River Road becomes, well...

Wow.

No "I'll be home for Christmas" for me, it seems, since this is my route back to Maryland...
Good wishes to the heroic MoCo rescue workers, and to all those surely-shaken-up motorists.

And a sobering thought that infrastructure is in such a sorry state (per Bethesda councilman Roger Berliner in the Washington Business Journal, “We have long known we are in a dangerous situation. We know that, without the federal government’s help, there are future incidents similar to today’s that are waiting to happen.”) in one of the top ten wealthiest counties in America.

Public works stimulus projects on the '09 agenda, anyone?

Brown paper packages tied up with string

A few great reads to honor the best part of the season: cookies.


Slate's foodies debate the cookie in a seven part series. Absolutely excessive? Without a doubt. And also a total pleasure to read - these writers are to the cookie what Dahlia Lithwick is to SCOTUS: reverent of their subject while still being funny, highly personal, and thoroughly entertaining.


A must-read for holiday bakers: a treatise on butter in the NYT. I love baking with quality butter, but mostly just because it satisfies my pretensions of being more sophisticated in the kitchen than I am. Vindication here, though: apparently butter is not simply an ingredient in, but the foundational element of, a good cookie. And nota bene, my fellow soften-in-the-microwavers, apparently when butter reaches 68 degrees (just a precious few degrees past its ideal softened state), that water-fat emulsion that gives a cookie its perfect texture breaks down past the point of no return.


and a recipe recommendation:
despite her irritating near-pornographic programming, Giada de Laurentiis does a mean holiday biscotti offering for Food Network - I had a lot of success with it this weekend. Skip the red and green sprinkles and go premium with the ingredients for a classy take on the cookie as Christmas gift.

Happy eating, and happy holidays!

A brief review of the newly reopened Museum of American History

American History was always my favorite of the Smithsonians growing up, and while I was saddened to see it close for renovation the September before I moved back to the city, I eagerly looked forward to seeing the museum post-facelift. Even discounting my DC chauvinism, the NAMH is like, the granddaddy of American History museums; I pictured dozens of respected and innovative curators and designers salivating to bring the landmark into the 21st century, and anticipated the fruits of their imaginations with baited breath.

I shouldn't have.

While many of the classic exhibits - Julia Child's kitchen, the 200 year old Boston house - have remained, others - the First Ladies' dresses, the artifacts representing American sport and the arts - are dramatically truncated, shells of once impressive displays. It is no exaggeration to say that the new or expanded exhibits lack any hint of creativity; each room seems a barely tweaked version of the one before it. It hardly helps that more than half of the exhibits could be accurately titled "War! Soldiers Were Brave!" or "Industrialization! It Works!" (or some combination thereof).

A visitor gets very little sense of any kind of complexity or conflict in this inexorable march of progress - particularly laughable is the tiny display box in the Paean to the Automobile exhibit containing a battered copy of The Feminine Mystique and noting that not everyone loved the suburbs... but wait, look at that silly early-model Honda Civic!

Compounding the failure to think at all creatively about what artifacts or narratives might represent America or Americans through time, the architecture and design are deeply uninspired - high ceilings seem not grandiose but airplane hangar-esque, and the overwhelming grayness of the whole aesthetic suggests nothing so much as the Holocaust Museum. Is there no joy, no light, no color to the American Experience?

I can't imagine this is what the curators meant to suggest, but coupled with the limited scope of its contents, the new NMAH gives the distinct impression that one is visiting the National Museum of the American Military Industrial Complex.

Ya'll stay down here, you hear?

A good read in this week's Newsweek about "The Second Auto Industry" of foreign carmakers who have invested heavily in plants in the American South over the past two decades. It's kind of bizarre to read about Southern Senators voting as a bloc (there's a jarring throwback) against the Big 3 Bailout, but the story of how companies like Toyota and BMW have transformed the economies of small Southern towns is remarkable.

I was skeptical of what sounded like the article's boosterism - I'm not particularly inclined to see Southern right-to-work laws as real economic solutions - but the consequences of foreign automakers' (writer Daniel Gross tags them "The Little Eight") investment in Dixie communities are stunning. Most notably, job creation: Gross cites a figure from the Alabama's Development Office that these foreign auto companies supported a payroll of $5.2 billion in the state last year, and quotes a DC economist that "every job in auto production supports five other jobs in the economy in steel, tires, rubber, programmers and auto dealers."

And those jobs are in much better shape now than those in the Detroit footprint. Obviously, the lack of legacy costs gives Toyota, BMW, et al a financial edge over their Big 3 competitors (not to mention the huge investments made by these Southern communities to attract them in the first place), but other innovation factors, like plants designed with production flexibility, have put them on more stable footing.

