Snowmaggedon update: usage of "celebrity" edition, with added commentary on youthfulness

Like probably every other D.C. resident, I've been checking in on the Washington Post's local weather coverage obsessively over the last few days. I'm hoping for some oracular pronouncement that my fair city is about to return to normal. Maybe they'll tell me that my agency can re-open, or that my street will be plowed, and even that grocery store stocking might return to normal shortly. It looks like I'll have no such luck, but hope springs eternal.

One of the sillier pieces there: an article titled "Celebrities' snow days just as mundane as ours." The snark practically writes itself, especially because I have never heard of most of the local "celebrities" mentioned in the article. I nonetheless note it because it throws into relief a key question that Pnin and I have debated many times: how to define who is and is not a celebrity? Especially in our fair city, where connections, rather than lucre, is the coin of the realm.

I tend to throw around the term liberally when describing real life friends of mine as quasi-celebrity bloggers and the like. Pnin thinks this is mostly ridiculous. I freely acknowledge being ridiculous, at least with regard to most of things, but here my more liberal use of the term is in line with the Post's. One complication: that many of the people I want to characterize as such are well-known within particular subcultures, but not much outside of them. Perhaps it's best just to split the baby and call such people quasi-celebrities?

Relatedly, I wish to apologize for anything derogatory I might have said about the Uggs and North Face look. I know, I know, were I to have capitulated, I fear I'd be mistaken for a GWU freshman* even more frequently than I already am. But my beloved rubber elephant patterned boots are starting to fall apart from frequency of wear. They're also not as appropriately warm as they might be, and they're perhaps no longer as appropriate from a pure partisan perspective as they once were. Clearly the Ugg-clad hordes were more prescient than I was.

*No, I don't really understand the biocons' obsession with female youth either. Perhaps it's because I didn't feel I was more attractive when I was 15 or 16 either. Skin quality is one important variable; I still had terrible acne at that age, which didn't disappear altogether until college or so. Another is having a more well-developed sense of fashion; I have a much better sense of what will look good and what horrible now than I did then. Third is that I have more disposable income to spend on my looks than I did then, though I suspect that the mileage of non-lawyer types differs from mine here.

Also, as far as I can tell, nearly everyone I encounter in real life pegs my age at around 18-20, or worse, younger. I have a long litany of ridiculous stories in this regard. I can't order alcohol in restaurants without being carded -- even in the kinds of upscale places where, presumably, nineteen-year-olds are not going to get wasted. Most of the career staff at my agency thought I was a college-age intern for the first three months that I worked there. They then became extremely apologetic and deferential when I gave them my actual title, which privately amused me to no end. If I go to the Hill for briefings, often someone stops me to ask which member or Senator I'm interning for this semester, and also where I go to school. Perhaps the most ridiculous anecdote in this vein comes from the time that Clarissa Dalloway came to visit me two summers ago, when we were both 26, and this guy on the S2 was convinced that we both must have come to town to visit colleges. Note: we did not actually look old enough to be in college at the time. We looked like we were the right age to be applying to college.

I once tried Googling how to seem older. I came across a stupid article that said that I should focus on trying to seem more mature by a)increasing my vocabulary and b)improving my knowledge of politics and current events. Despite my feeling intellectually weak on both counts, the allegedly objective indicators indicate that I'm way out the right tail on both of those. So no help there...

Anyway, the moral of these stories seems to be that 1)many people aren't good at pinning down young women's ages precisely and b)there is significant variation in how old or young women of a particular age look -- both of which seem to counsel against Charlotte Allen inflicted panic about hitting the wall in one's mid-20s.

Charlotte Allen: also no Florence King

Obligatory acknowledgment of the train wreck that is Charlotte Allen's Weekly Standard piece on the sexual revolution. I'm reminded of the time that George Will observed that he wished Teddy Roosevelt hadn't built the goddamn Panama Canal, as building it would have given Bill Kristol an admirable outlet for his prodigious energies. So, too, one wonders: what up, WS? Can't you come up with articles about dubious nation-building adventures to slap on the cover instead?

So among the gems: I learn that according to Kay Hymnowitz that, as I have reached the ripe old age of 28, my fertility has gone down and I am no longer luscious. Good thing I am getting married in September. I'm of course over the median age of 26, which is regrettable too, as Allen longs for the days when the median age of first marriage was 20.

Note to Roger Devlin: learning how to bake an apple pie is actually not very difficult. You can do a search on epicurious.com and figure out how in about thirty-five seconds, in fact. There are also videos and illustrations available on sites like cooksillustrated.com and YouTube, should you need additional help. It is quite easy to pursue a fancy degree and/or hold down a demanding job and still find a Saturday afternoon to make one once in a while. The modern world being what it is, it is even possible to pull cases from Lexis (!) or write a section of a memo while, say, the crust is blind baking.

