"Before, it was more punk.... Now, people are starting to think maybe a shaved head is actually really chic and elegant."

"It’s not just for skinheads."

Women shaving their heads is a big new thing now, according to the NYT.

“Individuality and androgyny are certainly not a new thing in fashion, but the trend has swung back around due to a larger gender conversation,” said Alastair McKimm, the fashion director at i-D....

“A girl with a buzz cut is like Jaden Smith wearing a skirt,” [said shaved-headed model  Tamy Glauser], referring to Will Smith’s son, who has publicly challenged gender norms through fashion. Ms. Glauser says that people often make assumptions about sexual orientation based on appearances, “but the two have nothing to do with each other. I think it’s good for society to see people going against what we’ve all been taught is the way we’re supposed to dress for our sex and our orientation,” she said. “You realize there’s no right or wrong.”

It's funny that something like this can be made to seem new. I've heard remarks like Glauser's for half a century. And here's a book from a quarter century ago — "Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle," by Elaine Showalter  — about breaking the gender norms over 100 years ago. Excellent book, by the way. I read it when it came out. What I remember as Showalter's message is — and I might be misremembering — that the most intelligent and sophisticated people find themselves in the middle, within gender ambiguity. It's the cruder, dumber people at the poles of gender differentiation.

Back to the NYT article:

“The first time [I shaved my head], it was an impulsive decision,” said Mackenzie Jones, 20, who has kept a shaved head since she was 15, when a bad breakup inspired the act. “But when I look back now, I think I did it — without knowing it at the time — because it was the ultimate rejection of the male gaze.”

Besides the obvious convenience and the aesthetic appeal, Ms. Jones said, she has stuck to the shorn style because, particularly when she was younger, it helped filter out potential suitors who weren’t “on my level.” (Plenty of guys, she adds, are into the look.)

Suitors! I love the notion that within this supposedly new way of living, there are still characters called "suitors."

Dressing for one’s self, not one’s paramour, has been a theme in fashion for several seasons now....

Dressing for yourself has been the theme in fashion writing for as long as I can remember, and I have read a lot of fashion writing. (I had a job once — in the 1970s — that required me to read all the fashion magazines.)

And add "paramour" that picture of life as we live it now, along with those "suitors." Paramour and the Suitors — it could be the name of your band.

Practical advice from the article: You'd better make sure you have a good-shaped head before you shave off your hair. It is one way to set yourself apart: I have a well-formed head, and you don't know what hideous form those other ladies are hiding under all that hair.

“A lot of women are very attached to their hair,” Ms. Jones said. “When I was in a bad relationship, my hair was like this mask. Once it’s all gone, you don’t have anything left to change. You have to look yourself in the face and deal with it. It’s really transformative.”

ADDED: From the 60s:

Trump announces his child care plan.

"The first part of my childcare plan allows every parent or family in America – including adoptive parents and foster parent guardians – to deduct their childcare expenses from their income taxes...."

For low-income individuals who have no net income tax liability, we will offer an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the form of a childcare rebate....

Next, our plan allows every parent in America to open up a Dependent Care Savings Account.... the funds in these accounts do not expire at the end of the year...  The funds will remain in the account until the age of 18. Whatever still remains at that time can be used to help offset the costs of higher education.

For low-income individuals, the federal government will provide matching funds – if parents contribute $1,000 dollars, the federal government will provide a $500 dollars match....

Our plan includes incentives for more employers to offer on-site childcare as well....

Finally, our plan offers a crucial safety net for working mothers whose employers do not provide paid maternity leave....

I'm saying this for the last time.

I'm teaching my last semester at the law school. Every class I teach I'm teaching a case for the last time — sometimes a case that I've taught 30 or 50 times. Yesterday, I taught Marbury, a case I've taught about 100 times and the first case I ever taught. It means nothing, I don't think, to the students, but there's something transcendent for me.

100 years ago today: Roald Dahl was born.

My son John reminds me... with quotes from his 1990 obituary.

The key to his success, he frequently said, was to conspire with children against adults.

"It's the path to their affections," he said in an interview earlier this year with the London newspaper The Independent. "It may be simplistic, but it is the way. Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all."

"If one is willing to grant Clinton a bit of comedic license ('basket of deplorables' really is a funny line), her change in tone might actually help her in the long run."

"The two candidates are polar opposites; Trump can't build a wall between his brain and mouth, while Clinton is painfully lawyerly and cautious. This was a rare moment where it appears she said something she actually thought, not something that had been run through the Public Opinion-o-Tron 3000 before being fed into her mainframe."

