"Men, to the best of my knowledge, don’t even read."

"When’s the last time you heard a man say, 'I’ve been reading this great book, you’d really like it’? My girlfriend always tells me about these books she’s reading, and I don’t even see her reading the book! Where does this book live?"

A quote from Bryan Goldberg, the founder of the website Bustle, quoted in this New Yorker article titled "FROM MARS/A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing." I enjoyed the whole article — Goldberg raised $6.5 million to start up a website for women, though he knew he knew nothing about what women want to read. He just knew there was money to be made from advertising if he could deliver big numbers of young female readers, and he hired a whole lot of young women to work for $50 or $100 a day writing blog posts about whatever interests them (because what interests them will kinda sorta already be what interests young women). His goal is 50 million readers a month, and as of the publication of that article (last September), he'd gotten the traffic up to 14,000 a day — i.e., about half the traffic I get here, with just my own self writing, albeit not to the demographic most loved by advertisers, even though I am sure that some of you do get excited by the newest innovation in eyeliner.


But what got me thinking about that quote about reading was running acrosss this new article in Slate: "Dan Kois’ Favorite Books of 2013." Dan, a man, apparently read enough books to have 15 favorites in one year. How many books do you need to read in a year to have 15 favorites? I'd say at least 1 a week. But he's the book editor there, so he'd better do some reading. The truth is, if you put me in a room with all the books sent to the book editor in a year, I could produce a 15 favorites list in a single 8-hour workday. You just need a methodology, right? Spend less than 10 seconds on most books until you've got about 30 that seem as though you're going to like them. Maybe 30 more that you'll give a chance. Go through the first pile of 30, 5 minutes per book, and see if you get 15 you like. If not, proceed to the second pile. Put another 10 minutes into each of the chosen 15 to check that you haven't been fooled. If you find any clunkers, swap in one of the also rans from the top 60, maybe something with a colorful title or strange author name. I see Dan has on his list "There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself: Love Stories," by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Ha ha. Does my method sound like a male way to construct a top 15 list? It would amuse me.

"If you are a Republican and you like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, then you probably already have your candidate for the 2016 presidential campaign."

"If you do not like Christie, then your candidate for 2016 is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker," says John Dickerson at Slate, who I doubt is keen on helping Republicans, but check out his argument. Excerpt:

Walker has near hero status in the grassroots for taking on Wisconsin’s public sector unions. Cruz talks about taking stands on principle, but he lost his fight. Walker took a stand, was targeted by the full force of the Democratic machine, and stayed alive. He won a recall election with a larger margin than his original victory. He raised $30 million for that race, so he knows how to tap wealthy donors. Social conservatives also consider him one of their own for his pro-life views and his pedigree: His father was a Baptist minister.

Speaking of the forceful machinery of Walker opposition, the Wall Street Journal had this the other day: "Wisconsin Political Speech Raid/Subpoenas hit allies of Scott Walker as his re-election campaign looms." Now, people can stop posting that link in the comments threads and emailing me about it. It's nice to see the WSJ get involved, but from my perspective out here in Wisconsin, the John Doe investigation became tedious long ago. I do see that there are some new subpoenas. Noted.

Anyway, Walker's book "Unintimidated" is now available, beginning today. Subtitle: "A Governor's Story and a Nation's Challenge."

Don't confuse it with "Unintimidated," subtitle "Wisconsin Sings Truth to Power," which is a coffee table book of photographs celebrating anti-Walker protesters... at least the ones who put their protests in musical form. At only $31.50, it makes a great Christmas gift for the right person.

"But as you sit there sipping wine and eating pork belly, watching a marathon of The Sopranos — which sounds like a very nice evening..."

"... keep in mind that the distance between you and some imagined figure pounding Mountain Dew and Quarter Pounders while watching hours of Pawn Stars is not so vast."

Willa Paskin, tweaking the snobbish consciences of Slate readers who may have lost touch with old-fashioned it-will-rot-your-brain snobbery about watching too much television.

"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

"Revealed: Bush ancestor was heavily invested in kidnapping Africans into slavery."

I assume this report is true and that the tainted blood of the Bush clan is interesting, but why is it being revealed now?

Because Obama's in trouble, and it's the next thing that could be pulled out of the country's miscellaneous bag o' distractions?

Because Jeb's in that lineage too, and he's in the running for next President, and he said something embarrassing recently, so it was a good time to kick him?

Because the George Zimmerman trial is getting underway, and that hasn't worked out as well as some in the race-baiting industry had hoped, and maybe some unrelated racial disturbance would resonate?

Because Paula Deen said something really stupid about slavery, so the editors at Slate looked around in their storehouse of as-yet-unpublished articles and found one that had slavery?

Are people laughing at Charles Ramsey?

And if so, is it racist? Or is the Slate blogger talking about "The Troubling Viral Trend of the 'Hilarious' Black Neighbor" the one who's channeling racism?

Here's our earlier discussion of this video, and what I see in the comments is admiration for the guy — for what he did and for his straight-talking. For example: "I loved this guy when I saw him interviewed. Straight, honest, and not an ounce of pc!"

