Biography
Meghan Daum is the author of the essay collection My Misspent Youth (Open City, 2001) and the novel The Quality of Life Report (Viking, ...
Barking up the right tree
February 17, 2011
It's been a big week for glittery, over-the-top and slightly perplexing contests. First the Grammy Awards ceremony, with its requisite preening and prancing and bizarre outfits, then two evenings of the Westminster dog show, which offered more of the same.
-
Farrah Fawcett's swimsuit hits the big time
February 10, 2011
Surely you noticed this urgent news item over the weekend: The red swimsuit worn by Farrah Fawcett in her iconic 1976 poster has been donated to the Smithsonian's popular culture history collection. Along for the ride were some of Fawcett's "Charlie's Angels" scripts, a Fawcett doll, a hairstyling kit called Farrah's Glamour Center and, of course, the poster itself.
-
In praise of snail mail
February 3, 2011
I've always loved mail. By that I mean the mail that arrives in a physical mailbox six days a week, not e-mail. Well, I love that too, but it's a cheap thrill. My heart belongs to snail mail.
-
'Skins' passes an ick test
January 27, 2011
Even if you haven't watched MTV since Duran Duran broke up, you've probably heard of "Skins." It premiered on Jan. 17 amid a fanfare of anticipation after the Parents Television Council pronounced it "the most dangerous program that has ever been foisted on your children."
-
In the eye of the 'Tiger'
January 20, 2011
Amy Chua, a Yale law professor and mother of two, was unknown to most of the world until two weeks ago. On Jan. 8, the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt from her then-forthcoming, now-bestselling book, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Part memoir and part manifesto, the excerpt was titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior" and led with a list of activities and behaviors that Chua's two daughters, now teenagers, have never been allowed to engage in. These include "attend a sleepover," "have a play date," "be in a school play," "complain about not being in a school play" and "get anything less than an A."
-
Rhetoric as comfort food: The mac-and-cheese instinct
January 13, 2011
If only we could go back to Monday. Discussions about Saturday's shootings in Tucson, which killed six and wounded 13, including Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, were so much simpler then: inflamed, righteous and deliciously partisan in a comfort-food kind of way.
-
Narcissist -- give it a rest
January 6, 2011
At any given moment a whole lot of people are accusing a whole lot of other people of being narcissists. In recent years, the term for a self-destructive "personality disorder" has become the insult of choice for almost anyone doing almost anything.
-
The app to end all apps
December 30, 2010
The other day I went to the movies and forgot my BlackBerry. This proved disastrous, not because I missed any calls but because during the five or so minutes before the trailers began, I found myself in the terrifying position of having nothing to do. As nearly everyone in the theater soothed themselves with Facebook Mobile or tiny, hand-held rounds of poker, I had no choice but to be alone with my thoughts.
-
Michael Vick: Still in the doghouse
December 23, 2010
What does Michael Vick want for Christmas? A dog, apparently. Don't panic: He's not allowed to get one until 2012, when he finishes the probation that followed his nearly two-year prison sentence for running a dog-fighting ring. But there's much anticipatory anxiety in the air nonetheless.
-
The last of 'Larry King Live'
December 16, 2010
Say what you will about Larry King — that he's a shameless softballer, that he's a selective listener, that he may not always understand who he's talking to and what they're saying — you have to admit the man has stamina. Even as his body seems to shrivel and his concentration appears to wane, he's been showing up for "Larry King Live," his five-nights-a-week, hourlong CNN interview program, for 25 years. Throughout it all — and, indeed, throughout his whole career, which began in radio in 1957 — his off-the-cuff, agenda-free (unprepared?) style has proved both amusing and bemusing to heads of state and reality show stars alike.
-
(Brand name) here, there, everywhere
December 9, 2010
Anyone who's seen "Idiocracy," the 2006 cult comedy set 500 years in the future when even announcements from the State Department are "brought to you by Carl's Jr.," won't be surprised by a recent civic trend. In cities all over the country, public spaces — from bridges to state parks to school auditoriums — are being offered up and sold as advertising space.
-
Back from the brink
December 2, 2010
For four days at the end of last month, I was unconscious. After a week fighting an illness I thought was the flu, I'd ended up in an intensive care unit on a feeding tube and a ventilator with swelling of the brain, multiple organ distress and a platelet disorder called disseminated intravascular coagulation. (Read the first part of Meghan Daum's medical odyssey.)
