"When a masked Palin walked past me into the courtroom this morning, she was clad in her trademark eyeglasses, high ponytail, and large-radius hoop earrings."

"She’d also broken out a pair of knee-high leather boots with heels like stilts. All eyes were drawn to her as she took her seat at the plaintiff’s table."

From the gendered prose stylings of Seth Stevenson at Slate — "Ticktock of a Journalist’s Nightmare/The first day of the Palin v. Times case laid out a tricky path ahead for the former governor—but a 'what if' hung over the court." 

That was published on Thursday. The newer report of the trial by Stevenson is "'Are You Up?'/The excruciating anatomy of a journalistic screwup at day two of the Sarah Palin—New York Times trial." 

At the merciful lunch break, I grabbed some food in the courthouse’s cafeteria. And who should I see when I looked up from my sad yogurt but Gov. Palin herself, wandering in to purchase some sort of hot beverage.  If there was any question about whether Palin qualifies under libel law as a “public figure,” her appearance in the courthouse canteen resolved it. Various law clerks and courthouse staffers who were eating their lunches froze mid-swallow, turned toward Palin, and openly gawked....

Then, in a fantastic collision of tabloid universes, Michael Avenatti—who was at the courthouse because he was being tried on fraud charges—walked in. Palin strolled over to greet him. The celebrity plaintiff and celebrity defendant briefly, and warmly, bantered, before each went their separate way. (Hours later, Avenatti was convicted of stealing $300,000 from a pornographic film actress.)

Yeah, the celebrities know all the other celebrities. They're automatic friends. I note that she strolled over to greet him. It's not as though he came looking for her. And now he's going to have to be a celebrity in prison. What's the structure of celebrity in prison? Palin is the celebrity doing the strolling. She's having her grievances aired — minutely — whether she hits the standard of "actual malice" or not.

And if not, she's got a great shot at being welcomed into the Supreme Court, where Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch are interested in talking about whether public figures ought to have to meet an "actual malice" standard anymore. See "Two Justices Say Supreme Court Should Reconsider Landmark Libel Decision/Justice Neil M. Gorsuch added his voice to that of Justice Clarence Thomas in questioning the longstanding standard for public officials set in New York Times v. Sullivan" (NYT).

"You've run out of free articles. Try your first month of Slate Plus for just $1..."

Uh, no. I will not do that. Ironically, the article I would have kept reading is "How Berries Became the Juiciest Battle of Kid-Food Instagram/Fun to eat, but paying for them … not so much." 

This is about parents complaining — or faux-complaining (with cute pictures) — about all the berries their children will eat. Like a whole $4 box in one sitting. I don't know where this story goes, but I'd tell these Instagram ladies to stop giving a little kid the whole box. And stop with the humblebragging. 

I'm very far removed from having little kids to take care of, and I do remember the pride you can take in the way your child eats, but I did not have the temptation of social media as a place to display this screwy pride. So I don't care what Slate Plus has to say. I say: Control your child with portion control — e.g., 2 strawberries, 10 blueberries. And: Control yourself by never exposing your little kids — and your pride — to the creepy eyes of the internet.

***

There is no comments section anymore, but you can email me here. Unless you say otherwise, I will presume you'd enjoy an update to this post with a quote from your email.

"The online publication Slate has suspended a well-known podcast host after he debated with colleagues over whether people who are not Black should be able to quote a racial slur..."

"... in some contexts. Mike Pesca, the host of 'The Gist,' a podcast on news and culture... made his argument during a conversation last week with colleagues on the interoffice messaging platform Slack. In a lengthy thread of messages, Slate staff members were discussing the resignation of Donald G. McNeil Jr., a reporter who said this month that he was resigning from The New York Times after he had used the slur during a discussion of racism while working as a guide on a student trip in 2019....  Jacob Weisberg, Slate’s former chairman and editor in chief [said]... 'I don’t think he did anything that merits discipline or consequences, and I think it’s an example of a kind of overreaction and a lack of judgment and perspective that is unfortunately spreading'... Joel Anderson, a Black staff member at Slate... disagreed. 'For Black employees, it’s an extremely small ask to not hear that particular slur and not have debate about whether it’s OK for white employees to use that particular slur,' he said."

The NYT reports.

