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Hot off the presses from Publishers Lunch:
UCLA Medical Center OB/GYN Dr. Michael Lu’s HOW TO MAKE A SMART AND HEALTHY BABY: What You Need to Know Before You Get Pregnant, revealing the latest science on how preconception is a critical period for a child’s lifelong health and development while offering easy-to-follow advice including how to eat the right foods, undergo an immune tune-up and detoxify one’s environment, to Caroline Sutton at Collins, in a pre-empt, by Dan Ambrosio at Vigliano Associates (World).
I’ve written before about my belief that the parent-child spending complex originates in a totally understandable attempt to control our children’s future lives, so that they never know a moment of unhappiness, ill health or other misfortune. I’m filing this book in that category.
Here’s the real evidence the economy is in the crapper, courtesy of Craig’s List:
HUGE sale -rain or shine Tent if it rains – 1000’s of things from several families – kid’s stuff, electronics, clothing, art work, household items, electronics, TOOLS, Bikes, toys, sculpture, games, designer linens, furniture – Brand new Executive Gifts, never opened – Way too many different objects to name – all at bargain bargain prices. We have to clear out our stuff ! THIS SATURDAY and SUNDAY, June 28 and June 29 , 9AM – 5 PM. 26 Hilltop Road off 121 North, WACCABUC.
Waccabuc? This is a town so exclusive, no one has ever heard of it.
This intrepid reporter promises to get on the case promptly and report back.
The news that shouldn’t be news study of the week comes courtesy of Rutgers University and the journal Politics and Policy. Researchers took a look at the academics offered spots on a number of op-ed pages including the The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The results: men wrote more than 80% of the academic op-eds at The New York Times and — drum roll, please — 97% of such op-eds at The Wall Street Journal. In a demonstration of grace, noblesse oblige and chivalry, editors at the Times and Journal would not comment on the findings.
Like all bibliophiles, I find there are too many books to read and not enough time to get to even one percent of them. As a result, every so often I will try to catch up with books I always meant to read but somehow never did. This month has been a particularly productive. First, I finally acted on the advice of hundreds of folks over the years, and picked up a copy of Eric Ambler’s classic A Coffin for Dimitrios, which was indeed as good as promised. But instead of sticking with Ambler, I got intrigued by the 1970s.
Let me backtrack. Last month I read the compelling revisionist history The Sixties Unplugged, by Gerard DeGroot. DeGroot takes on the decade from a left-wing perspective, arguing that aside from a few genuine moments of revolutionary change such as the Stonewall riots and the resultant cry for equal rights for homosexuals, most 60s movements – including the anti-war movement — were narcissistic in origin and quickly subsumed by capitalist interests. It’s an incredible work of history, one that challenges just about every belief you have about what you think you know, and leaves you desperate for more information at the same time. So I moved on to the 1970s. And because I wanted to see the decade from the completely opposite political perspective, I checked Neo-Con David Frum’s How We Got Here out of my local library.
All I can say is that it is a tribute to the uniquely fascinating properties of the 1970s, which is indeed a truly under-appreciated decade in our nation’s history, that I was able to read as much of this book as I did. I won’t waste anyone’s time ripping apart a book that is almost a decade old, but I will take moment to note it did provide a few moments of unintentional insight, particularly into the hypocrisy of the neo-cons. One in particular stands out: Frum’s look at the inflation of the 1970s.
Low interest rates are very pleasant, but they can also stimulate inflation. Ideally, the Federal Reserve acts as a thermostat. It lowers interest rates and injects cash into the economy during recessions, and it raises interest rates and removes cash during booms, thus preserving a stable, stead price level. But if the Federal Reserve were to continue lowering interest rates during a boom, cash would soon become ridiculously over-plentiful and its value would begin to tumble.
So where was Mr. Frum during the Greenspan era? Oh, right. He was busy adding such lovely phrases as “axis of evil” to President George W. Bush’s lexicon and clearly too busy to take on the disastrous economic policies of the Fed.
As for me, I just put the well-regarded Something Happened: A Political and Cultural Overview of the Seventies on reserve at the library.