-
A medical odyssey
November 25, 2010
You may have noticed that I've had "the day off" for the last three weeks. That's something of an understatement, since I was actually in the hospital for 11 days, four of which I was intubated and sedated in the intensive care unit. I received two platelet transfusions, one blood transfusion, a spinal tap, three EEGs, three MRIs, two CT scans and round-the-clock infusions of four kinds of antibiotics. I had liver failure, kidney trouble and meningoenchephalitis, a swelling of the brain and the lining around it. I had a breathing tube and a feeding tube. Friends and family gathered at the hospital. My father jumped on a plane from New York. My husband, though he rarely left my side, was beside himself. At one point, my platelet count, which is supposed to be somewhere around 200,000, was 14,000. That meant there was a high risk of spontaneous internal bleeding.
-
Sarah Palin, feminist
May 20, 2010
After struggling with its definition and connotations, Sarah Palin has apparently made peace with the "F-word." She freely used it in a May 14 speech for the Susan B. Anthony List, a PAC for antiabortion female congressional candidates. And given Palin's extraordinary influence in certain circles, you can bet untold numbers of women who might once have never considered it will now be dropping the F-bomb with alacrity.
-
Carrie Prejean vs. Perez Hilton
April 25, 2009
It's been a notable week in not-really news. Songstress Susan Boyle, who supposedly delivered us from our shallowness by belting out a showstopper without the help of hair dye or eyebrow tweezing, continued to make headlines. The former vice presidential candidate's grandbaby daddy, Levi Johnston, went on "Larry King Live" and managed to say and be asked almost nothing. And Earth Day, with its myriad opportunities for celebrities to talk about CFL bulbs, filled talk shows like so many Styrofoam peanuts in a cardboard box.
-
The recession heats up romance novels
April 4, 2009
Amid the ceaseless reminders that the economy is in a persistent vegetative state, it's easy to forget that some industries and products are thriving. U.S. News & World Report, which recently released its list of "10 Winners in the Recession," says that Hershey's chocolate increased earnings by more than 50% last quarter and the Burpee seed company has said it expects sales to increase by 25% in 2009 (and this was before the first lady's organic-gardening initiative).
-
Michelle Obama's no-win role
March 28, 2009
I'm having a hard time forming an opinion about First Lady Michelle Obama, mostly because there are already so many out there, and they're almost uniformly inane.
-
Curse you, Zillow!
March 21, 2009
If you've looked up your home value over the last year or so, you know the experience is not unlike weighing yourself after eating a large meal. The number is simply wrongThe number is simply wrong.
-
Happiness is in your mind -- and wallet
March 14, 2009
Oh, no. Here comes another study about happiness. We can't seem to do enough of these paeans to cheerfulness. In the last few months alone, the British Medical Journal suggested that having a happy close friend boosts our own odds of being happy by 25%; the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological
-
The age of Friendaholism
March 7, 2009
Thwarting the age-old theory (and high school coping mechanism) that unpopularity in adolescence portends wealth and success in adulthood, a new study from the University of Essex in Britain has shown that the more friends you have in school, the more money you'll earn later.
-
The day the talk died at KLSX
February 28, 2009
For those of us who like to listen to people rant, whine and talk about their gastrointestinal problems on the radio, the last week has been a sad one in Southern California. KLSX, which had been the region's only all-talk FM station since 1995, abruptly changed its format to Top 40 music on Feb. 20. The switch, according to executives at its parent company, CBS Radio, was an effort to attract younger listeners.
-
Refusing to toe the Oscar party line
February 21, 2009
Irealize what I'm about to say is a form of blasphemy in this town: I hate the Oscars. I hate everything about them: the gazillion awards shows that precede them, the obsession with the gowns and their designers, the scenery-chewing movie performances they inspire and, most of all, the parties.
-
Doomed by your name?
February 7, 2009
If you read "Freakonomics," the popular 2005 book that applied economic theories to non-economic issues, you probably remember the mention of African American twins named OrangeJello and LemonJello (pronounced a-RON-zhello and le-MON-zhello).
-
Eight is more than enough
January 31, 2009
Ihave octuplet derangement syndrome. Ever since Monday, when an unidentified woman gave birth to eight babies at Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center near Los Angeles, I've been obsessed. And not in a good way.
-
Dream dad: one job too many for Obama
January 24, 2009
Which image of President Obama with his daughters is your favorite? Is it the goofy-faced shot riding bumper cars with Sasha at the Iowa State Fair? Is it one of the photos snapped on the beach when the family vacationed in Hawaii in August? Or is it the moment that Sasha, talking to her father on a huge screen during the first night of the Democratic National Convention, punctuated his remarks with "I love you, Daddy," a declaration sure to claim a permanent spot in the annals of political campaign adorableness?
-
Obama's poet
January 17, 2009
This time last year, on the snowy campaign trail in New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a swipe at her opponent Barack Obama with the quip, "You campaign with poetry, but you govern with prose."
