"I’ve been actively avoiding the news for years. It wasn’t always this way. I’ve been a journalist for two decades..."

"... and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it 'work.'... It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it!.. I was too permeable.... So, like a lot of people, I started to dose the news. I cut out TV news altogether, because that’s just common sense, and I waited until late afternoon to read other news.... I went to a therapist. She told me (ready?) to stop consuming the news. That felt wrong.... Then one day a journalist friend confided that she was avoiding the news, too. Then I heard it from another journalist. And another. (Most were women, I noticed, though not all.) This news about disliking news was always whispered, a dirty little secret. It reminded me of the scene in 'The Social Dilemma,' when all those tech executives admitted that they didn’t let their kids use the products they had created."

Writes Amanda Ripley, in "I’m a journalist who stopped reading the news. Is the problem me — or our product?" (WaPo).

She decides that news needs to be rebuilt around human needs. It needs to give people: 1. hope, 2. a sense of agency, and 3. dignity. 

Joseph Epstein scores with an essay telling Jill Biden to put aside the "Dr. Jill" honorific.

Let's take a close look at this Wall Street Journal article that's causing a mini-uproar, "Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D./Jill Biden should think about dropping the honorific, which feels fraudulent, even comic." It's by Joseph Epstein. Epstein is an essayist. He's been writing essays and publishing collections of essays for many years. He's 83. And good for him, suddenly scoring so big with this one essay. It really gave people with a need to write essays and mini-essays — tweets 'n' blogposts — something to write oh so easily about. 

That fiend Epstein! He's a misogynist! Why's he a misogynist for calling bullshit on the use of "Dr." for people who are not medical doctors? I haven't read the essay yet and I've only glanced at the criticism — enough to see the charge of misogyny — and what I'm going to presume is that it's perceived as misogynist because it's women — and not men — who style themselves as "Dr." when they are not medical doctors. Why do women do it? Are they guessing they'll be thought less of because they are female? The "Dr." business might be a defense again real or imagined misogyny, but that doesn't make it misogynistic to argue that it's time to lay off the self-puffery of the non-medical "Dr." 

Now, let me read the essay:

Madame First Lady -- Mrs. Biden -- Jill -- kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter. Any chance you might drop the "Dr." before your name?

He's just asking. The "kiddo" might seem over-familiar, but it's in a series — from most formal to most familiar. Laying out a series of approaches to addressing the woman — Madame First Lady -- Mrs. Biden -- Jill -- kiddo — is a way to say What should I call you? He's asking.

"Dr. Jill Biden" sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.

That's phrased with some politeness — jocose politeness — but he's plainly saying it is fraudulent and comical. All right! He's got us, and those with an inclination to protect the Bidens are activated and ready to denounce old man Epstein. As a person of cruel neutrality, I am anticipating liking this essay. I'm thinking this "Dr." bullshit among women has gone on too long and is a marker of inferiority, so he's calling on Jill Biden to set a good example and drop the honorific. You don't need it, and you shouldn't want it. 

Reading Hillary's book, Part 1: "mustered."

I wasn't going to buy Hillary Clinton's new book — "What Happened" — because I did not want to read it. And if you're thinking Althouse is going to read it, so we don't have to you're wrong. I'm not going to read it. But I am going to blog it. I bought it because Meade asked me to put it in our Kindle  account, because — a propos of the Harvey Weinstein exposé — he had some search terms to apply to the text.

Now, Meade is doing something with the text that I'll call proto-blogging: He reads and speaks aloud the kinds of thoughts I might have if I were doing the reading. And that might get me to something I want to put in writing here on the blog. You'll just have to imagine the Meadhouse interplay that precedes the posts in this series. I'll just say he's the one who's kind-of/sort-of reading the book, we have conversations, and I dip into the text to get things to spin out for this new series.

So Meade is going to almost read it, so Althouse doesn't have to, so you don't have to. But it will be prime stuff. Nothing is blogged here unless I think it's blogworthy. Everything in this series is 100% guaranteed interesting. To me.

I've heard it said that the first maybe 100 pages of the book is a pretty good read, but after that it gets boring. I don't know if that's true, but I have found evidence that the first chunk of the book had a different author (or editor) than the rest of the book. The evidence is the word "muster," which I used to find a section of the text Meade and I were talking about, a section about Hillary's decision to show up for the swearing-in of Donald Trump. The passage in question ended with:

That’s how I ended up right inside the door of the Capitol on January 20, waiting to be announced. It had been such a long journey to get here. Now I just had to take a few more steps. I took Bill’s arm and squeezed it, grateful to have him by my side. I took a deep breath and walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster.

We were making various jokes — such as interjecting "I didn't inhale" after "I took a deep breath" — and got to talking about the word "muster" — which I said was like "garner." (I first blogged my objection to "garner" here.)

I wanted to blog various things about the Trump inauguration scene, and to get to the text, I searched for the word "muster." It was a good search term because I remembered it from our conversation, and it's unusual enough not to be likely to appear too many times in the text. Here are the results of the search:

The word appears 4 times in the book, and all 4 are in the first 100 pages. I don't have the kind of sophisticated software that can be used to detect whether various texts are written by the same author, but I think such software looks for many examples like this. I'm just entertaining the hypothesis that someone was involved in writing of the first 100 pages who did not work on the rest of the book.

