The thing about sports is that it, well, tends to be an old-boys’ club. The sports world is full of sexist shit that pisses me off if I think about it too much (and, honestly, I’m not often prone to do that, because I don’t always want to be addressing Big Issues in the context of something I enjoy just for the hell of it, which I suppose is lazy of me). Commercials aired during sporting events or programs often are sexist. There are sexist athletes and sexist columnists, and I hate it all, but I try not to hold it against sports as a whole. That would be like being a Cubs fan, but hating the Cubs because of Cubs fans.

That said, there’s one place where the sports assholes come out in droves and it drives me batshit insane every freaking time I see it. It’s a land where you’ll see Asshole Stupidus in its natural environment, taking a gigantic dump on women and human decency.

It’s the land of the Deadspin commenters.

I was going to leave a comment there but figured I might as well put it here instead, since it’s important that many people in the world know how I feel about this issue.

Basically, I think DS has acquitted itself kind of poorly in defending itself in the comments of the post, but I guess that lack of rational thought is sort of the point of the irreverent misogyny.

I think the best criticisms of this post are the ones pointing out that Tracy is painting with a pretty broad brush. But those criticisms aren’t so great, either, because the fact is that the great majority of DS comments ARE offensive and stupid. So we’re not talking about a few bad apples spoiling it for everyone–we’re talking about a pernicious and overwhelming atmosphere that invites and encourages a race to the bottom.

Not to say that most Deadspin readers, or even most commenters, are offensive/stupid, but the atmosphere in the DS comment space is pretty pathetic most of the time. I like that kind of stuff when it’s well done (Kissing Suzy Kolber, literally the product of DS commenters, is at times pretty brilliant, for example), but there’s nothing less enjoyable than someone aiming for hilariously-rude and missing the mark (ahem, Carlos Mencia).

And it’s true that DS is no worse than many, if not most sports blogs (or, um, nearly all blogs), but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to make it better. I don’t know what it is about public fora, but any blog with a sizeable readership ends up with a crew of douchebag commenters trying to one-up each other in stupidity and offensiveness. It’s a complete waste of time, and I basically never bother reading the comments on hugely popular sites like Deadspin, Engadget, The Washington Post (yes, even old media suffers from this problem), etc.–sifting the wheat from the chaff is just not worth the energy.

So, given that reading comments is not compulsory, even if you do read the blog’s content, how important is it that Deadspin’s commenters come off, for the most part, as hateful assholes? Probably not all that important, really. But it is pretty pathetic, and gives ignorant old media types ammunition in their poorly-conceived arguments against the basic idea of “the blog”–the quality and content of blog comments end up getting attributed (unfairly) to the blog itself. So when Deadspin’s comments are stupid, it makes Deadspin itself look stupid. Which is unfortunate, because Deadspin’s actual tone and quality are pretty great.

Although of course there are plenty of exceptions to Tracy’s general argument, I don’t think there’s any question that Deadspin’s commenters are representative of a misogynistic streak that runs through sports culture. And having someone point that out (and actually be heard) can only be a good thing.