My out-to-lunch parenting skills finally explained, courtesy of Dutch researchers. Their study also explains, no doubt, why I found this article from The Weekly Standard so compelling. The title says it all. It’s called, “The Kindergarchy: Every Child a Dauphin.” Go read it. The author posits that there is something very, very wrong with how we raise our children today. The money quote:
My mother never read to me, and my father took me to no ballgames, though we did go to Golden Gloves fights a few times. When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life.
As someone who spent $700 last year at a school auction last year to have a teacher take pictures of my younger son over the course of the school year, I think the author’s parents were on to something.
Never mind Stuff White People Like. Check out the hilariously un-pc Blognigger. Let it be noted for the record that the rage of us native NYC kids who can no longer afford to live within the boundaries five boroughs (ok, I mean the gentrified parts of the five boroughs) knows no bounds. His side-splitting take-down of the reception newbie Brooklynites are giving to the opening of an Ikea in Red Hook cannot be described but must be read. Then there is the saga of the homeless man on the A train …
I should note there is some debate on Gawker as to whether he’s for real or not. I just got off the phone with another native NYC pal now living in Westchester exile and we agree: He’s for real and if he’s not, we don’t care. You go, Blognigger!
Years ago, the incomparable Ron Rosenbaum wrote a terrific essay called “My Theater Problem — and Ours,” in which he postulated the concept of “the wrong performance.” Instead of paraphrasing, I will quote directly:
I always seem to be seeing plays that seem utterly unlike what everyone else seems to have seen. I’m forever going to things that have been raved over by critics, chattered about by the chattering classes, awarded prizes and grants, and finding myself thinking — in those moments when I can keep myself awake from the industrial-strength tedium they induce — that this is the most cliched, empty, contrived piece of ranting I have ever seen. Afterward, I’d find myself wondering, Is it possible I went to the wrong theater; this second-rate, self-satsified, soporific contrivance can’t be the same stuff that people are taking seriously, can it?
My husband and I are such fans of this essay that its nomenclature has been adopted into the house lingo. If one of us reads a book, sees a movie, or experiences another such cultural event in a way different from the mainstream of opinion, we don’t say we disagree with the conventional take, we say, for example, we saw “the wrong movie.”
The latest wrong movie viewed by this unfortunate blogger: Kung Fu Panda. Manohla Dargis at The New York Timessaw a “diverting and visually arresting” film, “a grab bag of gentle jokes, sage lectures, helpful lessons and kicky fights.” Other reviewers were equally as wowed. The film I saw? An incomprehensible melange of fat jokes, violence, father-son issues, violence, Cain and Abel allusions, violence, buddy film and, yes, violence. I must have been in the wrong auditorium. Bleh.
As someone who fell into co-parenting (those of you who know me know both my husband and I work out of the house these days), I’m here to tell everyone what is wrong with this on-the-face-of-it amazing advance in sexual relations. In the time my husband and I spend negotiating the logistics of school pick-ups, playdate organization and the like, one of us could have just done the job themselves. As a result, all l I could think as I read Lisa Belkin’s article on co-parenting in the NYT Magazine this weekend was, “Why didn’t she ask these couples how many hours they spent arguing about who would do what and then devising the organization charts that kept their homes running?”
Folks, there has to be a better way.
Liza Was Here compared my voice in my recently published essay “The Mean Moms” to that of Anne Lamott. Thank you, fellow Smith College grad! And thanks to the magic of Google alerts, I now know of another great blog worth reading.
As for “The Mean Moms,” it’s in the recently published anthology The Maternal is Political. Check out the book. It’s great.
Friday marked my final appearance as snack mom at any nursery school, anywhere, ever again. I got very sentimental, even though I had spent the entire year attempting to avoid the job the way a medieval peasant might well have tried to avoid catching the plague. I read Rockabye Crocodile to the assembled masses and sniffed a lot. When school starts in the fall, it will be the first time in nine years I won’t have a baby at home or a child attending a limited hour’s nursery school.
I came home and signed on to The New York Times to discover that both the both the price of oil and the unemployment rate had surged. Another story announced massive job cuts (and probable newspaper destroying cuts) by a former employer. I sniffed more, suspecting that many of the things I’ve considered great problems over the past several years will, in retrospect, feel like very frivolous and luxurious things to have spent any time worrying about at all.
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