-
Ashley Madison's secret success
January 10, 2009
'Life is short. Have an affair."
-
Fictional memoirs
January 3, 2009
How did Herman Rosenblat, a 78-year-old Holocaust survivor and seemingly sweet old man, become the pariah of publishing? He spent upward of 15 years telling this story: As a teenager at a German concentration camp in 1945, he encounters a girl on the other side of the camp's fence who tosses food to him daily. The two never speak, but she gives him the strength to survive. Settled in New York 12 years later, Rosenblat finds himself on a blind date with a Polish woman named Roma Radzicki whose family, she says, lived near the camp during the war. Despite incalculable odds, Radzicki turns out to be the girl from the fence. He proposes to her on the spot, and they remain married today.
-
Burger King's body spray
December 27, 2008
You know you're in the throes of hard economic times when one of the most talked-about gift ideas of the holiday season is body spray from Burger King. You heard me right. There's a new burger in town, and it's not a burger at all. It's a fragrance called Flame by BK (pour hommespour hommes, presumably).
-
Barack Obama has added you as a friend on Facebook
December 20, 2008
Despite common assumptions that President-elect Barack Obama's Cabinet nominees are told of their selection via personal phone calls, The Times has learned that the famously tech-friendly Obama is actually notifying his picks by "friending" them on the social networking site Facebook. Requests to Obama for comment on the following transcript have gone unanswered, though he did "poke" us just as this went to press.
-
Recession-free Christmas ads
December 13, 2008
Tired of reading grim news about the economy? Then skip the articles and go straight to the ads. It's December, after all; the season of lights, gift giving and glossy magazines and newspaper supplements that smell like Glade PlugIns and weigh enough to break your toe.
-
From YouTube to Carnegie Hall
December 6, 2008
For every bassoonist or violist who's bemoaned his exclusion from that celebrated form of artistic democracy known as "American Idol," the dark days are over. No, Paula Abdul probably will not be waxing befuddled on the finer points of Mozart concertos. But YouTube has announced plans for something possibly even scarier: the YouTube Symphony, the "world's first collaborative online orchestra."
-
Life on our own L.A. fall line
November 29, 2008
Congratulations Southern Californians, autumn -- or something resembling it -- has finally arrived. It's been a long, dry, flame-engulfed road, but I'm glad to say (and I hope this won't jinx it ) that we probably won't hit 95 degrees again for at least five or six months.
-
Bushes' books
November 22, 2008
If you thought exiting your last job was painful, because you had to stand around eating sheet cake and acting excited about your impending "freelance projects," imagine being an outgoing president. Not only do you have to give up your career, move out of your house and bid farewell to your jumbo jet all on the same day, you're expected to embark on one of the most onerous tasks known to humans: writing a book.
-
Dog days ahead for the Obamas
November 15, 2008
In case you hadn't heard, Barack Obama's daughters are getting a dog. They were promised one after the election regardless of the outcome and, as the president-elect noted at his first news conference, the subject is generating "more interest on our website than just about anything." He said this in the same somber tone with which he also discussed Cabinet appointments and Iranian nuclear proliferation, referring to "criteria that need to be reconciled" (the need for a hypoallergenic dog and a preference for a shelter dog) and calling it "a pressing issue in the Obama household."
-
Gratitude with attitude
October 11, 2008
Question: What prize was recently characterized by one of its winners as "mundane"?
-
Straight talk expressed
September 20, 2008
On Sept. 12, the writer David Foster Wallace, who was 46, died by hanging himself in his Claremont home. A formidable intellect and a virtuosic craftsman whose following seemed cult-like despite being too large to really qualify (several of his books were bestsellers), Wallace had been a professor of creative writing at Pomona College since 2001.
-
Obsessed? Addicted? It's politics
September 13, 2008
Are you experiencing disturbing, election-related thoughts? When you close your eyes at night, do the colors of CNN's "magic" electoral map dance in your head like red and blue sugarplums? When you get in your car and hear the same talk-radio personalities saying the same things they said the last time you got in the car, do you wonder what day it is? Are you getting carpal tunnel syndrome from hitting "refresh" at political websites and blogs? Are you aware that most of these sites refresh automatically, yet you find yourself clicking the navigation bar because new information about Sarah Palin's other baby, the alien dinosaur, might have surfaced seconds ago and you can't wait that long to read about it? Are you at once totally sick of election news and insatiably hungry for more? As a result, are you sick of yourself?
-
Greetings from the energized GOP base
September 6, 2008
Sure, I spent much of the last week in a state of apoplexy at the hypocrisy and cynicism of the political process in general and the Republican Party in particular. But I can't say those were the very first thoughts that came to mind when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was introduced to the world Aug. 29.
