Half Changed World

the beginning of the end (perhaps)

I think it's a sign of a blog that is seriously ill, if not on life support, when most of your posts are apologies for not blogging more often.  I'm thinking about pulling the plug.

• Next month, I'll have been blogging for five years.  According to Typepad, this is my 1,013th post.  It's not that I have nothing left to say, but I'm not spilling over with ideas the way I used to.
• When I started this blog, I was at a job where I was frustrated with the policies, was not allowed to speak my mind, and had a fair amount of time to kill.  That's not the case these days.  I've done three presentations already this month, and have four more scheduled.  I'm loving it, but I'm exhausted by the time I get home.
• My kids are getting older, and are staying up later, especially in the summer.  The window of time between when they go to bed and when I collapse myself is shrinking.  And I'm somewhat less willing to post about them as they get older.
• It's not just me.  Laura at 11d had a post recently about how the blogosphere has changed, and I think she's on the mark.  I used to love the big kerfluffles (remember the Perfect Madness posts?) where we'd all read and post and link and then post some more to respond to the points that someone else had made.  It had the wonderful heady feeling of being in college and staying up until two in the morning because you were discussing the meaning of life and solving all the problems of the world.  I haven't had that feeling in a while.

So why keep it?  Because I'll miss you, my readers and commenters. The level of civility and thoughtfulness that has always characterized the discussions here is really quite remarkable, and not that common.  And (to be honest) because I still mumble about wanting to write a book someday, and having a built in "platform" might help me sell it.  On the other hand, I might be more likely to stop mumbling and start writing without the blog.

Even if I stopped posting, I do think I'd like to keep my archives alive somewhere.  Not sure I'm willing to pay Typepad for that.  Is there a simple way to migrate from Typepad onto one of the free services?

trackbacks

With great regret, I think I'm going to set this blog to reject trackbacks.  For whatever reason, maybe because you don't need to enter a captcha (the funny looking random letters you need to type to enter a comment), I've been getting far more trackback spam than comment spam lately.

While it's not the end of the world to have to go through and delete trackback spam, the fact is that it's been months and months since I've gotten a real trackback.  Even when some of my posts have provoked discussion on other blogs (e.g. the conversation about PTAs), no one did trackbacks.  Some people posted comments noting that they were writing more on their own blogs, and some I only discovered because I read their posts.  It's possible that there are other conversations going on that I'm totally missing.

This makes me sad.  When I started this blog, one of the great joys of the medium was when a bunch of us all took on the same topic, with lots of links and trackbacks and back and forth, and it almost felt like being back in college, staying up far too late and arguing passionately about the problems of the world.  It's been a while since I've been part of one of those conversations.  I'm not sure if blogging has changed, or if I have -- I know when some topics come up (e.g. where are the women bloggers?), I just sort of roll my eyes and move on.

So, I'm turning trackbacks off, but if you feel drawn to respond to one of my posts, I'd love to hear from you.

nearly forgot

I nearly forgot to do my annual meme where I post the first line of the first post of each month:

• Happy New Year!  I was offline for a while because we took the boys to Florida to see their grandparents and aunt.
• I'm really not a football fan, but D's teacher got him all excited about the super bowl, even though he's never watched a football game, so we're letting him stay up and hanging out watching it with him.
• I'm starting to do my taxes, so I've been looking at my Prosper statement.
• In skimming today's Washington Post, I saw a short blurb that says that women's careers are responsible for one-third of corporate relocations, up from 15 percent in 1993.
• I took the BoltBus up to NYC and back this weekend, so thought I'd post a review.
• The recent discussion of budgeting and how we're dealing with rising prices inspired me to revisit my experiment of trying to stick to the thrifty food plan for a month.
• Back from the camping trip with my college friend.

• I've got several long thoughtful posts that I'd like to write, but I've just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.

• In response to my initial post about Palin, Beth posted a comment questioning her judgment as the mother of a child with Down syndrome choosing to take on the responsibilities of being VP.  
• I seem to have fallen out of the routine of doing regular weekly book reviews. 
• Since I think I'll be a bit distracted on Tuesday night, I'm posting this week's book review tonight.
• I knew that December 1 is World AIDS Day, but I hadn't realized that it was first observed 20 years ago. 

I'm shocked at how few political posts made this list, given that it feels like I spend the year obsessing about the election.  (To be fair, the line about the super bowl comes in a post about how this is an easy post to write while I was waiting for the caucus results.)

I see there were lots of personal posts.  In part this is because after 4+ years of blogging, I feel like my regular readers know me fairly well, and care about what's going on in my life.  And in part it's because my energy for blogging was lower this year (due to the demands of work, family and politics), and the personal posts are easier to write than the deeply analytic ones.

What would you all like to see more of here in 2009?

I've got several long thoughtful posts that I'd like to write, but I've just been crashing before I get to my blogging time.

media and the election

After an election that was dominated by new media (blogs, youtube, twitter), the end turned out to demand the old media.

We watched the results come in on television, and our guests nearly rioted when at one point T revealed that we were actually ten minutes behind live thanks to TiVo and channel switching.  I had my laptop on, and occasionally looked over to check things like which counties had reported in the states that had only partial results, but the focus was definitely on the big screen. 

And then, yesterday, it seems like everyone wanted a newspaper, the dead tree kind, to hold in their hands and put away in the closet.  Papers all over the country sold out, and people were lined up waiting for the special editions to come out.

When I drained the battery on the car last week, I set off the anti-theft device on the audio system, so I can't listen to the radio until we manage to get to a dealer.  Listening to the previous day's podcast works ok for Planet Money and This American Life, less well for the more newsy shows.*

*It's almost like having a TiVo for the radio.

Blog Action Day

This year, the theme for Blog Action Day is Poverty.  Check it out.

and on Yom Kippur it is sealed

Annika's getting a new liver right now.  It's been a long time since I blogged about her, but I hadn't forgotten her.

I don't believe in the kind of God who would decide whether or not to let a little girl make it based on how many people are praying for her.  (And I know Moreena doesn't believe in God at all.)  But I'm praying for her nonetheless.  I firmly believe that prayer is a positive thing to do, even if no one's exactly listening.*  If you're so inclined, you might spare a prayer or two for Annika, her family, and the brave family that donated the liver.

*Earlier this month, I decided that I felt more or less the same way about political canvassing -- I'm not sure I changed anyone's votes, but it made me feel more hopeful about democracy.

Updated: And if you're looking for something more concrete than prayer, blood donation is always good.

only connect

Anyone going to the DC BlogHer event next weekend?  I'm interested in meeting people, but am not sure that I want to spend the $100 they're charging for the actually conference.  Cecily is organizing a dinner for the night before so I may just go to that.

Phantom Scribbler posted today, asking where the cool kids are hanging out these days.  I told her I didn't know, but I agreed that I'm finding less sense of community in the blogosphere these days.  I'm still writing, and still reading, but commenting less, and getting involved in fewer long conversations.  I'm still on a bunch of listservs too, but I'm wondering how much this is a matter of habit, rather than something that's still important to me.

Phantom did convince me to sign up for Facebook, which I had been resisting.  I guess I'm an old fogie or something.* I know, I've been hearing for years about how popular it is, but I was still shocked when it told me that there were 588 people in my gmail address book who had Facebook accounts.  I only attempted to friend about 50 of them, but that's still a lot.  Obviously, not everyone who has a facebook account actually uses it, but 28 people use it enough to respond to my request to friend them within 9 hours.

* This summer, I decided that a good description of my precise state of being almost but not quite up-to-date is that I watched Dr Horrible, but I heard about it first on NPR.  Similarly, I've been blogging for four years, but this is the first social networking site I've joined.

Information management

Looking for some advice...