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)
3. Titanic (1997)
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
5. Toy Story (1995)
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)
11. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
12. The Matrix (1999)
13. GoodFellas (1990)
14. Crumb (1995)
15. Edward Scissorhands (1990)
16. Boogie Nights (1997)
17. Jerry Maguire (1996)
18. Do the Right Thing (1989)
19. Casino Royale (2006)
20. The Lion King (1994)
21. Schindler’s List (1993)
22. Rushmore (1998)
23. Memento (2001)
24. A Room With a View (1986)
25. Shrek (2001)
26. Hoop Dreams (1994)
27. Aliens (1986)
28. Wings of Desire (1988)
29. The Bourne Supremacy (2004)
30. When Harry Met Sally… (1989)
31. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
32. Fight Club (1999)
33. The Breakfast Club (1985)
34. Fargo (1996)
35. The Incredibles (2004)
36. Spider-Man 2 (2004)
37. Pretty Woman (1990)
38. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
39. The Sixth Sense (1999)
40. Speed (1994)
41. Dazed and Confused (1993)
42. Clueless (1995)
43. Gladiator (2000)
44. The Player (1992)
45. Rain Man (1988)
46. Children of Men (2006)
47. Men in Black (1997)
48. Scarface (1983)
49. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
50. The Piano (1993)
51. There Will Be Blood (2007)
52. The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad (1988)
53. The Truman Show (1998)
54. Fatal Attraction (1987)
55. Risky Business (1983)
56. The Lives of Others (2006)
57. There’s Something About Mary (1998)
58. Ghostbusters (1984)
59. L.A. Confidential (1997)
60. Scream (1996)
61. Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
62. sex, lies and videotape (1989)
63. Big (1988)
64. No Country For Old Men (2007)
65. Dirty Dancing (1987)
66. Natural Born Killers (1994)
67. Donnie Brasco (1997)
68. Witness (1985)
69. All About My Mother (1999)
70. Broadcast News (1987)
71. Unforgiven (1992)
72. Thelma & Louise (1991)
73. Office Space (1999)
74. Drugstore Cowboy (1989)
75. Out of Africa (1985)
76. The Departed (2006)
77. Sid and Nancy (1986)
78. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
79. Waiting for Guffman (1996)
80. Michael Clayton (2007)
81. Moonstruck (1987)
82. Lost in Translation (2003)
83. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn (1987)
84. Sideways (2004)
85. The 40 Year-Old Virgin (2005)
86. Y Tu Mamá También (2002)
87. Swingers (1996)
88. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
89. Breaking the Waves (1996)
90. Napoleon Dynamite (2004)
91. Back to the Future (1985)
92. Menace II Society (1993)
93. Ed Wood (1994)
94. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
95. In the Mood for Love (2001)
96. Far From Heaven (2002)
97. Glory (1989)
98. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
99. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
100. South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)

Thoughts:

I sure have seen a lot of movies. The disparity between this list and the book list is somewhat depressing.

Interesting how two high-budget, special-effectsy sci-fi sequels–Aliens and Terminator 2–got love over their arguably better but unquestionably less showy predecessors. Also interesting how one sequel generally seen as significantly better than its predecessor–Toy Story 2–got no love. WASSUP WITH THAT?

Putting a trilogy on the list–in the #2 spot, no less–seems kinda shady, no?

Hoop Dreams: Just too depressing. I had the wrong expectations for this one, perhaps. I certainly would never watch it again, though.Oh, um, I had this one mixed up with The Basketball Diaries. I am an idiot.

The Bourne Supremacy: Really? I mean, it was fun and all… is this like the Da Vinci Code of this list? I don’t understand. See also: Men in Black, Clueless, and the criminally overrated Napoleon Dynamite.

Back to the Future: greatest time-travel movie with an incest-based subplot.

L.A. Confidential couldn’t crack the top 50? Unlike, er, Shrek? I am just going to pretend these movies are unsorted, because otherwise I might have an outrage-induced coronary.

Of course if they are sorted, I can definitely back up putting There Will Be Blood way above No Country for Old Men. GOOD CALL, EW! (note: I’m not being sarcastic.)

Basically, I think it’s pretty difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff with so little perspective. Some of these movies came out last year. This is a fun discussion piece, but the presence of Evil Dead 2 on the list should tip you off that it’s not to be taken too seriously.

What is it with Steven P. Jobs and batteries? On Friday, Apple’s new iPhone went on sale (for a mere $199; how does that make you early adopters feel who stood in line last year for the privilege of plunking down three times that amount? Just wondering.) In their reviews of the new device this week, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the iPhone’s battery problem had gotten worse in the new iteration.

The original iPhone, you may recall, got “8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback and more than 10 days of standby time,” to quote Apple’s public relations mantra. There were two catches, however. To get that long battery life, Apple had to forgo high speed wireless 3G, which chews up batteries. Second, if the battery did run down during the day, you couldn’t just swap it out for your backup battery, as you can with just about every other smartphone. The iPhone case was sealed tight. Looked cooler that way.

The new iPhone, of course, has wireless 3G — indeed, that appears to be the biggest improvement in the new model. And sure enough, it’s a battery-killer; according to The Journal reviewer, Walter S. Mossberg, the new iPhone battery lasts only about four and a half hours before it needs a new charge. Yet Apple still insists on sealing the case, thus preventing customers from using a spare battery when it runs down. For heavy cellphone users—and who isn’t these days?—the battery is going to need a charge by lunchtime. Good luck with that. Unless Apple does something about its battery problem, the iPhone will always be more a toy than a tool.