ADDED: If a place of business wants to have zero-tolerance rule that says you will lose your job if you ever say the syllables of the n-word, that's one thing. But I don't see how the policy can be, as Joel Anderson suggests, that it only applies to white employees. That's overt and unsubtle race discrimination, and it would, I think, be hard to argue that it's not a violation of statutory law. Would Anderson support a rule that required the firing of black employees who happen to slip into say the word? I don't think I've ever heard anyone push for a rule like that. So I think the employer would be well advised to take the context of the saying of the word into account.

AND: A race-neutral zero-tolerance rule would create a much greater risk for black people. I think it's very easy for white people to avoid ever saying the word. Some just don't think we should be so repressed and sensitive about the word — as opposed to its use as an insult. But if the rule is you'll be fired if you ever say it, regardless of context, white people will abide by the rule.

"Extremely pale people tend to have visible veins. No foundation is going to be able to cover a bruise effectively while allowing those blue-tinged lines to show through..."

"... which leaves the pasty among us kind of screwed unless we’re going to go get serious special effects makeup training. Try having your husband bite the nape of your neck in or just on your hairline.... Ask your doctor about arnica. It’s an herb that can be applied topically, and some circus people, BDSM aficionados, and sex workers swear by it for speeding up the healing of bruises...."

Advice from Slate's sex columnist, How to Do It, responding to a question that begins "I love being bitten. I especially love being bitten at the joint between my shoulder and neck during sex."

As an extremely pale person, I was interested in the makeup advice. I think she's saying that the EPP needs to use foundation that's translucent enough to let your little veins show through, that the purple is part of your natural-looking skin tone — sort of like pointillism....



As for the bruises... well, that's what's in Slate today. I wonder how hard they had to try to make sure nobody thought they were giving advice to women who are actually abused and wanting to hide it.

I will read one and only one of articles on the "Popular in Slate" list, which I think stands on it's own as something worth reading.

I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.

ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").

Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.

This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....

This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works.... 

IN THE COMMENTS: William said:

I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....

That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.

"Why is Slate acting like the suppression of this ThinkProgress article is a shocking aberration that’s all the Weekly Standard’s fault?"

"Facebook should give up on the inevitably subjective task of policing 'fake news,' and simply let us, the users, decide for ourselves what news is credible."

Writes John, at Facebook, linking to "When Fact-Checking Becomes Censorship/Facebook has empowered a conservative magazine to suppress liberal viewpoints" (Slate).

Liberal websites absorb/process the Al Franken news, part 4: Slate.

I think this one will be my favorite. I've been saving this up as I slogged through some other things. Here's the Franken-related material as situated on the front page of Slate:



You've got, first, most prominently, "Al Franken Should Resign Immediately / Democrats’ credibility on sexual harassment is at stake," by Mark Joseph Stern. That went up very quickly (at 12:11 p.m.), and you don't even need to click through to get the message, with is impressively forthright. Stern cares about principle, perhaps on the theory that it's the most effective strategy for the Democrats. Don't waffle! Stern is hardcore:

The Democratic Party now has a chance to set the proper example and prove that absolute intolerance for sexual harassment crosses party lines. Democrats should not hedge or wring their hands or await more accusations. The path forward is simple: If the party wishes to retain an ounce of credibility, it must demand Franken’s swift resignation.

Absolute intolerance. There are those in Congress who know more about what secrets have been hidden and therefore where an absolute-intolerance policy may lead. A Franken resignation won't affect the number of Democrats in the Senate. (Minnesota has the Governor fill an opened Senate seat, and it stays that way until the next election.) But will the Democrats insist on the resignation of all sexual harassers? And once they lock into that track, what will count as sexual harassment? If you go with feminist analysis, it could be quite a lot. Consider the next article:

"Al Franken's Humor Always Had a Mean Streak," by Laura Miller. If you click through, the headline tames down to "Comedians Know to Play to the Room. Al Franken Should’ve Known Better." Miller is pretty sympathetic to Franken, offering him the padding of context, but she says something I'm going to make a big deal about. I'll put it in boldface:

It doesn’t matter—as Franken, to his credit, now seems to realize—whether the photo portrays an actual grope or a near-grope. The joke was at Tweeden’s expense, a tedious unfunny entry in the long, long catalog of humor based on the idea that sex in any form is an advantage men seize over women, at women’s expense. That seems to have been a theme of Franken’s USO appearances with Tweeden, as well: him leering at her in order to win laughs from servicemen. It looks like the servicemen found this antique, Bob Hope-style shtick funny, but humor is notoriously dependent on context....