My team at work is trying to figure out a way to keep track of the huge numbers of statistics and examples that we all run across, and to make them accessible by all members of the team, so we all don't have to read everything.  There's a range of comfort levels with technology, and we're all stretched pretty thin, so it has to be something that can be implemented with a minimum of effort.

I've been using Zotero for tracking reports and webpages, but so far, it can't be shared across a group.  And you have to use Firefox to access it, which I think might be a barrier for some of  my colleagues.  I think a wiki is probably too challenging.  So, what's the right choice?  Google notebook pages?  Sharepoint?  Any other suggestions?

watching the convention

I'm watching the convention with half an ear.  For some reason, I can't get my local PBS station at the moment, and the CNN coverage is driving me nuts -- I'd rather listen to the speakers than to James Carville.  They're saying that there's not much happening that's of interest to the television audience, but there's no way to tell from their coverage, since they're not actually letting anyone hear the speakers.

I'm enjoying reading the twitters from Bitch PhD, but am not sure they're really adding to my understanding of the convention.

Ted Kennedy looks damn good under the circumstances.  He's far less jowly than my image of him -- don't know if he's lost weight or what.

I read the draft Democratic Party platform earlier today. In some ways platforms are always fairly meaningless documents -- they're written by committee, and include something for everyone, so they don't tell you anything about what the real priorities will be when the rubber hits the road.  But, as laundry lists go, it's a fine one.

I don't have much to say about the choice of Biden as VP.  I don't think he changes the dynamics of the race much.  He's got good foreign policy credentials.  NPR this evening had a long piece about whether his support for the awful bankruptcy bill was because the credit card companies are major constituents or because they're major donors.  I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful.  It's the same problem as Schumer's support of tax loopholes for hedge funds.  Fred at Stone Court says that Biden was particularly disrespectful to Elizabeth Warren during the debate.

The Republican candidate for Congress in this district just ran an ad that says he's the one to support for "real change" in Washington.  Choke.

Michelle did a good job.    T. walked in during the "ice cream" part of the speech and we both went "awww..."  If you've already read Dreams from my Father, there's not that much new in her description of Barack, though.

Gaak.  CNN has been going on about Carville's complaints that there wasn't enough "red meat" in the evening, but they just admitted that they didn't cover Pelosi's speech which did get people in the convention hall rared up.  Why?  Because they were talking with Carville!!

Advertising, PR, reviews and Avatar

Cecily's posts about lousy PR pitches reminded me that I wanted to go over my advertising and review policies.

Advertising: I accept ads through BlogAds.  I accept most ads that are submitted.  I reject them if I can't tell what they're selling, or if I'm offended by either what they're selling, or how they're selling it.  The most common reason I reject ads is that I think they're preying on parental fears.  If I'm really enthusiastic about the cause or the product, I might mention it in a post, but buying an ad doesn't automatically get you a mention.

PR: I can't think of a single case where I've chosen to interview someone based on a PR pitch.  I'm can pretty much guarantee that I'm not going to discuss your product on the basis of a press release.

Reviews: I always disclose if I'm being paid to do a review (e.g. through MotherTalk).  But I won't do a review even for money unless I think it will be of some interest to my audience.  I know I don't want to read reviews of cleaning products, and I assume you don't either.  (Trust me, no one is offering me enough money to pretend that I like housework.)  I'm not going to spend my money on $60 layettes, and I'm not going to waste your time with reviews of them. 

Books are a special case where I worry more about myself than my audience -- I think book reviews are often interesting, even when I have no intention of reading the book -- but I'm not going to take one on unless I think I'm going to enjoy reading the book.  If you send me a book to review other than as part of a blog tour, I'll try to get to it, but I don't make promises.  If the book doesn't interest me enough to finish it, you're probably happier if I don't review it anyway, right?

On that note, here's T's review of the final disk of Avatar:

Avatar, Book 3 Fire, Volume 4, concludes the long-running series. For those (like myself) who have enjoyed it very much, that in itself is a melancholy and somewhat frightening notion.  Sad, because we won't get to watch any more new episodes, and scary because they might well screw up the ending.  It's been done before, with works substantially less ambitious than Avatar.  So if you're intently searching out reviews, you're probably wondering:  Did they pull out a cheesy deus ex machina to resolve everyone's problems and make everything happy sunshine land?

 

Well ... yes and no.

 

They do not change the rules as regards the conflict we've seen coming from day one:  The fight against the Firelord and his armies is HARD.  Everyone pulls their weight, everyone puts their life on the line, everyone makes sacrifices.  You get the matchups you expect and require:  Aang vs. the Firelord, Zuko vs. his sister.  The loose plot threads are tied up so neatly, and with such precision, that toward the end I was able to predict the dialogue word for word on more than one occasion, simply because there were only a few possible things left for people to say to each other.  That's not to say that it's stilted or trite ... the stuff is heart-warming and incredibly powerful ... just that it proceeds with a powerful sense of dramatic and emotional necessity.  As General Iroh puts it:  people are compelled to meet their destinies, and they do so with the tools we've seen them honing throughout the series.

 

But there's another item that's not so well addressed ... because the writers actually tacked on more ambition as the series was coming to a close.  They opened up a can of worms I never thought they'd go near:  the hard reality of fighting leading to violence and death.

 

It's a kids show.  They're allowed a pass on this subject ... they really are!  If they wanted to say "Aang is a wise, peaceful, loving soul who would never hurt anyone, and who uses his avatar powers to kick butt for justice" and leave it at that, they're allowed.  So I was impressed when an episode early in the disc ended with the following dialogue:

 

Zuko:  Violence wasn't the answer.

Aang:  It never is.

Zuko:  Then I have a question for you:  What are you going to do when you face my father?

 

I'd been expecting that the series would end with Aang defeating the Firelord, who would then self-destruct in some fatal last attempt to enact vengeance.  But it becomes clear that's just not in the cards.  If Ozai is defeated, he'll want to live, in order to plan yet more world-stomping mischief ... and letting him live will ensure that nobody ever has peace.  What's a decent, caring person with the weight of the world on their shoulders to do?

 

Aang's attempts throughout the remaining episodes to answer this question in a way he can live with create conflict in places I didn't expect it:  Particularly a serious and powerful conflict with the past Avatars.  The series becomes once again, at the end, what it was at the beginning:  A coming of age story.  Aang is torn between himself, the needs of the world, the pressures of his friends, and the well-meaning advice of the past Avatars who are the closest thing he has to parents.

In the end, the answer that he comes to is imperfect, and yeah maybe something of a gimmick.  You can hear a lot of back and forth about it on fansites if you go looking.  But you won't hear it here: The writers asked a question that, in the abstract, has no good answer.  Heroic violence vs. respect for life ... if they had an answer that fit the bill in all times and all places, without resort to gimmicks ... well, that'd be great, but surprising.  As it is, I'm glad just to have seen the question so well addressed. 

Blogroll

I spent some time updating my extremely out of date blogroll.  I think I got rid of all of the blogs that aren't being actively updated, but if you see one that I missed, please let me know.  If you're a regular reader here and have a blog that I haven't included, feel free to give a shout out in the comments.

sidebar?

Can you see the sidebar on this blog?  And what URL are you using?  I'm not seeing it on www.halfchangedworld.com, but it's there on elb.typepad.com.  And I don't understand how they could be showing different things.

Clarke's 3rd law

... as a Venn diagram, at indexed.

T. showed me an article last week that pointed out that there's a reason that geostationary satellites are in what's called the Clarke orbit. 

elsewhere

A couple of posts that you should all go read:

• Lauren at Faux Real On Having Goals.  This made me cry and grin at the same time: "Somewhere along the way, I became the parent I wanted for Ethan. Strip away the 1950’s ideal that typified the family life I pictured when I felt so helpless, strip away the myth of preparedness, and it’s clear that what I wanted for Ethan was me, but stable."
• Flea at One Good Thing writes about Home, meaning South Carolina.

