Jesus Christ, it is like Cities Will Kill You month or something: In DC, they want to stop people from falling off subway platforms / throwing themselves in front of oncoming trains, so they're giving commuters games to play. I'm not quite sure how this is supposed to work. These people who accidentally fall off subway platforms -- is it a good idea to distract them and encourage them to run around? And if we're worried about jumpers, well...subtly judgmental "I Spy" cards? Hopscotch? Whoever thought of this is either incredibly clueless, or my new best friend.

New York (the magazine) wants to know why so many people come to New York (the city) to kill themselves, and it's sort of a sequel to that New Yorker story about the Golden Gate Bridge. (Though far less arresting and nowhere near as well-written. Well, no, it's well-written in its own way -- New York has a particularly lovely utilitarian style.)

Halfway through, smack in the middle of the second page, you'll find the pull-out quote, which I sat and stared at for a good five minutes, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Through suicidal eyes, the New York skyline can appear to be “a lot of opportunities to die from heights.” Well, through any eyes, the New York skyline is a lot of opportunities to die from heights. The difference between suicidal or not is whether that scares you.

Which I guess is where I feel this story could have been better -- you can be utilitarian and still go beyond the facts. There are a million ways to die here, that's a fact. The question is, why do we think you have to be suicidal to see it? You can be utilitarian and still ask questions, which this story doesn't really, beyond the main thesis of "Why do people come here to die?" And in the end, it's a cop-out, because we all know the answer. They come here because they can. What we want to know is why they can.

And for some reason, in my mind this story is directly connected to last week's story about subway worker deaths. (Its pull-out quote, in the middle of the third page, will kill you.) Maybe because it was basically all questions and humanity, with no attempts to answer, or maybe because it connects in that place where I think the suicide story really happens -- the point isn't that this is a place where you can die, the point is that some people come here because of that, and some people come here anyway.

I'm not a big New Yorker fan, but this may be the best thing ever written. It's about jumpers on the Golden Gate Bridge, and I don't remember the first time I read it -- but it was one of those things that sticks with you, and you spend a year afterward looking for it, typing in variations on the words you remember. I found it, obviously, eventually, and every so often I read it again, maybe once or twice a year. Because halfway down the first page, you get this:

As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable -- except for having just jumped.”

That's the part I always remember, the part that makes me go look it up again, but it continues to be that good for about six pages, really.

I was thinking the other day about how both campaigns seem to struggling -- internally, not even against each other. Obama is facing media backlash, his people are pulling some childish bullshit, and Hillary...whatever the fuck that was. (And Heather Mills? Seriously? I worry about Hillary. She's smart and funny and kind of obviously the most kickass potential president ever on the face of the Earth -- at least till Roslin gets here, at which point they will get drunk together and airlock people just for fun. But she has like no concept whatsoever of what people are thinking.)

Anyway, the New York Times thinks they all just need a nap. I didn't even realize what a long-ass primary season this has been till they pointed it out, and then:

“The other campaigns seemed really long and tough when I was doing them, but now I look back and it was like a jog around the park, compared to some intense triathlon,” said Jake Tapper, a senior national correspondent for ABC News. “I still don’t know when it’s going to end. I still think it’s entirely possible it’s not going to end until Denver” — where the Democratic convention will be held in late August.

August. God. We all just need a nap. (Also, for furies, from the Times article: "In Ohio on Valentine’s Day, Mrs. Clinton phoned several reporters’ girlfriends from her plane to 'personally apologize' for their boyfriends’ absence." Love! Why am I not dating one of those reporters? HOW CAN WE GET ON THAT PLANE?)

PS - Richard Milhous Obama.

CNN calls Texas, Ohio, and Rhode Island for my girl. I have nothing to say except: Love. Love love love.

I'm scanning the headlines while I wait for CNN.com to refresh, and something like this happens every time I read the news: "Beaten baby clings to life." Eh, whatever. A story about a Marine throwing a puppy off a cliff ("the black-and-white puppy makes a yelping sound as it flies through the air"), that makes me cry.

Additionally, this election brings the lulz: Obama's lawyer crashed Clinton's conference call with the press. Wasn't this a scene in Mean Girls?

There are a ton of things wrong -- philosophically, politically, logically -- with the same-sex education that serves as a starting point for this article, but I didn't even need to get that far:

Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.

Already, first paragraph on the first page, they lost me. Holy shit, I'm sweaty just thinking about it. Yellow walls? Warmer temperatures? While the boys are down the hall, chilling (literally) in their blue room with their snakes? And then there's this whole thing about how the boys need more movement and physical representations of important concepts, and they get to read The Hatchet, while the girls have sing-alongs about being sisters forever and talk about their mamas making friend chicken. IN A SEVENTY-FIVE DEGREE CLASSROOM. Christ. I would have wanted to be in the boys' room so bad. I would have been the crankiest, itchiest, most inattentive class clown the girls' room had ever seen. I would have sued just to get the hell out of there.