I know I have posted on this before, but my problem with Charlotte Allen is that she is no Florence King. A review of Confessions Of a Failed Southern Lady once called King "America's funniest bisexual monarchist Republican," which she of course was. King never married, and she detailed in Confessions a series of youthful lesbian and straight love affairs that would doubtless leave Charlotte Allen flushing crimson. King carried out all of this while standing somewhere to the right of Ayn Rand on economic and regulatory policy.

King didn't have an easy life. She worked her way up through a series of big Southern newspapers while churning out reams of pulp romances to pay the bills. Finally, late in life, she landed a National Review column. Yet if anything stands out about her work, it's her stubborn refusal to feel sorry for herself. Charlotte Allen would have me on the floor, sobbing, because it's just sooooo hard to find someone who will marry me and roast red peppers in the oven and find things in Bluebook all at the same time. Florence King would shoot me a Look, tell me to "Bucky up, ducky," then toss off some mordantly clever literary reference.

I'd rather be friends with King, needless to say, and I'd also rather have someone like her leading my intellectual movement. One of my college classmates wrote a series of broadsides targeted at "crybaby conservatives," which I really appreciated. My beef with Allen is a variation on Beck's theme: at the risk of sounding crudely partisan and obnoxious, isn't whining best left to left-liberals?

Yes, life is hard! Mating is hard! But... there are fine books to be read, bread to be baked, dogs to be adopted and loved, children to be tutored, and plenty more hobbies to pursue. Self-reliance, strength, and being interesting are virtues that ought to be at the core of any right-of-center feminism. See generally also this, which describes the type of woman to which a libertarian or conservative feminist ought to aspire to be.

Obligatory Snowmaggedon Post

Yes, I'm still fine. Haven't turned into an icicle yet.

Megan McArdle and Bryan Caplan have interesting reports from the ground. My experiences are similar to theirs.

Our Whole Foods was out of all salad greens yesterday. I felt as though I was witnessing some weird form of Yuppified apocalypse, with people grasping desperately at the last cans of San Marzano tomatoes and balsamic vinegar. But our Trader Joe's indeed had arugula and a pretty good supply of other things. So Pnin and I are prepared tomorrow....

More amusing sentences

"An important reason Justice Scalia's dissent appears so persuasive today lies not in its formalist command of constitutional text or original understanding, which have been well-criticized, but rather in a functionalist argument which my student John Vecchione, former President of Georgetown Law Center's Federalist Society, once called the "Terminator argument." That is, the independent counsel is set up like Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in The Terminator, a movie set in a future where machines are conquering Earth and have developed cyborg assassins like Arnold to take out designated humans. Like the Terminator, the independent counsel is programmed to investigate, prosecute, and ultimately take out a designated human being. Like the Terminator, the independent counsel shuts down once she or he has done so. Like the Terminator, the independent counsel is frightening even if a possibly defensible creation. 27 What is frightening is the creation of a prosecutorial apparatus unfettered by normal fiscal, political, and fairness limits."

-- William Eskridge, PANEL I: RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN FORMALISM AND FUNCTIONALISM IN SEPARATION OF POWERS CASE, 22 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 21, 27 (Fall 1998).

A footnote adds, "In Terminator II, Arnold plays a "good" Terminator sent back in time to protect humans from assassination by a "bad" Terminator. Draw your own constitutional or political parallels."

Are women at work insufficiently obnoxious?

I am trying to decide what I think of this. I've seen the phenomenon-- I saw it particularly plainly when I was on the editorial board of my college paper. We made all the incoming applicants write out essays about why they thought they should get their board of choice, and one of the questions asked them to identify their weaknesses. There was a pronounced variation by gender -- the women all wrote long, self-flagellating things like "Sometimes I think I am too passive-aggressive when criticized," and the men all wrote brief sentences to the effect of "I had too many proofreading errors in my early stuff, but I've basically fixed that by now."

The title "Will Wilkinson Wants People to Be More Like Will Wilkinson" is glib and kind of funny. But it's not really fair. Most people want others to be more like ourselves. Or, at least, to value what we value. It's not so much narcissistic as human.

Also, unlike PEG, I don't think Wilkinson and Shirky's suggestions are mutually exclusive. Extreme exemplars of either tendency probably should be tryin to meet each other in the middle.

This also reminds me of a conversation Pnin and I had about his experiences at a conference with many Asian academics. He noted that norms among them were quite different than in the States; people were much more respectful and deferential, less inclined to ask gotcha questions, etc. I had been perhaps influenced by too many of the multi-paragraph ads for Asia-based Biglaw recruiters that pop up on Above the Law, but I wondered aloud then if more women shouldn't make a point of trying to work in Asia instead of the U.S. After all, from Pnin's description (and from others, too) it sounds like Asian corporations might be more hospitable to stereotypically female personality types than American ones are. This is all a bit quixotic, I know, but perhaps not totally ridiculous.