Looking back: 2007

Jody reminded me of the meme I did last year where you post the first line of the first post of each month.  It's an easy post to do on a night where I'm distracted watching the caucus results.

• I'm usually into New Year's resolutions, but somehow can't come up with ones this year that I'm both excited about and can really commit to.
• Feeling frazzled, so you get some bullets tonight.
• So, N's preschool has a casino night/auction every year as its major fundraiser.
• Ok, I'm coming really late to this discussion, but I really liked Penguin Unearthed's comments on the research about how it's better to praise effort than results.
• We're in the new house.
• Jody and Phantom Scribbler and chicago mama all have thoughtful posts up about the NYTimes article about redshirting kindergarteners.
• N is at a stage where he desperately wants to be a big boy, or even an adult.
• I wanted to pick up on Dave S' last comment about the role of peer groups and selection in schools.
• I'm still on the email list for D's old school, because I still care a lot about the students and the school.
• Some interesting conversation going on at 11d, Asymmetrical Information, and Raising WEG about the ethics of hiring people to clean your house.
• Based on a few posts that looked interesting from the TPM Cafe bookclub, I requested Daniel Brook's The Trap.
• T and I got a babysitter last night and went out to a preview showing of The Golden Compass last night.

What strikes me most in looking at this list compared to the previous  year's is that I'm posting more about my personal life, and more about schools, less about work-family issues per se.  Some of it is that after 3+ years of blogging, the audience I have in my mind when I write is no longer a random stranger from the blogosphere, but the group of commenters who post here regularly. So I figure that you're at least somewhat interested in what's going on in my life.  I also feel like I may have run about things to say about the mommy wars...

TBR: The Argument

In honor of election day, this week's book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai. 

Bai is (was?) a reporter for the NY Times Magazine, and the book is based largely on his experiences covering the 2004 and 2006 campaigns.  Much of the book was vaguely familiar to me, but Bai provides more details on some topics, such as the origins of the Democracy Alliance (a group of very rich individuals who are making a concerted effort to build a progressive infrastructure).   He provides nice sketches of Markos (whom he describes as a natural entrepreneur who built Daily Kos into the leading Democratic political site almost by accident) and Jerome Armstrong (whom he describes as a jack of all trades who discovered his calling in campaigns).  He's scathing about the bloggers at Firedoglake, and glowing about Gina Cooper.*  All this is very well written, although there's so many characters that I started to lose track of them by the end.

But the meat of the book is Bai's claim that Democrats don't stand for anything in particular, other than being not-Bush.  And by "Democrats," he doesn't just mean the presidential candidates, or the Congressional leadership, but the whole left-wing apparatus -- bloggers, billionaires, think-tanks, etc.  And from where I sit, that's just not true. There's a bunch of organizations laying out progressive agendas. I think EPI is doing the best job of articulating the overall vision in their Agenda for Shared Prosperity.

Bai seems to dismiss all this as "same old New Deal."  As far as I can tell, his litmus test for something being a new vision is that it has to involve substantial change to Social Security.  If you're not willing to slaughter the sacred cow, you must be trapped in old think. (At the same time, he seems to think that Mark Warner is a visionary, for reasons that are never quite articulated.) But Social Security isn't really in all that bad shape. Yes, there's a funding issue, but it could be resolved with relative small increases in the cap on taxes and the retirement age, and decreases in benefits.  (Medicare's a whole 'nother story.)  And Democrats and progressives acknowledge that, by and large.

More good discussion at TPMCafe.

*  I had never heard of Gina Cooper -- she's the person who took the lead on organizing the first YearlyKos.  I'm thrilled to hear that she's getting some recognition, because from Bai's description, she seems to have taken on the classical female role of doing the critical behind the scenes work while Markos was running around chatting up reporters. 

All the news I don't have time to read

Yesterday, I saw an article somewhere about Brijit, a new website that abstracts newspaper and magazine articles down to 100 words or less, and rates them.  The idea is that it's news for people who don't have time to read, or something.  Anyone can sign up to write abstracts for them, and they pay $5 a pop if they use them.

It's certainly true that my to-read pile grows far faster than I can keep up with.  But I'm not convinced that this is a solution.  For one thing, it covers mostly sources that I actually do keep up with -- I don't read the NY Times cover to cover, but I usually look at the front page, and scan the list of  "most emailed" articles, and I think I get as much out of that as I would out of the Brijit summaries.

My favorite source for telling me what I would like to read if I had another 5 hours a day is Jenny Davidson at Light Reading.  She almost never suggests things that I've already read, and often includes a few paragraphs that capture the heart of the article.

On a related note, she recently linked to an interview with Pierre Bayard, the author of the wonderfully named book "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read."

(No book review today -- I'm in the middle of 3 different books, and not far enough along to talk about any of them.  I did watch the movie of Maurice last week; I think it was a mistake to watch it right after reading Birdsong, because all I could think about was that they were all doomed.)

 

All around us

I've been thinking a lot about a couple of bloggers lately.  I've never met either one in person, but their posts have gotten under my skin.

Flea, at One Good Thing, wrote a pair of posts this month about her family's experiences with poverty, bankruptcy, and nearly getting arrested for money laundering.  As she notes,  she didn't post about it much while it was going on.   She left enough slip that regular readers could tell that they were having some trouble, but I had no idea how bad it had gotten.  (For what it's worth, Flea is my nominee for most likely to write that Great American Health Insurance Novel that Phantom Scribbler suggested.)

Meanwhile, a month ago, WhyMommy at Toddler Planet was posting about her mother-in-law's surgery for breast cancer.  Less than a week later, she was reporting her own breast cancer diagnosis.  She's been posting regularly about what it's like to have chemo, her feelings, plans, and more.

As I said, I haven't met either of these women in person.  I don't know what they look like.  It's not likely, but WhyMommy could be the woman behind me on the grocery store line.  Or, more probably, that woman has her own set of issues on her mind -- a shadow on a x-ray, a teenager failing all her classes, overdue bills, yet another miscarriage, a parent who doesn't want to go into a nursing home but needs more help that she can provide, a job that may not be there next month.

No one gets a free pass through life.  And people don't have flashing signs over their heads that tell us what they're dealing with. So it's probably safe to assume that who ever you're bumping into, they're probably having a hard day. 

Thinking blogger meme

Suzanne at Mimilou was kind enough to select me as a "Thinking Blogger."  I gather I'm supposed to tag 5 more.  I think most of the blogs I read are by thinking bloggers, so I'm going to try to pick 5 who I think most of you won't be reading already.

So my five, in no particular order:

• Flea, at One Good Thing
• Sandy, at the imponderabilia of actual life
• Quev, at Mobtown Blues
• Shannon, at Peter's Cross Station
• Laura, at Geeky Mom

Because of the house stuff, blogging is likely to be very light for a couple of weeks...

changing the culture of politics

Because of the snow/ice I happened to home this afternoon to receive a call from the Obama campaign asking for a contribution.  The caller said that Obama of course cared about universal health care and getting out of Iraq, but that what was really different about his campaign was that he wanted to change the tone of politics.  I thanked him for the call, but said that the election was a long way away and I wasn't ready to commit to a candidate yet.

I agree that the tone of politics is truly ugly these days.  I listened to a bit of the radio while cooking dinner tonight, and so caught a Republican Congresswoman saying that voting against the "surge" in Iraq meant that you were in favor of the terrorists winning.   Does she really believe this crap?  I'm not sure which horrifies me more -- that she'd believe that half of Congress (and, more importantly, half of the country) supports terrorism or that she doesn't believe it but thinks it's politically effective.

