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An all-purpose apology

The Week — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 15:55:00 -0400

Since political sex scandals now erupt every few months, I am offering, as a public service, the following all-purpose apology, to be clipped and saved for those occasions when lies will no longer do. I have helpfully provided some alternative phrasing that should cover virtually any circumstance. Ready? Bring in the media.

Some time ago, I suffered a severe lapse of judgment that led me to:

(a) have an inappropriate relationship with an intern who said I was "hot"
(b) tickle hunky young members of my staff until they cried
(c) take a wide stance
(d) impregnate our nanny

For this...

Editor's Letter: Rewarding bad behavior

The Week — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 03:13:26 -0400

Yale University Press will soon be releasing The Cartoons That Shook the World, touted as the “definitive account” of the Danish drawings that sparked deadly riots throughout the Muslim world in 2006 because they mocked both Islamic extremism and the Prophet Mohammed. The “definitive” part is debatable: The book will not include the cartoons that are at the heart of the saga. The risk of having “blood on my hands,” explains publisher John Donatich, was just too great. Now there’s a profile in courage. When even Yale University Press must self-censor a scholarly...

Editor's Letter: Developing psychic antibodies

The Week — Thu, 28 May 2009 04:07:50 -0400

It would be reasonable to assume that a declining old fogy such as myself—with my 50-something body creaking and wheezing like a car with fading paint, fins, and a clogged carburetor—would be far more vulnerable to swine flu than my bright-eyed teenage daughters. Not so. Two-thirds of the 5,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. thus far, the Centers for Disease Control revealed last week, have struck people between the ages of 5 and 24. Less than 1 percent of those infected were over 65. What gives? Many older people, blood studies show, have partial immunity to the swine variant because...

Editor's Letter: When bad news is also good news

The Week — Thu, 21 May 2009 05:00:30 -0400

First the bad news: The Wall Street meltdown has resulted in thousands fewer well-paying jobs for the new crop of top college graduates. Now the good news: The Wall Street meltdown has resulted in thousands fewer well-paying jobs for the new crop of top college graduates. I don’t mean to minimize the pain wreaked by the near-collapse of the financial sector. But there is a silver lining. With high finance suddenly in low regard, more of our brightest young people could soon be devoting their brainpower not to moving around paper for financial firms, but to such daunting problems as global...

Editor's Letter: A taste of our own medicine

The Week — Thu, 14 May 2009 03:55:12 -0400

Newspapers have been dispensing advice by the bucket load ever since the printing press transformed the neighborhood know-it-all into an editorial writer. Not all of that advice has been above reproach. (Translation: Cheap shots ahead.) The New-England Courant, published by Ben Franklin’s older brother James, argued that inoculating Boston’s population against a smallpox epidemic was wrongheaded. Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst advised that Alf Landon would be “overwhelmingly elected” over Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936. Two years later, London’s Daily Express...

Editor's Letter: O, be some other name!

The Week — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:59:09 -0400

Hog farmers and pork producers would like us to call it “the North American flu,” due to how panic over the “swine flu” is affecting sales of the Other White Meat. This is understandable, but as a lifelong North American, I would find that name offensive, not to mention geographically imprecise. Some politicians suggest we adopt the scientific name, A (H1N1) 2009, but it doesn’t roll off the tongue. The “Mexican flu” might be more accurate, but it is clearly a non-starter. Nonetheless, the overall goal here is a laudable one: To remove any stigma that this...

Editor's Letter: The swine flu and stress tests

The Week — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:58:38 -0400

What we don’t know can’t hurt us. If ever there was an aphorism that irks journalists and others who are temperamentally driven to know as much as possible, that’s it. We prefer Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ observation that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” So it is with considerable angst that on one of the most crucial government undertakings of these fragile times—the “stress tests” that regulators performed on the nation’s banks—I find myself sympathizing with the camp that’s pushing for less information, not...

Editor's Letter: Conflict and moral clarity

The Week — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:04:06 -0400

When I was a kid in Ohio, I played army with the older boy across the street. It was late in the Vietnam War, when politics were poisoned across the land. My friend’s prized possession—I was allowed to play with it on the rarest occasions—was a toy M16. It looked like the real thing, used by real soldiers in the real war—in Vietnam. But we didn’t want to play Vietnam. By the 1970s, who did? Even kids registered the widespread angst it engendered. So it was tacitly understood that our backyards were not Vietnam but German-occupied Europe. Fighting Nazis was a sure bet...