The most striking anecdote in the article cites the case of the San Antonio Toyota Tundra plant, which has laid in fallow for the past few months. Rather than than terminate the plant's workers, however, Toyota has kept them on and offered their services to the city. According to Richard Perez, president and CEO of the city's Chamber of Commerce, San Antonio has put the Toyota employees to work on beautification projects. I can't shake that remarkable image- a 21st century WPA, but funded by a foreign firm!- out of my head.

"At least when you marry an African-American, you're getting someone who already understands Passover"

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jeff Goldberg are two of the top five reasons I'm proud to be associated with The Atlantic, * and the two of them, together, talking about interracial/interfaith dating - be still, my heart.

I'm vacillating on whether I feel deserving of or want Jeff Goldberg's pity, as a Jewish woman with a non-MOT ("member of the tribe," in Goldberg parlance) mate -

"I guess I felt sorry for the Jewish women who intermarried, because I sensed that they tried, and failed, to convince Jewish men that they weren't, in fact, their mothers, that they were intelligent and sexy and all the rest. Jewish men who go outside, I think - and this is not everyone, obviously - are looking beyond the tribe not because they really think they're going to end up marrying their mothers if they find a Jewish woman, but because they're scared of Jewish women, especially the intense sort my friends and I all seemed to marry."

- and ask whether the issue isn't the bigger, third-wave feminist question of exactly how many young men want to date "intense," ambitious young women, of any religion. My roommate and I talked at length on Monday, after her visit to her boyfriend's naval base, about this phenomenon among young military officers, among which Jewish men aren't exactly known for being overrepresented.

I do wonder if this point isn't more true among African-American couples, though. As Ta-Nehisi puts it, "there is, in the black mind, this stereotype that black dudes can somehow get away with more dealing with white women," and it's not difficult to envision how this might be true. It would be a lot easier, I think, for a non-Jewish girlfriend to give her Jewish mate a hard time for acting lazy or immature, for example, than it would for a white girlfriend to use those (racially loaded) terms with a black partner.

The most interesting part of the conversation, though, is whether it's become gauche in certain circles "to advocate for in-marriage." Jeff says yes among Jews, Ta-Nehisi says that it's geographical for blacks - no in Atlanta or DC, yes in New York or LA - which seems like a fascinating area to be mined on the matter of the black community in the North vs. in the South.

As far as my personal life goes, I think the nut of it is what Ta-Nehisi has articulated so well in the past:

"Look, it's hard enough to satisfy the basic carnal needs--it's even harder to satisfy those needs, and satisfy the basic emotional and mental ones too. There is a good chance that your long-term relationship will one day fail. A great way to up the chances of truly epic fail, hot grits, I'm talking hot grits fail, burn down the mansion fail, is to shrink the pool of your potential partners."

This is what I've found, at least (and what I'm always trying (unsuccessfully) to communicate to my grandmother): it's hard enough to find someone who shares your values, intellectual passions, and appreciation for LOLcats without artificially limiting the search to last names that end in -berg, -man, or -stein.



*Number one, as always, is Caitlan Flanagan. Go read her December issue piece on the Twilight phenomenon - her remarkable gift for collective psychoanalysis applied to girlhood narcissism and the insatiable appetitite for dramatic novels.

Tiddly winks

Say it ain't so!

Here I've been thinking that the notorious VIP-debate wink was so obnoxious because it was Sarah Palin winking, but perhaps it was Sarah Palin winking that was the problem all along?
Jezebel has mini-essay up on whether it's ever appropriate for a woman to wink. I'll forgive them the irritating "can a women ever... " set-up, because I know the Jezzies have unimpeachable feminist cred and probably authored the headline with tongue firmly in cheek, but:

"Winking tends to be ridiculous by nature: patronizing, bizarre, old-man roguish.... Winking, for all its conspiratorial overtones, is inherently divisive: it places the winker in a position of secret-sharer; the wink-ee, by contrast, has no say in whether or not he wants to be in on the joke. As such, it's somehow embarrassing for both parties."

Untrue, ladies! At least, I certainly hope so. I remain an ardent partisan (and frequent perpetrator) of The Wink. It's always struck me as a friendly gesture of support, high spirits, even solidarity, not to mention an appealingly co-opted old-fashioned masculine gesture that indicates confidence and mischeviousness on the part of the female winker. You know, like wearing a secondhand man's corduroy blazer. But "patronizing," "embarassing," and "inherently divisive"? My. Guess I should watch my mixed signals!

