As a follow-up to my earlier post about the mission creep of sexual objectification into places where it just doesn’t belong, here are two more examples. I could write a book, or at least a longish screed-pamphlet, on all that I find wrong with NPR’s “Morning Edition” as it’s evolved in the last ...

I was going to write about this yesterday, but for many hours I was convinced that it had to be an Onion article, or a social-anthropological experiment designed by an ambitious graduate student. But, as I’ve written before, parody is endangered in an unhinged culture where anything that you can ...

If there’s one thing Abercrombie and Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries doesn’t want, it’s non-skinny women. The company won’t make clothes in larger sizes because they want to attract the “cool kids” in high school, Jeffries explains, and non-skinny girls don’t fit the bill.  The company does make larger men ...

Have you noticed how women in almost every professional field today are subjected to a hotness rating? Here’s a rating of the sexiness of women in academically elite colleges. Then there’s the fellow who wrote a blog a few weeks ago listing hot female authors he wouldn’t mind sleeping with (they ...

What’s the most perfect, ideal, pure act of sexual consent that you can imagine? Maybe it would be you and your most favorite lover, ever, in a hotel room for the afternoon: “You and me! Right here! Let’s have sex!” you both say—at the same time, out loud, in the same language, soberly ...

You spend a lot of time talking about sharing and alternatives to ownership when your child’s in preschool. In the morning story circle you don’t want to be an avaricious, cookie-hoarding Vanderbilt. It seems morally arbitrary, that we spend so much time instilling an ethic of sharing that we’ll ...

America’s nuclear waste is all dressed up in dry cask storage, with nowhere to go. In 1987, the Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was designated as a “deep geologic dispersal” site for waste generated by the commercial nuclear power industry. Like a boorish houseguest, the industry drinks itself silly with ...

Cruelty preoccupies me. I find that stories of cruelty stay with me, hauntingly, and infiltrate deeply. I cannot conceive of it in its most basic elements, the physical act of hurting another person. Unintentional psychic injuries against others are all too understandable to me, if not all but ...

It’s hard to absorb and write about stories that break your heart. When I saw the headline about Rehtaeh Parsons, who was gang-raped when she was 15 and committed suicide two years later, I thought the writer must be mistaken, and meant a teenager in California, Audrie Pott, who was also gang-raped ...

The ancient Greek poet Archilochus said that the fox knows many things about a little, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin used the fox and hedgehog distinction in his brilliant essay about Leo Tolstoy’s view of history and his longing for a unifying insight and ...

While I was writing a column on Victoria’s Secret and their “Bright Young Things” marketing campaign, I learned in the same set of articles about a new worry among adolescent girls about a “thigh gap.” This is when you have a space between your upper thighs when you’re standing with your knees ...

I think a little perspective is order. The incendiary advice of Susan Patton ‘77, a Princeton alumna, that Princeton women find husbands while at college and marry early, has crashed the Princeton website and generated millions of comments, most of them outraged, although some supportive ...

Back in the bad old days that are always threatening to repeat on us, it was alleged that rape victims were “asking for it.”  We were supposed to know that the woman was asking for it—even when she obviously wasn’t, and even when she was saying no— because of how she was dressed:  Too ...

Kate Losse reviewed Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In unfavorably in Dissent. For this reason, her publicist tweeted that Losse is going to “a special place in hell,” reserved for women who don’t support other women. First, I’m so tired of this kind of slapdash, hyperbolic nastiness. Second, has it ...

This week my son’s school was canceled for the day, in the usual hyperventilating overreaction to weather. At first the school proposed to open two hours late, and I was proud of their courage. I should tell you that the snow was more like rain, all day, and easily navigated by non-super-sized cars ...