The Narrative Failure of Barack Obama

Drew Westen, explaining how Barack Obama has failed to write or take part of a story that made sense to the American people:

The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

Real Identity

Alexis Madrigal makes the case that Google+ and Facebook are asking us, as members of society, to do something we’ve never done before:

Every statement you make on Google Plus or Facebook is persistent and strongly attached to your real identity through your name. Both services allow you to change settings to make your statements more or less public, which solves some problems. However, participating in public life on the services requires attaching your name to your statements. On the boulevards and town squares of Facebook, you can’t just say, “Down with the government,” with the knowledge that only a small percentage of the people who hear you could connect your statement to you. But the information is still being recorded, presumably in perpetuity. That means that if a government or human resources researcher or plain old enemy wants to get a hold of it, it is possible.

The pseudonym advocates note that being allowed to pick and choose a different name solves some of these problems. One can choose to tightly couple one’s real-world identity and online identity… or not. One can choose to have multiple identities for separate networks. In the language we were using earlier, pseudonyms allow statements to be public and persistent, but not attached to one’s real identity.

The Ethics of Using a 10-Year Old for Fashion Photography

Jenna Sauers, writing astutely about French fashion sensation Thylane Loubry Blondeau:

Even posing questions like these about the sexualization of children is discomfiting. To ask is this child too sexy is to put a child’s body under a kind of scrutiny that is (and should be) strange and unnatural, and that’s not a thing that should be taken lightly. But it’s one thing for a parent to take a photo of his or her little girl while she’s running around a beach in a pair of swimsuit bottoms. It’s another for a fashion magazine to take a photo of a 10-year-old sitting topless on a bed and publish it for a global audience.

The Power of a Photograph

The above photograph was published on a front page story in The New York Times on August 2nd, 2011. It is shocking, and it stirs the soul in ways that words most likely could not. Salon breaks down why the newspaper decided to run it, and whether it will have any impact on the debate (or lack thereof) over the situation in Somalia:

The graphic quality of Hicks’ photo certainly matches the stark portrait painted by Gettleman’s reporting. And executive editor Bill Keller told Salon that the choice to feature the image so prominently was uncontroversial in the Times newsroom: “We’d already decided to front Jeffrey’s powerful story, and it would have felt like journalistic malfeasance not to include Tyler’s powerful photography,” he said. “I know many readers found the picture disturbing. That’s good. The deaths of thousands of Somali children ought to disturb us, at least.”

Is Being a Playboy Bunny Empowering?

Linda Holmes, with a devastating critique on NBC’s really far-fetched pitch for its new show, The Playboy Club:

[Executive producer] Hodge argued, in the end, that the interaction between a Bunny and a customer at a table was all about “buoying women up and giving them the power,” because the men weren’t allowed to touch the Bunnies. Now, remember — these women are waitresses. They’re not prostitutes. They’re strangers, unknown to the men, who are serving drinks. And he is arguing, in effect, that they have been buoyed up and given the power because they are granted the right, while tottering around in painful costumes and high heels for the gratification of their customers, not to be physically touched. They have all the power because the club tells patrons that they’re not supposed to touch them. They don’t really have the power of doing anything; just the power of withholding. Essentially, the argument is that for these women, the highest power they can possibly hold, and what truly elevates them, is the power to deny men the opportunity to touch them.

The Facebook Birthday Experiment

David Plotz gave himself multiple birthdays on Facebook to see if people would mindlessly send him great birthday wishes each time. The results are depressingly unsurprising:

[T]he Facebook fake birthday experiment did end up confirming my worst fears about the network. All too many birthday wishes are autonomic, sent without thought or personal feeling. It’s one thing to remember your friend’s birthday because you took him out a decade ago for his drunken 21st birthday debauch. It’s much lamer to “remember” your friend’s birthday because Facebook told you to.

Electronic Calendars Are The Tool of the Devil

Still in New Zealand and heading home soon. Lots to share, but I can’t resist posting this blog post by Joshua Topolsky, in which he ruthlessly destroys a moronic NYTimes article about the prevalence of paper calendars:

[H]ow can anyone repeat this luddite drivel with a straight face? It’s not just that much of what is printed in this article is untrue — a lot of it comes off as downright silly, and the author doesn’t seem to take a moment to ask any of these people to qualify their statements. It’s like she wrote the piece to back up arguments made by those profiled. The result is a piece that seems more intent on propagating one skewed view than it does with telling a story that has legitimate meaning.