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‘Mad’ world, then and now
By Margery Eagan | Sunday, August 16, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
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This week we rightly praised Jerry Remy, a no-nonsense Red Sox [team stats] hero, for openly discussing his post-cancer struggle with depression - a disease stigmatized particularly among men.

This week, too, we debated whether basketball great Rick Pitino, caught in a sordid extra-marital mess, should lose his job.

But tonight millions of Americans will return to an era where cancer, mental illness and any other dysfunction were routinely hidden; to a time when a powerful man such as Pitino could have called in chits with police or the press to keep his unseemly story quiet.

Tonight’s time is 1963. The place is Madison Avenue. The vehicle is “Mad Men,” the huge TV hit with “Sopranos” appeal. It captures that new-superpower, everything’s-possible moment in American history. But it also lushly and darkly portrays a time when conformity ruled. Breaking rules brought shame. And sexism and racism were the rules.

Then, white men in gray flannel suits were uptight and buttoned down. Women in pumps, hemmed hose and sprayed hair were subservient. Few Jews and nobody black or brown need apply. Anybody gay was closeted and unwed, pregnant young secretaries disappeared, discreetly, claiming a needed extended stay at grandmother’s country home.

Lunches, sometimes entire workday afternoons, were lost to Whiskey Sours, Old Fashioneds, Lucky Strikes and Old Golds. And if, like main character ad man Don Draper, your life began in poverty and ignominy, you did not reveal it to show how far you’d come to your pinnacle of success. No, you created a new name and better identity and tried, unsuccessfully, to forget.

Tony Soprano went into therapy. Don Draper would die first.

You know idolizing the supposed Greatest Generation has become an American pastime. Yet “Mad Men” depicts a high-end piece of that generation at work, home and play. A great part of its appeal is as antidote to today’s restrictions

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society

Rich Kids, Don’t Look Now, but Your Teenage Angst Is Showing
Heidi Gutman/Bravo

Young shoppers: From left, Camille, Taylor and Kelli in Bravo’s reality series “NYC Prep.”

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By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 22, 2009

Kids today don’t watch enough television.
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Spending, texting and mingling: Sebastian, far left, and Kelli, seated at center, two of the principals in Bravo’s “NYC Prep.”

That becomes evident minutes into Bravo’s latest reality show, “NYC Prep.” Anybody who has watched even one episode of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” knows better than to invite Bravo’s cameras into the bedroom and favorite sushi restaurants.

“I treat my clothing like my children,” Jessie, a 17-year-old who fancies herself a fashionista, says earnestly. “You don’t wear all your labels at once, and I think it’s very important to mix and match.”

New York has a way of making kids grow up too soon, but even the most expensive schools and sophisticated circles don’t seem to protect children from their own naïveté. And that exposure is what ultimately makes “NYC Prep” so different from “Gossip Girl.” If anything, it’s closer to Whit Stillman’s wistful 1990 movie, “Metropolitan,” updated with cellphones, BlackBerrys and no-limit credit cards.

These six swaggering rich kids — four girls and two boys — dutifully spend and text their way around the Upper East Side like their fictional counterparts on “Gossip Girl,” only they do it haltingly. Like real-life adolescents, their arrogance is dotted with hesita

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tv society

Young Muslims struggle in 2 worlds
College graduates worry that Islam seen as dangerous

By Michelle Boorstein, Washington Post | June 6, 2009

WASHINGTON - Many had just entered high school in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks and now, eight years later, they are leaving college and entering the workforce. Young Muslims are part of a generation that appears markedly different from their parents in career choices, assimilation, and views of their religion.

Their youth has often been affected by the experiences of family members who have contended with the mistrust and wariness many Americans have of Islam. They are struggling with how to live their faith, from how to dress to whom to date, in a broader American society that frequently views them with suspicion.

Pollsters and researchers are just beginning to study this group of young people, almost three-fourths of whom are first- or second-generation American. One of the group's biggest issues, Altaf Husain said, is their concern that Islam is viewed as dangerous.

"There will be a silent majority among Muslim youth who say: 'I'm just not up for that. I won't be my religion's spokesperson. I'll just be spiritual in my private life,' " said Husain, a popular activist and social worker who writes about Muslim youth and speaks on college campuses.

Still others, however, are finding new avenues of activism.

