Subject: subway etiquette
Date: June 19, 2006
To: New York magazine
I was surprised that your etiquette issue made no mention of people who stand blocking the doors of subway cars when there are other places in the car to sit or stand. Obviously in a fully packed car all bets are off, but otherwise these people are making it all but impossible for their fellow citizens to get on and off the train, for no imaginable reason other than sheer laziness or obliviousness, as they have to wait five minutes for four people to squeeze into an all-but-empty train. This is arguably a greater crime than holding the doors. Those who walk onto a train and then stop directly inside the doors without moving to either side are particularly reprehensible and should probably be deported or at least forced to wear a special patch on their clothing.
Subject: cowardice?
Date: April 26, 2006
To: The New York Times
In "Pop Culture Beats Politics," Caryn James calls Thank You for Smoking "a cowardly film" because its tobacco-lobbyist hero, who wants to put smokers back on screen, never is shown smoking himself. James acknowledges in passing that "the satire is more about spin than smoking" (an understatement), but still she judges the choice to keep the smoking off-stage to be "hypocritical."
I wonder whether she finds Wag the Dog hypocritical for not perpetrating an enormous hoax on America or thinks The Ring is cowardly for not actually spitting up ghosts from the screen to murder its audience.
Subject: new filmmaking rules?
Date: April 7, 2006
To: The New York Times
In his review of the film When Do We Eat? (which I have not seen), Neil Genzlinger writes, "It's fine—healthy, even—to treat religious holidays with a little levity, but a certain respect is also mandatory." Mandatory? Is he kidding?
When did this rule get written, that films must display any level of respect for any institution, religious or otherwise? The film itself seems not at all interesting, but this is a rare instance where a negative review makes me want to go see the film, just to spite the reviewer.
Subject: "Here I Am Taking My Own Picture"
Date: February 18, 2006
To: The New York Times
Your article claims that "technology alone can't explain the trend" of kids taking their own pictures. However, the article fails to mention except in passing the single most important aspect of digital photography as it pertains to this trend: the ability to see your photos immediately after taking them. Add to that the fact that one need never pay to have a single print developed, and there's little msytery left over.
Maybe in 1960 kids didn't take pictures of themselves with a Kodak Brownie, but it wasn't because they were less prone to self-aggrandizement: it was because they'd have to wait whoever-knows-how-long to get that print developed, and it would have cost them some amount of money, however little. Compare the new photography to looking in a mirror (the 1960s version of the same thing), and then ask yourself whether kids were humbler back in the day.
The effect of having each photograph be totally free, totally disposable, and immediately available cannot be underestimated—nor, it seems, can the baby-boom generation's hunger for condescending and often alarmist pop psychology about how superficial kids have somehow become.
Subject: naming solution not completely satisfying
Date: February 5, 2006
To: The New York Times
The problem of married names is a stumper, and I applaud the Rudorens' innovation: the invention of a whole new name. The idea is admirable. However, I am far from ready to call the problem solved.
Ms. Rudoren gives as a key reason for her decision that she "didn't want to have a different name from [her] future children." But unless her intention is to establish a dynasty instead of a precedent, she will have a different name from her future children—as soon as they themselves marry and change their own names as their parents did. (That is unless they decide to go the more traditional route, in which case she'll likely have a different name from her future grandchildren.)
At least three grandparents' names are generally scrapped in the naming of a single child, and it would seem the main (nonhyphenated) alternative to this—the Rudorens'—is to scrap all four (or to melt down two). Maybe the best solution of all would be to return to a more old-fashioned naming system: if we had names like Emily of New Brunswick, or Michael son of Bill and Sue, or brown-eyed Sara, then no one could feel slighted when baby got a name.
Subject: the real force behind liberal-baiting
Date: January 17, 2006
To: Harper's magazine
Thomas Frank emphasizes the fact that our nation's conservatives frequently adopt a threatened attitude toward what they imagine to be a hateful liberal elite, when in fact liberals are a far less powerful minority. Although Frank is wise to note this seeming discrepancy, and although the political perversity in question is indeed revealing, it would be wrong to find any irony or paradox in it.
