Labels: alas, lit crit

Will you do this? No. You will not. You will dabble at the crossword for a while. Later, you might get a yogurt. Eventually, you'll start reading pointless crap on the Internet. You see, you're doing it as we speak! Because: You are lazy.

--Seth Stevenson

--Joseph Epstein, from Joseph Tartatovsky's review in the Claremont Review of Books

• James Kirchick on the return of Jeff Gannon
• Sonny Bunch travels to Hollywood to check out an adaptation of "Harrison Bergeron"
  
• Phoebe Maltz revisits The Israel Lobby controversy
• Laura Vanderkam on a new form of Catholic education
  
• Liam Julian talks to the Eduwonk, Andrew Rotherham
  
• And fiction by Eve Tushnet
  

Labels: Doublethink, shameless self-promotion

--Wallace Stegner, from Philip L. Fradkin's biography, Wallace Stegner and the American West

Labels: alas

Thirty thousand visitors came in the Mount's first full season of operation as a historic house, and although the upper floors remained unfurnished--Edith Wharton's bedroom contained no more than a bed frame--the gardens had been restored, at a cost of $2.7 million. (Efforts were made to acquire all twenty-three varieties of phlox that Wharton's gardeners had planted.) Copeland, responding to diminished fund-raising opportunities after September 11th, had decided that the grand public rooms on the first floor would not be faithful reproductions of Wharton's domicile, as planned; instead, the rooms would be interpreted by contemporary designers, in accordance with the principles expressed in "The Decoration of Houses." Libby Cameron installed a leopard-print carpet on the staircase, and Thomas Jayne equipped the den of Wharton's husband with a laptop computer. "I asked Libby why she selected the spotted rug, and did she do it because the spots mirrored the circles in the wrought iron of the bannister," Copeland recalled. "And she said, 'I did it because thousands of people will be going up and down these stairs, and you want to be able to disguise the fact.' And that is Wharton's theory of practicality!" One room that was not updated was the library, whose shelves Copeland filled by issuing an appeal for donors to scour their own libraries for appropriately aged-looking volumes.

Basically, for those of you who aren't going to read the article, no one wanted to go to the Mount, so to increase historical cache they purchased Wharton's original library for several million dollars, which no one at the time understood was a loan, and now they can't pay it back, which is sort of perfect when one considers the current foreclosure spree.

Anyway. Stephanie Copeland, the focus of the article, is no doubt a very intelligent woman, well-trained to do any number of things. Unfortunately, running a historical estate/museum is not one of them, and therein lies one of my biggest problems with the state of historical societies and smallish museums right now. Places like the Mount get shafted because of the assumption that they're the domain of wealthy white women, many of whom haven't a clue about how to actually navigate the often incredibly thorny path between maintaining a sense of historical integrity and creating an economically sustainable business.

Labels: alas

Surrogacy itself seems to have come out of the mommy closet, to judge from recent media coverage. The New York Times and the Boston Globe have both reported on the practice of outsourcing wombs to poor Indian women. On a recent cover of Newsweek, the abdomen of a pregnant woman appeared with the words "Womb for Rent" emblazoned upon it. The issue's lead story, "The Curious Lives of Surrogates," ignited a small media frenzy with its sensationalistic revelations about military wives cashing in as surrogates -- in part by bilking their government-provided health plans.

The attention has rekindled the debate over the morality of renting wombs. While most people are reluctant to stand in the way of women who want to use modern medicine to help them conceive, others are more wary. Jennifer Lahl, the director of the California-based Center for Bioethics and Culture says "The surrogate isn't seen or treated as the patient. She's the cow, the womb."

Labels: shameless self-promotion, third-party repro

In a way, said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, "the dress is like the ultimate piece of clothing," to suit the velocity of contemporary life. While she was once a person who approached her closet the way a D.J. might, Ms. Gilhart said, she now "throws on a dress, and when I go traveling I put in five dresses, a long cardigan and a coat."

Certainly it's much more efficient. "Instead of spending days thinking about your wardrobe," she said, "you can concentrate on who you're voting for for president."

Labels: girly stuff