZA in Atlantic City. Here is what I have to say about that; okay, there is a hotel room shortage in Atlantic City, sure. But if if you are the governor you get the "casino" rate and that is seventy bucks. "It became almost laughable — I would never have my own hotel room," Pedersen said. Okay, so a few things: what does this mean about Silda Spitzer? How long has the New York Post been sitting on this story just waiting for everyone to remember that they once for a brief moment cared about Dina Matos McGreevey?
MEGAN: I'm personally hoping that Silda's sunning herself on a beach somewhere foreign and being served tropical alcoholic beverages by inappropriately young but attractive cabana boys.
And that she and Eliot didn't fuck around with 3rd parties because it's one thing imagining Gay McGreevey jerking off and another entirely grosser thing to have to picture Eliot Spitzer in a wide variety of sexual situations
Excuse my while I go wash my brain out with bleach. Maybe you could talk about the financial markets and i'll try to think of something to say that makes it sound like my summer interning for the Bank of New York wasn't a complete waste of time for everyone involved?
MOE: Okay, well, the government is going to have to print money to bail out the banks because they made the financial instruments so complicated no one has a fucking clue how much, if anything, they're worth, and everything is so interconnected that it could all collapse like in the Asian Financial Crisis unless the Fed steps in and offers a quarter trillion dollars to save it. Or something.
Here it is explained by someone named Dave Wilson who is on some email list that my ex-boyfriend is on.

There's currently a kind of cascade failure happening throughout the financial community, spurred
both by extraordinary levels of borrowed money that was used to speculate (it's like those mortgages that were issued for 110% of the value of the house, except that type of "investment" has, unbeknownst to most people, actually been taking place in pretty much every investment sphere you can think of); if those speculative investments go South, investors have to come up with lots of cash, fast, (this is known as a margin call) meaning they wind up selling everything they own to raise cash, which then depresses the value of the stuff the investors had to sell (as well as similar stuff owned by others) since suddenly there's a lack of scarcity combined with a suspicion on the part of would-be buyers that perhaps this stuff is being dumped for reasons other than a need for quick cash...

Last fall, the former Treasury secretary confessed to Fortune magazine that until the mortgage storms broke over his head in the summer of 2007, he was unfamiliar with the kinds of complex mortgage structures with which Citi's own balance sheet was packed. Almost certainly, the gulf between competence and compensation on Wall Street has never been wider.

"Why not set an example of Bear Stearns, the guys who have this record of dog-eat-dog, we're brass knuckles, we're tough?" asked William A. Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital in Issaquah, Wash., and co-author with Fred Sheehan of "Greenspan's Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve." "This is the perfect time to set an example, but they are not interested in setting an example. We are Bailout Nation."

Just last year, the x17 agency found itself slammed with allegations that it was trafficking skilled illegal immigrants into Los Angeles and condemning them to lives of indentured servitude trailing the likes of Vanessa Minnilo and Spencer Pratt. Three years ago I personally spent some time with an elite cadre of Bauer-Griffin photographers, nearly all of whom were foreigners who had honed their skills snapping pictures of wars and things but left that business because, you know, there's no money in it. So what do our amateurs have going for them?

Well duh! It's the fact that our youth has been immersed from a tender age in American celebrity culture, exposed to a near limitless array of celebrities on a few hundred cable channels in what amounts, for the average American, not only to the formation of a crippling addiction that practically assures a recession-proof market, but millions of hours of free job training! You knew there had to be a silver lining somewhere.

The Rise Of The "Citizen Paparazzi" [WSJ]

Days after Mrs. Tucker's brain scan, Dr. Brown, the neuroscientist, sat in her book-lined office looking at the results. "Wow, just wow," she recalls thinking. Mrs. Tucker's brain reacted to her husband's photo with a frenzy of activity in the ventral tegmental area. "I was shocked," Dr. Brown says.

Upstate New York mathematicians, naturally! When they met, she was 28 and he was 54.

They met sitting across a horseshoe-shaped table at a math conference in the Adirondack Mountains. "I knew immediately we'd get married," Mrs. Tucker says. They got their marriage license less than a year later, on Valentine's Day.

Keeping Love Alive [WSJ]

"Free from horoscopes, letters and sensationalized sex stories," it promised to instead deliver "frocks, politics, lipstick, handbags, human rights, babies, gardening, stilettos, fridge magnets." Its target age range was 15-40. I bought every issue I could get my hands on at the campus international bookstore/clove cigarette purveyor. But...

No one else did. In one of those cases of tremendous pressure meets limited funding meets entrenched competition, Frank shut down after less than two years.

Pursuits will be a whole nother story. It's not a women's magazine but a magazine that must appeal to women in order to win over the Sunday advertisers the Journal craves. It won't rely on the "blink" psychology of newsstand sales. It doesn't have to appeal to 15-year-olds or run horoscopes. It doesn't have to be at all "cool." Maybe, with all those advantages, Tina Gaudoin will be able to put together a magazine that is, actually somewhat "frank"?