And I'm truly appalled by the misogynist and frightening crap that Amanda and Melissa have been taking and that forced them to resign from the Edward's campaign.  I want to repeat what Melissa wrote, because I think it's important:

"There will be some who clamor to claim victory for my resignation, but I caution them that in doing so, they are tacitly accepting responsibility for those who have deluged my blog and my inbox with vitriol and veiled threats. It is not right-wing bloggers, nor people like Bill Donohue or Bill O'Reilly, who prompted nor deserve credit for my resignation, no matter how much they want it, but individuals who used public criticisms of me as an excuse to unleash frightening ugliness, the likes of which anyone with a modicum of respect for responsible discourse would denounce without hesitation."

Frances Kissling should not be the only religious leader who is speaking out against this, no matter what you think of Amanda's original posts.

But I'm not sure that the quality of discourse can be elevated one-sidedly.  Obama makes a point in his book of how during his Senate race he told campaign staff to remove from his website language that suggested that all those who oppose abortion are motivated by a desire to control women.  And there certainly are those who truly care about fetal life.  But there's also a bunch of people who seem to care a lot more about fetal life than about living women or children.  And always assuming that your opponent is decent and well-intentioned is as great a mistake as always assuming that your opponent is evil.

I want to tip my hat to Cecily, who does this about as right as anyone I know -- keeping on talking with people who disagree with her on abortion, but consistently drawing the line at abusive language and behavior.  But you can ban trolls from your blog.  I don't know what's the right way to deal with trolls who get themselves quoted on NPR and the New York Times.

Edwards and bloggers

I'm fascinated to hear that both Amanda from Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister have taken jobs with the John Edwards campaign.  Amanda will be their blogmaster and Shakes will be their netroots coordinator.

I'm intrigued both by their choice of Edwards and by the Edwards' campaign choice of them out of all the bloggers they might have picked. (Maybe it will put to rest for once and all that stupid "where are the women political bloggers" question.)  I've been fence sitting, but this might help push me off.  I need to think about it a bit.  (And yes, I know the election is nearly two years away.  My dad keeps nudging me that if I want to do something other than knock on doors, I need to pick a team early.)

It's going to be very interesting to see how the internet affects this campaign.  It's amazing how much the political landscape has changed just since the 2004 campaign.  Blogs weren't ubiqitous and you tube didn't exist.

picks of the year (a bit late)

I thought I had posted this at the end of 2006, but I just found it in my draft posts.  Whoops.  Anyway, better late than never, here are my picks for my favorite posts of last year (and why). 

• Fair, not kind.  The right word matters.
• The Endless To Do List.  I really like these posts where I pull together ideas from lots of different places.
• TBR: The Woman at the Washington Zoo. In too many of my book reviews this year, I feel like I simply recapped the thesis of the book.  I think I did a better job on this one.
• School spending.  I haven't done as many data-driven posts since I've changed jobs (since they take a lot of time to research), but this is a post where I really learned something in the process of looking up the data.
• Why register with the state? One where I feel like I added to the dialogue in a productive way.
• School round-up.  This was not necessarily one of my best posts of the year, but it summed up probably the best conversation of the year, taking place here, in the comments, and in other people's blogs.

Here's what I did as a roundup last year [2005, that is] and in 2004.

2006: First lines

As seen at Raising WEG and Angry Pregnant Lawyer, the first lines from the first post in each month of the year:

• Back in November, Jody posted about a project that Forbes and Yahoo undertook to let you send an email to yourself in the future.
• Today's book is Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
• I don't have anything to add to Laura or Amanda's comments on Tierney's column from Tuesday's Times.
• I know, even I'm getting sick of hearing about mommy wars.
• As some of you guessed, the stuff going on that I couldn't talk about is that I'm changing jobs.
• I learned via Shannon at Peter's Cross Station that today is Blogging for LGBT Families Day.
• Via Becca at Not Quite Sure, I read Meghan O'Rourke's commentary on Linda Hirshman's book.
• Today's book is a strange and compelling book, In The Little World (A True Story of Dwarfs, Love, and Trouble), by John Richardson. 
• In her comment on my post about my tri, Trishka wondered: "I don't know how you manage to do all that you do -- work full time, have two small children, volunteer, and to train for a triathlon on top of it."
• Well, I can't say I had any epiphanies while I was gone, but I think I benefited from taking a step back.
• Please vote.
• Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about rumors that the Department of Labor was going to try to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) 

The personal is (still) political

As Sandy noted, Elizabeth Marquardt posted an apology for assuming that the "dc mom" in my heading stood for "donor conception" mom rather than "[Washington], D.C." mom.  I was anxious to clear up her misunderstanding, not because I think that donor conception is a bad thing, but because I didn't want anyone to attribute an inappropriate authority to my commenting on Katrina Clark's essay. 

As futher evidence of how "the personal is political," I'd like to point to Mobian's post about the FMLA.  She picked up on my FMLA post via the Carnival of Feminists, but then writes:

For LGBT employees, the issue may not be so much the “definition of an eligible employee,” but rather the “definition of a family member.” Employers are not obligated to give an employee FMLA leave for the birth of her child, if it is her same-sex partner carrying the child. Same goes for adoption if the state does not allow second-parent adoptions and it is the employee’s partner who is adopting. And if the employee’s partner is lying in the hospital dying of cancer? Too bad. Thankfully, many corporations are choosing to give LGBT employees leave that is equivalent to the federal rights, but many others still don’t.

I'm embarassed to admit that this issue hadn't occurred to me when I wrote about FMLA, and I thank Mombian for pointing it out.

I've been reading some of the manifestos that Hugh MacLeod's been collecting and one point jumped out at me from the Amiable Heretic:

"4. You're only entitled to the opinions you've thought through. You can only do that if you use hard data. Opinions you adopt from others are other people's opinions, not yours."

I agree, as long as "hard data" isn't limited to statistics.  Real people, talking honestly about their own experiences, can be hard data too.

Hip parents

I'm not quite as enthusiastic about Babble as RebelDad is.  Yes, I'm glad to see a parenting site that is making a serious outreach to dads.  But they seem to be trying a little too hard to be hip.  Earlier in the week, it seemed like every other post on their front page was gratuitously cursing or referring to sex toys.  Oooh how naughty.  It made me think about what Andi Buchanan wrote recently about "the escalation of cool" or how being a hipster parent can be as much of a confining role as being a saccharine mommy who just loves pastels.

I feel like the Babble people read that annoying SFChronicle article about how boring mommies are and want to show that parents can still drink, curse and wear black.  Er, yes, but so what?  Is that really still a radical concept?  And is it really that exciting?

I know I've linked to it before, but if you haven't read Being Daddy's Square: The Unhip Parent's Manifesto, go check it out.  I agree with RebelDad that being a parent shouldn't mean giving up everything else that's important in your life (#4 on his list), but if you go into parenting expecting that your life isn't going to change at all, you're shortchanging your child AND yourself.

Maybe after Babble's a bit more settled, the authors will stop defining themselves by what they're not and start talking about who they are.  I'll check back in a month or so.

Political blogs

Alison asked me what political blogs I like.  That's a harder question to answer than it seems.

A short answer is provided by my bloglines subscriptions.  As you'll see, there's a lot of blogs there, and no, I don't read all of them every day -- nowhere near that.  But these were all ones that I liked enough to think that I'd want to find them again, and the easiest way to do that is to add them to my subscriptions.

But, of all those blogs, which ones are political?  That's hard to answer.  Majikthise and Pandagon were both finalists for Koufax awards last year.  But what about Bitch, PhD?  Does the fact that she sometimes tells cute kid stories make her less of a political blogger?  For that matter, what about me?  I don't generally think of myself as a political blogger, because I write about a lot of things, but I've been interviewed by two different academics studying political bloggers, and was invited to participate on Gather's election 2006 group. 

I tend to prefer bloggers who mix the personal and the political to those who are all politics all the time.  For one thing, I think it dramatically reduces the level of flaming -- when you think of the words on the screen as coming from a real person who gets frustrated with their kids and likes to watch trashy tv, you're less likely to tell them they're a moron.  For another, the volume of postings tends to be more managable.