To someone of a liberal, humanist mind-set, the straightforwardness of the conservatives' real position might appear counterintuitive or even self-contradictory, but its actual coherence is evident in one of the examples Frank cites, in which Al Franken is imagined as knowing nothing about baseball (when in reality he is a big fan). The slur, of course, is that liberals are so snobby and out of touch with American values that they probably don't even like sports.
That's the rub. Speaking as someone who doesn't like sports, I can testify personally to the fact that no one in this country doesn't like sports. Political belief has nothing to do with it: sports are just about everybody's common ground. Some people care less about it than others, but to go so far as to dislike sports, particularly if you are a man, is to cast yourself in the role of a pissy eccentric: incomprehensible at best, but likely bordering on loathsome. Certainly lonesome, non–sports fandom is a true minority position. To push Al Franken into that category is to make him less powerful, not more.
Conservatives don't need to pretend that liberals are in charge: unlike most of us lefties, who tend to have some kneejerk sympathy for the little guy (even when sometimes unwarranted), conservatives are perfectly happy to demonize the underdog—maybe even at their happiest. The picture they draw of liberals is not of an imaginary overclass but of a dangerous, alien minority, a group of rightfully marginalized deviants who are trying unjustly, outrageously, to exercise their immoral influence over the right-minded minority. That's what liberal-baiting really means, or what at least it has come to mean. The Republican party has become our Nationalist party, as Anatol Lieven has suggested, and the imaginary enemy is not a threat from "above," but very much from "below" or at least from "outside"; not the danger of monolithic oppression, but of subversive dissent.
[No subject]
Date: October 20, 2005
To: USA Today [via web site]
Your article about oral sex among teenagers ("Teen define sex in new ways") makes two crucial mistakes:
The first is imagining that this is news. As I know as a 28-year-old, and as your own statistics show (numbers for boys are about the same as they were in 1995, 88–90% of all adults 25–44 have had oral sex), young people have had these relaxed attitudes toward oral sex for at least a decade.
The second is concluding that intimacy is in danger. This is based simply on poor reasoning. James Wagoner thinks the changing attitudes suggest a "disconnect between intimate sexual behavior and emotional connection," and Sabrina Weill thinks they represent "confusion about what is normal behavior." But isn't the whole point that the concept of intimacy has changed and that oral sex is not in fact all that intimate anymore? And in what sense can kids be said to be confused about normal behavior if oral sex has in fact become the norm?
The truth is that attitudes have simply changed—and given that oral sex is in fact safer than intercourse (as your article acknowledges), it's not at all clear why that should be considered a problem.
Subject: "All Ears for Tom Cruise"
Date: July 26, 2005
To: The New York Times
I agree with Nicholas Kristof's sad evaluation of our news media's priorities ("All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt"), but I wish he had made some effort to offer an explanation for this sad state of affairs: without understanding a problem, how can we hope to solve it? It seems clear that the reason the news will always focus on celebrities instead of genocide is that celebrities are more fun than genocide, and the news is now unofficially (and in some cases officially) entertainment. To change that, we would need either to change the taste of the population or to make the news media see itself not as just another business in the free market, but rather as an institution serving a vital public need.
Subject: On [Bull]
Date: February 14, 2005
To: The New York Times
In "A Princeton Philosopher's Unprintable Book Title," philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains that he chose his "unprintable" book title "because I wanted to talk about [bull] without any [bull]." What a pity that The New York Times isn't up to that task.
What was once perhaps an admirable commitment to some sort of meaningful standard appears increasingly frivolous and embarrassing—and is, at this point, really only so much [bull].
Subject: proofreading help
Date: September 12, 2001
To: The New York Times
On your web site, there is currently an article with the headline, "Bush Vows to Avenge Attackers." In case you plan to use that headline in your print edition, I should point out that you have misused the word "Avenge": the headline makes no sense by any current definition of the verb "to avenge," unless what Bush vowed was to avenge the deaths of the suicide terrorists, which seems exceedingly unlikely.
The headline should read either, "Bush Vows to Avenge Attackers' Victims," or even the archaic, "Bush Vows to Avenge Upon Attackers." The sense you use, "To take vengeance UPON," has been obsolete since the 17th century.
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