-
A few PUMAs on the loose
August 30, 2008
Now that the Democratic National Convention is over, have all the PUMAs gone back to their dens? Is it safe to jog in the mountains or are rabid, ravenous Hillary Rodham Clinton supporters still crouching in the chaparral, patiently waiting until November, when they'll avenge their candidate in one deadly pounce?
-
Roy Den Hollander's war on feminism
August 23, 2008
This week, while you were distractedly waiting for one of the presidential candidates to just go ahead and pick Michael Phelps as his running mate, a Manhattan lawyer sued Columbia University for discriminating against men.
-
In China, a pretty face wins
August 16, 2008
China's never been known for its stellar policies on little girls. But this week, its female trouble in Beijing has been especially vexing. There are, of course, the rumblings about members of the Chinese women's gymnastics team who appear younger than the International Olympic Committee's age requirement of 16. But that controversy has been put on the back burner by the fracas surrounding Lin Miaoke, the 9-year-old who lip-synced "Ode to the Motherland" during the opening ceremony.
-
I'm nonplussed, maybe
August 9, 2008
Ineed to say something. And even though I'm going to refrain from typing in all caps, I urge you to pretend I did.
-
All together now
March 29, 2008
You know a nation is in trouble when the worst epithet its citizens can hurl at each other is the title of a folk song: "Kumbaya," an African American spiritual whose name (and chorus) translates from the Gullah dialect as "come by here."
-
Why we still need Clinton
March 8, 2008
Admit it, Obamaphiles, there was a part of you that was a teeny bit relieved about the outcome of Tuesday's primaries. As much as you think you want Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the picture so you can love your man with uninterrupted, full-time ardor, you're just not quite ready to cut Clinton loose. She's just too fundamental, too necessary, too much like a sofa you think you hate but, while attempting to move it through the doorway, realize is crucial to the look and feel of the room.
-
Booming sense of pride
March 1, 2008
I'm not going to pretend I knew what Michelle Obama meant when, at a rally in Milwaukee, she said that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country." She later said she meant she was proud of people "rolling up their sleeves" and "trying to figure this out," which I take to mean she wasn't so sure either.
-
Finding Mr. Good Enough
February 23, 2008
In the march issue of the Atlantic magazine, sandwiched between an article about Chinese Internet technology and a review of modernist art criticism, lies a seven-page essay called "Marry Him! The Case for Settling." Its author is Lori Gottlieb, a 40-year-old Los Angeles writer and single mother who admits that the idea of finding Mr. Right, a notion she once harbored, was in fact a bill of goods. Young women in search of marriage and family, she writes, should think seriously about resigning themselves to Mr. Good Enough.
-
Chelsea's rant control
February 9, 2008
Maybe you were privy to an e-mail that was circulated, perhaps, by Chelsea Clinton this week. According to a post Tuesday by Emily Bazelon of the online magazine Slate, the e-mail's subject heading was "a must read ... send to every woman you know." The body of the e-mail was a pro-Hillary screed by the famous 1960s- and 1970s-era feminist Robin Morgan (author of the iconic "Sisterhood Is Powerful" anthologies) called, "Goodbye To All That (#2)." The essay was dated Feb. 2 and appeared (and can still be read) on the website for the Women's Media Center, a nonprofit feminist media watchdog organization that Morgan helped found.
-
News from the Department of Depression
February 2, 2008
Misery really does love company. How else to explain our endless fascination with studies about why it's so much easier to worry than be happy? In the last few years, researchers have provided us with all manner of mood-related news, much of which has gotten more ink than civil unrest in Third World countries (and no wonder; that stuff is really depressing).
-
A house is more than an ATM
January 26, 2008
If real estate in 2008 has a fashion corollary, it's the Member's Only jacket. Like those elasticized, cotton/poly zip-ups that were all the rage in the 1980s, houses and condos -- at least those purchased in the last few years -- have gone from must-have items to invitations for public mockery.
-
High-definition anxiety
January 19, 2008
Say what you will about society's shallow preoccupation with physical appearance, no one can accuse us of not sweating the details. Never was this more clear to me than a few years ago, when I visited a "laser spa" at a dermatologist's office in the hope of lightening a small (and, in retrospect, inconsequential) scar on my knee. Without looking at my chart, the porcelain-skinned, flawlessly made-up "laser spa technician" led me into the treatment room, gestured toward a hulking machine worthy of the Starship Enterprise, glanced up at me and asked, "Just your face today?"
-
Hillary's gotta have it
January 12, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton may have clawed her way out of an abyss in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, but the shadows over her campaign are a reminder that the path she's forging is still in the deep woods.