Funnily enough, a lot of people thought they'd hand the reins to another Frank, as in Robert Frank, the newspaper's chronicler of the uberwealthy and how they live and author of the book Richistan — wisely, they found someone who might be a little less openly contemptuous of the wealth of its most valuable readers. Personally, I could use a weekly magazine edited by Thomas Frank, but no one asked me.

Editor is picked at WSJ Mag [NY Post]

"This time around, 'I just had to feel it on my skin,' he said, sounding primal.

His wife rolled her eyes.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

A Man's New Best Friend: Diamonds And Pearls [WSJ]

Interestingly, women are thought by the dudes to be more "compassionate", whereas they're perceived by the other women to be bigger hardasses. In another story Google executive Sheryl Sandberg cites a case study of an individual's career in which half of a group of Stanford students was asked to rate a the person's competency thinking her name was Heidi, the other half Howard. And while they rated Heidi/Howard as equally competent regardless of the name, no one wanted to work for Heidi — they perceived her to be too aggressive and out for herself. But then another executive admits to having taken a female employee out to lunch to express her support for the employee's decision to have a kid, and the female employee is all, "Um, that's so nice of you to say, thanks for the 11:30 p.m. emails. So basically yeah, it's what you'd expect, a struggle you can't win, husbands who are willing to stay at home rule but find it somewhat emasculating, you can't win etc. But hey! At least they manage not to mention HILLARY.

In other news, stay tuned for the drunk version of this video.

But even the wrong color can bring put-downs, Miss Gilker notes. When she wears pink, she says, "I get the snarky 'Nice clothes!' when people walk by in the halls."

2. Wait, Jesus Christ, Lourdes has her own stylist? Is this because Madonna looks back on all those pictures of everyone dressing the way she did in the Desperately Seeking Susan era and just shakes her head thinking, "Personal style. Now that was a dangerous idea."
3. Does anyone over the age of 20 seriously think school uniforms are a bad idea? Because I sometimes think they should make it a constitutional amendment. But then I think of how creepy and Hitler youth that would look in the history books fifty years later. But then I think, isn't that the idea behind the Abercrombie catalogs anyway?

Fashion Bullies Attack — In Middle School [WSJ]

Isn't she a little too nice and funny and likable to be for real? Isn't that a major reason this book is so goddamn popular? Because you're like, well shit lady, you cheated on your husband and now you're charming the bejesus out of middle American housewives all the way to the bank! Or am I just a terrible person? You've gotta read it to decide for yourself! TGIF, right?

From Hardcover To Paper, How A Blockbuster Was Born [WSJ]

The collection includes a piece painted entirely of Hershey's chocolate, which reminded us of a friend of ours who used to paint exclusively with her own menstrual blood, which should maybe be the theme of Taylor's next small collection. Oh my God though, please read the story: it is insane. Four year olds who start collections in "happy colors," moms who use their son's art knowledge to undermine friends and prey on party guests, kids who get carried away at auctions and keep bidding just to keep the price going up, and the inevitable backlash from snooty gallery owners. Happy Friday, poors. Here's your first gift.

Small Collectors [WSJ]

I left the movie depressed. Depressed because I wanted to like Mariane Pearl because she had gone through so much and stands for so much and Angelina Jolie, of whom some of us here are a fan, is such a fan, but I had a feeling that the real life widow was the only thing standing between the world's most famous couple making a serious important film that could do for a mass audience what Control Room did for, you know, the NPR-listening choir. A Mighty Heart, in other words, had to be a bad book.

So I looked it up on the internet. Everybody loved it! She even had a co-author! Maybe I was stupid! (Duh!) Did I just not want to blame Angie?

So I bought it. I started reading it; I did not finish; my suspicions proved correct.

Mariane clearly, clearly, clearly loved loved loved Danny. To read the beginning part where she talks about how proud she is of him and how warm and perfect and wonderful he is is like reading some very precocious teenage girl's diary about how she imagines life with the man of her dreams is going to turn out. And who knows, teenage girls could love this movie. It could be the next The Notebook. But to the adults in the audience it seemed false, and immature, and dishonest. (I cannot speak for Kimora Lee Simmons.)

Like Daniel Pearl I worked for a distant bureau of the WSJ when 9/11 happened. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I was not so much a great reporter.) Also, my distant bureau was Los Angeles. (Unlike Daniel Pearl, I mainly wrote about shoes.) My weeks after the towers fell were spent mostly in an eastern shitty suburb of San Diego called Lemon Grove, where two of the 9/11 hijackers had lived and worked and attended the odd strip club. The story was so impossibly big and important and terrifying-to-get-beaten on that they sent two of us down at first, me and an editor about twelve years my senior. I was reminded of this because in the first chapter, Mariane talks about how she went on almost all of her interviews with Danny, and interviewing subjects with a companion is really cool, especially, when they are the sort of people you don't actually relate to much, like this methhead we met whose neighbor followed a very fringe anti-modernity sect of Islam that had inspired him, it was revealed in family court, to skin his daughter's pet rabbit as punishment for playing with "idols" (Barbies).