Skipped the debate, but I'm reading the coverage:

"Well," she responded, her voice rising, "could I just point out that, in the last several debates, I seem to get the first question all the time? And I don't mind. You know, I'll be happy to field them, but I do find it curious. And if anybody saw 'Saturday Night Live,' you know, maybe we should ask Barack if he's comfortable and needs another pillow."

Oh, honey, I love you. You can have my pillow.

I can't figure out of this is a joke. Is it obvious and I'm just missing it? Caitlin Moran says women don't think about music -- they have a "pure" emotional response, which relieves them of the responsibility of knowing who Ahmet Ertegun is:

Women, on the other hand, prove that they love a song by either screaming: “I love this song!” and getting up and dancing to it, or wailing: “I love this song!” and bursting into tears. Women make jokes about the band’s hair, drink a shot of tequila for each time Rihanna sings the word “umbrella”, and work out in which order they would have sex with the band lineup – a popular, diverting game known as “Shag Order”.

Hm. Forget first lines, here's a new meme: Guess My Shag Order. I'll give you an easy one: In which order would I have sex with the members of Platinum Weird?

(I want to meet the woman who can survive "a shot of tequila for every time Rihanna sings the word 'umbrella,'" by the way.)

Meanwhile, it's okay for women to want to bang band members, but it's not okay for a man to own more than one copy of an album -- to his wife, it's akin to bringing home another woman, says Pete Paphides:

For men, it might be that record collecting is a displaced throwback to hunter-gatherer times. Dragging the carcass of a wild ox back to your North London home is a logistical nightmare. Record collecting is a pleasant alternative. Certainly, in the dusty secondhand record shop where I regularly browse I have only seen one woman there. Well, she wasn’t really a woman. She was my daughter. And when she woke up and realised where she was, she screamed until we finally left the shop.

Pixie, remember that time we had a sex change and went to Princeton Record Exchange? Let's do that again. (Oh shit, remember Abbey Road? I miss Abbey Road. Wasn't that where I got my copy of Buckingham Nicks? The fucking FBI, man.)

I spent approximately 300 hours in AP US History. I'm pretty sure they were the best 300 hours of my life, and they started with a lesson on propaganda. It's served me well, both as a reader and a writer, and my favorite part of it -- the part I always remember -- is "glittering generalities." Which is why I can't believe I didn't think of this myself:

I still can't quite get over how creepy the w.ill.i.am* (or however you "spell" it) video for Barack Obama is. (I've embedded it below after the jump.) Aside from utilizing a lot of empty-headed celebrities, it also does a stellar job of using the techniques of propaganda, including: the bandwagon call, the use of beautiful people, euphoria, glittering generalities, intentional vagueness, repetition, slogans, virtue words and gratuitous use of Scarlett Johansson. In other words, it's almost the perfect ad.

That's what it is. I haven't been able to put my finger on what, exactly, makes me so angry about the Obama campaign, but that's what it is. Glittering generalities. I have heard more words -- more undeniably beautiful words -- from Barack Obama than from any other candidate. And yet, until I went and read his plan, I had no idea what he wants to do. The fact that I can spend so much time listening to him and hear absolutely nothing is problematic; the fact that so many people don't find this problematic is distressing.

Of course, the writer goes on to undercut himself by getting all "Kids today! They can't spell!" a full three times about will.i.am (thereby establishing Hillary as the candidate for geezers and Obama as the candidate for change) and floating some doofus idea about Scientology (because when you have a good point, the best thing to do is totally bury it).

NY Mag has an incredibly good piece on what this primary means for the Democrats, which culminates with this:

If you find yourself drawn to the Clinton candidacy, you likely believe that politics is politics, that partisanship isn’t transmutable, that Republicans are for the most part irredeemable. You suspect that talk of transcendence amounts to humming “Kumbaya” past the graveyard. You believe that progress comes only with a fight, and that Clinton is better equipped than Obama (or maybe anyone) to succeed in the poisonous, fractious environment that Washington is now and ever shall be. You ponder the image of Bill as First Laddie and find yourself smiling, not sighing or shrieking.

If you find yourself swept up in Obamamania, on the other hand, you regard this assessment as sad, defeatist, as a kind of capitulation. You’re perfectly aware that politics is often a dirty business. But you believe it could be a bit cleaner, a bit nobler, a bit more sustaining. You think that paradigm shifts can happen, that the system can be rebooted. Most of all, an attraction to Obama indicates you are, on some level, a romantic. You never had your JFK, your MLK, and you desperately crave one: What you want is to fall in love.