"Meet the Gaybros: They like sports, hunting, and beer. They make the gay community mad."

I don't know if this Slate article deserves all the traffic it's going to get, but I decided to become part of the problem, if it's a problem. I apologize in advance.

"Seems like a lot of twentysomething women, including me, have felt bad? strange? uncomfortable? guilty? childish? about wanting a boyfriend..."

"... but we hardly talk about it."

But if you did? talk? about it? would there be question marks? all over everything? you were saying? to each other?

The link goes to a Slate dialogue with lots of female participants, all much younger than I am. I'm not sure if any of them says exactly this, but it seems to me that the shame of admitting to wanting a boyfriend is the concession that you don't have a boyfriend. Pride leads you to act as though what you are doing you are doing intentionally. And if you really do want a boyfriend, you probably also think that revealing that you want what you don't have only makes it harder to get get what you want.

Maybe women are so good at standing proud that men have stopped believing women must really want men.

Late in the conversation, from a participant other than the one quoted above:

What strikes me as weird about this conversation, and why this shift in priorities doesn't seem like a complete feminist victory, is that it discounts the idea that a relationship can be an incredible source of support for career and life goals. Having someone who, say, helps with chores to give you more time to study or work, or who encourages you when you're discouraged, or works in a similar field and helps you with ideas, who backs you publicly, etc? All this stuff can make it much easier to work harder and in a more productive way or to work through difficult challenges. I'm not sure we should get psyched by the idea that young women don't want relationships but rather by the idea that women want more from their relationships or that we view relationships as part of a larger matrix of things that can work well together.

Jeez! It's all so much work. The point of love is so you can do even more work. The stereotypical traditional male works so that a woman would have him and he could have love. Love was the end, not the means. If, for the woman, love is the means and the end is career advancement... then what? And why?

"Why Are Teen Pregnancy Rates So Low in North Dakota? Fracking."

Headline from a story that is not purveying some environmentalist scare.

How does North Dakota do it? “It’s not by having such great sex ed, contraception access, and abortion providers,” Guttmacher senior researcher Laura Lindberg told me, listing off solutions favored in more liberal states. No—North Dakota has one Planned Parenthood in a 700,000 square-mile state. Seventy-five percent of North Dakotans live in counties with no abortion provider. State law mandates abstinence-only education in its schools....

The scare is for progressives who want to believe their anti-teen-pregnancy policies work best. So it can't be that all the policies they've opposed — abstinence only education! — actually work. The theory is presented that North Dakota — with all that fracking — has a booming economy and females delay pregnancy when economic prospects are high (and when there's a plentiful supply of men to choose from).

Now, here's the craftily written last paragraph of the article (which appears at Slate and The Washington Post):

Add it all up—a sparsely-populated state heavy in white men, low in sex education, and bursting with oil—and you don’t find many helpful clues for crafting national policy....

It's important for progressives to exclude the good results in North Dakota, which call into question whether the progressive policies are the correct policies. Time to quote a professor:

“North Dakota is just off-the-charts, demographically,” says June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The state may prove that white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.” But that doesn’t change the fact that “the pernicious impact of abstinence-only education is its combination with poverty,” Carbone says. “The best contraceptive has always been a promising future, and North Dakota is one of the few places in the United States right now that is booming."

Off-the-charts, demographically... white, middle-class teens will probably do OK... I can think of a way to translate that into blunter language that would — speaking of scary — sound really awful.

Quokka.

Another sign people are tired of having to think about politics.

"How likely is it Antonin Scalia will die in the next four years?"

Asks Slate jauntily, offering what it calls "The Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator."

Ultra Soft... Ultra Suave... MEGA!

Plunging into the Amazon Associates Earnings Report today, category "Health & Personal Care, I see someone — anonymous, of course — purchased THIS.  Hey, what a great idea!  A commonly used everyday item.  And at no additional cost to the buyer, this blog receives $1.80 from Amazon.

So it got me thinking and I went over to the SiteMeter to see that the blog had approximately 25,000 visitors today.  And I thought — what if just 10% of those 25,000 visitors were to regularly, so to speak, in the privacy of their own homes, meet their Quilted Northern needs via the Althouse Amazon portal?  I'll let you do the math.  But let's just say it would leave the Meadhouse, well, flush.  And of course a flush blogger… is a blogger who feels well-appreciated.  So thanks, anonymous and everyone else who used the Althouse Amazon portal!  May you ever experience great softness, comfort and convenience. 

Meanwhile, yesterday, we were talking about clown suits and trillion dollar platinum coins and I see Slate put out a call for ideas on designs for the proposed imagined magic coin.  My personal favorite design idea:



Well done! Let's see... can Charmin be purchased on Amazon?  Why yes, yes it can!  Ultra Soft... Ultra Suave... MEGA!

"Lady Jerks of 2012: A Year in Review."

