"For a small but growing cohort of parents — ones who see gender as a spectrum rather than a binary — the unisex movement of the ’60s and the 'gender neutral' parenting trends that have followed have come up woefully short."

"For them, society’s gender troubles cannot be solved by giving all children dolls and trucks to play with or dressing them all in the color beige; the gender binary must not simply be smudged but wholly eradicated from the moment that socialization begins, clearing the way both for their child’s future gender exploration and for wholesale cultural change.... 'I knew that I wanted to parent like this years before I ever got pregnant'.... The point was not to have a genderless child but one who comes to an understanding of their gender — whatever it might be — in an environment where colors and objects and activities are not slotted into the arbitrary and binary categories of 'girl' and 'boy'... 'We were just like, Let’s make it look like a rainbow exploded in this house,' Myers explains of wanting to provide Zoomer with all available options, rather than limiting options to those deemed to be gender neutral....

"Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that 'some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,' as one mom told me.... Once Jacobs, whose partner identifies as nonbinary, selected a day-care provider, she sent an email further explaining her stance and asking that the caregivers — who would certainly be changing Scout’s diapers — not share Scout’s anatomy with anyone else. 'It was a little hard at first,' says Jenny Lee, who was one of Scout’s teachers. 'Not because we had any sort of philosophical challenge with it — we were really behind what they were doing — just because of the grammar.'...

"A common fear among gender-open parents, then, is that their family will be isolated, cut off from people for whom interacting would require just too much cognitive work. 'It has been challenging,' says Jacobs.... 'I just think parenting in general is a social experiment,' says Myers. 'That said, I just don’t think I could ever parent my child within a binary. So, like, is this an experiment? I don’t know.'... 'Zoomer is going to have a gender,' Myers says. 'They are going to let us know what their gender is, and it will probably happen when they’re 3 or 4. And we can all just get onboard, you know.... But now that we are parenting this way, it’s actually very possible that Zoomer will be gender nonconforming because we are not raising them to conform to a binary gender.' One of the most nuanced pushbacks Jacobs has encountered is the point that they/them actually is a gender identity for some people and that by using it, she is in fact assigning a gender to which her child may not relate...."

From "It’s a Theyby! Is it possible to raise your child entirely without gender from birth? Some parents are trying" (New York Magazine).

ADDED: Some cruel science experiments that were performed on children.

"I don't think the guy can be fixed. ... This guy is a lost cause. He is consumed with hate. He is part of the problem, not the solution."

Unlike the frontman of The Eagles of Death Metal,Ted Nugent won't back down.

"If I could turn the clock back I would not have had children... There were times where I didn't feel mature enough to be responsible for somebody..."

"It just felt like an endless round of putting a bottle or food in their mouth for it to come out of the other end - and at what point was any of this going to be fun? I just felt like screaming that actually it's not all it's cracked up to be. If you're really maternal then that's great you've got everything you've wanted, but when you're not maternal all you've done is trap yourself.... But I feel guilty for saying that, because I love my children dearly... You feel like you've not been a good mum and it's a guilt you always carry, it never goes away and you wonder if they know. But life shouldn't be about giving up your life, your freedom, so they can have a life."

From "The mothers who regret having children" (BBC).

"From the very opening notes, we had this slightly inexplicable reaction of 'Oh, wow. They’re really doing Jesus Christ Superstar.'"

"We don’t know that we honestly expected otherwise but we suppose in retrospect we assumed some sort of vaguely ironic, winking, American Idol-esque take. JCS is a beloved album, film and show, but theatrically, dramatically and at times even musically, it can get downright goofy. In addition, it’s tied very closely to a post-hippy, pre-metal sound and aesthetic that doesn’t always update well. Plus there’s the treatment of the subject matter, which can be seen as unquestioningly reverent or downright blasphemous, depending on your point of view. And let’s face it; some of those songs are nearly impossible to sing. But JCS Live 'solved' pretty much all of those problems by … simply ignoring them, it would seem... As a production it 'solved' the format problems so many previous musical theater television productions had by simply… putting on a show, in front of an audience, with an orchestra, some dancers, and some great singers with theatrical voices all moving around in a finite and limited space (also known as a stage). No one tried to over-think this one and that was entirely to the production’s benefit. Jesus Christ Superstar Live was the very best of the live network musicals, mainly because it didn’t try to be anything other than what it always was – goofiness and all."