-
Leno writes a wrong
January 5, 2008
In hopes of learning the true -- and possibly mystical -- value of writers, I did something Wednesday I hadn't done in years. I watched the "Late Show With David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" all the way through (thanks to DVR technology). The occasion, of course, was the programs' return to the air after two months off because of the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike.
-
The gift card shuffle
December 29, 2007
Who cares that holiday spending fell short of expectations this season? The real shopping is happening right now.
-
Tracking the mild coyote
December 22, 2007
In the last few weeks, a buzz has developed around a weblog called the Daily Coyote. It features the comments and photographs of Shreve Stockton, a 30-year-old woman living in a one-room cabin in an undisclosed "town of 300 people" in Wyoming. The focus of the blog is Charlie, a 9-month-old coyote that Stockton took in when he was orphaned shortly after birth. Feeding him goat's milk from syringes and then baby bottles (he promptly chewed the nipples off), Stockton has raised him from a tiny fluff ball that cried unless he could sleep in her bed to a long-snouted, giant-eared, 25-pound almost adult coyote that still sleeps in her bed. Oh, and her cat, Eli, sleeps there too.
-
Knocked up but not out
December 15, 2007
When I was in high school during the Reagan years, teen pregnancy wasn't just taboo, it was the worst possible situation you could find yourself in. Equal parts personal tragedy and quasi-criminal act, getting knocked up (not to be confused with knocking someone else up, which might have been a tiny bit cool) was the ultimate wrong move -- not least because it was preventable in so many ways.
-
Save the world: stay married
December 8, 2007
The American obsession with striking out on our own, with poster children as varied as John Wayne and Mary Tyler Moore, appears to be at odds with our other current obsession: saving the planet.
-
The Red Cross' latest emergency
December 1, 2007
I just took an informal survey and discovered that a lot of people are under the impression that the American Red Cross is a religious organization. Maybe it's the cross that's throwing them (though it's really more of a plus sign), or maybe it's the fact that the 126-year-old disaster relief agency acted more like the morality police than an international humanitarian organization this week. After losing two presidents in the last six years -- Bernadine Healy resigned in 2001 amid accusations about the mishandling of donations for 9/11 victims; Martha J. Evans stepped down in 2005 after the Red Cross' response to Hurricane Katrina was deemed inadequate -- yet another leader has made a scandalous departure.
-
No more reading the readers
November 24, 2007
One of the many uses of air travel is the opportunity it provides to take a snapshot of the public's reading tastes. Sure, bestseller lists rank what's popular, but if you want to do more detailed market research -- to know what kinds of people are reading what kinds of books, and how many pages into them they fall asleep -- there is no better vantage point than the aisle of a jetliner. It is from there that my extremely scientific research has produced data suggesting the following: Readers of mass-market thrillers often wear Dockers and polo shirts bearing company logos; readers of books like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" can often be found in business class or first class (it works, folks!); and, almost without exception, there will be a young person in the last row traveling with nothing but a knapsack and reading Camus for the explicit purpose of striking up a conversation with a sexually desirable fellow passenger.
-
Pictures imperfect
November 17, 2007
Readers of this newspaper were mesmerized this week by staff photographer Luis Sinco's two-part series about Lance Cpl. James Blake Miller, the man behind his now famous portrait, "Marlboro Marine." Taken in 2004 during the battle of Fallouja, the photograph shows a weary Marine staring into the morning sun. His face is smeared with mud, the bridge of his nose is bloodied, and a cigarette dangles from his lips with a Bogart-style insouciance we rarely see anymore.
-
Things have never been better for kick-ass bloviators.
November 3, 2007
Is it just me, or has it become super-cool to be a blowhard? Everywhere I turn, it seems someone's speaking a bit too loudly, going on slightly too long and imparting ideas dressed up with dropped names, self-serving anecdotes and sanctimonious chest-thumping. And you should hear what I run into when I leave my house.
-
Cliche and cataclysm
October 27, 2007
Whenever California burns or shakes or collapses in mudslides, a cavalcade of familiar noir-isms comes along for the ride. Social critics wax nihilistic about impermanence as a permanent state of mind. Inevitably, Joan Didion quotes blow in like the Santa Anas themselves, offering up heavy doses of the line about the winds forcing an acceptance of "a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior." Inevitably, references will be made to Nathaniel West's "The Day of the Locust," to Raymond Chandler's "Red Wind," even to Steely Dan lyrics.
-
The Porn Age's unsexiness
October 20, 2007
It's been a tough couple of weeks for porn. On Oct. 12, two Arizona men were sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for generating pornographic e-mail spam, a venture in which they'd sent out millions of e-mails and earned more than a million dollars.
-
Did 9/11 kill feminism?
