Books

"The Ten Year Nap", Meg Wolitzer. About rich Manhattan opt-out moms. I know I'm gonna hate it; I can't wait to read it.

"The Runner," by David Samuels. Con-kid fakes it into Princeton. Yum!

"The Big Test: the secret history of American meritocracy," Nicholas Lemann. Self-explanatory.

If I had a fence

Book looks useful: Neil Gilbert, "A Mother's Life." Review was only so-so; I could've done it better.

Bibliographic winter

Discipline-suicide in the English department, here.

Attend the tale of woe

"Rational behaviors of black women," featuring Tim Harford and others, here.

Prostitution round-up

Prostitution and the Pollution of Moral Ecology.

Do as He Said (Spitzer, not a victimless crime)

George Carlin: "Why should it be illegal to sell something that's perfectly legal to give away?" (re: egg donation, organ and kidney donation)

Spitzer's True Folly, pro-prostitution.

"Prada Prostitutes," and the poor misunderstood johns who buy them.

Michael Pollan, from "in defense of food":

So this is what putting science, and scientism, in charge of the American diet has gotten us: anxiety and confusion about even the most basic questions of food and health, and a steadily diminishing ability to enjoy one of the great pleasures of life without guilt or neurosis.

But while nutritionism has its roots in a scientific approach to food, it's important to remember that it is not a science but an ideology, and that the food industry, journalism, and government bear just as much responsibility for its conquest of our minds and diets. All three helped to amplify the signal of nutritionism: jouranlism by uncritically reporting the latest dietary studies on its front pages; the food industry by marketing dubious foodlike products on the basis of tenuous health claims; and the government by taking it upon itself to issue official dietary advice based on sketchy science in the first place and corrupted by political pressure in the second. The novel food products the industry designed according to the latest nutritionist specs certainly helped push real food off our plates. But the industry's influence would not be nearly so great had the ideology of nutritionism not already undermined the influence of tradition and habit and common sense -- and the transmitter of all those values, mom -- on our eating.

Now, all this might be tolerable if eating by the light of nutritionism made us, if not happier, then at least healthier. That it has failed to do. Thirty years of nutritional advice have left us fatter, sicker, and more poorly nourished. Which is why we find ourselves in the predicament we do: in need of a whole new way to think about eating.

Or another one:

In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

And

But the industrialization of our food that we call the Western diet is systematically destroying traditional food cultures. Before the modern food era -- and before nutritionism -- people relied for guidance about what to eat on their national or ethnic or regional cultures. We think of culture as a set of beliefs and practices to help mediate our relationship to other people, but of course culture (at least before the rise of science) has also played a critical role in helping mediate people's relationship to nature. Eating being a big part of that relationship, cultures have had a great deal to say about what and how and why and when and how much we should eat. Of course when it comes to food, culture is really just a fancy word for Mom, the figure who typically passes on the food ways of the group -- food ways that, although they were never ''designed'' to optimize health (we have many reasons to eat the way we do), would not have endured if they did not keep eaters alive and well.

The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

And here's the link to the NYT editorial: http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=87

Uneven penetration

Christina Hoff Sommers does her thing, re: women in the sciences, here.

Cf. the panel at Mormons in the Life Sciences.

Marriage on the margin, mistress on the side

Little piece on total and marginal value of intimate relationships, here.

One in four

young women have an STI: via NYT, here.

Philosofiber

I should read this, "Liberty of Conscience," Martha Nussbaum.