Today seems to be my day for finding screwy ideas in Slate. This one seems to be a twist on the old feminist bumper sticker "Well-behaved women rarely make history." I can't quite tell whether Amanda Hess is trying to encourage/facilitate female jerkiness or what. Yeah, there's the ancient problem of wanting to be liked, which is really only a problem if you want it too much and want it above other, better goals. It's perfectly idiotic to think that the solution to the excessive desire to be liked is to be unlikeable.

But, whatever... the women Hess recognizes as the "Lady Jerks of 2012" are: the CIA agent who complained that she shouldn't have had to share the Distinguished Intelligence Medal for finding bin Laden; Anne Hathaway, the actress who talked back haughtily when asked about the photographs that paparazzi somehow were able to take of the body part Hess refers to as "her vagina"; Julia Gillard, the prime minister of Australia who called some political opponent a misogynist; Taylor Swift, the pretty young singer who crashed a Kennedy wedding with her Kennedy boyfriend; and Susan Rice, who, as Hess would have it, lost out on getting to be the next Secretary of State because people thought she was “prickly,” “hard-headed,” “temperamentally unfit,” and “always right on the edge of a screech.” Hess writes: "The personality police eventually moved Rice to withdraw her name from the running." That's not what I heard!

"The liberal news and culture website Slate published an online map Friday that it says will show a 'daily tally of gun-deaths in America'..."

"... basing that tally on incidents collected by an anonymous Twitter user. The organization, however, won’t say who is behind the tweets or how reliable its data is as a statistical compilation."

Gun deaths? So... just mix in the accidents and the suicides. Now, personally, as you may know from previous discussions on this blog, I think suicide is murder. Morally, it should be recognized as the deliberate killing of a human being. But many people withhold moral judgment and express only sadness and sympathy. I am sympathetic when the self-killer is mentally ill, but I'm also sympathetic when those who murder others are mentally ill.

But what's with grouping self-murder and murder of others for the purposes of Slate's gun-death map? It's a great way to boost the numbers. Google statistics, and I think you'll see that in the United States, there are twice as many suicides as murders, and that proportion is also true within the category of gun deaths. Shooting oneself is the most common method of suicide.

I realize some people think that there would be less suicide if people didn't have guns at hand. But I wonder how many of the mentally disturbed/emotionally overwrought men who shoot themselves to death are self-executors — that is, persons who feel a compulsion toward violence and stop themselves. There are murderers — like Adam Lanza — who murder and then kill themselves. There is no sympathy for these suicides, yet many people think: I wish he'd killed himself first.

If he had, it probably wouldn't have made the news, but if you'd read his story, you would have reacted the way you usually do to suicide: How sad... if only he'd perceived that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem... whatever it is you usually think when you read that an isolated, bullied 20-year-old man has shot himself in the head. Would you ever think to speculate that he knew that he had an irresistible, evil impulse to gun down children, and, thank God, he had one last shred of humanity and turned the gun on himself?

Gun deaths. You can collect them on a map as faceless pins, all looking alike. It's all numbers. No individuality. What are you counting? I don't know what these pins represent. Use a different color for suicides. And which suicides are uncontrolled mental illness? Who is checking out because of uncontrolled physical pain? Identify the justified killings, done in self-defense. I want to know which ones are criminals gunning down other criminals. I'd like to think about policy with some complexity and without irrational fear mongering.

Ironically, Slate seems to want to inspire urgency about the loss of human life, but it is reducing the lives we're supposed to care so much about to a bunch of dots who matter only because they're a massive crowd. Where is the individuality? There is particularity to each death, despite the common element of the gun.

Why didn't those Hollywood lefties pick "2016: Obama's America" for the documentary Oscars?

Here's some ripe PR. Dinesh D'Souza put out the bait and Slate took it:

A total of 126 documentaries were eligible for an Academy Award this year, and a selection committee recently narrowed those down to 15 hopefuls for five nominations. Dozens were snubbed, but the producers of 2016: Obama's America say their film's exclusion is evidence of something more sinister.

The anti-Obama film directed by Dinesh D'Souza was roundly panned by critics, though it rode word of mouth to a $33 million gross. D'Souza said the film's success would have resulted in a nomination if it weren't for Hollywood's bias. "Liberal political ideology, not excellence, is the true standard of what receives awards," he said.

Obviously, there's no reason why D'Souza's movie — even if it was popular — should be a finalist instead of those other movies — which we know little or nothing about, but which the selection committee supposedly watched and judged according to a set of principles about what makes a movie Oscar-worthy. Big box office is never the key to winning an Oscar, and in the documentary category, there are some traditional standards that skew toward more neutral, historical/scientific presentations.

I'm sure D'Souza knows all this. It was savvy of him to leverage the occasion to get attention for his film, and I suspect Slate knows that. Slate will get attention for debunking D'Souza, even as it give him the publicity he wants. Everybody wins.

ADDED: You can, of course, purchase the movie, but if I were recommending documentaries that weren't nominated for Oscars, I'd have plenty of others ahead of that. ""Grey Gardens" and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" to begin with.