Writes Christian Schneider in USA Today.

My opinion is: She said something she actually thought because she incorrectly believed it would serve her cause. I don't give credit for that. As for Trump, he's not saying everything he thinks, and if you think he is, congratulations, you are his dupe. 

The 5,300-year-old snowshoe.

The oldest snowshoe ever found — made in the late Neolithic age out of birch wood and twine. Found in the Alps in Italy by a cartographer, back in 2003:

“At first I thought it was maybe 100 years old and was a snow shoe that belonged to a farmer who lost it while driving cattle. I kept it in my office as a keepsake."

What wonders are found but not found, lying around in somebody's office or storeroom.

"Have we really reached the point that it’s O.K. for The Times to refer to Clinton in bold type as 'The Bitch America Needs'?"

Asks the NYT public editor, Liz Spayd. She likes the essay itself, including the focus on and playing with the word "bitch," but putting "bitch" in the headline made it "seem[] to come from the voice of The Times, at least when you come on it cold, as all readers do."

Opinion editor Rachel Dry... says she commissioned the piece because she wanted someone to wrestle with how this particular profanity is being used against Clinton. “Certainly the word focuses one’s attention,” Dry said to my questions about its use in the headline and so frequently in the story. “But that’s what the essay is about.”...

It’s one thing for an author, under her own byline and in the context of her ideas, to write the type of opinion piece [Andi] Zeisler did.... Dry says that when opinion editors write the headlines, they are distilling the author’s perspective, not the view or the voice of The Times.

That may be, but referring to the first female presidential nominee as the right bitch for the job brings an air of legitimacy to the word that seems beyond where we are at this moment in history. The mainstream may someday apply this term to women who stand up for themselves and bust through feminine stereotypes. Until then, it remains an insult, degrading and misogynistic.

Well, that's just very conservative. I think the word "bitch" got reclaimed by feminists decades ago, but the NYT has made a thing of its old-fashioned approach to rough language. But Spayd isn't talking about completely censoring "bitch," the way the Times censors "fuck."* Spayd's point is only that "bitch" works as an insult until you get into the context of the essay, so it's wrong to put it in the headline.

She doesn't mention the function of clickbait in the NYT. Obviously, the headline "The Bitch America Needs" is very clickbait-y. Taking something out of its real context is a clickbait technique. You need to click through to find out why this could be the headline. Personally, I avoided clicking on that headline precisely because I've trained myself not to take the bait. I still haven't read Zeisler's essay, and I remain content with my assumption that it put a good meaning on "bitch" and used that to say Hillary — who's been called or characterized as a bitch — is, in fact, a bitch but in the good way.

I'll await the NYT op-ed making the case for Trump under the headline "The Fucking Asshole America Needs" that could be retitled "The Feisty Fighter America Needs."

_____________________

* For an example of the NYT's censorship of "fuck," see "Odell Beckham Jr. Responds to the Lena Dunham Dust-Up: ‘I Have to Learn More About the Situation’":

“I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards,” Ms. Dunham said in the interview, which was posted last Friday. “He was like: ‘That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.’ It wasn’t mean. He just seemed confused.”

In Ms. Dunham’s imagination, the grid star’s “vibe” seemed to suggest he was thinking, “Do I want to have sex with it?” (she used an earthier term for “sex,” and yes, she said “it”).

That second paragraph summarizes this part of the original interview:

The vibe was very much like, "Do I want to fuck it? Is it wearing a … yep, it's wearing a tuxedo. I'm going to go back to my cell phone." It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, "This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes."

"Colin Kaepernick is great/Cops are pigs, cops are pigs/Wait, someone just took my stuff, I need to call the cops..."

A national anthem parody:

Don’t sit this one out! #SouthPark returns this Wednesday on @ComedyCentral with 10 all-new episodes! #mnf pic.twitter.com/EqEKquuf0g

— South Park (@SouthPark) September 13, 2016

You can watch the whole episode here on Wednesday.

"WHAT'S TRUE: A 1996 photograph was captioned as showing a 15-year-old Ivanka Trump sitting on her father Donald Trump's lap..."

"... during a concert at their Mar-a-Lago estate.  WHAT'S FALSE: The photograph does not in itself document any 'grinding' or other inappropriate physical activity between Ivanka and her father."

A popular item at Snopes titled "Mind the Grind/A photograph showing Ivanka Trump seemingly sitting on her famous father's lap documents less than is salaciously claimed."