I may lose my blogger credential for saying this, but I think that for most national political issues, the much maligned mainstream media generally does a better job of covering things than bloggers do.  Where blogs shine are the issues and races that get overlooked by the mainstream media.  So I love reading Not Larry Sabato who covers Virginia politics down to the delegate and state senate level.  The now defunct Democracy for Virginia used to highlight specific bills.  Nathan Newman writes about labor issues.

For the high volume political blogs, I mostly depend on others to point out the most interesting posts.  I usually only read Kevin Drum or Matthew Yglesias when Laura at 11d sends me over to them, but then I almost always find something else there that's interesting.  TAPPED and inclusionist are other blogs that often point me to interesting content elsewhere. 

It's worth noting that the biggest "political blogs" aren't exactly blogs.  They're community sites, like DailyKos and MyDD.  I generally don't read these unless someone points me to a specific post, because I haven't figured out how to handle the huge volume on them.  I do check out TPMCafe every week or so. 

Books, ebooks, and the internet

I regularly get offers of books and videos sent to the email address on this blog.  At first, I was so thrilled by the prospect that I said yes to almost everything, but then I felt compelled to actually read them.  So I've gotten more picky.  But I was sufficiently intrigued by the email I got a few weeks ago for a book called "Pick Me Up" that I requested a review copy.  The email promised:

Are you ready to pursue knowledge through the coolest graphics and pop culture references around? Then you and your site’s are ready for the reference-book revolution!  From Beethoven to dinosaurs to Bangali facts, PICK ME UP explains the world around us through smart, witty writing and a fun and modern design. This captivating reference book serves more as an unencyclopedia for the internet generation, and teems with fascinating information about history, science, nature, geography, and culture. These cool facts, inspired by pop culture, serve as a serious boredom eliminator, and their arrangement is inspired both by video games and the internet. PICK ME UP appeals speicifically to modern kids and teens, and mirrors the multimedia world in which we live.

The book is certainly visually impressive.  It's got a 3-D effect cover that creates an amazing illusion of depth, and the individual page layouts are well-designed and convey a significant amount of information, combining graphics and text.  D is well younger than the target age range for the book, but immediately asked me what it was and could he have it.  I think it's the perfect book to leave in the bathroom, since you can pick it up at any page and read for a few minutes.

But, as a reference book, it's got some huge holes.  The topics are clearly chosen based on what they had interesting graphics for, with no attempt at comprehensive coverage.  I have no idea how the pages are ordered.  (There will be an index in the published version, although it wasn't in the uncorrected proof they sent me.)  And the attempt at creating hyperlinks (by listing keywords and the corresponding page numbers in bold) mostly made me wonder why this information should be in a book, rather than online.  For reference and graphics, the internet has a strong comparative advantage over print books.  (For proof, see Phantom Scribbler's contest of yesterday.)  I have a feeling that this book will be mostly bought by parents and other older relatives for preteens who don't read very much, and it won't change that pattern.

By contrast, books are far superior to computers for portability and for ease of reading for long periods.  T is fascinated by the "e-ink" technology in the new Sony Readers, but so far I've seen absolutely nothing that makes me inclined to give up my wood pulp books for them.  The only applications I can think of that have any appeal are if I were in school (and all of my textbooks came in etext versions) or for long trips where I don't want to schlepp a lot of books.

Update: Does anyone reading this own a kindle?

I'd love a review from a real person who has one.

Back online

Well, I can't say I had any epiphanies while I was gone, but I think I benefited from taking a step back.  I enjoy blogging, but sometimes it just feels like another thing on the to-do list.  There have been some horrific stories in the news, and I can't imagine what I could have said that would have been meaningful.

The details are a little up in the air, but I've been invited to post several times over the next month as one of a group of political bloggers at Gather.com.  Gather seems to be something of a cross between a social networking site and a set of community blogs.  I'll let you know when things firm up.  In the meanwhile, tomorrow (e.g. Thursday), their front page poll question is going to be who do you think is going to win the Virginia Senate race, Allen or Webb.  At this point, I think it's probably too close to call -- Allen is still ahead in the last set of polls, but Webb has momentum and finally enough money to get on TV.

Connections

Last Friday, I was lucky enough to have lunch with Shannon and Nat.  It's always fun to meet the person behind the page, and Shannon was just as thoughtful and friendly as her writing.  Nat is also as charming as her pictures.  Seriously, everyone in our section of the restaurant was making googly eyes at her, and she very seriously taught us all the names of the parts of her face.  I asked Shannon how it felt to be part of an entourage, and she said "tiring."  We had the obligatory discussion of how even though we met through the internet, neither of us is an ax murderer, and wouldn't it be nice if all of our blogfriends lived close enough that we could hang out together.

I keep getting emails about different mommy blog communities that I could join -- Today's Mama, ParentsConnect, ClubMom.  I can't say that I'm particularly interested. For one thing, I've already got more blogs bookmarked than I have time to read.  For another, I feel like most of these sites are vehicles for advertising.  [Thanks to Geeky Mom for the link.]  If I were new to the whole blog thing, it might be more appealing.  Or am I missing something?

I'm more intrigued by two other sites I've run across that attempt to harness the power of connections for practical ends.

• Prosper.com connects borrowers and lenders, taking a much smaller middleman slice than banks.  In a world where credit cards charge 18% or more for loans, and bank accounts pay only 5%, there's a lot of room for mutual benefit.  Interestingly, so far I don't see much evidence that there are interactions between people who know each other (or who are friends of friends).  That's the idea behind the groups concept on Prosper -- a high tech version of the microlending circles that require groups of borrowers to mutually guarantee each other's loans.  The idea is both that your friends know better than a credit agency whether you are trustworthy -- and that you're less likely to default if you'd screw over your friends than if you'd only be hurting a stranger.
• BorrowMe is a site for matching people with things that they want to borrow and lend -- baby gear, ladders, weed whackers, books, whatever. I absolutely love the idea (the gift economy in action, with the added benefit of being easy on the environment), but it only makes sense in practice if there is a high enough density of participants that you can find what you need without paying huge shipping costs or driving all over the place.  I'm a beta test member and so far things are pretty quiet, but they're having a promotion this week where they're giving away an ipod and a bunch of shirts to people who recruit new members, list things to lend, and actually lend or borrow stuff.  If you're interested in checking it out, let me know and I'll email you an access code.  And no, it's not because I'm trying to win the ipod, but because I genuinely think it's cool. 

TBR: Crashing the Gate

Today's book is Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics, by Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD) and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (of DailyKos).  It's their breezy take on why the Democrats can't win elections, in spite of being demonstrably better at governing.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in the NY Times, Jerome and Kos deliberately don't discuss "message" -- they argue that we need to stop trying to achieve the perfect platform, and start focusing on winning some elections.  (Peter, of course, has a book coming out this summer in which he argues that Democrats should be talking about a liberal foreign policy agenda.)

Parts of their analysis are totally on target -- the incestuous relationship between the party committees that control the money and don't take candidates seriously unless they hire the "right" (insider) consulting firms, the failure of progressive organizations to pay their employees enough to make them a career path for all but the most dedicated (or independently wealthy).  And I liked their argument that campaign dollars don't have to be a limited resource that need to be hoarded for the most competitive races -- by running serious candidates in even less competitive districts, more people are energized to participate and contribute, expanding the pot.

But the heart of the book is, I think, their claim that the biggest problem of the Democratic party is single-interest groups like environmentalists, the labor movement, and pro-choice activists.  They argue that these groups give Republicans easy targets, and hold candidates hostage to ideological purity.  The explicit comparision is to the Religious Right, which has used its power to support Republicans for the long-term benefits, even when their issues weren't front and center in a given campaign.  They are particularly angry at pro-choice groups which have mobilized against pro-life Democrats. 