October 6, 2007
Because I seem to be one of an ever-dwindling handful of women under 50 who still call themselves feminists (and, therefore, am allowed to make fun of feminists with impunity), let me say this: Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of 9/11 isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.
-
Live and let live -- nah . . .
September 22, 2007
As the proposed two-year moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles wends its way through the City Council, the zoning debate over a long-planned Orthodox synagogue continues to simmer in Hancock Park. In both cases, the hullabaloo can be heard for miles. What can be learned from this? Not much other than a) if there's anything we fear more than poor people, it's poor people with high cholesterol, and b) freedom of traffic flow trumps freedom of religion. And, let's face it, we're not even too sure about those.
-
Should kids be seen?
September 15, 2007
On Wednesday, CBS will premiere "Kid Nation," a reality show that puts 40 youngsters, ages 8 through 15, in a New Mexico "ghost town" for 40 days without electricity, indoor plumbing or adult supervision. While six weeks off the grid may sound like exactly what today's over-mediated, nature-phobic, hyper-parented kids need most, some people are suggesting that the finer points of the arrangements are more reminiscent of "Oliver Twist" than a Sierra Club camping trip.
-
Defending Jerry Lewis
September 8, 2007
I never thought I'd find myself defending Jerry Lewis. Like a lot of people of my generation (and, unless you live in France, the one before that and quite possibly the one before that), my brain just isn't wired to appreciate the charms of his act, which has always struck me as about as close to dental drilling as comedy can get. But now that we've spent the better part of a week chastising the 81-year-old for saying, in the 18th hour of his Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy telethon, all or most of the verboten word "faggot," part of me is feeling just a wee bit French.
-
Our wonder of Wonder Bread
September 1, 2007
As a cultural icon, Wonder Bread has always been pretty tiresome. Occupying that dismal, overhyped semiotic space between authentic Americana and ironic pop artifact, its one of those products (see also Spam and Pez) that's been usurped by its own kitsch factor. For every middle-aged cornball who tries to capture his lost youth with mawkish allusions to Wonder Bread, there's a tattooed hipster ironically wearing a Wonder Bread T-shirt. And you kind of want to kill both of them.
-
American Apparel's ick
August 25, 2007
I've been looking at American Apparel's advertisements for years now, and I'm still not sure what I think about them.
-
Death by numbers
August 18, 2007
On any given day, an average of 148,000 people will die. That means over a million people have died in the last week. Nearly 5 million have died since around this time last month, which, incidentally, was exactly when we were briefly bombarded with the news that 199 people were killed in a Brazilian airliner crash.
-
When Hillary met Robert
August 11, 2007
When letters written to a friend by a college-aged Hillary Rodham resurfaced in the news a few weeks ago, her mention of a certain "Dartmouth boy" with whom she spent an evening in 1966 piqued notable interest. But last week, the New York Times reported that the mystery date was none other than Robert Reich, former secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton. In a post on his video blog, Reich called the encounter a "presidential summit" ("She was the president of her freshman class at Wellesley, and I was president of my sophomore class at Dartmouth," he explained.) and said they went to the Michelangelo Antonioni film "Blow Up."
-
The case for conspiracies
August 4, 2007
Since the May release of his 1,612-page book, "Reclaiming History," criminal prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has been appearing on everything from C-Span to "The Colbert Report" telling the world that JFK's death had nothing to do with a government conspiracy. By most accounts, he's made a pretty airtight case.
-
The little black dress of 'responsibility'
July 14, 2007
IN CASE YOU haven't heard, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa takes full responsibility for his relationship with Telemundo newscaster Mirthala Salinas. Not some responsibility, not partial responsibility, not indirect responsibility. Full.
-
Little voices of distraction
July 7, 2007
HAS THE WHOLE country been sucking on helium balloons?
-
Who killed Antioch? Womyn
June 30, 2007
ON JUNE 12, the board of trustees of Antioch College, the famously countercultural institution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, announced that the campus would shut down next year. The decision is a result of declining enrollment, insufficient alumni support and facilities so neglected that, according to several reports, some buildings don't have hot water. Earlier this year, a number of faculty members were laid off. Meanwhile, student enrollment, which had been about 2,000 in the college's 1960s heyday, has dwindled to about 400.
-
40-love, or 20-love?
June 23, 2007
A "GREAT SOCIAL experiment" has commenced on Monday nights on NBC: a reality show called "Age of Love." The idea is to find a mate for Australian tennis star Mark Philippoussis, a 6-foot-5 former GQ cover boy who, according to the show, "has everything except someone to share his life with."
-
Our blond obsession, from Di to Paris
June 16, 2007
ADMITTEDLY, there's something uncanny about the publication of "The Diana Chronicles," Tina Brown's book about the princess of Wales, just as America's own blond headline-grabber, Paris Hilton, was making her way (back) to jail. It makes it too tempting to draw all sorts of parallels between the two women. And we all know who wins that contest.
