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Might I suggest an older woman commonly known as "Prudence" be added to this list?

Good Lord Almighty, don't read this one before you've had your coffee. I got four paragraphs in before my eyes were bleeding from the Park Slope entitlement.

#slate #culturebox

Hi, I'd like to lodge a complaint against a man who uses italics to emphasize four words in two adjacent paragraphs.

#timothynoah #slate #thecustomer

I bet she hasn't been this bummed since it rained on her wedding day.

#slate #cleanplate

I know one of the less-attractive parts of being a movie review is that you have watch and write about pablum like "No Strings Attached." If you're a good reviewer, you understand the limitations of whatever genre the movie is in and go from there.

If you're Dana Stevens, you blast the movie for not making the characters very deep.

#slate #dana stevens

Mobsters, they're just like us! They get silly nicknames from people who like them AND hate them

#slate #explainer

"Sweatin' with the Fatties"? Are you serious?

#fitness #badediting #slate

Yawn. Wake me up when Linda McMahon actually runs.

#emilybazelon #slate #doubleX

Ugh. Prudie gave advice to a gentleman whose ladyfriend only disclosed she had herpes after they slept together about 10 times. While what this woman did is bad form and Prudie's advice that we should all have the STD chat before we get naked is good, herpes isn't a big deal. Repeat after me: herpes isn't a big deal.

Anyone who cared to Wiki it or read Dan Savage's well-researched advice on the subject would learn that many people have it, many people have it and don't know it, and beyond some obnoxious itching, it's not harmful.

But why need research? By refusing to do even minimal research on the virus, Prudie perpetuates the stigma about herpes that made disclosing so difficult for the letter writer's girlfriend.

#emilyyoffe #dearprudence #slate

Slate's servers have been over capacity twice today (by my count). I'm curious as to whether it's a system glitch or switching to a new format, though I haven't heard anything about the latter.

#slate

Somewhere in New Haven, Emily Bazelon keeps a secret diary. After the kids are in bed, she opens the heart-shaped lock and tears the pages with her purple pen.

"I HATE JOE LIEBERMAN!!!"

So it was all sundaes and frosting yesterday for Emily when news broke that Lieberman won't seek a new Senate term in 2012. This made her SO happy she found some choice bits from Slate and made sure they were posted at exactly midnight on 19 January. The first news article about Lieberman that day would be hers, dammit!

She references Curtis Sittenfeld's piece on Obama (another political piece that sounds like it started in a Lisa Frank diary) in what has to be the most obvious way possible. Bazelon, "loathes, loathes, loathes," Lieberman.

Her grievances against Lieberman are justifiable. He does things that benefit the financial and insurance industries, he chastised Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal, he was hawkish on the Iraq war, he supported efforts to limit some morning-after pill access.

Personally, she calls Lieberman out as a shameless self-promoter. I don't think even Lieberman's staff would disagree. But what Lieberman's doing with his excess of ego and constant political manipulation is what any political moderate in this day and age has to do to be successful. Bazelon's distaste with Lieberman isn't groundless, but she's myopic in calling out Lieberman when she should be calling out the system that produced him.

Let's compare Lieberman to his buddy John McCain. McCain wasn't going to win any conservative purity tests and he certainly couldn't curry as much favor with the establishment as other Senators. So he played the role of "Maverick," deal-maker, iconoclast to the hilt. He swaggered in his support of MOR legislation and, more importantly, never shut up about himself. In doing so, he became a new center of power in the party and leveraged it into a Presidential run.

Bazelon isn't angry at Lieberman; she's angry at the fact that he's a moderate Democrat. She's angry he isn't as liberal as she is and that he's able to exploit that for political gain. Yawn.

#slate #emilybazelon #joelieberman

OH NO YOU DIDN'T MIKE PESCA!

OMG, Rothlisberger is a jerk and Cutler's a jerk. Let's equate them, never mind that Rothlisberger's a motherfucking rapist and Cutler's just a jerk who just happened to lead an unlikely team to the NFC Championship.

Hang Up and Listen Podcast (around the 7 minute mark)

#hangupandlisten

(link in title) Do you remember those hazy crazy days of summer when jokes about Helen Thomas' anti-semitism flowed as smooth as the Mojitos on your summer patio? Chris Beam does.

Do you remember the mid '90s when all smart people watched The West Wing and jokes about solving national issues with natty clips had cache? Chris Beam does.

Do you remember when Maureen Dowd had any national audience whatsoever? Chris Beam does.

#chrisbeam #slate #lowconcept

A Hurricane in a Bell Jar over Rape

I thought this piece was interesting enough, if overstated in grand Slate fashion (to be fair, the grand fashion most science journalists use). If you haven't read it, it's a review of the literature about the psychology of rape as it pertains to women. The conclusion Jesse Bering comes to is that women have evolved defense mechanisms against rape, particularly during ovulation. His claims are grand, but the article's interesting enough.

Now there's a shitstorm over at Double X. Amanda Marcotte's rebuttal is pretty good. The crux of her argument is that Bering's article assumes a fair number of cultural myths about rape to be true. And, she quotes a scientist debunking the article. So far, so good.

What really got my hair up in a dander is Emily Yoffe's half-assed response. Instead of fighting science with science, she complains about "hormonally-obsessed" researchers focusing on ovulation. The gem here is her implication that because women don't go into heat, women aren't hormonally motivated. "Female humans do not, which for some reason drives evolutionary biologists buggy. They endlessly do studies trying to prove that the behavior of female humans is dictated by our hormonal status..."

I'm neither a scientist nor a science journalist and I get cranky, too, with the overplayed cultural rhetoric that my periods somehow control me. That said, I'd be hormonally-obsessed, too, if I were a scientist studying hormones. I just want refutations of scientific research to be defended with, ya know, science.

#slate #emilyyoffe #amandamarcotte #doublex

Farhad Manjoo says Steve Jobs is permanently leaving Apple because, in his vision, everything Jobs has set out to do has been done.

In the smart words of commenter enplaned, "That Manjoo can't see anything left to accomplish is why Manjoo is Manjoo while Steve is Steve."

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