You want to fight the Republicans. In order to have a chance of winning that fight you'll need a Democratic party worth fighting for in the view of a lot more people. Read this: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/trump-gop-democrats-protests-marches-social-movement/
"Let's ignore Clinton - she couldn't even beat Trump! Instead, we should all follow the guy who couldn't even beat the woman who couldn't even beat Trump!"
Thread jacking in the first two comments is a violation of like twelve different unfogged statutes. And also irritating.
Come on, heebie, you don't honestly expect me to believe that there is an evil corrupt senator from Alabama called "Big Luther Strange". I may be gullible but I'm not that gullible.
Am I allowed to hate the term "woke" and hate Donald Trump at the same time?
It also bears mentioning that Alabama, culturally and geographically, are as far apart as can be. The situation may also not rise to Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's vow to "not just give the fu--i-g thing away" and appoint Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, But that theory may be getting slightly warmer to the Alabama situation. But there are a couple of reasons to expect lingering distractions of the mechanics behind the appointment.
... These people are in dire need of an editor.
Is the common factor that all three articles were written by software rather than humans?
The image of hungry poor kids dumping their free school dinners in the bin because they don't trust these fancy foreign vittles and who made you king anyway? you with your fancy ideas about puttin' mint in peas? you ain't from round here, we got our own ways of doing things! will stay with me.
And yet, Don Siegelman. Really do not get Obama not pardoning.
On the Teen Vogue thing: I very much get and agree that sexism caused the real political content in women's magazines to be ignored/dismissed. But there's a couple other dynamics going on as well:
1. Near as I can tell, the author is talking about a trend (of serious politics in "ladymags") less than 10 years old. Say what you will about Playboy and Esquire, they have always paired serious (or "serious") writing with the fluff and titillation. If you spend half a century earnestly creating a rep for publishing nothing but fluff and titillation, you really don't get to complain if people don't immediately notice that you've added a monthly column that's genuinely political. Come to think of it, the exact same thing is true of Cracked.com; how may years were they publishing insightful articles on e.g. what living in poverty is like before people stopped appending, "I can't believe I'm linking to Cracked, but" to their links?
2. And then we get into the politics of both ladymags and the likes of Playboy. Bien pensant liberals are all feminists (right?), and feminists have always critiqued both kinds of mags, albeit on slightly different grounds. Because Playboy has always promoted, let's say, non-conservative sexual politics, its broader politics have been viewed as not-conservative, but I think people would be genuinely surprised if, say, Corey Robin became its leading voice. Furthermore, the author claims that nobody blinks an eye at Olbermann going to GQ*, but it was certainly viewed as weird when Pierce ended up at Esquire, and that magazine's consistently liberal political writing--paired with risibly traditionalist cultural writing, to be sure--is pretty much ignored by the liberal socialmediasphere.
*although I think that's partly that no one cares about him anymore, right?
6: That's quite something. Although, all that excerpt needs is a few more cliches and a couple of statements that are at once both false and irrelevant to the subject, and I would swear one of my students wrote it.
Near as I can tell, the author is talking about a trend (of serious politics in "ladymags") less than 10 years old.
Nah. I don't read fashion magazines mostly, but well over ten years ago, I knew Marie Claire had a lot of political/issue coverage. I think there's always been some.
I actually found a (heavily over illustrated) article about Phill Picardi, the guy behind Teen Vogue's shift (it predates the new editor coming on board; she only joined in August last year)
http://coveteur.com/2016/08/18/deskside-phillip-picardi-teen-vogue-digital-editorial-director/
Interesting read.
8: If that image is accurate reporting, I think the issue is that while there are a lot of badly nourished kids in the US, there aren't many that are hungry in terms of not getting enough calories. So rejecting school food because unfamiliarity makes it unpalatable isn't surprising at all -- the kids doing it, even if they're poor, aren't 'hungry' in the sense of feeling hunger pangs, mostly.
According to the article, a lot of them were getting half their daily food intake from school meals. So I grant that they weren't hungry as long as they were eating their school meals.