To be fair, no one expected pirates

This is a fun retrospective:
Foreign Policy magazine remembers what Bill Kristol, Jim Kramer, and others might like to forget in its look at the "10 Worst Predictions for 2008."
My favorite is that Great Font of Arrogance, Charles Krauthammer, getting the Georgia/Russia showdown spectacularly wrong. On Fox News, no less.

Madison Avenue, NW

Here's fascinating food for thought:

Advertising Age points out today that, once appointed, Bush's "Car Czar" will oversees all of the Big Three's expeditures, including $7.3 billion in advertising and marketing in the U.S. market alone.

All management and budget issues aside, President Bush is about to appoint the most powerful marketing exec in America, who will manage more marketing dollars than almost all the rest of the top 5 American advertisers combined.

Will marketers and sales teams suddenly be flooding into DC, currying favor with the Czar and his under-Czars with expensive lunches and glossy presentations? There's a lasting legacy for Bush - transforming some lowly government agency block into the epicenter of the ad world.

Hands, touching hands, reaching out....

An admission that will surprise no one: I love Caroline Kennedy.

Love her writing/editing, love the crucial early Barack endorsement, love the not giving her kids WASPY verb-present-tense nicknames, damaging a yacht in a drug-addled stupor, having an affair with the teenage babysitter, or any of the other Kennedy-cousin shenanigans that seem to plague the male members of the bloodline. I admire her shiny, shiny hair and her lifetime of public service with equal ardor, and I very much want her to be appointed to the U.S. Senate (David Patterson, I know you can't see it, so trust me: very shiny hair.)

And I think this kerfuffle about her wee upper-arm tattoo is awesome. Badass. Go, Caroline, with your terrible Asian butterfly-splotch thing. You are an example to those of us young women aspiring publicy to public leadership (and not-so-publicly to the ranks of the be-tatt'ed) everywhere.

Truth in dubbing

With full disclosure that I actually like David Gergen, I've watched far too much CNN for this not to be a hilarious send-up of most of the expert appearances. Courtesy Megan McArdle:

Daddy Issues

I'm not sure I've ever heard the term "sugar baby" outside the context of the favorite childhood candy (do they still make those? they were fantastic), but the mademoiselle writing under the nom de plume Melissa Beech seems to have brought the original meaning back into vogue, lighting up the blogosphere with her recent, unapologetic post at the Daily Beast, "My Sugar Daddy."

"Melissa" is a college senior and daughter of Philadelphia privilege who has discovered a shortcut to the lush life and - the more interesting part, here - career advancement in the form of a wealthy benefactor about ten years her senior who provides these benefits in exchange for sex and companionship. Shocking, of course, that our wee Pretty Woman has not been particularly well-received. Her grating tone and excessive self-pride - the bratty "how many other college students are wearing Christian Louboutins to class?" alone is enough to merit most of the vitriol directed her way in the comments - do seem to invite censure.

But her Cinderella story is sticking with me in a way that, say, Ashley Dupre certainly didn't, and I'm starting to think that maybe Melissa seems more identifiable, a little more acceptable, because she's speaking my language - she's not a prostitute, she's a networker (or at worst, a short-term prostitute networking for her future career.) After all, in addition to providing her with an AmEx Black, Melissa's sugar daddy has put her in a position to make contacts in the PR world (her chosen field) and helped her line up multiple internships. Her confidence about her job prospects post-graduation is enviable, given the financial climate that has most nearly-graduates trembling, and reminds me acutely of the budding old-boys-clubbers I knew at UVA.

And that's exactly it. It's a farce to pretend that all, or even most, hypersuccessful young people have "earned it" through hard work. The capital for a start-up, the connections to a position that leapfrogs all the menial stepping-stone jobs - those things are hereditary. How is Melissa's sugar daddy different, really, than a Congressman daddy, or a Chairman-of-the-Board daddy?

It's easy to dismiss her as a gold-digger when she's harping on the manicures and tanning, but then there's the line about the $12,000 that she's saved to start out her career, and suddenly the moral tut-tutting gets clouded by... jealousy? Not that I'd trade grilled cheese sandwiches with my debt-burdened law student for well, anyone, but I do know plenty of my peers who work jobs they loathe to save much less than that, or waste away in uninspiring positions in the mere hope of making those types of valuable connections. Our correspondent does, after all, enjoy the company of her patron, which is far more than most young people can say about their jobs.

Is this really such an immoral arrangement, or are we just angry that, like those privileged rich kids, it's all come so easy to her?

how true.

Ross Douthat on the word additions/removals to the updated edition of the Oxford children's dictionary:

"There's something awfully depressing about the idea that the word "database" is more relevant to your average British ten-year-old than the word "guinea pig.""