Editor's Letter: Why pundits misjudge

The Week — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:06:39 -0400

Suppose for a moment that a large swell had hit the USS Bainbridge just as the three Navy SEALs were squeezing off their shots at the Somali pirates’ heads, making one of the bullets go awry. The surviving pirate surely would have killed Capt. Richard Phillips. Back in the U.S., those with a dim view of Barack Obama would brand the attempted rescue a “fiasco,” betraying Obama’s fecklessness and lack of inner steel. As it happens, the SEALs’ aim was true. So this week, some pundits are lauding Capt. Phillips’ rescue as a demonstration of the president’s...

Editor's Letter: The end of voice mail?

The Week — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:08:42 -0400

Well, at least it’s not just me. I’ve been feeling a little hurt lately because my kids have been routinely ignoring my voice mails. Are they so busy, a voice in my head asks (a voice that sounds disturbingly like my father’s), that they can’t bother to respond to their dear old dad? But I shouldn’t take these snubs personally. A new telecom industry study found that more than 30 percent of voice messages languish unheard for at least three days, and that more than 20 percent of people with voice messages in their mailboxes rarely bother to check them at all. The anti...

Editor's Letter: The JournoList and pool reports

The Week — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:54:02 -0400

Politico.com recently revealed the existence of JournoList, an off-the-record e-mail discussion group consisting mostly of liberal journalists, bloggers, and policy experts. With kindling provided by the Drudge Report, the story ignited howls that Washington journalists might be taking orders from some kind of liberal Politburo. Last week, blogger Mickey Kaus posted an excerpt from the group’s discussion that succeeded in making all involved look like nincompoops. However, the leak also revealed the limits to conspiracy among people who are professionally disputatious. Here’s the gist...

Editor's Letter: End Times for the shopping mall?

The Week — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:00:33 -0400

The men’s department at the local department store was deserted when I walked in the other day. Three salesmen jumped up and began circling with needy smiles, eyeing me as if I were the last woman at the bar at closing time. “You’ve shopped with us before,” said the salesman who stepped forward when I showed some interest in the pants rack. He was right, but my last purchase came months ago; like most other people, I’ve been spending less money and less time at the mall. In my suburban area there are a half-dozen small, medium, and large malls, and these meccas of...

Editor's Letter: Alone with one's self

The Week — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:50:12 -0400

I spent quite a bit of time alone as a teenager, licking my latest social wound, brooding over the meaning of life, mooning over Connie or Marie or Carole. (At one point, I recall, I was besotted with all three.) For a few hours of each day, I deliberately cut myself off from both adults and my fellow teens; there was so much to process and figure out, and it seemed natural to withdraw into these ruminations while bicycling down to the harbor, or looking out from my bedroom window over the rooftops of my Brooklyn neighborhood. This kind of extended alone time, I now see as a parent of two teenage...

Editor's Letter: The appeal of boundaries and limits

The Week — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:01:42 -0400

There appear to be hard limits on the soft power of friendship. In an article in The Economist last week, Facebook’s “in-house sociologist” has revealed some interesting data about behavior on the social networking site. It turns out that the average Facebook user has 120 friends in his or her network. That figure roughly corresponds to the “Dunbar number,” a hypothetical limit on the human brain’s capacity for social networks, which peaks at around 148 people. Significantly, the average Facebook man interacts with only seven of his friends on a deeper basis...

Editor's Letter: It seemed like a good idea at the time

The Week — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:17:29 -0500

It seemed like a good idea at the time. (It always does. So did “New Coke,” breaking into the Watergate, and credit default swaps.) When we decided a few months back to decrease the frequency of The Week’s music reviews, we had a perfectly sensible rationale. We needed to make room for our new Puzzle Page—the creation of which, judging by reader feedback, actually was a good idea. Our reviews of music CDs seemed less and less relevant, since so many people were now procuring music directly through the Internet, usually by downloading individual songs, not albums. CD...

Editor's Letter: The new N-word

The Week — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 09:26:09 -0500

It has been called the new N-word, and while it has nothing to do with race, it may be nearly as incendiary. Over the past few weeks, the Obama administration has been issuing increasingly dire warnings about the precarious state of the nation’s financial system and the urgent need for additional federal intervention. But officials have bristled at any suggestion that they’re moving toward bank “nationalization.” Sure, there may be a new kind of “public-private partnership” between banks and the government, and, yes, some major banks may be placed in “temporary...