Every joke is meant for one room or another, some group of people with a particular set of values whose approval the joker hopes to gain....

As I've said a few times, we may be entering the era of That's Not Funny. If everything is going to get out, through social media, open microphones, and digital cameras everywhere, then maybe nobody should dare to be a comedian or at least comedians need to confine themselves to comedy shows and stay out of politics.

But let's look at that boldface and think about the burgeoning potential of the idea that you might not be able to safely express anymore. The whole "Bob Hope-style shtick" is off limits. All the jokes (and all the serious statements) about sexual transactions may become suspect, and any statement about unequal sex may turn you into a social pariah. In this new template, Trump could be denounced without any credible stories about groping a woman and without regarding the Access Hollywood remarks as a confession that he actually did go up to women and just start kissing them. Just the idea that he thought of kissing women as taking an advantage is enough to condemn him — even if it's true that the women want that kind of sexual domination when it comes from a star.

Here's something I wrote in 2005, when the feminist writer Andrea Dworkin died:

[T]his is a classic problem in American feminism: do you want to describe one big system that applies to all women or should you concentrate on the truly oppressed?.... In the area of sexuality, I can see why people like Dworkin wanted to say to all the women who were smug about their own lucky lives and proud of their mates to say look closely at what you've got and start identifying with women at other levels of sexual happiness: empathize with them and see the problems. Dworkin and MacKinnon said that women had eroticized domination. That's not absolutely accurate, but it is one of the most powerful ideas I have ever encountered in my life. It's a truly scary, unsettling insight and a lot of the intense reaction to them is an unwillingness to lose what you want to believe is good.

The feminism of the 1980s may be reviving, and I see it right there in Laura Miller's hostility to "the idea that sex in any form is an advantage men seize over women, at women’s expense." This is just one product that might emerge from the manufacturing process that takes in Al Franken as its raw material. And I do want to scare you! Soylent Green is people!

The third article from the front page in Slate is "Today in Conservative Media: Let’s Be Frank About Franken" by Osita Nwanevu, and I like this because it looks as though it might be the same as the idea I'm applying to liberal media, just doing it to conservative media. But it's just collecting quotes. No real commentary.

The headline on the front page has more analysis than anything in the article: "Conservative Media Sounds Gleeful About Al Franken." I guess that means it's wrong to be gleeful. You should be somber and empathetic toward the women who come forward to speak about sexual harassment, so if you let it show that you're enjoying taking down a political enemy, you're committing an offense, the offense of glee. But if you're going to crack down on that offense, you'll have to restrain yourself over Roy Moore and Donald Trump. So quit smirking and put on that face you're going to need to avoid disaster in the era of That's Not Funny.

"The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level."

"Donald Trump will be president. We are going to be unpacking this night for the rest of our lives, and lives beyond that. We can’t comprehend even 1 percent of what’s just happened. But one aspect of it, minor in the overall sweep, that I’m pretty sure we can comprehend well enough right now: The Democratic Party establishment has beclowned itself and is finished."

So flows the hysteria over at Slate. That's by Jim Newell, who might need to settle down.

It was so recently that we were told that the GOP was permanently over, that America was now structured so that the Democrats were going to win everything from here on out.

I do like this paragraph of Newell's:

We should blame all those people around the Clintons more than the Clintons themselves, and the Clintons themselves deserve a ridiculous amount of blame. Hillary Clinton was just an ambitious person who wanted to be president. There are a lot of people like that. But she was enabled. The Democratic establishment is a club unwelcoming to outsiders, because outsiders don’t first look out for the club. The Clintons will be gone now. For the sake of the country, let them take the hangers-on with them.

Slate has hired a youngster with a lip ring to replace Emily Yoffe as its "Dear Prudence" advice columnist.

You want advice from a person who on first look you can tell could have used some better advice?!

Okay, on second look, here are 3 articles (listicles) by Mallory Ortberg:

1. "Dogs I Would Like To Own In Art, Even Though They Are Probably Dead Now."

