Alex Kuczynski's Moral Blindness
How is it possible that Lisa Wilson, in a three-sentence, 58-word letter to the editor, can raise more serious and more interesting moral issues surrounding the institution of surrogacy than Alex Kuczynski did in her entire 7,700-word cover story on the subject? I'm not sure, but that's exactly what she did:
If prostitution is unethical, immoral and illegal, why is it O.K. for one woman to pay for the use of another woman’s body? If it’s unethical, immoral and illegal to buy and sell body parts for transplantation, why is it O.K. to rent a uterus? Our morality seems so malleable in the hands of those who feel entitled.
LISA WILSON
Yarmouth, Me.
Thank you, Ms Wilson, for nailing the real fault with this story, instead of getting sidetracked by a silly discussion about the semiotics of the accompanying photographs.
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Del.icio.usFurther Adventures in Fried Pork
Have you been to Back Forty recently? The first thing on the menu is a $4 starter of "Pork Jowl Nuggets with Jalepeno Jam" which is, I swear, the single greatest dish being served in New York City right now. Better than Momofuku's pork buns, better than Eleven Madison Park's suckling pig confit. Go. Eat. Now.
Tasting menus
Pete Wells will tell you, and show you, and talk about, what you get for $1500: a 20-course meal, with paired wines. Gael Greene has the play-by-play, including this:
Several tables have emptied even before the bacon. Foodists have to catch the train back to Dutchess County or find their way home to Tribeca. So I see many chocolate bon bons left behind.
Spending $1500 a head on a meal? That's obscene. But spending $1500 a head on a meal and then heading home before it's even over? Now that's conspicuous consumption.
But it's also something I can understand. A huge multi-course tasting menu with paired wines is exhausting, and often not much fun. A great restaurant meal has to have great food, but it can't be only about the food -- it's also about the guests enjoying -- as opposed to simply being impressed by -- the food. And when you're concentrating on the molecular gastronomy, and the ever-changing wine pairings, especially at a meal which is billed in advance as being incredibly unique and special -- well, then you lose a certain amount of fun.
I don't think I ever want to have wine pairings again, they're too distracting. For me, the best meal is one where I'm the happiest. Good food makes me happy, as does congenial atmosphere, and friendly servers, and great company, and, frankly, not eating in a shopping mall. This is good food, which made me very happy indeed.
While I'm as impressed as the next guy by auteurist pyrotechnics, I always get a whiff of self-congratulatory smugness, both from the chef and from the diners. And sometimes, as happened at one recent 20-course meal which started at 8pm and didn't finish until 2 in the morning, the whole thing can become a chore. I think I'm the kind of person who cares more about the food than about the cooking. But ask me again in a couple of weeks, when I get back from Corton. I might have changed my mind.
Broken link datapoint of the day
Four years ago, Apartment Therapy ran a Sleeper Sofa competition. (Evidently, four years ago the switch from "sofabeds" to "sleeper sofas" had already happened.)
Apartment Therapy put together a shortlist with 15 sofas on it. I found it quite quickly, when I started looking for a sofabed myself. And how many of the links to those 15 sofas are now broken? All of them. People, I'm all in favor of keeping websites fresh. But don't break all your old links when you do so.
Have the Democrats moved to the left?
One way in which 2009 is different from 1993 is that the Democratic Party is far to the left of where it was back then--let alone back in 1977.
Is the Democratic party the only major left-wing party which has moved to the left over the pat 30 years? Or is Brad being a bit contentious/disingenuous here?
The Prop 8 Hypocrites
This is the kind of thing which tipped support for Proposition 8 over the 50% mark:
The NYT boils the story down to one paragraph:
A total of $73 million was spent on the race there, a record for a ballot measure on a social issue, resulting in incessant television and radio commercials from both sides. Advocates of the ban played up their belief that without it, children could be taught about gay marriage in schools, while opponents likened approval to denying fundamental civil rights.