Or maybe people will just charge their phones more often. THE HORROR!!!!! At any rate, the 3G iPhone’s horrific battery life isn’t, in fact, any worse than the other 3G phones on the market (in most cases, I believe, it’s actually better). So the issue here isn’t Apple, it’s the industry as a whole. Better battery life is a worthy goal, but singling out Apple for what is really a industry-wide chipset problem is kind of silly.

Also, the lack of a replaceable battery isn’t just an “it looks cooler” choice. It allows Apple to use non-standard batteries, custom-fitted to whatever space the iPhone’s internal design allows. Designing for replaceable batteries requires a designer to make other concessions (size, weight, durability, cost, etc.) that might be more irritating.

To be honest, this is a reviewer’s problem more than a real life problem. Battery life is something easy to measure and easy to criticize (critics did the same thing with the iPod’s features for a long time–how’d that work out?), while user interface and hardware design are difficult to quantify (more on this from Daring Fireball). So everything that Apple excels at gets lost in the shuffle of a simple (and deceptive) feature checklist. Would you rather have an ugly, awkward, pain-in-the-ass phone that gets eight hours of battery life, or a really useful, intuitive, powerful handheld that gets four hours? I get the impression that most reviewers would recommend the former, but it’s safe to say that most consumers want the latter–and are happy to pay a premium for it.

All of that isn’t to say that the iPhone’s battery life isn’t annoying, but for 90% of people it really won’t be an issue. Those who really need more battery life will, no doubt, be able to buy external battery pack gizmos, just like they have been doing for the iPod for many years. And if battery life is more important than data speed, consumers can facilitate it: they can just turn off the 3G radio, which allows the device to use the EDGE network instead, with slower data but better battery life.

What this “problem” comes down to is that the iPhone is so much more useful than just about every other phone on the market that people will be glued to it all day long. Of course that uses more battery, but it’s really a symptom of Apple’s success. If your product’s biggest problem is that people like using it too much, I’d say you’re in the catbird seat.

^* Incidentally, the column starts out, “If I were a blogger, these are some of the posts I would have written this week.” Which is kind of an odd start, but is actually much odder when you look at the bottom of the page and see: “Joe Nocera’s new blog, Executive Suite, can be found at nytimes.com/executivesuite.” Huh?

Michael Gerson is very worried about vulgarity in politics:

In 2006, after a long monologue about a dog and its vomit, Franken impersonated the deceased Sen. Strom Thurmond as saying: “Yeah, I screwed a woman who was vomiting once.” He once proposed a television sketch about a female CBS reporter being drugged and raped. He has suggested that his next book title might be “I F — – — Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf — – — !” At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: “Why don’t we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.”

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility.

Incidentally, I think “I F — – — Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf — – — !” would make for a great title. It makes its point quite artfully, and is much better than the title of Bill O’Reilly’s upcoming tome.

My favorite part is where he explains that when his friend is vulgar, it’s okay, but when RAPPERS do it, it’s loathsome. Not sure I understand why that is… maybe because his friend has a terminal degree? But a lot of rappers, apparently, have doctorates, so that can’t be it. Hmmm… what could it be?

Also, remember when Dick Cheney told a senator, on the floor of the Senate, to “fuck yourself“? Or when George Bush called a reporter “a major league asshole“? Weird how Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, doesn’t mention those incidents in his condemnation of Al Franken (who has, as of yet, never even been elected to any office that I know of).

What a load of (to pick a civil word) manure.

But let’s get back to Franken for a minute. Gerson takes great offense to Franken’s description of his work as “satire.” Because it uses naughty language, and stereotypes, and even sexual imagery. Well, yes, I think we can all agree that it does those things. But, last I checked, in pursuit of satire we aren’t limited to the scrabble dictionary and the Comics Code. Sometimes, offensive content and objectionable imagery is the most effective way of making a point. Let’s look at an example from Gerson’s op-ed:

At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: “Why don’t we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.”

Okay. So does anyone out there think that Franken, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who loves taxes, abortions, and homosexuals, said those words sincerely? AT A FEMINIST MAJORITY FOUNDATION EVENT??? Of course not. This is, what’s the word, sarcasm. Franken is making a point–to limit women to these traditional roles is horrible, stupid, and maybe even terrorism! Okay, probably not really terrorism, but you can’t deny the Afghanistan connection. Better send in some troops, just to be safe.