Also, even if they are not hungry in the sense of chronically calorie deprived, I bet they were hungry in the sense of "I am a child and it has been several hours since breakfast". I wasn't undernourished as a child but I still felt pretty keen on eating once lunchtime rolled round.
The virtuous actors are female while the villains are male. Set all three in the same town, film the story on a couple of leftover sitcom sets and you have a Hallmark Channel pitch. I would like to play Luther Strange in the youtube fan version.
This is where someone points out that the Hallmark Channel has been doing hour-long investigative documentaries on Ethiopian politics and prison privatisation for years now but no one seems to notice.
I went to a socialist nanny-state school where about 2/3rds of the students got free or reduced price lunch. We ate in our classrooms in assigned seating with an aide monitoring our food. She made kids eat their vegetables and drink their (nonflavored) milk. I remember her getting in arguments with kids wanting to dump their tray before eating vegetables, telling them they had to take one bite. Kids grumbled, but eventually they ate their vegetables. Chocolate milk was available twice a year, on chocolate milk day. Our school, despite being title 1, was extremely high performing, with 60-70% of students testing at or above grade level.
In college, during the summer I volunteered in similar schools to the one I attended, teaching reading and math to students more than 6 months behind grade level. Part of the program involved free lunch. Here students ate in the cafeteria and were not policed in their food intake. Students were allowed to put food they didn't want on the "no thank you" table, and other students were allowed to eat it. About 90% of students put their vegetables, usually carrots or cauliflower, on the table, and about 60% of students put their fruit, usually plums, apples, or bananas, on the table. Sadly, plums were the least eaten fruit (probably because students didn't have much exposure to plums), while bananas were the most eaten. I remember one girl in particular who took apart her sandwich, put mustard and mayonnaise on the bread, and just ate the bread, leaving the meat and cheese. She then ate her cookie. She had behavioral problems, and I feel like a diet of 100% refined carbs probably contributed to this.
Anyways, personal experience is why I'm a big believer in nanny-state policies for children. Adults can make their own choices, but children need guidance and they need rules.
But to the takeaway, my school only worked as well as it did because we had a principal willing to work 18 hour days to make it work. She was incredible, and after she retired lots of these programs fell apart.
IIRC the aide would also hold back dessert from the trays. Kids could only get dessert if they'd demonstrated they'd eaten enough of the meal. Again, there would be serious arguing, but usually the kid would eat more food.
Candy and soda were completely banned.
More seriously,
a) Great that there are print publications easing people into the practice of reading something news-ish. Aside from systematic and succesful disenfrachisement of voters or war, my biggest fear for the US is a continued slide into a fact-free existence, except for noticing how things are getting locally worse.
c) Alabama sounds like something else. I did not know it was this bad.
18) Buttercup, sounds great in real life, but I do not see a winning way to write this character into the screenplay. Maybe as a musical number, ideally with 80s-Bollywood choreography. Lets run it past the set designers and budget people.
All children should be killed. There would be arguing at first, but fewer tears in the long run.
My school used to sell donuts during breaks as a student council fundraiser. Then parents complained that their kids were skipping breakfast at home for donuts during break and thus didn't have any time for a cigarette until after lunch.
17: Actually, they've been doing a lot of Columbo re-runs, but mostly the later, crappy specials. Which my husband and I are still recording and watching.
While I take JRoth's point, LB is right that Marie Claire had excellent news features at least back to when I was in high school,
fewer tears in the long run.
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Earworm: No Tears (In The End) [Roberta Flack]
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a lot of Columbo re-runs
I had the thought, yesterday, that there's a certain similarity between the Henry Fonda character in 12 Angry Men and Columbo ("There's just one thing that I don't understand . . .").
Sorry, Heebie, for the OT comments; I realize it's a little early for that.
I too was going to say that Marie Claire has been politically good for a long time and the French-language version even better. (Thanks to my Women's Studies college mentor who recommended keeping up my still-bad language skills by reading women's magazines sometimes.)