Write Tom & Lorenzo (with much more at the link).

"What the hell am I doing here?/I don't belong here..."

Ada Vox/Adam Sanders on "American Idol" last night:



"Creep" is kind of an "American Idol" tradition, notably from Jena Irene in Season 13:

It's Orwellian the way it's always the other side that looks Orwellian.

Things I'm seeing in my Twitter feed this morning:





Links — to Lowry, to Adams.

The subject is that Sinclair news story — with all the local anchors reading the same script — that we talked about yesterday, here.

I just spent way too much time searching the archive of this blog for things I've written about Dan Rather. Not sure what I'm looking for. "Ironically attacking his own reputation, Dan Rather sues CBS for ruining his reputation/What a mind-boggling legal theory!"? I guess I'd like to gesture impressionistically at all the fakery associated with Dan Rather, you know, the...



... and all that. But I stumbled into "Who the hell is 'Mammon' anyway?" and got utterly distracted by this amazing image...



Some people like when I list the questions raised by the post. If that's not you, go ahead and start commenting. If it is, hang on a few minutes while I work that out.

AND: Questions presented:

1. What do you think Maguire and Rather mean when they use the word "Orwellian"? How diffuse has this pejorative become? Do you prefer a more precise meaning? If so, what is it? And how far off are Maguire and Rather?

2. Who is Maguire anyway? Why would anyone who wants to be taken seriously go beyond "Orwellian" to "one of the most Orwellian things I've every seen"? What has this guy seen? Seems like not much, right?

3. Why is Scott Adams taking such a mild-mannered shot at Maguire? Or is this style very effective as a response to Maguire's hyperventilation?

4. Isn't Rather pretty obviously indulging in a propagandistic style? Is it really possible that he doesn't realize that?

5. Do we remember Rathergate, or has it gone down the Memory Hole?

6. Does Althouse fall down the Memory Hole when something reminds her of something in the archive, and she's thinking you're probably wondering by now just what this post is all about? More baffling: What is this thing here for? Is it nothing?

7. Who the hell is "Mammon" anyway? And if there is no Hell, is there no Mammon?

8. What's in Mammon's sack?

9. How obscene is that illustration? Who is that woman and what does she have to do with Evelyn De Morgan?



10. Isn't it Orwellian the way it's always the other side that looks Orwellian?

A fruit-seller in China became a ride-sharing driver in the hope of finding his daughter, who had gone missing 2 decades earlier, at the age of 3,

Wang Mingqing and his wife had been searching for Qifeng all those years — searching the city of Chengdu, putting ads in newspapers and on line. He thought becoming a driver for Didi Chuxing might give his search new reach, and he had signs in his car and gave out cards about the missing Qifeng.

Mr Wang did not have a picture of Qifeng as a toddler so he used a picture of his other daughter in his leaflets, as they looked similar.... "One day, my daughter may just be the person sitting in my car!" he was quoted as saying.

No, the woman did not get into his car one day. His method of searching caught the attention of the media, and that led to a police sketch artist working with Wang to produce a drawing of the adult Qifeng, where it was seen by a woman who lived in a distant city. The woman, called Kang Ying, thought it looked like her, and like Qifeng, she had a small scar on her forehead and she got nauseated when she cried. A DNA test proved that Kang Ying was Qifeng.

The father is quoted — "I can't tell you how much hope, disappointment and despair we have gone through these past 24 years. Now we can finally meet again" — but we're not told how Qifeng disappeared or what she's been doing all these years. I'd like to hear more about what happened, but perhaps the real story for us is that tells us something about China to know that this is what has (supposedly) captured the hearts of the people or this is what the media in China are serving up for the entertainment and delight of the people.