Many of their parents came to the United States to study engineering, medicine, and the sciences. But many in this generation are drawn to politics, journalism, and public service, researchers said. The aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the Bush administration's counterterrorism policies, which many Muslims opposed, have motivated many of them in their 20s to pursue newly established public-policy internships and fellowships created in government and the private sector.

"We're realizing we don't have the voice we need in American politics," said Nadia Sheikh, 22, who graduated last month from Georgetown University and hopes to go to law school. She h

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spirituality society

Fleur Cowles, 101, Is Dead; Friend of the Elite and the Editor of a Magazine for Them
By ENID NEMY

Fleur Cowles, who rose from modest beginnings in New York to become a well-heeled friend of the powerful and famous and the creator of one of the most extravagant and innovative magazines ever published, died on Friday at a nursing home in Sussex, England. She was 101, and her death was confirmed by her husband, Tom Montague Meyer.

Ms. Cowles (pronounced coals) was a painter, a writer and a renowned hostess. But she took greatest pride in two things. One was her short-lived magazine, Flair, published in the 1950s during her marriage to Gardner Cowles Jr., known as Mike, the publisher of Look magazine. The other was her talent for friendship.

Her anecdotal memoir, “She Made Friends and Kept Them” (HarperCollins, 1996), was practically a Rolodex of many of the world’s most recognizable names: American presidents, foreign heads of state, Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth the Queen Mother (described as her “best friend”), Princess Grace, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Lady Bird Johnson, Pope John XXIII, Howard Hughes, Judy Garland, Joan Miró (who designed her dresses) and Cary Grant, the best man at her wedding to her fourth husband, Mr. Meyer (pronounced to rhyme with “clear”).

Although there were just 12 issues of Flair, published from February 1950 to January 1951, the magazine caused a sensation and is still admired for its coverage of fashion, décor, travel, art, literature and other enthusiasms of Ms. Cowles’s. It was part of the Cowles publishing empire, which included newspapers in the Midwest and, most notably, Look magazine, of which Ms. Cowles had been an influential editor.

But Flair, incorporating cutouts, fold-outs, pop-ups, removable reproductions of artworks and a variety of paper stocks of different sizes and textures, was simply too expensive to produce, even though it sold for 50 cents a copy when Time and Life were selling for 20 cents.

When Flair ceased publication, Mr. Cowles, who had financed

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society publishing

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politics economics environment society

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society psychology

Decency in the face of hate-mongering

By Neal Gabler | May 26, 2009

BY NOW you have probably heard that President Obama is a socialist, that he is a Muslim agent whose policies will endanger your life, that he is a would-be dictator who will snatch away your liberty, that his failure is essential to the survival of the Republic, even that he is the anti-Christ or the Great Satan. And that's the mild stuff. You've heard these silly canards because they've been widely circulated on right-wing cable shows, right-wing talk radio, and right-wing blogs. The Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs, and Michele Malkins don't just disagree with the president or oppose him or even dislike him. They hate him, and they appeal to others who hate him, too.

Of course political hate-mongering is hardly new. Though Americans rightly like to fasten on their idealism, hate has played a significant role in defining our values and shaping our nation. Indians, blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants have all been targets of hate, and anyone who promoted the interests of these groups was subjected to the most scurrilous attacks. Franklin Roosevelt's enemies whispered that he was confined to a wheelchair because of syphilis, not infantile paralysis. Harry Truman's enemies called him a drunkard. Martin Luther King Jr.'s said he was a communist agent. Bill Clinton's accused him of murder.

The good news is that due to a certain proclivity among Americans, this hatefulness is no more likely to last than the hateful smears of the past. The bad news is that this time, because of other proclivities in the country, the hate-mongering, even though it will eventually pass, may be more tenacious than before, more difficult to marginalize.

Let's begin with the more hopeful scenario. Hate movements and hate-mongers in America have generally followed a pattern. They emerge either out of fear - typically the reactionary fear that the status quo will be disrupted - or out of anger - typically the quasi-populist anger that the system is rigged against them.