The irony of the argument is that Jerome and Kos are generally opposed to the DNC and other party insiders coming down from above and trying to annoint a candidate.  And, my reading of the situation is that NOW and NARAL have only really dug in their heels against candidates when they feel like the Democratic party leadership is trying to annoint a anti-choice candidate before the primary (cf Pennsylvania).  Obviously, they're not happy when a pro-life Democrat wins the primary, but they generally just quietly look away, and recognize that the Democrat is usually still the better candidate on their issues.  But they're trying to draw a line in the sand and say that they're not going to acquiese when someone else tries to play kingmaker and expects them to fall quietly in line.  In other words, they're not going to be the labor movement, which has loyally provided the muscle for Democratic campaigns for decades and gotten essentially bupkes in return. (Jerome and Kos also don't seem to notice the irony when they proudly recount how bloggers knocked Tim Roemer out of contention for DNC chair because of his pro-life stance.)

The conventional wisdom seems to be that contested primaries are a bad thing, by draining resources from the general election, and causing the victor to be tarnished.  I'm not entirely convinced of that, for some of the same reasons that Jerome and Kos argue that Dems ought to be fighting in more districts.  I think primaries can draw more attention to campaigns, expand the pool of interested people and reduce public cynicism about elections.  The key is to figure out how to have real primaries and then still be able to talk to each other at the end of the day.

The Republicans seem to be better at this than Democrats these days, but I don't think it's because they have a magic strategy that the Dems are missing.  I think it's something about being the majority party.  When you're in charge and control the goodies, people fall into line even if they're furious.  When you don't have goodies to give out, the backbiting begins.

Other interesting reviews of the book:

• Mark Schmitt in the Washington Monthly
• Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise (particularly addressing the abortion issue)

What I want

Over at 11d, Laura wrote an interesting post about "What Do Men Want?", specifically about whether men overall prefer stay-at-home wives, as Jane Galt suggested.  Laura thinks that most men underestimate the ways in which stay-at-home wives contribute to the family's well-being, and so would prefer that their wives work.

My guess, with absolutely no data to back it up, is that most men would prefer that their wives worked part-time -- enough to bring in some money to allow for extras (nicer cars, better vacations) -- but not so much as to result in an expectation that they'll be responsible for making serious addditional contributions to the domestic front.  This isn't because they're evil.  I know I sound like a broken record, but Rhona Mahony's point is that once you've stepped off the career track, it's hard to get back on at a level that (economically) justifies your spouse making significant sacrifices (covering an equal share of sick days, relocating) to further your career.

Certainly, all else equal, when the boys are both in school, I'd like it if T figured out a way to bring in more money.  It would give me the freedom to consider lower-paying but more interesting and/or meaningful jobs without feeling like I was sacrificing my family, and it would give us more options generally (see yesterday's post about schools for an example).  And I'd like to be more involved in the boys' schools, which is hard to justify while I'm working full-time and T's staying home.  But it's probably not worth making him miserable doing database work (even if he could still get hired to do so, which is unclear).  So we shall see. 

The discussion on Laura's post got a little sidetracked into a back and forth on whether it's upper-class indulgence to discuss any of this.  I liked Tim Burke's answer:

"We live our lives, not someone else's lives; in each of our lives, there are issues, problems, dissatisfactions. Effacing your own life, your own issues, your own reactions, ignoring the ethnographic texture of your immediate social worlds, in favor of endless pious genuflection at the holy shrine of some constituency of "deserving poor" is an upper-middle-class indulgence in its own right, and usually phonier by far than talking about how to do right by your children or your spouse."

Parenting and mothering

Via RebelDad, I found Jeremy at Daddy Dialectic's post about why he's happy to claim the title of Mr. Mom:

"When I’m taking care of Liko, I don’t feel like I’m “fathering” him. In my mind – and this is just the thought I was raised with, not the one I want to have – a father goes to work and comes home in the evening. "Fathering" is playing ball, patting on the back, putting food on the table. An honorable role."

"A mother, meanwhile, is home changing diapers and cleaning baby food off the floor and kissing skinned knees. That's also honorable and often honored. That’s what I do. So I feel like by staying home with him, I’m “mothering” Liko. I’m a mom, or at least, that’s my role. In many respects, a man out in the middle of the afternoon with his toddler, who is known to neighbors and neighborhood shop clerks and waitresses as a “Mr. Mom,” is a man in drag, and queer in the most political sense of the term. Why shouldn’t I be proud to be a Mr. Mom?"

I commented that I worry that this definition implies that working mothers aren't real mothers, and there's been some interesting back and forth on Jeremy's blog. 

But maybe Jeremy's right in some ways.  I write here a fair amount about what I call "reverse traditional families" -- families with working mothers and at-home fathers.  One of the strains on women in these families is that we rarely give ourselves mothering credit for being breadwinners.  We often beat ourselves up for the things that we don't do, without giving ourselves corresponding brownie points for the things we do.  Maybe we should stop worrying about whether we're good enough mothers, and decide that we're damned good fathers.

I can't remember if I posted here about the "daddies and donuts" event at D's preschool last month.  This was a chance to have a snack and do a craft with the kids, at the relatively working-parent friendly hour of 9 am (vs. the 11 am time for "family snack" and most other events to which parents are invited).  When I got the flyer, I asked T if he thought in this context, "daddy" meant "male parent" (e.g. him) or "the parent who never gets to do things at preschool" (e.g. me).  [The flyer did say that if a father couldn't come, a mother or "other Very Important Person" could attend.]  Ultimately, since I was taking off a day the week before to go on a field trip with the class (to the Planetarium), I decided not to fight T for the chance to go.  As it turns out, the "craft" was that the kids decorated paper ties. 

***

On another note, RebelDad is having an online chat with Leslie Morgan Steiner at WashingtonPost.com tomorrow (Thursday) at 1 pm.  If you can't be online at the time, you can submit questions in advance and read the transcript later.  I got Steiner's book out of the library -- look for a review in the next week or two.

Blogs and the MSM

I've been getting a bunch of hits today from people searching for "Annette Lareau" or "Unequal Childhoods" because David Brooks wrote about the book today in his NYTimes column.  Time to break out the "I blogged about that last year" bumper stickers. 

The Washington Post has a new work-and-family blog, by Leslie Morgan Steiner, of course  It's frustrating that they've got this huge built-in audience and are covering so much of the tired old mommy wars ground.  (On a technical note, like the NYTimes, the Post blogs allow comments, but don't let you link to your own blog.  Kudos to the Business Week bloggers for acting like a real part of the blog community.)

The April Working Mother magazine has an article by Arianna Huffington that lauds the advantages of blogging as a career that lets you work from home.  Yeah right, if you're already a celebrity, or started blogging before 2003 (cf. Dooce).  I emailed off a letter to the editor, telling them that they missed the point.  If you're looking for a way to quit your day job, blogging probably offers only slightly better odds than a lottery ticket.  But if you're looking for ideas, laughter, and comraderie, and you can only do it when the kids have gone to bed, I don't think there's a better place to look.

Awards

I'm so excited.  Not about the Oscars, about the Koufax awards.  They're finally open for voting.  (Not that I'm complaining about the delay -- they're a major effort to put on, and a total work of love.)

I've been nominated in two categories: Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and Best Series for my posts on work-family issues.  I think this is a preliminary round of voting, and then there will be another round after they've narrowed the nominees down. I know that some of my other favorite blogs -- Bitch, PhD, Geeky Mom, Feministe, Pandagon, Majikthise -- have been nominated as well.  I think Pharyngula gets my vote for best single post.  I know that there are lots of other great blogs out there.  Please vote for your favorites.