Okay, where was I. Oh, right. Gerson is just being disingenuous. He knows Franken doesn’t seriously believe women should only cook, bear children, and pray. He knows Franken was joking. And, more generally, he knows that there’s nothing seriously objectionable about Franken’s humor–except that he is a liberal and is running for the Senate. This piece is deeply cynical, condescending, and just plain wrong.

For the record: I like Al Franken and think he would make a very good representative. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few more politicians who are funny on purpose?

C’mon, Pearlstein. Get real. The cell phone industry is big business at its most conservative. If Apple hadn’t exposed them as anti-innovation charlatans, they’d still be foisting brick-sized, unusable smartphones on us all. The big innovation in mobile media is that every company involved is trying to figure out a way to charge consumers even more for access. Things are getting more, not less expensive (yes, even the iPhone, when you account for the extra $10/month you will have to pay for data). And until Google forced the issue, all cell phone service providers were THRILLED to regulate, bottleneck, and charge users through the nose for access to their networks (and, in fact, it remains to be seen whether Google’s intervention will make any meaningful difference at all).

Now it’s possible that change, in the guise of improved hardware and cheaper/better service, is coming to the industry. But one handset that’s sold fewer than 10 million units (worldwide) is not nearly enough to convince me that things have changed for the better.

After these enlightening observations, Pearlstein goes on, in a transition that can only be described as “forced,” to compare the high-paced competitive cell phone industry with intellectual property law reform in Congress. Apparently, reforming a cornerstone legal doctrine from top to bottom isn’t a speedy process. I, for one, am shocked and scandalized that the legislature isn’t acting as quickly as private companies (most of whom are well on their way to bankruptcy, incidentally)!

If this were an isolated case, you might write it off as a bit of bad luck or a testament to the political clout of drug companies with too much money to spread around. Unfortunately, however, it is the norm. Immigration reform, a major energy bill, global warming legislation, the housing bill, overhaul of the aviation system and fixes for the alternative minimum tax have all been bottled up in the Senate, thanks to those quaint rules that effectively require 60 votes even to take up legislation, let alone pass it. As long as this arrangement persists, it will be impossible for the country to simplify the tax code, reform the health-care system, restructure financial regulation, fix the tort system, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure or put a brake on runaway entitlements.

Hmmm. It’s almost as if the legislative system were intended to be conservative, to prevent overreaching by self-serving political bodies who don’t have the perspective to make good long-term decisions!

Patent law is kind of a mess, but it’s a lot easier to cry out for reform than it is to actually put together a proposal that will improve matters. And it’s a lot easier to complain about the speed with which the legislature moves than it is than it is to actually think about why it might work that way.

What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I’ve revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they’d have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?

When I write about my kids, I’m not only thinking as their mother. I’m also thinking as a professional writer. Those two identities don’t always align—they just don’t. I like to think that when there’s tension, I err on the side of protecting my kids’ interests, steering clear of any material that’s too embarrassing or private.

The article/column explores these issues adroitly, and touches on a lot of points worth discussing. Can kids even understand this stuff well enough to make an informed decision? Is it exploitative to use your children’s lives as source material?

But I’m going to digress a bit from the topic of writing about one’s children and talk instead about Facebook and the First Amendment.

The article mentions the fact that, now that information is archived on the internet, it won’t fade away like it used to. But what this interesting piece doesn’t really mention is that popular notions of privacy are, at least temporarily, shifting. Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, etc., are creating a situation where nobody currently under 20 will ever be un-Googleable. Yes, there are still a few holdouts, eating baked beans out of the can in their secluded cabins, scrawling byzantine anti-technology manifestos on the walls (or rather, sensible people who don’t see the point of Facebook and refuse to create profiles). But, for the most part, the information about us we all choose to put online dwarfs the information about us that gets online without our permission. And I mean dwarfs both in quantity and in amplitude–what Ms. Bazelon writes about her son now will pale in comparison with the harmless but sophomoric stuff he uploads in high school and college.

