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Meghan Daum |
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I've long believed that the deepest divide in American society is not the lines separating genders, races and classes but, rather, the gulf between people who have normal, easily pronounceable names and those who don't.
For those of us who lust after real estate the way certain overexposed television-turned-movie characters lust after designer clothes, "six months" has become a mythical countdown to our version of the Barney's warehouse sale. Perpetually put forth as the amount of time before the housing market reaches its nadir, "six months" is part mirage, part the product of a highly speculative math formula. It's the magic number that keeps us believing that someday in the near future, all deals will transform into quantifiable steals.
Back in 1992, just before Bill Clinton managed to elbow Jerry Brown, his last remaining competitor, out of the Democratic presidential nomination, my father said something to me that I have never forgotten. "I don't understand," he said, "why you're not more enthusiastic about Clinton. He's got that impressive wife. I would think you'd be excited to see a woman like that in the White House."
If there's anything that sends me into a vortex of nihilism and despair faster than getting a Shania Twain song stuck in my head, it's starting to think about "Within the Context of No-Context." The seminal essay, by George W.S. Trow, is a doomsday prophecy about the corrosive effects of electronic media. It's also turned out to be a massive understatement.
Nearly a decade ago, I moved from New York City to Lincoln, Neb. In that new land, I observed many strange things. For instance, workers showed up the same day you called them, and usually started the job the day after that. Later, when I moved to a tiny house on 12 acres on the city's rural outskirts, I had a landlord who regularly called and thanked me for paying the rent.
If you're white and you like stuff, maybe you've bookmarked the Internet blog Stuff White People Like. The creation of Christian Lander, a 29-year-old Culver City copywriter, it's an ever-growing list of the kind of privileged preoccupations that traditionally are coded "white." Examples include Not Having a TV ("the number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don't have a TV"), Indie Music ("To a white person, being a fan of a band before they get popular is one of the most important things they [sic] can do with their life") and, a bit abstrusely, Awareness ("White people ... firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through "awareness").
Barbara Walters' memoir "Audition," in which the legendary TV newswoman admits to a lifetime of chronically low self-esteem, hit bookstores Tuesday. That was the same day the results of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries made Hillary Rodham Clinton's indefatigability look more like Bush-level delusion than admirable perseverance.
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who invented LSD, died Tuesday at the age of 102. Although psychedelic drug enthusiasts are busy writing online tributes to Hofmann (who died from a heart attack, not from attempting to chew off his elbow in an acid-induced freak-out), there's also a sense that few people under the age of 30 have heard much about LSD, let alone the man who discovered it working for Sandoz Laboratories in 1943.
At Yale University, an undergraduate art student is saying she spent the academic year inseminating herself and then taking steps to induce miscarriages (or abortions, depending on your semantic preference) for the sake of making a very deep statement about ... something.
Years ago, at a dinner party on Manhattan's Upper West Side, I found myself in a shouting match about whether it was fair to make fun of intellectuals. The person with whom I was arguing, herself the daughter of prominent scholars, said she was offended by the work of Woody Allen because of his mocking portrayal of educated, urban elites.