I'm not sure yet what bothers me so much about this piece on Amy Winehouse from the New York Times. Perhaps it's the assertion that, were he alive today, bloggers would have branded Kurt Cobain "krazy Kurt." Oh. No. Give 'em some credit, come on. They could do better than that. But I see what you did there! Oh, those krazy kids on the Internet, with their snarky nicknames and wacky spellings! Lollerskates!11!!

Or maybe it's the utter retardedness of this: "Addiction might start with experiments by performers so young they feel invulnerable; it might seem to be, at first, a way to ease the stress of a peculiar job. It might be a way to act out the old Romantic image of the artist as daredevil." Thanks for the insight.

It's at least a little bit the stupid idea that if you are concerned about a celebrity having her problems splashed across the mass media, the best thing to do is write about her problems in the mass media -- which, admittedly, is not unique to the Times, but combined with the house style of addressing subjects by a title and last name, it seems doubly condescending and hypocritical, like she's getting scolded by a particularly obnoxious headmistress: "In the era of total exposure Ms. Winehouse would serve herself and her listeners best by working behind closed doors."

It's partially the name-checking of Facebook to suggest that ours is becoming a surveillance culture -- a suggestion which is promptly not followed up at all.

But it is definitely, definitiely the fact that we a get a full five paragraphs re-stating the same fact: back then, celebrities did their dying in private; now, because of the Internet, we see it in real time. Five paragraphs! Of the same thing! That's space you could have used to talk about surveillance culture! How we are rejecting, or at least re-defining, the notion of privacy! How maybe the reason we are so obsessed with posting our lives on the Internet is because we have seen celebrities' lives posted on the Internet, and the boundaries between celebrity and civilian are blurred, and like nine million things more interesting than five paragraphs of the same goddamn sentence! Did somebody drop an ad or something? Why were you so desperate to fill this white space? What is fucking wrong with you? What is fucking wrong with me, that you have to write this way?

Remember the '90s, when everybody cared about the environment in a non-political way, and children in Keds and brightly colored sweatshirts would go to the UN and make-guilt trip speeches asking why adults were ruining the planet for us? Stop polluting journalism! Fuck! Jesus!

I started reading Gawker in 2005, about a month after I started my internship at CosmoGIRL. It was mostly out of necessity: I was commuting out of Jersey with no prior internships, the other girls in my cubicle were in the NYU journalism program, and Gawker was a crash course -- no, an entire crash degree -- in the world of New York media. I was genuinely fond of the Gawker Stalker, though -- and, maybe not coincidentally, I finally stopped reading when they rolled out the Gawker Stalker Map, which promised concise, realtime updates of stars' whereabouts, as opposed to a lengthy, end-of-the-week compendium of snapshot nonfiction.

For all the complaints about the map, nobody mentioned the real problem, which was that it missed the fucking point: the pleasure of the Gawker Stalker was the meta double voyeurism -- watching people watching themselves watching people -- the prose and the thought, not the stargazing itself. Nobody reading Gawker (media folk in Midtown offices) was going to get up and go down to SoHo to try and catch a glimpse of Claire Danes eating a taco, especially since Gawker was all about how we didn't want to do that, anyway. How we were too good for fame, how we hated the people who thought it mattered, how we were hilariously ashamed of ourselves when we found ourselves staring at Uma Thurman in Whole Foods. And it ended up not being realtime anyway, or even particularly useful (thanks for showing me where 23rd and Broadway is, Gawker, because I totally forgot) and the whole thing was just the beginning of Gawker's downhill slide into being hostile and hypocritical and tail-eating above all else.

So maybe it was my kneejerk reaction to Gawker Media that made me hate Idolator. (Although I was still reading Defamer on and off -- probably because they still stalk celebrities in periodic digest format.) Maybe it wasn't as pompous and one-note as I thought. Or maybe it was terrible and I had good reason to stop reading. (I've also started re-reading Gawker, and they are just as awful as I thought back then, despite good coverage of the MTV permalancers scuffle and that Army Times piece.) Whichever it was, at some point while I was passionately hating them, they stopped sucking and started being pretty fantastic, and someone, I think it was koganbot, shut me up and alerted me to this fact, and this morning when Jess made a post about blogging unbathed at 10:30am and watching ER reruns, I thought, "I want to work at Idolator." And when I came across this article about Nick Denton possibly wanting to sell it off, my heart gave a panicked flutter of "oh God, no!"

None of which stops me from mispronouncing their name.