And, of course, nobody knows how this will turn out. Who’s gonna run for president in 2025, when everybody has a mile-long internet wrap sheet, chronicling all the idiotic stuff they said and did as dumb kids? Unless we want to limit our public figures to friendless virgins, we’re gonna need a radical shift in cultural expectations. Whether that sounds appealing or not, I believe it’s coming.

Just to be clear, there’s an important distinction to be made here. We all say stupid things, especially within the confines of what we used to think of as our private lives, and once those things are all publicly available I believe that we’re going to have to relax our standards with respect to judging each other. And I think that’s a good thing. Maybe we’ll have a national conversation about what the First Amendment actually means–that it’s not just about you getting to say what you want; it’s about people you don’t like getting to say what they want, too. And that restricting speech is reserved for the most extreme circumstances, not for obscene, indecent, ignorant, or politically-unpopular content.

So here’s the distinction: Doing stupid things will always be more problematic. There’s a spectrum between pure speech and pure action, and I don’t think every action is a big deal. For example, how many people do you know with a photograph online of them in a state that doesn’t even abut sobriety? If you’re like me, the trend asymptotically approaches infinity. Getting hammered and making stupid faces for a camera amounts to (stupid, goofy) speech. In essence it comes down to whether one’s behavior will affect somebody else (and I don’t meant embarrassing your mother at having raised such an idiot).

I’m not going to hold those silly photos against anybody, and I’m not going to hold embarrassing, cloying, internet diaries against anyone. I’m pretty sure doing either of those things would be deeply hypocritical, for one thing. But there’s another type of speech that, while completely legal, will probably always be a career killer–hate speech. “Hate speech” may be too strong a term, because I’m thinking also about the simple prejudicial speech that probably isn’t hostile enough to qualify. The More We Know, the more objectionable I find language that paints an entire group with one brush. It betrays the prejudice itself, which is bad enough, but it also betrays the lack of judgment of saying it out loud. I’m not suggesting we muzzle this stuff, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using it as a marker of someone who shouldn’t be doing anything important.

So, okay, what’s my point? My point is that things are changing. The internet (and the omnipresent gathering of information that accompanies it) exponentially increase the amount of data–numbers, text, photos, videos–about us that will eventually be publicly available. It’s worth doing the same kind of thinking that we’ve always done about invading people’s privacy. In fact, it’s far more important now than it has ever been before. But we need to do some critical thinking about what we take from the invasion itself, too.

The process has already started, I think. My generation–I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s–has gone through an inflection point. When we were in middle school, the internet was a non-factor. By the time we graduated from college, everybody had digital cameras and Friendster profiles. It’s hard to know what things would have been like without the internet, but I do know this: I assume that everyone I meet has at least one photograph of themself, face flushed, holding out a cocktail, and joyfully screaming to the camera. But that’s not all. I assume that everyone under 40 I haven’t met has that photograph, too. So when I read a story about a popular athlete’s drunk party photos getting made public, it doesn’t make me think that he’s a terrible person. It makes me think that David Sarno probably doesn’t have a Facebook profile. I could go on–there’s a book’s worth of writing to be done about how members of “old media” don’t understand how things have changed–but you get the idea. Whether we like it or not, the world just got a little smaller.

The adage “those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” has always been pretty tough to enforce. Fortunately, the world wide web is a great equalizer–it won’t be long until we’ll all have glass houses.

In case CNN wises up and yanks this feature:

The irony is that I think he’s probably right–this isn’t very good journalism. Baio should have tried to get in touch with the relevant persons (just about all of whom seem to be quite available) before publishing. No question, it’s a thorny issue–the material he’s citing was company property, so he doesn’t need permission from the employees to post it–and who knows what happened behind the scenes.

At any rate, there’s a lot to enjoy here, if you’re patient enough to wade through it all.

Washington: “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Blacks Get?” “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Men Get?” “They Scream, They Swoon. How Dumb Can Latinos Get?” Ha ha! Very funny. I’m laughing my head off. Inside. Get a clue.

Charlotte Allen: Is this a compliment or an insult?

…

New York: Do you think women are aware of the hypocrisy with their anger toward this column? Specifically I refer to the whole litany of TV programs, magazines (like Marie Claire) and society and popular culture as a whole that makes humor at the expense of men everyday. Do you feel the angry responses validated your article?

Charlotte Allen: Very much so. I’ve heard from women with Ivy League degrees complaining that they’re oppressed, female graduates of top law schools complaining that they’re oppressed. C’mon!