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politics society

How Cheever Really Felt About Living in Suburbia
By JOSEPH BERGER

OSSINING

JOHN CHEEVER was perhaps America’s foremost chronicler of suburbia, and in his quirky short stories and novels, fictional suburbs like Shady Hill are often pictured as a place of deadening commuter routines, liquor-fueled get-togethers, loveless affairs and forays of conspicuous consumption. These writings suggest that he seemed to take a jaundiced view of so manicured and lovely a setting.

But there is evidence in a new biography of Cheever that he relished his life as a suburban burgher and did not disdain his fellow suburbanites as a class. Cheever was “crazy about the suburbs,” said Blake Bailey, whose book, “Cheever: A Life,” published in March by Knopf, was written with apparently unrivaled access to Cheever’s journals.

“He loved the natural beauty of the Hudson Valley,” Mr. Bailey said. “He loved walking through the woods along the Croton Aqueduct. He liked his neighbors.”

Many of the signposts of Cheever’s life in the suburbs are still around, along with members of his family. His wife, Mary, 90, still lives in the gently fraying house here on the rural eastern edge of Ossining, 35 miles north of New York City. It was here that Cheever spent his autumnal years. His son Ben, a writer, lives nearby in Pleasantville. Yes, they say, his fiction explored the chaotic, sometimes heartbreaking condition of those living in the suburbs, but his insights were as true of residents of Greenwich Village as of the tree-lined streets of Westchester.

“Most of that is not exclusive to the suburbs,” Ben Cheever, 60, said of the grimmer aspects of suburban angst that some of his father’s stories illuminated. “You could be banal and boring in the North Pole. The suburbs was what he knew and that was his entry point for the studies of people. But he wrote about them deeply enough so that the things that were true about the suburbs would have been true anywhere.”

Mrs. Cheever was glad to show a visitor around the house she and her husband bought i

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suburbs books society

Recently, business information solutions provider LexisNexis released the results of a study that examined how technology was used in the American workplace. The focus of the study was on the differing opinions between generational groups. Their findings? The generation gap at work is really wide with vast discrepancies when it comes to what the appropriate use of technology is - a problem that leads to increasing tensions in the workplace.
The Findings: Boomers and Gen Y are Worlds Apart at Work

The survey compared technology and software usage among generations of working professionals, including Boomers (ages 44-60), Generation X (ages 29-43) and Generation Y (ages 28 and younger). The total sample size was 700 legal and white collar professionals with 250 coming from the legal profession.

According to the survey:

* Two-thirds of all Boomers agree that Personal Digital Assistants (like the Blackberry, for example) and mobile phones contribute to a decline in proper workplace etiquette, and believe the use of a laptop during in-person meetings is "distracting," less than half of Gen Y workers agree.
* Only 17% of Boomers believe using laptops or PDAs during in-person meetings is "efficient," while more than one third of Gen Y do.
* Only 28% percent of Boomers think blogging about work-related issues is acceptable, while forty percent of Gen Y workers do.

Yikes! Phones and PDAs are distracting and inefficient tools? Blogging is unacceptable? Who are these people? Unfortunately, they're the people who still have a lot of power when it comes to the decisions being made at the workplace. Baby boomers are the executives, the CEOs, the bosses, etc. while Gen Y is just now getting their foot in the door. But it's clear that these two generations strongly disagree on how technology is to be used.
More Findings

Another issue being faced is the blurring of boundaries between work and home. Gen Y workers generally don't see a problem accessing personal web sites from work - like Facebook and blogs. In fac

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society gadgets

At First Sight, Stereotypes, Then Real People Emerged
By SHAILA DEWAN

MEMPHIS — Wearing a lilac suit and rhinestone earrings fit for an Easter service, Savannah Simmons made a grand entrance on Sunday at AutoZone Park, a minor-league baseball stadium in the center of downtown. News photographers clustered around her as she smiled broadly enough to broadcast a single gold tooth amid her pearly whites. On the wall behind her, a portrait of Ms. Simmons, an 80-year-old black former factory worker, in a giant mural showed that same gold tooth in a slightly more restrained version of that same smile.

Ms. Simmons may have been the picture of elegance, but when her face began to take shape on the wall about a month ago, some people viewed it in a very different light — particularly because it was in clear view of almost every seat at the popular stadium.

Gregory Grant, the president of the local chapter of the National Action Network, an advocacy group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton, saw in it an offensive stereotype in a city that already had its share of racial problems.