Also, I'd like to say that "muster" is a rather silly word, though its true silliness only emerges when you use the past tense and create the homophone with "mustard." (If you did the Thursday NYT crossword this week, you might have enjoyed or groaned over the use of this homophone at 16 Across.) But "muster" is an okay word. I've used it 4 or 5 times in the 50,000+ posts on this blog, but I don't like to see it coming up 4 times in 100 pages. That's over reliance on a distracting word that could be replaced by words you would be more likely to use in conversational speech, like "pull up" or "bring together."

There's a phoniness to "muster" when someone uses it to convey how it feels to draw upon your inner resources to do something you need to do. In the above-quoted example, Hillary "walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster." Later, on page 41, she's talking about another loss, not to Donald Trump but to Barack Obama:

By the end, he led in the all-important delegate count, but our popular vote totals were less than one-tenth of a percent apart. That made it all the more painful to accept defeat and muster up the good cheer to campaign vigorously for him.

Again, the word is used in the context of holding back negativity and putting on a game face. The phony-sounding word aptly expresses her being genuinely phony on those 2 occasions.

On page 32, there's:

I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

That seems to say: Yeah, I know this reference to prayer is bullshit. If she really believed in prayer as a defense against Trump at his worst or even just thought her readers took prayer seriously, I think she would have said something more like: and I hope you are praying too. Or: and I know many of you pray that God will give our president wisdom and good judgment. (And I don't like saying she "can use all the backup" as if she's the prayer leader and we're behind her.)

Finally, on page 92, we get the last "muster" in the book, and it's in one of these goofball girly passages:

Someone once asked what we talked about on long flights. “Food!” we chorused. It’s funny how much you look forward to the next meal when you’re living out of a suitcase. In 2008, we often relied on junk food to see us through; I remember a lot of pizza with sliced jalapeños delivered right to the plane. This time I was determined that we would all be healthier. I asked friends for good on-the-go snack recommendations. A few days later, shipments of canned salmon, as well as Quest and Kind protein bars, arrived at my house, which we lugged onto the plane in canvas totes. When the Quest bars got cold, they were too hard to eat, so we sat on them for a few minutes to warm them up, with as much dignity as one can muster at such a moment.

This is the best use of "muster" in the book, because she's describing something silly: sitting on her food to warm it up. And the thing being mustered — dignity — is supposed to be funny. There's no dignity in using your ass as a makeshift microwave.

By the way, "muster" comes from the Middle French word "monstrer" which means "to show," which is the same source for "demonstrate," which is a much better word, that is, a word you can use in casual conversation without seeming weird.

"He portrayed the Irish as drunken apes, and the image still remains today."

The New Jersey Ancient Order of Hibernians opposes inclusion of Thomas Nast — the great 19th century political cartoonist — in the New Jersey Hall of Fame.

Nast—whose drawings gave rise to Uncle Sam, Santa Claus and the elephant and donkey that symbolize the American political parties—was critical of the Irish as supporters of Tammany Hall. He pilloried the Vatican for trying to recruit children from public schools into parochial institutions....

Nast was an abolitionist who supported equal treatment for blacks and Asians. The anti-Irish tenure of his cartoons was a product of the times...

Here's Nast's "Uncle Same's Thanksgiving Dinner" in which Uncle Sam and Columbia serve murdered bird to a bunch of racial and ethnic stereotypes:



(Enlarge to see the outrageous details.)

Deadline Hollywood summarizes the movie and TV history of men dressed as women...

On the occasion of the new TV show "Work It" (which we talked about yesterday):

While it may have deeper implications today than it did decades ago, men dressing like women is one of the oldest forms of comedy. It is at the heart of one of the best feature comedies ever made, Some Like It Hot, as well as several other classic comedy films, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Birdcage, and it has had a presence on TV, most notably with the 1980 series Bosom Buddies starring Tom Hanks, and Saturday Night Live where male cast members regularly impersonate female celebrities. And then there is the British school of comedy with Monty Python and Benny Hill. ABC’s president Paul Lee brought up his heritage when explaining his decision to pick up Work It to critics at the summer TCA press tour. “I’m a Brit, it is in my contract that I have to do one cross-dressing show a year,” he said. “I was brought up on Monty Python. What can I do?” As a fellow European who also grew up with Monty Python and Benny Hill, I can actually relate to that...."

I can see the Brit excuse, but it's really awful, if you're going to indulge in argument by listmaking like that, to leave out the most prominent — in more ways than one — cross-dresser in the history of television, the man who was called Mr. Television, Milton Berle.

Here's a great clip of Berle in drag — in a guest spot on Lucille Ball's show.  (If you've only got 2 seconds to spare, click here.)



By the way, what a concentration of comic acting in that 5-minute clip, from everybody involved, including Desi Arnaz, who, if he showed up on TV today, would probably elicit criticism from some dignity-protecting group that doesn't care whether or not comedy has room to breathe.

"The engine of unbridled capitalism, with its unfair system of thought, has reached the end of the road and is unable to move."

"Selfishiness and insatiable greed have taken the place of such human concepts as love, sacrifice, dignity and justice. The belief in the one god has been replaced with self-belief."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the U.N. — as reported in the NYT.

Hey, I hope he really did say "selfishiness"? It's a cool coinage. Like there's something really suspicious about the selfishness of capitalism. And it stinks after 3 days.

AND: Elsewhere in today's U.N. speeches, Gaddafy said: "Perhaps tomorrow we will have a fish flu." Think about it.

An essay on dignity.

That WaPo apology got me thinking about this: From "Welcome to the Dollhouse," a movie I highly recommend.