From an ABC News article on the paparazzi:

Hilton was captured sobbing in the back seat of a sheriff's car while being returned to a jail cell for repeatedly driving with a suspended license. But as Holly Millea of Elle magazine points out, even more telling than the photograph was the identity of the photographer, Nick Ut.

"What really shook me about that photograph was that the photographer who took that picture was the same guy that took the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the girl running down the street, napalm having burned her clothes off, in Vietnam. And it's like, well, congratulations, this is what civilization has come to."

Elsewhere in that article, Adnan Ghalib (a.k.a. The Photographer Who Hung Out With Britney) notes that the women yelling "Get a job!" in every video on TMZ are "the first ones to be seen in a nail salon, having a pedicure, reading Us Weekly." I went to the store today and I couldn't decide between Life & Style and Us Weekly, so I bought them both, and that is why Adhamiyah isn't on the front page of The New York Times.

TWoP recapped the My So-Called Life Christmas episode, and this line just stopped me: Angela's sneaking around the hallways between class periods to put a note in Rickie's locker.

Putting notes in people's lockers. I forgot that happened. Does that still happen? Or do kids today just, like, text each other? Oh god, I feel so old now. I need to go listen to 'NSync.

Sometimes, Gawker comes through. See their gorgeous write-up of an already-gorgeous piece on an Army unit stationed in Adhamiyah. Read both.

That's journalism.

At some point I will post something other than random links, but right now Salon is being intentionally fucking dense about Britney:

Then there is the atrocious, patently ridiculous "Hot as Ice." Not only does any 3-year-old know that ice is not hot, any 23-year-old knows that declaring yourself cold, even indirectly, even accidentally, isn't the least bit arousing.

You're right, that doesn't make sense...unless you think about it for one fucking second. I get that there's something you want to say about Britney and her responsibility (or lack thereof) for this album, but pretending to be illiterate is not the way to do it. This is such lazy, lazy writing. Why would you do this? Why would you choose not to use the material at your disposal? Isn't it more interesting to talk about something new than to push it aside and rehash old discussions -- Britney is a brand! Britney isn't responsible for her own music! -- instead?

The best part is how he spends the first two paragraphs recounting Britney's tabloid adventures -- and takes a swipe at her for not writing her own songs, for old time's sake, I guess -- then bitches about "Piece of Me" doing the very same thing: We're left with the sensation that, yes, Spears is aware she has been in the news.

I'm left with the sensation that, yes, the reviewer is aware Britney has been in the news -- but unfortunately, no, he hasn't actually thought about the album.

The Christian Science Monitor (...really?) attempts to restore my faith (no pun intended) in Kara's intelligence:

She is a perfectionist who still agonizes, for example, over a single word in Kelly Clarkson's "Walk Away." The word "attention" in one line should really be "intention," she says, to fit the song's emotional "thesis."

Whoa! Look at that! That's a whole different song! My mind was just blown!

The North Denver News published a bit of "social satire" as a news article, except it wasn't particularly clever, or incisive, and so nobody got that it was "social satire."

The graceful thing to do here would be to publish an editor's note stating that the piece was meant to be satirical, but the joke, alas, did not work as well as they had hoped.

Instead, the editors of the News spewed forth this bunch of sour grapes, in which they stomp around pointing out that it was supposed to be funny, of course, duh, and maybe you would have noticed that it was a joke if you hadn't been so busy pointing out how the joke didn't make sense, whatever, and furthermore they are a big publication, in case you haven't noticed, and maybe you were just too stupid to get the joke, because it was full of references to Paris Hilton, and American media consumption, and Fox News, or "Faux News" as they call it in the newsroom (inside joke! high five!), and by the way, they know the Latin word for thumb--do you???--even if they still haven't noticed that their headline is kind of grammatically nonsensical, and you know who would have found this joke totally funny? Franz Kafka. They are just like Franz Kafka. Except not dead. You probably don't even know who Franz Kafka is. So there.

On the heels of the discovery that marine life is essential to climate control, we get this from AOL News: Stingray Leaps into Boat, Stabs Man in Chest.

Steve Irwin was just a warning shot, people! The battle has begun! And you don't want to piss these stingrays off--they can change the temperature of the Earth.

As that stingray flopped back into the ocean, his victim thought he heard it hiss, "Who's warming the globe now, bitches?"

Perfect weekend: successful Christmas shopping, sushi dinner, furry parka, and dog. Perfect day: television, gifts (new shoes & candy & books), laziness, videogames with Michael, dinner with family, coffee and more laziness at Barnes & Noble, and dog. Everything was warm and glowy, soft and cozy, jingle-bells and winter air--what I love about the holiday season.

Recommended reading: Candyfreak by Steve Almond.

In other news, my old baby name book does list a "Haidee," of Greek origin, with the pronunciation noted as "HAY-dee."