I just visited my child in the psych unit where lunch was a small salad (low-fat Italian dressing) and a piece of tilapia with well-spiced breading. She ate all of the latter and about half of the former. They don't have a bumper sticker for "My child's unit was the best-behaved in the psych hospital during the bomb drill" but I'd totally be eligible for one, apparently. (She's fine, coming home tomorrow afternoon on adjusted medication if all goes as planned.) The girls eat breakfast and lunch at school usually because it's a Title I school with free food for all and having them participate keeps the numbers up, plus makes my life tons easier.
I just visited my child in the psych unit
What! Where have I been! Is everything ok?
What heebie said.
(Re Colombo, I love this.)
So are there exceptions other than Marie Claire?
Also, if you'd given me a list of, say, Cosmo, Vogue, Elle, and Marie Claire, I would totally have picked MC to have real content. I wonder if that's pure subconscious association with the name (two names, French-seeming, possibly sophisticated), or if somebody said something to me once in college.
29: I don't think I said anything. The weekend was rough, then things got scary and panic attacky Sunday night. She was admitted about 3:30 am, so more than 6 hours after we got to the ER, but that's just when she got a bed and I started paperwork, so I wasn't back to my parents' where the other two were with their clothes for the day until 5 am. Not highly recommended! She was, as usual, brave and worked hard to express her needs. Everyone who's worked with her there has great things to say and her sisters and I will be thrilled to have her home again.
Giving you best wishes and warm fuzzies and strength and all the good things Thorn.
Anyway, I got her a Teen Vogue sub for Christmas, so she'll be fine. (Her sister got Sesi, by and for young black women.)
33: Ugh, I'm so sorry. Good for her, and you, and the family, but still I wish her peace.
Consider finding them on a streaming service instead-- you can skip the bad ones-- well the ones where the redeeming features are insufficient. Also, if you are actually in the mood for a detective from the past, consider Rockford. Or Swedish Wallander.
33: Oh gosh! I hope she's home soon.
32: My memory is that Vogue has real content. Maybe Elle, too. Can't remember if Cosmo does.
I reread Fear and Loathing: On the campaign trail '72 recently and noticed that Women's Wear Daily had a full time correspondent following the campaign.
Thorn, I hope things go OK and get back to normal soon.
36: Yeah, I'm kind of making light of it, but this is really hard on a kid and she's dealing with so much hard stuff already. I bought her two new graphic novels yesterday because she's allowed to have two paperbacks in her room and got some snuggly new toys. They let her keep the doll she brought to the ER because it's soft plastic. But things on the unit are much more regimented than they were three years ago and I'm sure the trend will keep going in that direction so they can keep all kids safe. It's just so restrictive and sad.
39: I remember Vogue as pretty tightly focused on actual clothes/makeup. Cosmo had a lot of content, but all demented - I used to buy it in airports because it had a lot of words to read, but nothing that wasn't loony. No real sense of Elle.
True story: A guy I worked for had a wife who was an editor at MC. They got divorced for reasons I'm not privy to, unless the reason was that he was dating other people. He publicly backed Trump.
Hope she continues to feel better, Thorn, and that you're holding up as well as possible. Which graphic novels/comics do the older girls like?
They read anything Raina Telgemeier or Squirrel Girl and not a whole lot else, though a few of my old Amelia Rules collections have suddenly been getting some action. I bought Svetlana Chmakova's Awkward, which is the one that came out for lunch, and another one I'm not thinking of right now that was also by a name I knew and looked plausible on the shelf even though I knew nothing. I was pretty much just wandering shell-shocked in the bookstore, so not a lot of thought went into it.
I've read it and I think the oldest has. The art is nice but I thought the story was just awful and really disappointing since it's way too scary and gory for girls Luna's age to read it and follow. Maybe stuff beyond the first TPB is better.
When I taught women's studies over 20 years ago, one of my students did, as her semester long project, an a analysis of the articles in Glamour.