Very amusing sentences

"Note here a similarity between needle-sharing and unsafe sex: at the point of risk--shooting up and orgasmic exchange of bodily fluids--the "decision maker" is least likely to be "processing" information in a rational cost-benefit way. Again, Aristotle might be right to suggest that at certain moments we take leave of reason and throw ourselves into craving and compulsion. Choices to shoot up or to go for a risky orgasm under these circumstances can be understood as made under diminished capacity--momentary choices that cannot be considered utility-maximizing. Interestingly, the two phenomena, drugs and sex, sometimes combine in a synergism of risk. Studies suggest that partners are more likely to engage in HIV-risky sexual activities when they have been using drugs. 34 By clouding the mind or releasing inhibitions, drugs can induce an acquiescent or skewed judgment yielding a momentary utility calculation not reflective of one's ordinary thinking. We are reluctant to consider such scenarios as utility-maximizing for both participants."

-- William Eskridge, "The Economics Epidemic in an AIDS Perspective," 61 U. Chi. L. Rev. 733, 750 (Spring, 1994)

Thoughts on the passing of J.D. Salinger

I used to have opinions about J.D. Salinger's work, but I don't know what they would be anymore.

I read Franny and Zooey first of Salinger's works when I was 12 , on my librarian mommy's recommendation. She'd been a teenager in the early 1960s when Salinger-mania was at its height. I'd read almost nothing but children's literature up until then -- the Allentown Public Library wouldn't let anyone under 12 check out books from the adult section, and I confess I was far more excited about being old enough to check out adult books than about becoming old enough to drive, vote, or drink legally when those birthdays came. Franny and Zooey offered a glimpse of a world I'd never seen before. The Glasses were more brilliant than anyone I knew, certainly. I felt inadequate reading all of those casually tossed off references to Eastern mysticism. Not to mention how I envied their radio quiz show successes! (This was three years before my glory days on local public television quiz bowl.) But I felt a little bit neurotic and a misfit in the same way that Franny Glass was. I didn't like her smarmy date one bit either. I knew she deserved better. I wondered if we could be friends in real life, and if we'd each feel less angst if we knew each other.

Drawn to the Glasses' strange world, I raced through Catcher in the Rye and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters within a year or two. In ninth grade, I was assigned to read Catcher again in English class. I know now that it's impossible to assign a novel to sixteen kids that age and expect most of them to like it. Predictably, most of my classmates didn't. The popular girls leaned back languidly, running their French manicured hands through their perfectly highlighted hair, and sighed, "Like, Holden is so negative about everything." One or two of the most prudishly religious of the lot would throw in something apparently sincere about all of the cursing. I felt proudly edgy being comfortable about it and wondered if (despite my then-steady Rush Limbaugh habit) if that means I was fated to end up somewhere on the left side of the spectrum. Our teacher, perhaps anticipating David Brooks's stuff six years later on Establishment Kids, allowed that it might be generational and that the novel was "dated" in places.

A year later, an acquaintance of mine ("Madame Merle") took the class and read the book. "It's so trite," she sighed dramatically. "Do you know what Marks said that the theme of the class is? Loss of innocence. That's so trite. Once you're educated, you're not innocent anymore."

That was wrong -- or, at least, oddly phrased. It's possible to have a head full of literary and artistic knowledge and still be as innocent as a lamb about any number of practical subjects. In fact, I blush now to think just how innocent I was when that conversation took place.

I found Merle fascinating and simultaneously deeply aggravating. I couldn't decide if I wanted to like her or how the hell one would go about managing a friendship with someone as obviously mercurial as she was. (In this post from my old LJ, I recount the story of a particular teacher whom she worshiped. She was the girl who convinced herself that a 60-year-old European history teacher was in love with her and wanted an affair.) But she oozed sophistication. She wore suits and four-inch designer heels" to class every day and put her hair up in a sleek chignon because it made her feel more like Grace Kelly. I slouched around in clogs, corduroys, and sweaters from J. Crew, attire which was both comfortable and minimally socially acceptable. On days when you could pay to wear jeans for charity, I'd happily fork over the $1 to help the Somalians; she never did. Merle had a quasi-professional acting career outside of school, and in it, she played the female cultural conservative intellectual to perfection. I had a tattered copy of The Road to Serfdom, of which I actually understood about one quarter.

I don't wonder about 90% of the people I knew in those days, although quite a few of them have friended me on Facebook. I wonder about Merle every two weeks or so. Alas, her real name is quite common and doesn't Google well.

Merle thought we should be reading more Shakespeare and Aeschylus. As I delved deeper in more sophisticated literature, I wondered if she wasn't right. Maybe Salinger was just self-indulgent pablum, a misbegotten attempt by the adults to convince us that they were really cool and knew what we were thinking. I found myself agreeing with Merle that it would have been better if they hadn't tried. So I left Salinger alone on my bookshelf for years and immersed myself in other authors instead. I don't think I've read him since.

What do I think now from the height of wisdom of twenty-eight? Of course I care about opportunity costs in assigning literature. Aeschylus and Shakespeare probably are better choices. But Merle's sophistication seems more obviously fake, more of a transparent pose, than it did then. So does her patron's. As I slowly grow less fixated on impressing the New Criterion crowd, I wonder if I'd like Salinger more again. I wonder if I'd just enjoy his sketches of a world very different than the one I grew up in for what those sketches are.