"The dread idea of arts administration has come to YouTube."

"... YouTube’s not really supposed to have any aesthetic or ideological principles, is it?"

"I am self-involved, mercurial and comfortable eating dinners of frozen waffles in my underpants."

I understand. And why do you like to live alone? Or -- in case you don't live alone -- what exactly would you like about it if you did?

Bloggingheads!

It's me and Garance Franke-Ruta.

Topics and times:

Do women like looking at women? (07:41)

'Momoirs' and third-wave feminists (10:23)

Polygamy in NYC, wife-beating in Germany (09:25)

Too much Gore in 'An Inconvenient Truth'? (09:30)

Candidates and their wives and husband (08:20)

Is Ann a conservative? We don't know, but she gets really mad here (10:36)

Whew, that's over. Let's talk about things guys write on the web about women (17:01)

ADDED: There's an interesting discussion in the first segment about the ways of the journalist. Garance says, "I'm used to sitting quietly and using awkward silences to learn things." This makes me ask her if this is "a sort of a trick."

GARANCE: It's one of the ways that people report. It's a reporting technique. Being incredibly awkward. It's a reporting technique. There's also: seeming like you don't know what you're doing.

ANN: Oh! So it's a scam?

GARANCE: Well, I mean, that was the whole book: "The Journalist and the Murderer." Right? I mean...

ANN: Yeah, I read that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

GARANCE: I mean, there's this idea that a journalist is inherently a somewhat... I mean, you're forging a bond in which it's very instrumental. It's a very instrumental bond.

Althouse thought: So is this what you're going to try to do to me in this diavlog?

ANN: But it's interesting that there's a pretense of ineptitude. It does remind me of sort of like a stereotypical male-female dating where the woman acts sort of helpless and is actually really thinking about everything that's going on and trying to control the situation by appearing helpless.

GARANCE: Right! Right.

ANN: You think there's like a gender relationship in journalism?

GARANCE: Maybe. I mean, maybe only because you're in the questioning role, and you're sort of putting yourself in that subservient questioning role.

Althouse thought: Does this make me the boy here?

MORE: There's a lot of discussion about how angry I get in that one segment. Some folks think I should pull my punches and adopt some sort of mentoring role. Ridiculous! Garance is an adult. She's over 30 years old and a senior editor at a major newsmagazine. Either I am in a debate with her or it's a mismatch.

UPDATE: Here's a neutral starting point if you want to peruse the evidence that this episode has gone viral. I hope Bob Wright is happy!

ANOTHER UPDATE: So a huge swarm of lefty bloggers in unison declared me to be an absolute witch for getting angry for one minute when Garance -- the woman who began the dialogue by owning up to the technique of "seeming like you don't know what you're doing" -- sprang a touchy old subject on me. What does it all mean? I think either: 1. ordinary human emotion frightens bloggers out of their wits or 2. the lefty bloggers are demonstrating my point that they are vicious and nasty. Of course, I think it's #2. I really find it too hard to believe that they are so numb or robotic that anger seems bizarre and insane. I could be wrong, but I think that's terribly sad. Or are you thinking: Ooh! Sadness! How crazy! No, no, you guys are just boring politicos -- still ready to do anything to defend your man Bill Clinton and to say whatever you must to deny that he set feminism back 20 years.

Spring!

Pix!

Lots of bare feet and mud. Plus: clean laundry, turtle, etc.

"In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress..."

".. not Jimmy Carter, not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment." Says Robert Novak.

[N]ot many Republican lawmakers would speak up for Gonzales even if they were sure Bush would stick with him. He is the least popular Cabinet member on Capitol Hill, even more disliked than Rumsfeld was. The word most often used by Republicans to describe the management of the Justice Department under Gonzales is "incompetent."...

The saving grace that some Republicans find in the dispute over U.S. attorneys is that, at least temporarily, it draws attention away from debate over an unpopular war. But the overriding feeling in the Republican cloakroom is that the Justice Department and the White House could not have been more inept in dealing with the president's unquestioned right to appoint -- and replace -- federal prosecutors.

The I-word (incompetence) is also used by Republicans in describing the Bush administration generally. Several of them I talked to cited a trifecta of incompetence: the Walter Reed hospital scandal, the FBI's misuse of the USA Patriot Act and the U.S. attorneys firing fiasco. "We always have claimed that we were the party of better management," one House leader told me. "How can we claim that anymore?"

Painful.

Overbreadth and vagueness in the federal anti-child-porn law?

The Supreme Court has taken U.S. v. Williams, a case about the constitutionality of a child pornography law:

The [11th Circuit] court panel found the pandering provision of the PROTECT Act of 2003 was overbroad and impermissibly vague, saying that it criminalizes the speech of someone who touts material as child pornography when in fact it is clean or nonexistent.

In the appeals court's view, the pandering provision could apply to an e-mail entitled "Good pics of kids in bed" sent by a grandparent, with innocent pictures attached of grandchildren in pajamas.

Michael Williams, who got the advantage of this finding, sent sexually explicit photographs to an undercover agent (after initially exchanging non-pornographic photos of children).

"He wanted to play hard... he nailed me with a really good one."

When Bob Dylan boxed Quentin Tarantino.

Lengthening the school day for kids.

Is lengthening the school day the solution for failing schools? I think not. In fact, I think it is a morally wrong solution. It's bad enough that children are cooped up and physically restrained for as long as they are to get through a school day. To justify that physical restraint, adults owe children a lot. If the adults are now failing to do what they owe children to justify physically restraining them, it is outrageous to attempt to make up for their own failure by increasing the restraint. What makes it worse is that the solution is inflicted disproportionately on minority kids. Oh, but it's a benefit! It's not as if we're proposing to put them in jail during those long afternoons when they might otherwise be roaming the streets.