About those Oscars.  I might TiVo them.  Not seeing the movies takes a lot of the fun out of it. Of the movies up for major awards, Brokeback Mountain is the only one I've seen.  I've seen two of the three nominees in the animated picture category.  (We took the boys to see Wallace and Grommit, but saw Corpse Bridge on our own.  Yes, we're geeks.)  I've also seen King Kong, March of the Penguins, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the last two on video).

This blog in 75 pixels

Following Anne's suggestion, I signed up with BlogBurst, which is a new service that is trying to syndicate blog content to appear in newspapers' websites.  It's still very much in beta, but I'm interested to see how it plays out.

They strongly encourage bloggers to add an image to appear with the blog listing, which is limited to a 75 x 75 pixel square.  Since I'm not a particularly visual person, I'm soliciting ideas for what sort of image to use.  I'd rather NOT go with a photo of myself.  The only idea I've come up with so far is a photo of a cell phone and crayons.  Any suggestions?

I don't intend to change what I'm writing here in order to try to make it more appealing.   I will stop posting poems that I don't have copyright to, which I've done a few times.

touching base

My computer is on the fritz (just when I had almost finished doing our taxes on it!) so my blogging is likely to be light for a while.  I'll check in from T's computer, but probably won't have much in the way of serious posts until I have it back in gear or give up and replace it.  (It's scary, but the low-end machines are so cheap, that at any reasonable valuation of our time, it almost always makes sense to buy a new one.)

I did want to express my sadness at the unexpected death of Octavia Butler.   Fledgling wasn't my favorite of her books, but she was a great writer.  I ran across this link to one of her short stories, Amnesty, today, and I recommend it to anyone who isn't familiar with her work.  In miniature, it displays all the themes that Butler kept on returning to.

Interestingly, it seems that the news of her death spread across the blogosphere well before it was reported in the press.  Steven Barnes seems to have reported it first.  Edward Champion shares a nice memory of how Kindred rocked his world, and a roundup of posts from others.

Misc

Will the person who found this site by googling "betty friedan and the goodie bag" please tell me what you were looking for?

Some of you may notice that I now have an ad running on the site for Perfect Madness.  I was somewhat amused the other day to discover that my post about her magazine articles is currently the number 2 google hit if you search for "Judith Warner," below the Newsweek article, but above the publisher's official site.

Thanks to the kind person who nominated me under "Learn Something New Every Day" in the Share the Love blog awards at One Woman's World.  (For once, I didn't self-nominate, or put anyone up to it.)  If you feel like voting for me, here's the link.  I see Mimilou, Landismom, and Danigirl got nominated too.

Annika's Internet Insurance Policy

I don't think anyone goes into parenting thinking of having a child who will need organ transplants.  But that's what happened to Moreena, whose daughter Annika has had two liver transplants, and is going to need a third, if she gets healthy enough that the doctors think she could survive the operation.  And if having a desperately sick child isn't bad enough, Moreena's family is about to hit their insurance limit for the year.

Andrea has organized a web page to share information about ways to help Moreena's family.  I'll be contributing, and will have a button up as soon as the donation account is set up.  I encourage you to consider contributing as well, and to spread the word.

I've written before about the craziness of our health care system, and I'll write about it again.  And I also encourage you to contribute to organizations working on health care more systematically, especially in countries where small donations go a long way.  But this one hits home to me.  Annika is very close to D's age. Reading about what Annika goes through makes me realize what a blessing it is to have a child who can consider a needle stick for a standard blood test a major indignity.  I can't imagine what it feels like to have a severely ill child.  But I know they don't need the financial stress on top of that.

Good reading elsewhere

No post tonight, because I'm going to torture myself by watching the State of the Union address.

Instead, I point you to some terrific reading elsewhere:

Wampum very generously hosts the Koufax awards (e.g. blog awards for lefties).  Only a few categories are up so far, but there's lots of interesting posts in there:

Categories include:

• Best single post.  I've only read a handful of the entries, but the one that I forwarded to my friends at the time it came out is the proper reverence due those who have gone before.
• Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.   I've been nominated, so have Geeky Mom and Echidne
• Best New Blog
• Best state and local blogs

(Has anyone done an OPML file of all the nominees?  I see a lot of people putting them in their blogrolls, but there's no way I have the time to do that manually.)

I'd also like to point out the new BlogHer site, which is doing a great job of highlighting interesting posts from a range of different blogs, mostly by women.    Cynical Mom and Anne have already announced that they're attending the convention this year.  I wish I could be there, but can't justify the $$ and time to schlepp out to California.

Julie v. The New York Times

Last week, I posted a graph, showing the impact of the NYTimes mention on my state statistics.

Now look at the graph for this week's statistics, and guess which day Julie at a little pregnant linked to me.

Site stats, etc.

Academic Coach wondered whether the NY Times story sent me much traffic.  Here's the Statcounter graph of my hits from this month:

So yes, I've gotten more hits than usual, but only by maybe 10 or 20 percent, not by an order of magnitude.

Recent searches that led people to this blog include:

• This image (I linked to it back in September 2004, and I get a surprisingly regular trickle of hits from it -- don't know if it's Library of Congress staff, or what).
• aap recomendation peanuts
• gogurt narnia
• choice feminism
• caitlin flanagan husband
• half changed world
• jonathan kozol the shame of the nation
• nova scotia bump miner
• get up grrl
• who are the real members of the book random familiy
• information on a black person who changed the world by doing something
• proof that nurture wins

bj wondered whether I'm anonymous.  The answer is "sort of."  As I've noted before, my full name doesn't appear anywhere on the site, but I've included links that would make it possible for anyone who really wanted to find me to do so.  And my family and friends know about my blog, as do some of my coworkers.  (Check out Ann Bartow's post on "real name bloggers," via the Carnival of the Feminists 7.)

Who's there?

I'm tired and don't have the brainpower to post.

Fortunately, it's Delurking Week, so I've got a good excuse for a zero-efforty post.  Everyone reading this is encouraged to post a comment to say hi.  And if you feel so inclined, post your favorite knock-knock joke.

Mine is:

Knock Knock (KK)

Who's there?  (WT?)

Boo!

Boo who?

Don't cry, it's just a knock knock joke.

(As Moxie points out, If you don't have a blog, and you don't want your email shown to the world, post a fake URL, and your email address will be hidden to everyone but me.  If you don't want ME to know your email address, go ahead and post a fake one.)

Bumper sticker

Greg at Daddy Types wrote last week about the silly NY Times article about parental bragging.  He noted that they cite Unequal Childhoods and was kind enough to point out my book review from last year. 

But the part that made me spit-take was "Her car probably has an "I SO blogged this before you" bumper sticker on it."

It doesn't, but I think I might need to order one.  Anyone else want one?  It's probably cheaper if we do a bulk order.

It is true that sometimes I don't have the energy for real life conversations on topics that I've blogged heavily about.  I want to say "look, read these three posts, and then we'll talk."  I don't, of course, but it's tempting.

(By the way, is it supposed to take Technorati four days to find a new link?)

Recurring themes

I went back through the blog tonight looking for my favorite posts of the year, but had trouble deciding among them.  I liked a lot of them, but almost all of them I'd write somewhat differently if I were writing them today.

Instead, I decided to pick a few favorite themes that I returned to again and again. One of the things that I really like about this medium is the ability to develop thoughts more fully and to have true dialogue with commenters and other bloggers. Thus, these collections of posts are better than any one on its own.

Gender and domesticity

• Vacuuming
• Your mommy hates housework and your daddy hates housework
• Division of Labor
• Marriage and compromise
• The domestic glass ceiling
• Cleanliness is next to...

Race and the school decision

• What we learn at school
• The call of the surburbs
• TBR: The Failures of Integration
• Segregation and Self-Reflection
• TBR: Shame of the Nation

Gender differences in children

• Boys and Girls
• TBR: As Nature Made Him
• It's A Boy!