We were all (embarrassingly) surprised at the level of substance and depth of many of the articles.
It's the thing I remember every time this issue comes up, because it ALWAYS comes up every time a 'ladymag' publishes anything that gets attention outside of their usual audience.
This is absolutely not a new phenomenon, and neither is the SHOCKED, SURPRISED reaction every fucking time.
Honestly, I find the Teen part of it more shocking than the Vogue part.
Also, there is plenty of crap in these magazines, to the tune of "Have you considered that you might not be optimizing and maximizing yourself fully? Perhaps if you have issues with your work/school/family/relationship, you need to wake up earlier, work out harder, eat better, and be more organized, and probably buy some new shit?"
"How to fix your flaws so you can be loved"
Also, on facing pages, "Accept that beauty comes in all sizes!" and "Healthy dieting tips!"
you need to wake up earlier
I knew there was a reason I don't read those magazines.
"Castration anxiety: make it work for you."
"Denounce carefully: Lots of things you enjoy count as 'sodomy.'"
17, 48: Buzzfeed's history is essentially this phenomenon at Twitter-speed. The ERMAGERD MILLENIALS pieces were landing literally at the same time as their superb reporting from the Russian-Ukrainian War was landing, and now they've published the one Trump story nobody else would print, and two years down range they may as well be the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, I liked this: Chocolate milk was available twice a year, on chocolate milk day
Because when else but chocolate milk day?
Also, I remember reading years ago that NatMags had decided at the executive level that Marie Claire (at least the UK variant) was going to be "the feminist/serious one" in the product lineup.
57 to the question posed in the title of the OP.
30: I'm imagining a capital of Sri Lanka where every man, woman, and child looks like Peter Falk, and nobody can leave the supermarket because every time they approach the door they turn around, take the cigar out of their mouth, and say, "Now, just one more thing...".
You could try to achieve that by force of arms and still have a more workable foreign policy than Trump.
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De-railing for an ATM
I've suffered from depression since my teens. While I continue to explore different treatment options, for the moment all I can say is that nothing I've tried had worked very well. I'm also on the "dog-training" track, and that's not going terribly well either. Over the past couple of years, some Bad Things have happened in my life, and the compounding stressors have not helped. My kennel has been very supportive and accommodating about (one of the) Recent Bad Thing(s) but has otherwise added to the stress.
I think maybe I want to do something else, because I'm beginning to suspect this career is not healthy for me. Unfortunately, my trusty back-up plan at Favorite Govt Agency is no longer an option. Also, I need to find a job that will let me at least stay current on my debt and that offers really good health insurance.
This is all pretty scary, and makes me feel like a failure. I've wanted to be a dog trainer since I was a kid. On the other hand, I'm miserable, I've written virtually nothing in five years, the head trainer hates my department, and when I hear about disciplinary debates in which I used to take great interest all I want to do now is roll my eyes or kick everyone in the dainties. It's possible I'd be happier at a more adorable puppy-focused place, but I honestly don't think any of them would hire me now because I look exactly like someone who couldn't hack a pedigreed kennel.
Spouse has always hated where we live--we moved across the country for this job--but wants me to be sure I wouldn't regret leaving.
Should I give up on dogs and get a cat?
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One consequence of the Bad Things has been my determination that life is too short to be this unhappy.
Fucking animal metaphors. If "cat" means "statistical programming for medical research," I can only say that it worked for me.
There's supposed to be a wolf, isn't there.
My stupid grad program didn't require me to take stats.
You should certainly investigate some specific cats and maybe even do some interviews so that the decision feels knowable and concrete instead of vague and terrifying. Don't bother with grandiose life path questions - that's just terrifying. In a specific alternative job, boil it down to how you'd be spending your hours in a typical day. Be very mundane and concrete. Then you can start to do gut checks about what feels good and what feels wrong.
Cats and guts suggests tennis with very old racquets.