Is it possible that this woman seriously doesn’t understand the difference between perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a group that has been historically (and is presently) oppressed, and making fun of those in a position of power?

I mean, I guess it is possible, but I find it much more likely that this is a shameless and disingenuous effort to get Ms. Allen a little more notoriety. I mean, these distinctions are fundamental and obvious ones. People who have actually struggled with injustice, rather than leverage it for a book deal, already understand why going after the powerful is very different from going after the politically- and socially-oppressed.

I swear no man watches “Grey’s Anatomy” unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of “The Friday Night Knitting Club.” No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know. Of course, not all women do these things, either — although enough do to make one wonder whether there isn’t some genetic aspect of the female brain, something evolutionarily connected to the fact that we live longer than men or go through childbirth, that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat.

That’s one of the more reasonable paragraphs, incidentally. Now let’s jump to the thrilling conclusion:

So I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

I’m not even going to bother critiquing the details of this… insightful look into the female mind. Suffice it to say that it says much more about its author in particular than it does about her gender generally.

I can only assume that this woman wants to be the next Ann Coulter, and needs something truly ridiculous to jump-start her career as a contrarian anti-feminist pundit. Regardless, I find it somewhat astonishing that the Washington Post would see fit to publish such an antediluvian polemic. Is this really such a vital viewpoint that it needs to be articulated (to use that term generously) in a national newspaper? What’s next, a defense of eugenics written by a self-hating gypsy? I really think that publishing this is a mistake. Not because it sets feminism back by a century (although it’s not exactly progressive), but because it’s unfair, it’s prurient, and (to my eyes) it’s a deeply cynical appeal to prejudices we’d be better off without.

Money lines, complete with practically sarcastic note that none of this has been proved (or even hinted at by any direct evidence):

If the Patriots secretly taped the Rams’ walk-through, then stopped the red-zone plays the Rams showed in that walk-through, then won that Super Bowl by three points, then logic says New England materially benefited from cheating in the Super Bowl. If true, this would be the worst sports scandal since the Black Sox.

Let’s put that in capital letters: IF TRUE. We don’t yet know if the Super Bowl allegations are true. Then again, we are into only the second day of information going on the record and the league finally answering some questions about the subject.

PS: Do you think there’s any chance that the Pats will use this as anything but competitive fuel tomorrow? My prediction: New England 37, New York 20.

I’m not even going to read the story–it couldn’t possibly live up to the title.

Certainly it would be terribly easy to rush toward some sort of instant judgment based on what we think we all knew about Taylor and the sort of life he once, and for all we know, still led. But really, we know nothing at the moment, and until we do, “may he rest in peace” ought to be the operative phrase for this day.

Still, could anyone honestly say they never saw this coming? You’d have to be blind not to consider Taylor’s checkered past. It was only a few months after he was drafted, when we got something of an inkling of what sort of young man the Redskins were selecting out of the University of Miami with the fifth overall selection in 2004.

Thank you, Mr. Shapiro. Thank you very much.

Kudos to you, unknown Washington Post editor. You made many people giggle.

Much of the original artificial heart work was driven by the technological optimism born of the space program. Some of the current work is driven by the idea that our brains and bodies are separate entities. But now, in light of Houghton and other victims of psychological and cognitive trauma after intervention in their bodies, some scientists fear that we are tampering not with a bodily machine but with the human spirit.

“We’ve got to understand the organs and systems coming into our lives. We haven’t paid a lot of attention to the psychological or emotional aspects of thinking of ourselves as bodies,” says Arthur Caplan. “People interested in eternal life through body regeneration or organ substitutions” consider humans to be “a brain on top of a complicated bag of water,” he says. “Ship that brain elsewhere, and it would still be you. Not true, exactly. Not that we couldn’t adjust or adapt. But in some subtle ways, our sense of self — who we are — is shaped by our carcasses. Shaped by the containers we drag around.

“People who have their heads frozen to live forever, like Ted Williams — my view is that if you get your head stuck back on something” that isn’t your body, “your identity will be shredded. It isn’t you anymore. It could lead to despair and depression, rather than gratitude that you can live forever. If you find yourself embodied in a different way, your perceptions and awareness of the world would be changed.”