And in Slate, even the alternative thesis that Prop 8 went through thanks to Barack Obama's large African-American support is ultimately discarded in favor of this:
The "Yes on 8" campaign was particularly well-funded and savvy, blanketing the airwaves with ads suggesting that gay marriage would be taught in schools.
I've talked to people who are very angry about this campaign, saying that Proposition 8 has nothing to do with education -- which is, narrowly, true. They say that supporters of the ban talk about not having a problem with two men or two women getting married, so much as with the idea that such a thing might be taught to children.
But if you were really in favor of gay marriage, wouldn't you want to have it taught in schools? What does it even mean to say that you support gay marriage, but you don't want children to be taught that men can marry men, or that women can marry women? That's a point of view which treats gay marriage as some kind of loophole: it's maybe OK for gay people who've already made their mind up, but it's not something we want to be proud of, and in fact it's something from which we should protect our children.
And in any case, if a young girl really can grow up to marry a princess, how on earth would it be possible to ensure that she couldn't learn that fact in school? If gay marriage is a reality, then yes of course it's going to be taught in schools -- and quite right too.
But I am confused as to why this education tactic seems, by all accounts, to have worked so well. I can see three possibilities:
- A lot of Californians really did support "loophole marriage". If you're already an out gay person in a long-term committed relationship, then what the hell, sure, go ahead and get married, it makes lots of people really happy and it's not like you're not going to be gay otherwise -- plus, maybe then gay people will shut up about this marriage thing already. But the implications, like gay marriages becoming so societally accepted that they get taught in schools and generally become part of the culture, are a little bit scarier: it's the point at which homosexuality moves out of "the privacy of their own home" and into family units. So you vote Yes on Prop 8 because while you're OK with them being able to get gay-married, you're not OK with us being able to get gay-married.
- It's the old "gays are pedophiles" thing, dressed up just enough to be acceptable. At the end of the ad above, it says "Protect our Children." From what? Obviously, from The Gays.
- It's simply an excuse to vote with your prejudice rather than your head. As Ta-Nehisi Coates says, "If someone wants to give me a reason why gay people shouldn't be able to marry that doesn't, at its root, boil down to 'yuck,' I guess I'd love to hear it." And the argument about children and education, while not being much of an argument at all, at least is something you can use to kid yourself that there's a good reason to vote Yes and try and stop yucky gay marriage from taking root in California.
Clearly, the Christians who pumped millions of dollars into this campaign didn't feel comfortable making an explicitly Christian argument for it, so they pimped out their children instead. I hope that by the time those children become old enough to vote, we will have gay marriage, not only in California but also in the rest of the country. It does seem historically inevitable. But it's taking far too long, and retrograde steps like this are a particularly tough blow: it's much harder to lose something you have than it is never to have it in the first place.
Indeed, for the first time in my three years of marriage, I felt ashamed of my married status today, like I was perpetuating some kind of apartheid institution. Obviously, I don't kid myself that any gay person would appreciate my getting divorced in solidarity with their plight, and that's not going to happen. But the aftertaste of Proposition 8 is nasty indeed, especially when it was so overwhelmingly supported by the blacks who gave Barack Obama the largest margin of victory any presidential candidate has ever had in California -- bigger even than Reagan. And when its passage is accompanied by so much hypocrisy, it's harder to take still.
Victory
Only twice have I seen lots of American flags on the streets of downtown New York. Once was after 9/11; the other time was last night, after the election of Barack Obama. An impromptu midnight street party sprang up on St Mark's Place, between 1st Avenue and Avenue A; one apartment put some speakers out on their fire escape and started pumping out Queen, Kanye, Biggie Smalls, and other crowd-pleasers. And the ecstatic throng below would scream and chant: "Yes We Can!" "O-ba-ma!" "U. S. A.!" At one point they even sang the national anthem. The cops were sensible, and let the party run until about 2:30am, blocking off the block to traffic and doing little more than keeping a careful eye on things.