1. Near as I can tell, the author is talking about a trend (of serious politics in "ladymags") less than 10 years old
I recall someone on facebook or twitter talking about Sassy's coverage of the first gulf war, sooooo
I like to think that Sassy grew up and became The Toast,
And that The Toast went to live on a farm upstate.
In retrospect, we should have known Trump would win when The Toast retired.
I guess she won't quite be old enough. 2024, then.
Why should Republicans monopolize governance-as-comedy? They have such bad senses of humor.
We've already elected at least one comedian to the Senate. He stopped being funny once he got there, though.
To President Garfield, 69 is good advice, in this thread as in life in general.
I'd be down with PRESIDENT ORTBERG TOWERING WHIRLWIND OF RIGHTEOUS FURY AND RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Barely legal (for the presidency) lesbians.
I'd be down with her primarying Feinstein in 2018. She's already old enough for that.
California's top two primary means you either need two people to primary her, or one person to primar and general her.
Whatever. You guys figure out the details. I'm just the idea man.
I do admit that I hadn't thought of that detail, and it does complicate the idea a lot.
I used to blithely assume that the descendants of East European Jewish immigrants to America had "become white," just like the Irish. These days, I'm not so sure. I have been truly (and no doubt cluelessly and naively) shocked by some of the anti-Semitism that has been more or less openly circulating over the past year.
The hard-core, neo-con, pro-Israeli-state contingent is a vocal and obnoxious minority. Their awfulness cannot, must not, excuse any move toward anti-Semitism, in my opinion. The vast majority of Jewish Americans are way liberal, and reliable Democratic voters; and we only wish the rest of America would think and vote like they were (non-neo-con) Jewish.
63: Sorry that you're struggling, Prez. I wonder if you've figured out which parts of dog-training you like. Is it the kind of work you could do at a community animal shelter? I'm convinced you could spin a change of focus based on Bad Things that makes you sound like it's not that you just couldn't hack it (um, because that's the truth!) that would make you interesting to less status-obsessed dog kennels, but those certainly have their problems too. There are a lot of options and "Bad Things made me reevaluate what I actually wanted to do with my life and it's THIS" are stories hiring committees find compelling.
This is all very helpful; thank you.
I certainly wasn't expecting to be helpful here. Maybe I'll stop trying altogether.
That's what Trump wants you to do.
I think I needed to finally admit to myself that it's possible to do something else with my life, if for no other reason than to reclaim a sense of agency irrespective of whatever I end up doing.
If you want a sense of agency, you can sell insurance.
Spoken like a man who hasn't tried selling insurance.
Good luck President Garfield, you can indeed go do something else.
It took me way too long to get that "dog-training" is a metaphor for something else.
To answer the question, I'd say yeah, switch careers. The idea of doing a job because you love it and are passionate about it is... I don't want to say that it's alien to me, because I have enjoyed parts of my jobs occasionally and also just because that sounds depressing, but let's say unrealistic. A job is a way to pay the bills; a good job is the one with the most money and benefits for the least trouble.
I've had three real jobs, excluding temp work, summer jobs, etc. before or shortly after graduating from college. My first real job had most if not all of the half-dozen or so specific moments that I have enjoyed the most in my professional career. But on any given day most of the time was spent doing just humdrum tedious stuff, and in addition to the good moments it also had a lot of really awkward or frustrating moments, and most importantly it wasn't a great way to pay the bills. My following job definitely had fewer highs and probably had fewer lows, but enjoyment aside I made a lot more money and had better hours. My current job is probably less enjoyable than the previous job, but was a pay increase again and has other benefits. (And I have reason to think it'll get at least a bit more enjoyable eventually, too.) No regrets about any of the transitions.
Work is work. If it were fulfilling all the time they wouldn't have to pay us to do it.
82: As a CA voter and a Toast fan, I heartily endorse this plan.
I have an Ask the Mineshaft that's not worth its own post. My dear roomie has, at the tender age of 26, published a novel. This is a major accomplishment! She is on her book tour right now, to return on Sunday. I have just finished it. I said I would write an Amazon review when I did, as have several other people she knows already have.