Side note: At the link, there is an adorable photo of two little girls looking at a worm. Since the newspaper article is presenting the proposal in a positive light, it would like you to picture cute young girls benefiting by hands-on science classes. Please don't picture older boys slumped in chairs.

UPDATE: The same issue of the NYT has this article about a study showing about the time spent in day care:

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.

"Deep seated anxiety" about Mormonism.

Bruce Feiler opines on the way people "out there" feel about Mitt Romney's religion. So much for the faceless masses, but does Feiler -- who's written best-selling books about religion -- disrespect Mormonism? Watch how he responds when Bob Wright tries to pin him down about whether he thinks it's any weirder than Christianity. I mean, after he gives a strong, flat "Yes!"

Couric asks Edwards a tough question about cancer.

And then another and another and another. Oh, why not fill the entire space you have to fill with the only question you've got? Surely, the fact that it's an insensitive and awkward question won't make it any worse than all those other times you've repeated the question. A reporter's got to get to the truth, you know. And really, aren't you a power-mad lout, Mr. Edwards?

Later that same day....

Audible Althouse! It's back! It's #80.

Oh, my friends, I rediscovered the true meaning of podcasting tonight. If you're not with me on this one, you're not with me. Go away! Go away and never come back!

You don't need an iPod. You can stream it right through your computer here.

But if you're really with me, you'll subscribe on iTunes:

And stay tuned, because I've got a video clip of this recording session, which I'm going to add here.

ADDED: The video clip is coming. But I found the poem that I talk about in the podcast, the one that Jean Shepherd used to read. It's "Evolution" by Landon Smith. It begins:

When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths of the Cambrian fen,
My heart was rife with the joy of life,
For I loved you even then.

Mindless we lived and mindless we loved
And mindless at last we died;
And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift
We slumbered side by side.
The world turned on in the lathe of time,
The hot lands heaved amain,
Till we caught our breath from the womb of death

AND: What it looked like:

"I've learned over time that my voices can't be rejected."

"No matter what I do, they won’t go away. I have to find a way to live with them."

Should there be a new acceptance of auditory hallucinations? Daniel B. Smith writes about the work of Hearing Voices Network, which argues that hearing voices does not always mean that a person is psychotic:

In his 2003 book, “Madness Explained,” [Richard] Bentall draws on the theory that auditory hallucinations may have their roots in what psychologists call “inner speech.” All of us, every day, produce a steady stream of silent, inward-directed speech: plans, thoughts, quotations, memories. People hear voices, Bentall argues, when they make faulty judgments about whether this inner speech is the product of their own consciousness or of something alien to their consciousness. Lapses in what researchers call “source monitoring” may occur for a number of reasons — because an individual is primed to expect a perception to occur, because the level of background noise makes it difficult to separate what is internal from what is external, because he or she is in a state of emotional arousal. But whatever the cause, Bentall writes, there is evidence to suggest that hallucinating “can be explained in terms of the same kinds of mental processes that affect normal perceptual judgments.”

This theory raises the critical question of why making source-monitoring errors results in psychosis: why, when people mistake their private speech for someone else’s, does it cause them to grow so distressed that they seek professional help? The answer Bentall gives echoes Romme’s observation that a fundamental difference between voice-hearers in the community and voice-hearers under psychiatric care is that the latter think negatively about their experience. According to Bentall, how patients perceive auditory hallucinations can have a significant impact on how those hallucinations are experienced.

"Tall latte's up."

"The biggest question is how far can Democrats go in opposing this president?"

Adam Nagourney assesses the Democrats in Congress:

“Democrats have an advantage because you are looking at a 33 percent president,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant, referring to Mr. Bush’s popularity rating. “You can get away with a lot,” said Mr. Galen, who served as a senior aide to Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker when Republicans battled the Clinton White House in the 1990s.

Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, said: “They can push pretty hard on this stuff — especially testimony. There’s no trust right now in the Bush administration and the White House.”...

As they try to figure out what they can and can not do, the Democrats are looking back to Mr. Gingrich’s House. Republicans exercised their power with gusto, peppering the Clinton White House with subpoenas and, of course, bringing impeachment proceedings. Then came the five-seat loss.

“We got so focused on impeachment that voters got sick of it,” said Mr. Galen, recalling his experience in 1998. He said he thought Democrats had so far avoided the trap that snared Republicans, but warned of the price of coming across as doing little more than fighting. “The danger comes if there becomes this sense that they are being truculent for the sake of being truculent,” he said.

For what it's worth: I'm sick of them.

Multitasking.

Despite its amazingness, the brain cannot concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Does this mean you shouldn't multitask? Does it depend on how old you are? It does! But not the way you're guessing it does:

A group of 18- to 21-year-olds and a group of 35- to 39-year-olds were given 90 seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code.

The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cellphone short-text message or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy.

“The older people think more slowly, but they have a faster fluid intelligence, so they are better able to block out interruptions and choose what to focus on,” said Martin Westwell, deputy director of the institute.

Of course, some of us "older people" are over 39, possibly by quite a few years. I wonder how fast and fluid we are. At some point, we've got to slow down, and at some point, fluidity of the brain is dementia.

Concentration is a funny thing. I don't think you can test it with a single task and a single type of interruption. A younger person may be more easily distracted by an instant message because it has intense emotional associations -- new sexual adventures or emergency demands from bosses.

I know my ability to concentrate and my susceptibility to distractions have changed over time, but I can't sort out what is caused by age and what is caused by changing life circumstances. Am I unwilling to sit in a dark room for two hours and devote myself to watching a movie because I've aged, because blogging has rejiggered my attention span, or because I don't have the right movie buff companion?