jfb | week in review

Barbara Ehrenreich--who I guess is subbing for Thomas Friedman?--looks at the Bush administration's marriage policies.

It is equally unclear how marriage will cure poor women's No. 1 problem, which is poverty — unless, of course, the plan is to draft C.E.O.'s to marry recipients of T.A.N.F. (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families). Left to themselves, most women end up marrying men of the same social class as their own, meaning — in the case of poverty-stricken women — blue-collar men. But that demographic group has seen a tragic decline in earnings in the last couple of decades. So I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.

The answer is 2.3.

An article starts with the Census Bureau's impending list of common surnames and then delves slightly into changing ethnic demographics (more Hispanics), but I was less interested in the names than in this addendum:

For the first time, more Americans now describe their ancestry as African or African-American than English, more as Mexican than Italian and nearly as many Vietnamese as Cuban. But no group grew more in the 1990's than those who described their ancestry only as "American" - up to 20 million in 2000 from 12 million in 1990.

Speaking of Americans, about 4.7 million of us, "more than 2 percent of the adult population, are barred from voting because of a felony conviction." An editorial says this is antidemocratic, but if we're going to do it, we should at least do it competently.

Another editorial opposes privatizing airport security, and an article examines airport culture. I liked Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air:

I call it Airworld; the scene, the place, the style. My hometown papers are USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The big-screen Panasonics in the club rooms broadcast all the news I need, with an emphasis on the markets and the weather. My literature -- yours, too, I see -- is the bestseller or the near-bestseller, heavy on themes of espionage, high finance, and the goodness of common people in small towns.... Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency -- the token economy of airline bonus miles that I've come to value more than dollars. Inflation doesn't degrade them. They're not taxed. They're private property in its purest form.

Cribbing from

fluxbox: "Today's NYT features an op-ed by Alain de Botton on architectural ambition and hubris." He liked it.

John Edward's Southernness may play better outside of the South than in it.

The NEA says people are reading less, especially young people, but Charles McGrath thinks maybe they aren't, or maybe they are, but anyway, it's not such a big deal. Of particular interest to bloggers, perhaps, is his last paragraph:

The really scary news in "Reading at Risk" is tucked away on page 22. While the number of people reading literature has gone down, the number of people trying to write it has actually gone up. We seem to be slowly turning into a nation of "creative writers," more interested in what we have to say ourselves than in reading or thinking about what anyone else has to say.

Okay, go!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I figured you might spot the Alain de Botton piece, but I hadn't seen the one on airport culture. Thanks!

I liked Up in the Air, too. Once upon a time, I was going to write the Great American Satire about mileage plans and other affinity schemes. Jennifer Government isn't it, either, but it's somewhere in that same neck of the woods. (I read Pico Iyer's book about modern placelessness, and I thought it was weak.)

Eric Alterman had a funny take on Barbara Ehrenreich:

Well this is something.

The New York Times has a card-carrying democratic socialist as an Op-Ed columnist. It took only about 108* years. And it’s a brilliant beginning. The fact that it also replaces Tom Friedman, well, it almost makes me feel sorry for George Bush.

Brad Delong, meanwhile, seems to have a less favorable opinion, claiming she has "infantile disorder".

I didn't realize until just now that she wrote Nickel and Dimed

Yeah, that's mostly where I know her from--although I think I read something by her ages ago in a women's studies class.

I've been a fan of her since reading "The Worst Years of Our Lives," a compilation of articles she wrote during the Reagan years (for a recent US history class). I recommend it. I also liked Nickel & Dimed a lot, but was not so big a fan of the one she cowrote about the history of women's health issues (can't remember the name, although I suppose I could look it up on amazon.com if I cared enough).

-B

"I have been endeavoring to calculate just how many blue-collar men a T.A.N.F. recipient needs to marry to lift her family out of poverty.
"The answer is 2.3."

Ok, so here's an argument for gay marriage: If we allow people of the same gender to marry, what's next--polygamy? Yes! Then all the TANF recipients will finally be able to lift themselves out of poverty! Yay, many problems solved.

What do you think, will that convince people?

-B

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