"People say, you know, we need to have a dialogue about race, but what that means is shut the fuck up..."

"... because nobody wants to have a dialogue about race, because it's too much — it's to much of a — we're having a dialogue about race: It's called America."

Said David Mamet, talking to Marc Maron (at 1:04:51).

"I am kicking the hornet’s nest, as much as I can. I think it’s important to lean into the controversy..."

"... because I know so much more about it now. I think now enough time has passed where people are starting to see the ridiculousness of what happened to me, and they’re seeing other people that Trump has done it to."

Said Kathy Griffin, quoted in "Kathy Griffin Is Returning to TV, and Still Taking On Trump" (NYT), she'll be playing the part of Kellyanne Conway on an episode of "The President Show" tomorrow.

"Jesus shows up and says, be like Jesus, right? But if you look at the Old Testament..."

"... there's nobody there you want to be like.... They's all screwed up. They're duplicitous and angry and wrongheaded an arrogant — just like you and me."

Said David Mamet, talking to Marc Maron (at 39:57).

AND: Here's Alice Cooper as Herod, singing at Jesus, in last night's live TV "Jesus Christ Superstar":

"The doctors’ conclusion... is that Beckett was attacked by a large bird of prey, probably a great horned owl."

"He likely encroached, unknowingly, on the bird’s nest and was blindsided with such force that he was knocked unconscious. The image of our son alone, face down in the snow, is haunting. We wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t managed to stagger to his feet and find his way home...  Andrew Vitz, the state ornithologist, tells me the Fells is home to raptors, including several types of hawks. But because hawks nest in the late spring and summer, they typically don’t behave aggressively in winter. If they do strike, Vitz says, hawks don’t inflict the sort of damage that was done to Beckett. But great horned owls, which also reside in the Fells, are another matter. They nest in the winter and they’re bigger, more powerful birds, weighing about 4 pounds and capable of flying 40 miles per hour. Great horned owls are notorious for their stealth and strength. They strike without warning — their feathers are adapted to minimize noise during flight — and their long, needle-sharp talons can apply sufficient pressure to snap the spine of their prey. 'The great horned owl is a large, very strong bird, and when it strikes, it’s almost always at the head'..."

From "Something attacked my son while he was sledding in the woods. But what?/My child went sledding alone and emerged from the trees bloody and dazed. He still can’t remember what happened" (Boston Globe).

Bulgaria says the famous French feminist Julia Kristeva was a secret agent.

The NYT reports. Kristeva — who was born in Bulgaria — denies it, and Bulgaria has posted its entire dossier on line.

Martin Dimitrov, a Bulgarian political scientist at Tulane University who has written about State Security, said the documents do seem to show that Ms. Kristeva knowingly, if not enthusiastically, shared information on French intellectual and political life with the agency.... “Was she a spy? State Security thought so; she says otherwise,” Mr. Dimitrov said. “This raises a question that is more moral than legal: Namely, who is a spy?”

Polls.

Obama was at 46% on 4/2/10... pic.twitter.com/khXmSjS77j

— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) April 2, 2018

"I Eat Cannibals."

A 1982 song by Toto Coelo, which I'm listening to — I hasten to say! — not because of anything in the previous post, but because the quote "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore"...



... came up in some other conversation we were having in real life here at Meadhouse, I wanted to do something with the Latin phrase "toto coelo," and I got distracted by the existence of a previously-unknown-to-me British New Wave group called Toto Coelo.

Here's a Washington Post columnist, complaining in 1988 about the Supreme Court's use of the Latin phrase:

In the court's major decision in this term, a 7-to-1 vote upholding the independent-counsel law, Scalia wrote a lively dissent. Included was the pronouncement: "Fiat justitia, ruat coelum. Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall." Actually not a bad line. In fact, catchy and an attention grabber for a dissenting opinion.