Class and Privilege

• One month on the Thrifty Food Plan (and related posts)
• Review: Unequal Childhoods
• Entitlement
• Class in America
• Rich?  Who me?
• The privilege of choice

TBR: Julie and Julia

The Julie/Julia Project was the first blog I ever read, back when I didn't really know what a blog was.  I think someone posted a link to it on one of my email lists, several months into the project, and I read a few posts and was hooked.  In it, Julie Powell documented her attempt to cook every single recipe in Volume 1 of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the course of a year.  She wrote about the dishes that turned out great and the dishes that she tortured her friends with, the days when she was interviewed on television and the days when she didn't get home from work until 8 pm and had to start cooking a dish that takes at least 3 hours to cook.

So, I really wanted to like Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.  But I didn't.  It wasn't as funny as the blog, didn't have the detailed information about the food and, of course, didn't have the element of uncertainty that was in the blog.  By the very fact that I was holding the book in my hand, I knew that Julie finished the project, got a nice book contract, and was even able to quit her crappy government job.

Maybe the book would be more compelling to someone who hadn't read the blog and so hadn't heard many of the most interesting stories already.  But I'm not sure.  One of the recurring themes in both the blog and the book is the crappy little kitchen that Julie had to work in.  In the blog, she mentioned several times that it's so small that she had to perch her food processor on top of the trash can.  That's a wonderful image, bringing the scene to life.  She never uses it in the book.  What happened?

Last week, Julie was quoted in the NY Times as saying that she no longer searches for herself on blogs.  I hope that's true, because I feel mean for saying negative things about the book when I got so much pleasure from the blog.

We're back

In case you were wondering, yes, some of my recent posts did disappear and then come back.  Typepad was down today, and for a while they were showing an old backup of all the blogs.  (If you have a Typepad blog and the new posts haven't returned, republish your blog.)

Weblog Awards -- Vote Early, Vote Often

The nominees for the Weblog Awards are up (and they've also fixed the flash problems that were stopping people from actually voting).

Some of my favorite bloggers have been nominated:

• Geeky Mom, for Best Parenting Blog.  Interestingly, although I feel like read zillions of parenting blogs, I haven't heard of half of the nominees.
• Bitch, PhD and Feministe for Best Liberal Blog.  (What a dilemma!)
• Pandagon for Best Group Blog
• Talking Points Memo for Best Blog
• Trish Wilson (the Countess), for Best New Blog.

The Weblog awards have a reputation for being slanted toward conservatives (one of the reasons the Koufax awards were started.) So far, that doesn't seem to be so much the case this year.  Yellow Dog Blog is one of the leading vote getters among Best New Blog, and Kos is leading Best Blog.

Vote early -- vote often.  (Seriously, you can vote once every 24 hours per computer, until December 15.)

My advertising policy

If you look near the top of the column to the right, you should see a little box that says BlogAds.  Right now, the only thing in it is the link to click if you want to advertise here.  In a week or so, there will be an ad for T's video editing and transfer service.  (He edits home movies for people and records them to DVDs.  It makes a great holiday present for the grandparents.  If you're in the DC area, he'll even come right to your house.)  At some point, someone might even decide to pay me to advertise here.  It's mostly an experiment at this point -- I'm not desperate for the cash, but I'm interested in seeing whether this blog could even cover its costs. 

Since there's been some controversies related to blogging and advertising, I thought I should lay my policies out for the record.

1)  There was a huge kerfluffle over the summer about an ad that TBS ran on Kos' blog for The Real Gilligan's Island.  Several people thought it was sexist and offensive, and complained to Kos about it; he dismissed their concerns in terms that were pretty condescending and obnoxioius.  If you ever see an ad here that ticks you off, please let me know.  I don't promise I'll yank it, but I do promise to take your comments seriously.

2)  More recently, Tim Kaine pulled an ad that he had run on Steve Gilliard's blog after Gilliard portrayed Michael Steele as a minstrel (eg in blackface).  Gilliard went ballistic, and Kos backed him up, arguing that this has a "chilling effect" on bloggers' self-expression.   I agree with Ezra Klein that they're delusional if they think politicians (and other advertisers) aren't going to steer clear of controversy like that.  I promise that I'm never going to censor my posts for fear of scaring advertisers, or say nice things about them because they bought an ad.  Trust me, it costs a lot more than $10 a week to buy me off.

Finally, a question about the visuals.  That right-hand column is getting awfully long, as I add more and more features to it.  Should I switch to a 3-column format, which looks a bit more cluttered, but doesn't require as much scrolling to see all of the links?  Or are you all reading via bloglines and don't care?

Fictious blogs

Both the New Yorker and the New York Times have had recent stories about "Article III Groupie," a gossipy blog about judges, supposedly written by a female lawyer at a big NY firm, but actually written by a bored male prosecutor.

A tip of the hat to Judge Posner, who last year suggested that the supposed author might be a fiction.

"I have a theory that the author is not a she, but a he," Judge Posner told The ABA Journal eReport. "The thing is exaggeratedly feminine and constantly drawing attention to her gender."

It reminded me a lot of the fake Harriet Miers blog that got a lot of attention when she was the nominee.   It showed her as obsessed about her appearance and everyone's opinion of her, and generally sounding like someone out of Sweet Valley High.  I don't see anyone making those sorts of jokes about even equally mediocre male candidates, even though in real life, it was Michael Brown who was busy sending email about where he got the suit he wore on TV during the midst of the Katrina crises.

Another famous fictional blog is Anonymous Lawyer.  It's written from the supposed POV of a hiring partner in a big firm, but was actually started by a 3rd year law student.  He fooled a good number of people though. 

The Friendship Crisis

This week's book is The Friendship Crisis: Finding, Making, And Keeping Friends When You're Not A Kid Anymore, by Marla Paul.  Someone recommended it on one of my email lists a while back and the title hit a nerve for me.  I often find myself thinking longingly of my circle of friends from college.  When I used to watch Sex and the City, I was never jealous of the characters' shoes or their dates, but I did drool over the idea of having a group of friends who met every week for long brunches.

Paul's book isn't profound, but it's an easy-to-read discussion of the reasons that women (and the book is really directed to women, in spite of the gender-neutral title) find themselves short on friends, and how to overcome them.  She talks about the concerns of women who have moved, new mothers, divorced or widowed women, and women who have left their jobs, whether to be SAHMs or for retirement.  Her recommendations for how to meet new people are basically common sense -- try new activities, go to support groups, introduce yourself to neighbors -- but she's open about how scary this can be.  I think most people have a notion that making friends is easy for everyone else in the world, so it's reassuring to be told that it's often hard work.

I hit my "friendship crisis" several years back, when I got hit with the double or triple whammy of four of my closest friends moving out of the DC area within a couple of years (one to Pennsylvania, one to Massachusetts, one to Israel and one to Senegal), having a baby (which severely limited the time I had available to socialize), and dropping several of the activities that I had been doing before (due to the same lack of time).  I was pretty depressed about it for a while.  Things are better now, but not what I'd like them to be.  That's one of the reasons that we're starting the Drop In Dinners.

In the last chapter, Paul talks a little about online friendships, and gives some examples, but I don't think she really gets what makes them special, not just a second-rate substitute for "real life" friends. Ronni at Time Goes By wrote a terrific post about this last week.  She writes:

"In my early years of reading blogs, before I started TGB, I was often astonished at how personally revealing many bloggers are. Much more so, I think, to unknown readers than most of us would be in the first few meetings with a new in-person friend.

This might be an advantage to getting to know another better; sometimes it is easier to be honest at a remove from one another."

Exactly. I think in some ways my online friends (from email lists, conferencing systems, and blogs) have spoiled me for in-person friendships, at least in the early, awkward, getting to know you stage.  I don't have the patience for the meaningless small talk.  I want people to talk about the things they're passionate about, what rocked and what sucked about their day.  And people don't generally talk about those things with people they've just met.  I guess I could just start doing it.