2. "Every Southern Gothic Novel Ever" (a 17-point list, beginning with "The Red, Red Dirt Understands" and including "No One Listens To What Old Pap’s Got To Say, On Account Of This Deformity, But I Say It’s You All What Has The Deformity, In Your Souls, I Knows What I’ve Seen").

3. "Every Comment On Every Article About Bras Ever" (and they're pretty much all you're wearing the wrong size).

"The hated Blue Devils win a national championship, and literally the only thing written by Slate is how this teenager looks like Ted Cruz?"

"Wow. Maybe time to find a new sportswriter who is not so propelled by this irrational hatred of a successful team (with the highest graduation rate of any other team in the Final Four), coached by the most successful individual of all time, from a university that does great things for the community where it is situated. And has he not watched any other basketball game to see nearly every player who ever dunks a basketball celebrate? Time to move on. Hate to break it to you, but Duke is NOT the hated program it was a decade ago. I know people who have stopped reading Slate because of the negativity. Tempting..."

Comment at an incredibly stupid Slate article titled "Duke Wins NCAA Championship Thanks to Heroics of Ted Cruz Look-Alike."

"That's not the observation of some wingnut in search of an idol..."

"... it's from a story by John Dickerson, political reporter for Slate, a publication that not too long ago held a navel-gazing session on the topic of 'Is Slate Too Liberal?'"

Writes Steve Elbow, a reporter for the Madison newspaper the Capital Times, in a piece titled "Scott Walker's Iowa triumph: Is this really getting serious?" Here's what he quoted from Dickerson's "Best in Show/Wisconsin’s Scott Walker outshines the competition in Iowa.":

"Before the Iowa Freedom Summit on Saturday, one Republican activist summed up Gov. Scott Walker’s challenge this way: 'He doesn’t make the flashbulbs go off.' But at the end of the marathon day of speeches before conservatives, the Wisconsin governor emerged as the leading light."

It's weird for people in Wisconsin — or at least in Madison — to see our governor — who's been hounded and belittled for the last 4 years — bursting out onto the national stage and suddenly seeming like the strongest candidate for President.

Elbow mentions some things Rush Limbaugh said about Walker yesterday, but he leaves out the part where Rush rejects the suddenly-last-Saturday template:

"While lawyers for Wisconsin and Indiana attempted to defend their state’s marriage bans, Posner issued a series of withering bench slaps..."

"... that unmasked anti-gay arguments as the silly nonsense that they are. Reading this string of brutal retorts is fun enough — but it’s even better to listen to them delivered in Posner’s own distinctive cadence. With the help of my Slate colleague Jeff Friedrich, I’ve collected the most exhilarating, satisfying, and hilarious of the bunch."

Nice job presenting the clips, by Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. And I'm saying that based on listening to the entire thing myself. I summarized it last night like this:

"Men, to the best of my knowledge, don’t even read."

"When’s the last time you heard a man say, 'I’ve been reading this great book, you’d really like it’? My girlfriend always tells me about these books she’s reading, and I don’t even see her reading the book! Where does this book live?"

A quote from Bryan Goldberg, the founder of the website Bustle, quoted in this New Yorker article titled "FROM MARS/A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing." I enjoyed the whole article — Goldberg raised $6.5 million to start up a website for women, though he knew he knew nothing about what women want to read. He just knew there was money to be made from advertising if he could deliver big numbers of young female readers, and he hired a whole lot of young women to work for $50 or $100 a day writing blog posts about whatever interests them (because what interests them will kinda sorta already be what interests young women). His goal is 50 million readers a month, and as of the publication of that article (last September), he'd gotten the traffic up to 14,000 a day — i.e., about half the traffic I get here, with just my own self writing, albeit not to the demographic most loved by advertisers, even though I am sure that some of you do get excited by the newest innovation in eyeliner.

"If you are a Republican and you like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, then you probably already have your candidate for the 2016 presidential campaign."

"If you do not like Christie, then your candidate for 2016 is Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker," says John Dickerson at Slate, who I doubt is keen on helping Republicans, but check out his argument. Excerpt:

"But as you sit there sipping wine and eating pork belly, watching a marathon of The Sopranos — which sounds like a very nice evening..."

"... keep in mind that the distance between you and some imagined figure pounding Mountain Dew and Quarter Pounders while watching hours of Pawn Stars is not so vast."