-
Down the aisle and over the top
June 9, 2007
I JUST TYPED "bride" into the search engine on Amazon.com and got 132,398 results. Some referred to fiction titles like "Brideshead Revisited," but the vast majority were nonfiction field guides to femininity. There was "The Conscious Bride," "The Buff Bride," "Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul" and something called "And the Bride Wore White: 7 Secrets to Sexual Purity." And that was just from the first few pages of the list.
-
Dr. Death, American icon
June 2, 2007
I'VE ALWAYS BELIEVED that someday there will be a Jack Kevorkian postage stamp. Granted, it will be a first-class stamp that costs $3; that's how far into the future we're talking. But considering we've already had a Richard Nixon stamp, who says you need charisma to grace the upper right corners of America's envelopes?
-
Without smoking, films lose some fire
May 19, 2007
THE PORTRAIT photographer Marion Ettlinger once told me that the worst thing to ever happen to her art form was the demise of smoking. A cigarette, after all, not only gives a subject something to do with his hands, it seems to provide an uncanny cure for camera shyness, allowing a facial expression and a physical posture to integrate into some ineffable moment of truth.
-
Does getting him a beer count as work?
April 28, 2007
IF YOU'RE ONE of those women for whom the only hobby more satisfying than aromatherapy wreath-making is complaining about how men don't work hard enough, I'm afraid your lament license has just been revoked.
-
Why doesn't Harvard love me?
April 9, 2007
IN THE LAST few weeks, the anxiety of high school seniors awaiting news of their college fates seems to have spilled over into the general population. It's easy to see why. UCLA received more than 50,000 applications, more than any other university in the country, and accepted just 11,837 of them. Harvard turned down 91% of about 23,000 hopefuls, 1,100 of whom had perfect SAT math scores. Acceptance rates for Stanford, Yale and Columbia were 10.3%, 9.6%, and 8.9%, respectively. That means thousands of valedictorians and people with grade-point averages of 4.0 or higher were passed over in favor of whatever form of superhuman DNA now constitutes a worthy Ivy Leaguer.
-
Dreaming your dream house
March 26, 2007
I HAD THE DREAM again the other night, the "extra room" dream. I walked out of my bedroom and instead of being deposited into the living room, which adjoins my bedroom in real life, I entered a long hallway that led to at least two or three other rooms I'd never seen before. "Wow," I thought. "My house is so much bigger than I thought! What's with all the bellyaching about having no space for guests? And why have I been using my sun porch as an office/dining room/tool shed?"
-
Documentaries or propaganda?
March 19, 2007
IN CASE YOU haven't noticed, documentaries are hot. No longer the domain of university film leagues and vintage un-P.C. jokes — "How many lesbians does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to turn the bulb and 20 to make a documentary about it" — nonfiction films are cheap to make and increasingly free of the esoteric artiness, and sometimes outright pretentiousness, that gave the genre its elitist reputation.
-
Sleep at your own risk
March 12, 2007
YESTERDAY marked the start of daylight saving time, a month early this year. The theory is that it will help conserve energy, but most of us know this is part of a vast conspiracy (possibly the work of government officials who know all about those aliens who come into our bedrooms and probe us) to keep us from getting enough sleep.
-
Echo Park in Mexico
February 24, 2007
I SPENT LAST Sunday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with a group of more than 500 Americans gawking at the designer homes of other Americans.
-
Fame-iness
February 17, 2007
WHY IS IT THAT MOST celebrities in the culture today are people I've never heard of? I always thought fame had to do with being well known to the public, with being easily recognized on the street, with being, you know … famous.
-
I'm with Cupid
February 10, 2007
WHAT HOLIDAY is dreaded more than Valentine's Day? Not enough of an excuse to eat a big meal or take a day off from work, but more than just a vehicle of the greeting card industry, it's an anxiety trigger of the most insidious order. So cloaked in cheesy packaging it makes Groundhog Day look downright sacred, this annual nod to Cupid is a cultural mandate not only to have a nervous breakdown but to feel like an idiot for doing so.
-
What Hillary's humor reveals
February 3, 2007
THIS WEEK, Hillary Clinton tried out a joke in Iowa. "We face a lot of evil men," she told voters in Davenport. "People like Osama bin Laden come to mind. And what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men?" Clinton then smiled big and chortled, cueing the audience that this was not an oral presentation in a women's studies class but, indeed, a joke.
-
Doggy gentrification
January 27, 2007
COYOTES MAY have invaded the otherwise orderly confines of Hancock Park adjacent, but where I live, in Echo Park, we've got an even more vexing problem: domestic dogs.