I'd known in advance that Obama would win -- and when Pennsylvania and Ohio both went Democratic, the result was a foregone conclusion. But the emotion we all felt on seeing him officially declared president-elect -- that was something else entirely. There were quite a few tears shed; the vision of Obama and Biden on stage, with the old white guy being the sidekick and the young black guy being the president-elect, was indelible.
So last night was great, but this morning is horrible, couldn't we have just a few days at least to savor the victory? I'm hugely disappointed in California; the result on Prop 8 goes to show that this country has a very long way to go, beyond electing a black president, before it can truly say that all its citizens are equal.
A couple of pictures from St Mark's Place last night:
Jargon Watch, Media Edition
In her Fishbowl NY exit interview, Rachel Sklar says that she's "excited to do stuff in other verticals". Earlier today, a friend of mine in the media unselfconciously used the words "surface" and "obsolete" as verbs in rapid succession. Both of these people are editorial-side employees. Or would have been considered such, anyway, before the distinction between editorial- and business-side started blurring so much.
The Parallel Universe of Leadership Events
(Cross-posted from Market Movers)
The World Business Forum is a two-day event; I only made the second afternoon. But even that was enough to almost make my head explode. I knew in theory that there's an almost insatiable appetite for motivational speakers and leadership tips from boldface names. But seeing the event in real life, at Radio City Music Hall, only served to bring home to me the reality of this whole parallel universe.
Before each session, the lights would dim and the audience -- thousands of us -- would be subjected to a full-frontal audiovisual assault of extremely noisy ads for various conference sponsors, including Fox Business News. And just in case the message wasn't hammered home enough, Fox had placed promotional antimacassars on the backs of all the seats, advertising the fact that it broadcasts in HD. Which presumably is the kind of thing which gets conference attendees to watch it.
Then the speakers would come on: a parade of successful men in expensive suits walking purposefully around the stage while talking about vague concepts like Greatness or Leadership or Success. In a sense, I can see why that's necessary: the audience was so broad that anything more specific would risk being irrelevant to many. But no one ever seemed to credit the audience with any extrapolation skills: the speakers made sure always to do all the necessary extrapolation in advance. Rather than being able to map X's experience directly across to their own situation, attendees were instead only able to apply the simple principles which X had generated for them from his own experience.
Indeed, the whole thing felt very much like television: the same ultra-low signal-to-noise ratio, the same feel that everything was targeted to the lowest common denominator, the same need to intersperse the serious stuff (Mohammed Yunus and Tony Blair, yesterday afternoon) with a StrongManager™ who was great at peppering his slogans with jokes.
Most depressing of all, the event had television's astonishing ability to take reasonably smart people and turn them into blabbering morons. Jeremy Siegel came on for a few minutes, to talk about the credit crunch; here's a verbatim sentence.
We need to substitute illiquid mortgage-backed treasuries with high-quality US treasury bonds known as tier 1 capital to get the banks lending again: if we do that, we will get to a point where we can liquefy these deposits.
This isn't Jeremy Siegel, Wharton professor; it's Jeremy Siegel, the "wizard of Wharton", and a man who is utterly unafraid to make a complete fool of himself so long as he gets paid lots of money for his appearance.
Of course, he didn't make a complete fool of himself, because the audience wasn't really paying attention to what he was saying. The idea isn't to write down Siegel's wizardly words and then puzzle over them later, deciding that they make no sense at all: the idea is to get the impression of having been exposed to Very Important People -- people whose Importance presumably will rub off in some manner onto the members of the audience.
For me, the whole experience was like being an atheist in church. The president of Cadillac came on stage, and talked about how "as leaders, our job is to unleash our teams' strength" -- and no one so much as giggled at how ridiculous it all was. One of the organizers of the conference, sitting down to interview Tony Blair, actually asked him: "What are the main three or four characteristics of a successful leader?"
Blair played gamely along: I'm sure he was being paid an astonishing amount of money to do so. But in the pause before his answer, you could feel his frustration and brief twinge of self-loathing. There's only one correct answer to that question, and it's the one answer you're never allowed to give.
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