I used to read a lot of fiction that directly or implicitly considered what it means to combine the organic and the inorganic. Though these issues have always been with us, the sophistication and the functionality of the technological measures we take to augment our fragile bodies is making things quite a bit more complicated and interesting.

The Post website managers feel the need to increase their page view stats. I get that. They break up all their articles into multiple pages (with multiple paying advertisers represented on each page), so that people get stuck loading a new page 3 or 4 times just to read an 800 word article. This is, in a word, short-sighted. They’re alienating their readers at a time that they really can’t afford to do so. I know what they would say in response–”all the major newspaper sites do it! (except for those jerks at the Wall Street Journal)”–but it’s just a matter of time, WashingtonPost.com. Somebody in charge of a big paper will get a clue, sooner or later, and put together a website putting its readers ahead of its advertisers. And that website will get more daily users, more links from blogs, and ultimately more (wait for it…) page views.

But I’m not really here to talk about that. It’s true that everybody does it, and I wouldn’t bother to single the Post out for it. I’d like to address a more pernicious, obnoxious “feature” of their home page. Here’s how it works:

1. A user navigates to http://www.washingtonpost.com/, either manually or by setting it as their home page (which is what I have done for about 8 years now).
2. That user leaves the page idle for, I don’t know, let’s be generous and call it 10 minutes.
3. The user notices that, for some reason, the little icon next to the URL box is moving–signaling that the browser is loading a page. This is strange because, the user knows, that page has already fully loaded.
4. Hmmm, everything looks the same. But wait–the URL is different! Now it’s http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=true!

And you can probably figure out what’s going on–the Post home page automatically reloads every few minutes, increasing their page view stats (and, presumably, their advertising profits).

There’s an argument that this benefits readers, too–as news develops, it’s automatically reflected in the next page load–but this argument does not satisfy me. The Post website is not exactly quick-loading. It’s stuffed to the gills with flash video, flash audio, a plethora of ads (of course), and quite a bit of actual news content as well. All this data takes a while to load in my browser–as much as 30 or 40 seconds, depending on my connection. So it’s not unusual for me to come back to my computer and find the browser stalled in the middle of loading the site. But wait, it gets worse! Because sometimes when I come back, the page is already loaded. So I start scrolling down, skimming headlines, looking for something to read. And I find it. And as I go to click on it… you already know what I’m about to say. The page refreshes. And I’m stuck waiting for it to finish loading before I can click on the link I had targeted. More than that, though, because when the page refreshes it resets my focus to the top of the screen. So I have to scroll down all over again.

Some of you may have noted that the URL to the refreshing page is actually just the standard URL with “?reload=true” appended. And you may have reached the reasonable conclusion, as I did, that there may be a workaround. Why not just set your home page to http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false, you ask? I’ll tell you why. This is my favorite part of the whole saga, actually, because it is so surreal. It’s like a Dali painting. After 10 minutes, the http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false page reloads!!!! Now, guess what the URL is on the reloaded page. It’s really great–the height of absurdity. The URL on the reloaded page is…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/?reload=false&reload=true.

Let me just say it again:

Wow. I mean, wow. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for how this works. Here’s what I came up with:

You meet a man and talk to him for a while and suddenly he punches you in the face and knocks you out cold. When you wake up, he’s sitting next to you and you’re wearing a shirt that says “Punch Me”. Lying on the ground you see a shirt that says “Don’t Punch Me”. Before he has a chance to punch you again, you take off the “Punch Me” shirt and put on the “Don’t Punch Me” shirt. A few minutes later, he punches you in the face and knocks you out cold. When you wake up, you’re wearing the “Punch Me” shirt on top of the “Don’t Punch Me” shirt.

Just to be clear, in that analogy, the Washington Post is the one repeatedly punching you in the face.

Obviously, I feel this is a mistake. It’s bad enough to make the stupid reloading behavior a default, but it’s unbearably stupid to provide the opportunity to make a choice and not actually honor that choice.

While we’re here, I wish the Post wouldn’t put links to stories in flash (e.g., that little ribbon of links in the middle of the home page)–I like to open links in new tabs in my browser, and that doesn’t work when I click on a flash object. Which means that I end up having to click on the story, then navigate back to the main website, wait for it to load, and go through this all over again. That’s poor design, and rude to readers.