The court's liberal wing, specifically Justice William J. Brennan Jr., also seems to be dusting off its Latin. Quoting Justice Felix Frankfurter in a case involving city regulations on newsboxes, Brennan wrote that a law allowing censorship based on an article's content "differs toto coelo from one limited . . . to considerations of public safety . . . . "

Toto coelo? The congressman from California? And his little dog, too? Instead, how about "completely"? Or "entirely"? Or "in every respect"?

Ha ha. The old independent-counsel law. Remember that?

All I wanna do, is make a meal of you/We are what we eat, you're my kind of meat...

The University of Oklahoma course modeled on a University of Michigan course taught by W.H. Auden in 1941.

Auden's course, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature," had 6,000 pages of reading, writes Mark Bauerlein in The Chronicle of Higher Education...

The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them....

The Auden-based course at Oklahoma is a small but significant instance of how it may be done. Western-canon talk offends many people in the humanities these days, the few faculty traditionalists often contesting the progressive orthodoxy....

I advise the traditionalists to try the Oklahoma way. Design your Western-civ or Great Books course and ramp it up to Auden levels. Be frank about the reading challenge. Boast of the aged, uncontemporary nature of the materials. Highlight the old-fashioned themes of greatness, heroism and villainy, love and betrayal, God and Truth, and say nothing against intersectionality and other currencies. Your antagonists are mediocrity, youth culture, presentism, and the disengagement of professors and students. You occupy a competitive terrain, and your brand is Achilles, Narcissus, the Wyf of Bath, Isolde, and Bigger. Let’s see what happens. Let the undergrads decide.

Quite aside from traditionalists, I'd like to talk to the kind of progressives who are outraged that the Brooklyn Museum hired a white woman as its curator and historian of African arts and architecture. I presume the woman, Kristen Windmuller-Luna, studied very hard to acquire the credentials that won her this position. Yes, here, read about it:

Trained in all periods of African art and architectural history, she specializes in the early modern period, with a focus on Christian Ethiopian. Her research centers on cross-cultural exchange, early globalization, transcultural art, and the depiction of non-Western cultures in museums and popular media.

In September 2016, she successfully defended her dissertation Building Faith: Ethiopian Art and Architecture during the Jesuit Interlude, 1557-1632. Based on research conducted in Ethiopia, Italy, and Portugal, the project considers the relationship between Roman Catholic and Ethiopian Orthodox art and architecture in early modern Ethiopia. She is currently at work on several new projects, including a revision of her dissertation and a project on the links between Ethiopian Orthodox painting and the global textile trade. She is also completing an article on the relationship between foreign design, native labor, and local agency in early modern Christian Ethiopian architecture....

I imagine that Kristen Windmuller-Luna believed that she was embracing the very best progressive values, and yet now she finds herself treated with hostility for taking this path.

What is the message to the next Kristen Windmuller-Luna, who wants to become an excellent scholar within the humanities? Would you advise her to specialize in African art?

The unintended (I think unintended) consequence of the criticism of the Brooklyn Museum is to tell white students who want a career in the humanities to specialize in the European tradition and take courses like W.H. Auden's.

The traditionalists will win with the assistance of the anti-appropriation progressives, and the universities will wake up from their dream of multi-culturalism and diversity. With progressive support, white students can feel that they should concentrate on the culture of white people.

I'm putting that bluntly not because I like it, but because the progressives who are participating in this dynamic don't seem to notice or to want to talk about it.

"You gotta give it to him, John Legend tries very hard to look serious as Jesus Christ … it’s not his fault if he’s physically incapable of it!"

How come I — who read the news every day — never noticed there was a "Jesus Christ Superstar: Live in Concert" until the day after it aired? Anyway, this morning I'm reading "Jesus Christ Superstar Live: The Highs and the Lows," in New York Magazine, which I only went to because it has a cover with a pig's nose photoshopped onto the face of Donald Trump. See:



Here's a sample of the show — featuring 2 of the "highs" — "The priests’ geometric black coats. Just look at this gorgeous thing, designed by Paul Tazewell (Hamilton) — an homage to Issey Miyake’s Bao Bao bag!" and the "gorgeously layer[ed] 'he is dangerous'... around the one-minute mark" of "This Jesus Must Die":