What I liked about this book: the prose. I wouldn't say that lightly! At the sentence level, there's a lot of fine work in this book.
What I disliked: everything else. It was a chore to finish.
If it were me, I'd actually want the truth. I don't get that sense from her. I'm a bad liar. I feel lucky that I finished it while she was away so I had the opportunity to compose myself a bit. I don't mind bullshitting an Amazon review, although I have a choice there: I can either write a review that's entirely false, or I can just make my star rating a lie and have the text say something like, "Other reviewers have talked about the plot and the characters already. I'd like to talk about the prose!" But there's also the question of how I relate to her about it in person. One thought I have is that I can talk about it without evaluating it -- say things like, "I hope there's a sequel!" or ask questions like, "How did you choose to center the narrative around the most despicable character?" (She knows he's despicable.) Maybe I can just email her a link to the Amazon review and it won't really ever be necessary to have a conversation that moves into the neighborhood of evaluation. Maybe it just won't come up. But I feel like I should think through my strategies. What do you do when someone you care about produces art you really don't like and it's long past the point where constructive criticism is valuable? I mean, I know on some level the answer is lie your ass off, but as I said, I'm bad at it, and my sincere feelings are so deeply negative that I would choke on anything that sounded like global praise.
What would you say?
Is she really likely to hear lavish praise of the prose as criticism of the narrative?
I can't tell whether that "really" is an intensifier or an indication of skepticism. I don't know. She intended to write a thriller with complicated, conflicted characters. It's supposed to be heartrending at the end. I think she's interested in what percentage of the feels her readers felt. But if "really" is meant as skepticism, maybe I shouldn't worry about that, and just focus hard on what I can sincerely say I did like. And I really can be lavish about it. If she gets an Amazon review forwarded to her where I fawn over a bunch of her sentences she might just not notice what I'm not saying, and she might not ask me anything more about what I thought.
I'm just stressing a little bit about it. It feels like I have an unpleasant secret.
I can't tell whether that "really" is an intensifier or an indication of skepticism.
Does it matter?
Praise the prose. She'll like it.
"Welcome to our 'rose. Notice there's no 'p' in our prose. Please keep it that way."
Break down crying, saying you never learned how to read. She'll never bring up her writing again.
Treat it like an ugly baby if she asks. Compliment what you can and ignore the rest. "You must be so proud. You write beautiful prose. I thought it was an interesting decision to [$plot]." If she prods, prevaricate. "Not my thing, but I have idiosyncratic taste in fiction."
That's how you handle ugly babies? I've been saying not to worry because it will probably get less ugly in a few years.
Maybe the "praise sandwich" approach is best.
1. It's great that you guys are doing such a good job raising that baby.
2. If you really wanted an attractive baby, maybe you shouldn't have been with each other.
3. That's a very nice outfit, especially since you clearly do all your shopping at Walmart.
Attractive baby: "Now that's what I call a baby!"
Average baby: "Well, that's something like a baby!"
Ugly baby: "Is that a baby!"
"This is a nice novel but if you want to learn how to write a good one, read some Chuck Tingle."
Ugly baby:
"They can fix that in post"
Moby, did you read the Tingle article I linked a week or so ago?
No. I remember it, but I got distracted before I could finish it.
I just saw enough to realize he was a local.
For the Amazon review: describe the plot/genre, give a tantalizing detail; praise the prose lavishly. In person, find a sequence that you enjoyed (even if it was for the prose) tell her about it, praise the prose.
109: I read in some book that the code for ugly babies is to praise them for being alert, which was funny, because that was the word everyone used to describe my kid, and then everyone had to explain that no, in his case, he's really, really alert, which of course makes it funnier.
My traditional ugly baby compliment is to say they have nice eyes. The other is "Oh, what a sweetheart," or something nondescript ("What long fingers! She'll be a pianist!"). There are so many lukewarm compliments one can deliver in bright, friendly tones. I wouldn't ever have thought of alert, but it's a good one, too.