This is a tough time for newspapers everywhere. I know that. But the only way out of it is to act with readers in mind. Don’t bend over backwards to make the user experience miserable, frustrating, confusing, and ugly–not just to raise a superficial stat that doesn’t actually reflect an increase in readership. It may benefit you in the short term, but in the long term it fosters in your readers a feeling that you think you’re doing them a favor. You’re not–you’re making money off of them, and they know it. So if you want to keep doing so, you’ll have to start treating them with appreciation and consideration. Else, you’ll find yourself in even more dire straits–the proud publisher of an advertiser-friendly website with a dearth of readers. Good luck turning a profit on that.

In the mean time, I’m on the lookout for a new home page. Any suggestions?

White House staff, including one Karl Rove, used outside email accounts for official communications–to get around the fact that all White House email is supposed to be permanently saved and publicly available.

The White House acknowledged yesterday that e-mails dealing with official government business may have been lost because they were improperly sent through private accounts intended to be used for political activities. Democrats have been seeking such missives as part of an investigation into the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

Administration officials said they could offer no estimate of how many e-mails were lost but indicated that some may involve messages from White House senior adviser Karl Rove, whose role in the firings has been under scrutiny by congressional Democrats.

Democrats have charged that Rove and other officials may have used the private accounts, set up through the Republican National Committee, in an effort to avoid normal review. Under federal law, the White House is required to maintain records, including e-mails, involving presidential decision-making and deliberations. White House aides’ use of their political e-mail accounts to discuss the prosecutor firings has also fanned Democratic accusations that the actions were politically motivated.

Of particular note is how egregious a violation of White House policy this is:

“Federal law requires the preservation of electronic communications sent or received by White House staff,” says the handbook that all staffers are given and expected to read and comply with.

“As a result, personnel working on behalf of the EOP [Executive Office of the President] are expected to only use government-provided e-mail services for all official communication.”

The handbook further explains: “The official EOP e-mail system is designed to automatically comply with records management requirements.”

And if that wasn’t clear enough, the handbook notes — as was the case in the Clinton administration — that “commercial or free e-mail sites and chat rooms are blocked from the EOP network to help staff members ensure compliance and to prevent the circumvention of the records management requirements.” (from Froomkin’s blog)

Yeesh. How is this not a huge issue? Why did this story disappear from the Washington Post front page so fast? (The link to Froomkin’s blog is up there, at least for now, but I had to delve into the bottom of the politics page to find the actual story.) Is there any question that as soon as this story got legs every White House staffer implicated by the scandal initiated a scorched earth campaign on his/her inbox? Why does every administration think it can or should get away with this kind of obfuscatory malfeasance? The American People demand answers!!!

[Dan Froomkin's blog post, Washington Post story]

Short summary: the NY Times has implemented a new function where double-clicking on any word on the site (i.e., not links, just regular text) makes a new window pop up with a helpful definition of the word. This includes such words as “the,” “green,” and “Spanish.” For those of us who semi-compulsively mess around with the text we read, this is a disruptive disaster. Thus the campaign to bring back free clicking. Please consider passing this along to your many friends and encouraging them to do the same, until we bring the paper of record to its east-coast liberal knees.

Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I wonder how much (if any) of the writing comes from the celebrity whose name is on the top. I know that people ghostwrite books all the time, but do they ghostwrite these bite-size polemics? Just based on the eloquence of the language and the artful structure of many of these pieces, I’m guessing yes, but it just seems wrong. Outsourcing a heartfelt plea for global justice smacks of inauthenticity–it’s one thing to hire a hack to help you make a quick buck off your hardcore fans (not a good thing, necessarily, but defensible at least) but it’s another thing to say to a staffer, “I’m against landmine use, could you put together an emotional essay about it for the Times?” Of course, this whole post is incredibly unfair; I have no idea whether Jolie actually wrote that thing, and there’s no evidence suggesting that she didn’t. But it doesn’t feel very likely to me.

At any rate, I actually think it’s great that Jolie is using her celebrity for a good cause (and “suggesting” to Brad that he might want to do the same). And she’s been doing it for a decade now, so it’s hard to chalk it up to a cynical stunt. Ultimately, even if she’s just lending her name to someone else’s writing, she’s contributing to a cause she cares about and trying to make the world a better place. That’s a huge improvement over this guy, even if he did write it himself.