SOFTY ALERT

If you’ve followed this Tumblr for any length of time (since yesterday, for example, when I posted a pic of my new CUNT necklace), you’ve probably gleaned that I have a fraught relationship with traditional feminine values.  

Putting my issues aside for a jif, check out the NYT’s Series ‘Making It Last,’ which profiles couples that have been married > 25 years.  I’m going to expose my gooey center for a minute and just say it’s nice to read about people who’ve held onto that brass ring for dear life.  (I like romance.  Shhhh, I’m tough.)  Plus you get to read hot shit like this: 

He drives up and was looking really fine. He wore a patchwork Levi suit, bell bottoms with a silk button-up shirt.

May we all find the patchwork denim-suited person of our dreams.

Source: The New York Times

Ms. Blunt and Mr. Tucci got to know each other at the wedding of her younger sister, the actress Emily Blunt. When Ms. Blunt eventually visited his home, they roasted a 26-pound suckling pig. Mr. Tucci recalled that he found her in the kitchen the next morning, tearing the cold flesh from the piglet for a platter of leftover pork.

“How can you not fall in love with a woman like that?” he asked.

Stanley Tucci, master of love and pork—the only things that matter

Source: The New York Times

Tiny Maine Hometown in NYT Today!

Kind of.  The NYT Real Estate section featured this house for sale for $629,000 in Winthrop, ME, the decaying former woolen mill town I grew up in.  (Sidebar: Who picks those amount?  $629k seems pretty odd. Why not $630k?  Anyway.)  Winthrop has about 6k people total, is in Maine and is entirely unremarkable, so it’s bizarre that it would make the NYT.  

I sent the picture to my Dad, who is still a proud Winthropian (Winthroper?), and his response is a perfect illustration of tiny town living:

I think that house may be on Annabesacook lake, down the road across from the blinker at the credit union.  

This is awesome because:

  1. He knew which house in town it was from a picture.
  2. He doesn’t use street names, just landmarks.
  3. The landmarks are his local credit union and a lake.
  4. The intersection only has a blinking light because there are so few cars on the roads.

This is amusing to approximately 0 people on Tumblr, but I’m enjoying it!

Breaking News: NYT Blows Lid off “Rich White Hamptonites Don’t Like Poors Moving In” Story

The East Hampton housing code allows no more than four unrelated people, or one family, to occupy a single-family home, and town officials acknowledge that crowding does exist. They receive a few complaints each week, most frequently in the Springs, and some of those do result in violations. And the deputy town supervisor, Theresa K. Quigley, said the Springs had some of the highest per-acre taxes around.

Nonetheless, some residents, including Ms. Quigley, say the objections are more sinister. “The people who came to the Town Board insist there is nothing racial intended,” said Ms. Quigley, who was born and raised in the Hamptons. “They say they’re talking about overcrowding, but they’re talking about Latinos.”


Extra Bonus Feature: References to Nazi Germany!

Source: The New York Times

“Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?”

Today, the NYTimes Opinion Page takes on the question of whether, and to what extent, there is value in the traditional system of qualifying attorneys to practice, namely ABA accredited law school + bar passage = attorney.

This is the author’s thesis:

Rather than improving quality, the barriers to entry exist simply to protect lawyers from competition with non-lawyers and firms that are not lawyer-owned — competition that could reduce legal costs and give the public greater access to legal assistance.

Interesting thought.  Not sure I believe his Econ 101 analysis of the market, though:

Of course, lower legal prices would cause new law school graduates to be paid less, but more jobs would be available for such graduates because the demand for lawyers would increase. And new graduates would begin their careers with less law-school debt, because alternative providers of legal education would force law schools to reduce tuition.

Law schools “forced” to reduce tuiton?  Hahahaha.  Good luck with that one.  HA

As to the substance, perhaps I am biased because I am part of the establishment, but I think there is some value in requiring attorneys to demonstrate some base level of competency.  I’m not the first one to suggest it, but I would reinstate the option for students to choose apprenticeship + bar passage instead of the 3 year law school model.  This was the traditional method of learning (which Abe Lincoln used to great fanfare) until relatively recently.  Several states still allow it (Virginia, and there might be others?), but most have done away with it in favor of the 3 year attendance requirement.

 Having paid upwards of $200k for the privilege of attending an ivy league law school, I can tell you that most of the classes I took have no applicability to or value in my legal practice—everything I learned about litigation happened once I started practicing.  If I could have skipped law school and just worked for attorneys for a couple years and then taken the bar exam, I would not only be a better lawyer now (because I would have learned how to practice) but I would also not have been hobbled by an enormous amount of debt.  

Down with the ABA!  What do other Tumblr-ing lawyers think?  Was your legal education as useless as mine?

Edit: Apparently David Lat agrees with me.  I hate his website, Above the Law, with a fiery burning passion normally reserved for racists, homophobes and people who eat more than their share of food when we’re out at a restaurant together, but I guess I can live with us having the same thought once.

Is Junk Food Really Cheaper? (Spoiler: It’s not, usually.)

Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)

- NYT, “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?”

Very interesting OpEd by Mark Bittman in the NYT tackling the issue of why we continue to buy processed/fast food when it’s more expensive and worse for us than making it ourselves.  The answer is apparently that we are all lazy fucks who watch too much TV.  (Guilty!)  This is not a revelation, but it’s nice to see an acknowledgment that some of the obesity problem is cultural, rather than economic or political.  Really loved it.  Except this part, however, which is idiotic:

Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley.

Oh yeah, me and my friends in Brooklyn just looooove scrambled eggs.  And salads?!  Don’t get us started on mesclun mix!  It’s all we talk about while we read Vice and listen to Velvet Underground records on vintage turntables we got at the Flea.  

You know who (as a broad category of people worth generalizing about) loves home cooked meals?  My grandparents.  And they live with everyone else’s grandparents in Florida.  Bittman invoking Brooklyn and Berkeley for this point is not only a cheap attempt at a cultural reference, but it’s also misguided.  (PS.  Brian Williams did it better.)  But the rest of it was great and thought provoking.  

Source: The New York Times

NYT: Old People Doing Just Fine; Youth Screwed

From today’s NYT:

Perhaps no households have weathered the downturn better than those headed by people 65 and older, whose incomes rose 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2010. By contrast, household income for every other age group fell. Among people ages 15 to 24, it plunged 15.3 percent.

…

Such data is likely to feed longstanding debates about generational equity, since the largest portion of safety net spending goes to those 65 and older, through Social Security,Medicare, and Medicaid.

“We are spending too much of our limited resources on the elderly, and not investing enough in programs for younger Americans, such as job training and education,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert at the Brookings Institution.

While not surprising, it’s pretty shocking that while everyone else in the US has become—collectively—worse off since 2007, older folks have actually done better.   Especially since the youngest demographic (15-24) have done incredibly poorly.  This is yet more evidence of the burden the “greatest generation” has on our country and how unsustainable it is.  Without job creation and income growth for younger people, there is no way we can continue to support our social institutions like medicare, social security, etc.  

For obvious, self-interested reasons, I support student loan forgiveness, but I think it is one tool we should be talking about more, given statistics like this.  The cost of education, combined with the deprecation in wages, are crippling young people today.  Or so I hear, since I am outside the demo.  

Finally, wave these stats in the air at old folks who persist in  saying stuff about bootstraps and the ability to raise oneself with them.  And then ask them to share some of their meds because you can’t afford healthcare.


Source: The New York Times

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