We note that this picture captures a fleeting moment, and without additional photographs (or video) of the event, it's impossible to say whether Ivanka was sitting on her father's lap for a prolonged period of time or for just a few seconds (or whether, despite the captioning, she was actually on his lap at all).

While late-night comedians have frequently mocked Trump for having an improper relationship with his daughter, those accusations are all based on speculation rather than solid evidence.

There is female privilege in our culture. Mothers are free to show affection to our children without worrying that our antagonists will sexualize it. 

Leveraging Hillary's illness into a feminist meme with the phrase "powering through."

Just think those words — powering through! — and the bad becomes good. The memo went out. You can transform the awful images and stories into exactly what Hillary needs to win: A convincing presentation of herself as a feminist heroine.

I can't link to all the stories and video processing Hillary's bad-health news with the phrase "powering through." I wish I had a video montage of the use of the word in the last day or so. It would be funny. But I don't...



... and I just want to cherry-pick 3 that show the feminist-heroine move. (The 3rd one is critical of the move.)

1. In Salon, by Mary Elizabeth Williams: "Hillary powers through pneumonia — because that’s what women do/Why is it surprising that the presidential candidate kept working even while ill? Women do it every day."

We fear being viewed as weak, so we hustle through the job, hiding or downplaying our diagnoses and hoping nobody notices. Can you blame the Clinton campaign, which has been under absurd scrutiny for every head turn, every cough, for initially keeping Hillary’s illness quiet? Could the Clinton team not know that if you’re looking for an argument that someone is unfit for a job, having a treatable and temporary illness sure seems more credible than “is actually an ignorant, incompetent bigot but at least has a penis,” right? 

Yet Hillary’s stamina, as anyone who’s watched her over the past few decades should know, is a force to be reckoned with. And as writer Liz Meriwether pointed out Sunday, “If anything, the fact that she was campaigning with pneumonia proves that she’s tough as balls.”

2. In Bustle, by Elizabeth Strassner: "If Hillary Clinton's Working While Sick Is A Scandal, All Women Are Guilty."

I was surprised by the extent of the Clinton pneumonia coverage, in large part because I believed that other news stories this weekend were more important, but also because few people seemed to focus on the aspect of the story that was most interesting to me: namely, that Clinton powered through many campaign events despite an unpleasant illness....

Canadian politician and feminist Charlotte Whitton was famous for saying, "Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good." Clinton is simply the most recent and, perhaps, most famous of women who must actively work to rebuke the prejudice that they are somehow weaker than their male counterparts....

The days after Clinton's diagnosis when she continued to work are emblematic of a larger tradition of women feeling that they must work more than men in order to prove their equality. Trump himself has acknowledged this: He has said he hires women because their work ethic indicates that "there was something that they want to really prove." It is unsurprising, then, that many women do feel they must work overtime, either to correct the many insidious stereotypes about women in the workplace or to fit in the many household and child care tasks for which American women, compared to their husbands, are still disproportionately responsible.

3. Karol Markowicz in the New York Post: "Hillary apologists’ response to collapse is demeaning to women."

[W]hen unable to deny that Hillary had been seriously sick and pretending otherwise, the narrative became how she was emblematic of women powering through and getting the job done even when risking a lung collapse. Like a bad sitcom where the wife is always right and the husband is a lovable doofus, Hillary’s surrogates insisted that soldiering on in the face of contagious infections is just something that women do.

Emily Hauser, a columnist at The Week, tweeted, “So what I’m hearing is that Clinton got really sick & soldiered on anyway, & most people didn’t even notice b/c that’s what women do.” Actor Patton Oswalt seconded that, and tweeted: “Wait, so Hillary has PNEUMONIA and she’s still campaigning as hard as she is? You realize how badass that is, right?”

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm joined in, tweeting that “’powering through’ illness is what women do: Stoically, every. single. Day.” as if Hillary was battling the sniffles....

Was it stoicism or an unstoppable hunger for power that drove Hillary to get ill enough to collapse at an event and have to be carried away? It’s not just women we’d criticize for taking risks with their own health, and the health of those around them. But Hillary always has her fallback excuse: Stop being mean to me, I’m a woman.

Ham-handed Hillary-helping, continued.

"Yes, Most Donald Trump Supporters Are Deplorable and Irredeemable," by Jonathan Chait. ("Clinton committed a gaffe because she acknowledged a reality that literally every other person in America, including Donald Trump himself, is permitted to speak aloud.")

The post title references that quote from Bob Wright: "Well, my concern is that they are so ham-handed about it — they're so obvious about it — that it won't work."