-
Wanna be happy? Expect the worst
January 20, 2007
WHEN PEOPLE ask me why I'm so negative, I always tell them I'm simply looking out for my best interests and everyone else's. Like instant mashed potatoes (which, let's face it, are often better than real mashed potatoes), negativity gets a bad rap. Everywhere you look, someone's waxing fustian about the power of positive thinking.
-
Adam Carolla's genius -- spoiled
January 13, 2007
THE TIME HAS COME to talk about Adam Carolla. Because you're reading the Op-Ed page of the Los Angeles Times, there's a good chance you're only vaguely aware of him as a host of cable shows you don't like or radio programs you don't tune in to. Maybe you've seen the bus ads for KLSX radio's "The Adam Carolla Show," which bill him as an "American Genius." You probably thought this was idiotic hyperbole. I'm here to tell you it's not. I'm also here to tell you not to listen to his show. Not now.
-
The books that read women
January 6, 2007
Sprinkled among the novels and political tracts I received for Christmas was a clothbound piece of candy called "The Female Thing." It was written by Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University professor best known for 2003's "Against Love: A Polemic," and its cover is a frontal photo of a woman's toned, depilated thighs, hips and belly, one hand posed sassily on her hip and the other holding a thin leaf over her privates. Naturally, I plucked it from the stack immediately, leaving Richard Ford and Jimmy Carter to lie in pitiable wait.
-
Half the resolution is optimism
December 30, 2006
AS WILL BE reported ad nauseum over the next few days, one of the most common New Year's resolutions is "get in shape." Exercise demands many things — patience, discomfort, the ability to ignore people who make weird humming sounds on the StairMaster — but the main requirement is time. So, needless to say, I was elated when my boyfriend showed me an ad for the ROM (Range of Motion) cross-training machine that he'd torn from an in-flight magazine.
-
As the solstice turns
December 23, 2006
MOST CLICHES, particularly those related to Los Angeles, are rooted in some semblance of reality. But the notion that the L.A. region is a vast strip mall whose only outdoor attractions involve surfing and driving around in convertibles has always irked me. Last month in Ojai, which is close enough to the city that you'd think people would know better, a woman who knew I was from L.A. saw my dog sniffing some tree roots and said, "I bet he doesn't get to do that very often."
-
Shopping for Person X
December 16, 2006
THE MORE WE LEARN about our loved ones, the less we know what they want from life — not to mention for the holidays. According to a new study, this is the reason couples give each other such lame gifts. In what won't come as a surprise to at least half the people having meltdowns in department stores this weekend, researchers have found that the chances of selecting a gift that the recipient actually wants run in inverse proportion with our degree of intimacy with that person.
-
My dinner with Joni
December 9, 2006
IT'S ALMOST ALWAYS a bad idea to meet your heroes. No matter what variety of fan you are — there are two kinds: those who innocently hang posters on the wall and those for whom the idol's life and work has been permanently absorbed into the bloodstream — meeting an object of devotion comes with a terrible risk. Having elevated them to a level where there's barely any oxygen left, they have no place to go but down.
-
Meghan Daum: The State of Student Activism
October 14, 2006
THE EVENTS at Columbia University on Oct. 4, in which about a dozen students stormed a stage where the founder of an anti-illegal immigration group was speaking, didn't exactly resemble those of April 1968. There were no arrests, no soundtrack by the Grateful Dead, no occupation of the president's office. But considering that most young people are considered to be politically apathetic, you have to credit the Chicano Caucus and the International Socialist Organization for trying.
-
Meghan Daum: $4k Cat Is Nothing to Sneeze At
October 7, 2006
IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that cats make some people sick. As a person who would no sooner pet a cat than stick her hand in a tree shredder, I consider this a law of nature.
-
Meghan Daum: Finally, It's Dad's Fault
September 9, 2006
THERE WAS some dark poetic justice to a study released this week finding that fathers over 40 were six times more likely to produce autistic children than fathers under 30. As grim a subject as autism can be, the idea that, for once, fathers rather than mothers are seen as responsible for abnormalities in children — because of age, no less — was nothing short of revelatory.
-
Coulter's a satirist -- really?
June 24, 2006
LIFE IS HARD for satirists. Like high school poets or people who get aroused when they put on furry mascot costumes, no one understands them. Back in 1729, Jonathan Swift was almost universally reviled when he suggested, in "A Modest Proposal," that the antidote to urban squalor was to eat the children of poor Irish immigrants and use their skin to make "admirable gloves for ladies and summer boots for fine gentlemen." If only Fox News had been around; Sean Hannity would have dined out (so to speak) for weeks on the skirmish.