Willa Paskin, tweaking the snobbish consciences of Slate readers who may have lost touch with old-fashioned it-will-rot-your-brain snobbery about watching too much television.

"Feminism, in short, doesn't just empower women. It empowers me."

"It allows me to take on roles that have traditionally been associated with women. It gives me more flexibility in my career. As a man, feminism has had a huge positive effect on my life. It seems like the least I can do in return is own it."

Writes Noah Berlatsky under the heading "All the Selfish Reasons to Be a Male Feminist," posted at Slate's XXfactor. He's certainly not telling us all the selfish reasons, since I can think of at least one additional reason: You can get your free-lance writing published at Slate's XXfactor.

Berlatsky talks about having a wife with a full-time job and health insurance benefits and his own role as primary caregiver for their child while he does his writing, and that catches my eye, because it's the family life I had from 1981 to 1987. He says:

There was a time not so long ago where doing any of those things would have made me the object of ridicule, and quite possibly self-loathing as well. Today, though, it's no big deal — and the reason for that is feminism.

Well, there was feminism back then too, but it didn't save men from the inner turmoil of switching traditional gender roles. We thought we were really sophisticated, advanced, hip, and evolved in the early 1980s. Does that come as a surprise to you, Noah? You say, "it's no big deal," but you're writing at XXfactor, where it's in your interest — you have a selfish reason — to say that. But these things work until they don't work, so don't be smug, and good luck. Have you really thought deeply about your masculine self-esteem? Because, to my ear, your thanks feminism sounds shallow.

Feminist blogger suspects that the AP meant to say "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

You may remember this story from yesterday, which I blogged here, about the NYC ad executive who leaned against her balcony railing in a way that made her date say "You know, you shouldn't do that." She said "I do it all the time," and then the railing collapsed, and she fell 17 stories and died. When should a death make the news and why? I know why I chose to blog that one: It was such a striking reminder of the way death might come at any time, and one's confidence that death won't come because it hasn't come yet — I do it all the time — is a delusion we live by and might die by.

I'm not afraid to lie down at night and sleep — I actively seek the loss of consciousness on those occasions — because I always wake up in the morning. That's happened every time so far anyway. And yet, every day, there are — lying in beds all over the world — dead bodies of human beings who surrendered consciousness to sleep the night before, assuming it would work out the same way it did all those other times.

How many will get AP stories written? None, unless they happen to be famous. The railing giving way is dramatic, especially because it happened to someone we can see did not expect it, who had that youthful sense of invulnerability, and the fall came from a great height, the death was instant, and there was an onlooker to make the experience come alive for us vicariously.

Like any blog, a feminist blog must feed on the available news stories or die of starvation, but a feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism. So here's the Slate's XXfactor blog, and the determination has been made that the falling woman story is bloggable, which has to mean that it's fodder for feminism. Extracting 4 facts from the opening 2 paragraphs of the AP story, L.V. Anderson writes that the "implication" is that "this smoking slut totally had it coming."

"Revealed: Bush ancestor was heavily invested in kidnapping Africans into slavery."

I assume this report is true and that the tainted blood of the Bush clan is interesting, but why is it being revealed now?

Because Obama's in trouble, and it's the next thing that could be pulled out of the country's miscellaneous bag o' distractions?

Because Jeb's in that lineage too, and he's in the running for next President, and he said something embarrassing recently, so it was a good time to kick him?

Because the George Zimmerman trial is getting underway, and that hasn't worked out as well as some in the race-baiting industry had hoped, and maybe some unrelated racial disturbance would resonate?

Because Paula Deen said something really stupid about slavery, so the editors at Slate looked around in their storehouse of as-yet-unpublished articles and found one that had slavery?

Are people laughing at Charles Ramsey?

And if so, is it racist? Or is the Slate blogger talking about "The Troubling Viral Trend of the 'Hilarious' Black Neighbor" the one who's channeling racism?

Here's our earlier discussion of this video, and what I see in the comments is admiration for the guy — for what he did and for his straight-talking. For example: "I loved this guy when I saw him interviewed. Straight, honest, and not an ounce of pc!"

"Meet the Gaybros: They like sports, hunting, and beer. They make the gay community mad."

I don't know if this Slate article deserves all the traffic it's going to get, but I decided to become part of the problem, if it's a problem. I apologize in advance.