"They" = mainstream media. "It" = pro-Hillary bias.

What an ideal vector for the Putin-is-poisoning-Hillary theory!

WaPo reports:

Bennet Omalu, the forensic pathologist who has made the NFL so uncomfortable with his discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brains of deceased players, suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign be checked for possible poisons after her collapse Sunday in New York.

Omalu, whose story was famously told in the movie “Concussion,” made the suggestion on Twitter, writing that he advised campaign officials to “perform toxicologic analysis of Ms. Clinton’s blood".... adding that his reasoning is that he does not trust Russian President Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee who has expressed admiration for Putin.

Putin, as The Washington Post reported, was implicated by a British inquiry in January in the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB operative, in London in 2006....

The article presents Omalu's idea as if it's another conspiracy theory, but I assume that poisoning is one of the threats the Secret Service is looking out for. Here's a Snopes article on the President's "food taster":

Whether food tasters are employed on behalf of U.S. presidents when they're away from the White House is a subject that the Secret Service refrains from officially commenting on, but it's something of an open secret that they are....

But it is known the Service goes to great lengths to scrutinise the source and the preparation of food served to US presidents whenever they eat out of the White House to ensure it is not tampered with.

And I wouldn't assume that Hillary Clinton hasn't had a toxicologic analysis of her blood. If she had, would she tell us? First, even though I don't like her general tendency toward secretiveness, I don't think it's good to hear details about the threat of poisoning. It might encourage someone to act and give hints on how to evade detection. But what if Hillary has been tested and Omalu's suspicious are correct: She has been poisoned. Would she tell us? Should she tell us? Would it be classified? Would we find out slowly through small doses of suspicion like Omalu's tweets? My suspicion is that we would find out only what is deemed politically useful to Hillary Clinton (at least up to a point where she withdraws from politics). But what would be politically useful? It's politically useful to waft a theory that Putin may be poisoning her. Her campaign has been trying to paint Trump as chummy with Putin, and a Putin plot to help Trump would bolster the hell out of that theory.

Omalu seems to be a sort of folk hero. A movie was made about him. The movie — "Concussion" — starred Will Smith. What an ideal vector for the Putin-is-poisoning-Hillary theory!

What do we know about the 9% of voters who are under age 25?

"Pollsters have trouble reaching them, and they’re often excluded when a survey breaks out its results by group," reports FiveThirtyEight.

But new SurveyMonkey data (shared with FiveThirtyEight) suggests that Clinton is winning under-25 voters by half as much as Obama did.... [O]lder millennials are more likely to back her. Among voters ages 25 to 35, Clinton is leading 46 percent to 24 percent over Trump, with Johnson at 18 percent and Stein at 7 percent.

Are younger millennials simply more Republican-leaning? It doesn’t seem so. In fact, under-25 voters are more likely than any other age group to approve of the job Obama is doing as president....

Under-25 voters aren’t backing Trump in unusually large numbers. Instead, they’re either backing a third-party candidate or saying they’re undecided....

"The top 20 cities for male same-sex married couples are more likely to include dense city centers like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago."

"The top 20, while the top 20 cities for female same-sex married couples tend to include smaller and medium-size cities like Springfield, Mass.; Madison, Wis.; and Burlington, Vt," reports the NYT.

Women gravitated toward commitment more than men. Among the same-sex marriages, 55 percent involved same-sex women and 45 percent same-sex men....

The problem with anti-Trump bias is that the media are so "ham-handed about it... that it won't work."

Says Bob Wright (talking with me):

"I think we should have a debate with no moderator, just Hillary and I sitting there talking."

Said Donald Trump.

I'm sure Hillary doesn't want this. You never know when you'll need a Candy Crowley-style assist. But then again... key word: sitting. 

The Republican presidential candidate said that criticism of NBC’s Matt Lauer following last week’s candidate forum in New York City is an effort to manipulate the presidential debates.

“The fact is they are gaming the system,” Trump said of the criticism of Lauer, “and I think maybe we should have no moderator. Let Hillary and I sit there and just debate. I think the system is being rigged so it’s going to be a very unfair debate.”

I agree with him. The system is being rigged so it's going to be an unfair debate, but he's doing some re-rigging there: Everyone should assume that the moderators are doing all these things to boost and coddle and prop up Hillary, so if it looks anything close to a tie, that means I won.

But Trump, could you work on the me/I distinction? "Let Hillary and I sit there and just debate..." Give I a break.