Point being: people out there = weird. Situation = stressful. This editor = the only sane person with whom I communicated for weeks after this cataclysmic event.

"So did you ever think about, like, just giving your editor a blowjob in the car? Just to like ease the tension?"

That was the first question my friend Evan had when I returned. Evan used to work in porn, which might be why he's such a great reporter, because people don't get as creeped out when he asks shit like that. Some even answer honestly. I did not.

"He's married!"

But yeah, of course I had. We were all in this weird place with all these strange poor people (Muslims in America: not so affluent, a lot!) and all their weird skepticism and racist neighbors and meth fiend advocates and everything was really really really tense and all the editors back in New York were falling to pieces because their offices had been totally destroyed in the attack, and yes, for being with me through all of that I wanted to hump my editor, very much yes. He was the only remotely doable person I was going to happen upon.

It was not so easy to reconcile that with the righteous humanism with which I wanted to view the world, especially in the wake of 9/11, when suddenly my own country had experienced a tragedy on the scale of other countries and I wanted to believe that the world would share in our grief, that we were all grieving together, that out of tragedy ought to come some better understanding between us and our neighbors.

Also: The world was collapsing. Why all the thinking about fucking? Because I was human and horny and all this chatting up of poor crazy religious people was starting to feel really fake? Because I was human and I DON'T love everyone else in the universe equally, especially the ones who seem so unlike us? Or because in the movie version, there would be romance; in the movie version, there would be a Great Affair?

To read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane Pearl is kinda in the latter camp without ever really have considered the question. In fact, to read A Mighty Heart is to think Mariane was actually writing the movie before her husband was even beheaded. I'm not saying she didn't love him sufficiently, but there's a scene in the movie in which someone wonders why she's not more weepy about things and it's because she can't help it, she's thinking ahead, about what it will mean, what sort of statement she can make out if it, how she can narrativize it. That's a common thing in a journalist, something she's so aware of she cops to it on the very first page:

It is the curse of all journalists, I suppose, to be writing a story even as you are living it.

That said, if anyone loves Mariane, Angelina Jolie seems to, because she manages to portray her in a way that is both accurate and gentle. We've all read about how they're friends. It makes me glad for Brad and the family that she spent all that time being crazy and fucked up. We bet she's a good mom. We hope she rubs off on Mariane.

The View

Anyway, today we finally came across an article about an emerging Estonian industry we weren't completely bored to tears by: The Borat-themed, homoerotically-charged bachelor party industry beloved by men like Briton Adam Burrows.

By evening, Mr. Burrows was back on the town in a shiny, skin-tight red T-shirt and matching shorts, the get-up worn by an openly homosexual character in the British TV comedy "Little Britain." In the old town square, he and his pals ran into another group led by a groom-to-be in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle outfit. He and Mr. Burrows engaged in mock combat, wrestling one another to the ground.

In Estonia, "if we drink, we don't make so much noise," notes Tallinn's deputy mayor, Jaanus Mutli.

Yeah, Estonians probably wouldn't think to bake their own jizz into their best friends' bachelor party cakes, either. But just wait for another decade or so of steady GDP growth!

British Bridegrooms Bring Stage Revelry To Eastern Europe [Wall Street Journal]

"Sometimes we all go a little overboard at the mall," the announcer intones empathetically in one spot. "Take an honest look at your shopping habits," advises financial planner June Walbert in another ad. "Do you shop to make yourself feel better?"

Sometimes we fantasize about what women's magazines would be like if they, too, were taxpayer-supported, freed from the shackles of Maybelline ads that force them to "dumb down" their copy and run the same five life tips over and over again. This story is sort of the journalistic equivalent of a huge Ayn Rand turd in the middle of our utopian vision. We are so depressed, we probably need to buy something.

Soldiers, Beware: Mall May Be Risky
Ayn Rand [Wikipedia]

Sometimes we read the work of WSJ "In The Lead" columnist Carol Hymowitz in hopes of learning some grand new insight from all the women she talks to who actually have jobs. Today, she reports that some women who have jobs managing other women allow certain women — and men — to work flexible schedules, but only if they don't need them in the office. It really depends! [WSJ]

Being a woman on the Hill has never been easy, although Nancy Pelosi has managed it for twenty years or so. But now that she's in charge, it has gotten easier to be a woman lobbyist, maybe, if you are someone with actual expertise instead of just connections, or maybe if you just happen to be connected, ehhhhhh we give up. [Politico]