“We’re telling our young people to take the gold teeth out of your mouth and pull your pants up and be a responsible citizen, and then you paint one on the wall,” Mr. Grant said. “I immediately responded in a very violent, negative-type way.”

He began hearing from others with similar concerns, and got in touch with officials from Rhodes College, where a group of students was overseeing the mural, which portrays a diverse group of the city’s residents, arguing that they might as well have painted a black child eating a watermelon. That is when he learned from Elizabeth Daggett, the coordinator of the college’s arts outreach program, that Ms. Simmons was a real, longtime Memphian.

“As soon as Liz said, ‘We meant no disrespect to Miss Savannah,’ he stopped cold and said, ‘Who is Miss Savannah?’ ” recalled Daney D. Kepple, the director of communications for Rhodes.

Mr. Grant said, “I thought it was an artist’s rendition of what he thought an African

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art society

No, You Can’t Get an Upgrade
By DAVID SEGAL

We are not going anywhere.

That is what we learned from a report last week by the Census Bureau which found that fewer Americans are changing residences than at any time since 1962, back when there were 120 million fewer Americans than today.

The numbers are yet another worrying beep from the array of gizmos that monitor our economic coma. But the report also signals a profound, if barely noticed, change to our national psyche, one that goes far beyond the way we think about housing.

For decades, Americans have been known as epic consumers, but it would be more accurate to call us epic upgraders. During all those years of packing up and moving, we were headed to a bigger house, at a better address, perhaps for a higher-paying job. We were trading up, and that urge — to acquire something bigger or better, preferably something bigger and better — is a quintessentially American urge. It is so neatly woven into the double helix of our DNA that we hardly notice it.

When we buy a television, it’s rarely because we lack a TV. We want a thinner TV, or a bigger TV, or a TV with features that sound beguiling even if we have no idea what they do. Like the DynaLight Dynamic Back Light Control on the latest Toshiba high-definition set. What is that? We don’t know. But we’ll take two.

Or we would if we could afford them. To fully understand our collective shock over our pulse-less economy, take a good look at the upgrade cycle that we’ve been gleefully riding for at least three decades. Until last year, if you were living the 2.3 version of Life, you had your eyes on version 2.4 and odds were pretty good that you’d get it. Maybe on an overextended credit card, or from a loan that you really couldn’t afford. But you’d get it.

Now, if you’re living Life 2.3, your ambition is to avoid Life 2.2.

Forget the upgrade. The game now is avoiding the downgrade. This is grim and troubling, in part, because so much of our consumer culture is built around the enticements of the Better.

En

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society gadgets

A Workers’ Paradise Found Off Japan’s Coast
By MARTIN FACKLER

HIME ISLAND, Japan — If Marxism had ever produced a functional, prosperous society, it might have looked something like this tiny southern Japanese island.

At first glance, there is little to set Hime (pronounced HEE-may) apart from the hundreds of other small inhabited islands that dot the coasts of Japan’s main isles. The 2,519 mostly graying islanders subsist on fishing and shrimp farming, and every summer hold a Shinto religious festival featuring dancers dressed as foxes.

But once off the ferry, the island’s sole public transportation link to the outside, visitors are greeted by an unusual sight: a tall, bronze statue of Hime’s previous mayor, rare in a country that typically shuns such political aggrandizement. Rarer still is that the statue was erected by his son, who is the island’s current mayor.

In fact, the father, who died in 1984, and the son, who succeeded him, have won every mayoral election in Himeshima, the island’s village, for 49 years — without once being challenged by a rival candidate.

And it is not just the cult-of-personality politics that smack of a latter-day workers’ paradise. This sleepy island, just off Japan’s main southern island, Kyushu, has recently come under unaccustomed national media attention for a very different reason: it invented its own version of work-sharing four decades before the current economic crisis popularized the term.

Under Hime’s system, village employees earn about a third less pay than public servants elsewhere in Japan, though they work the same hours. This has allowed the village to create more jobs: it now directly or indirectly employs a fifth of all working islanders. Most of the rest are engaged in fishing, also government-subsidized. In fact, village officials say, there are few fully private-sector jobs on the island.

Islanders admit to the socialist parallels, even while proclaiming themselves political conservatives who vote for the governing right-wing Liberal Democratic Party. S

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society

The Lonely American

by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, from the book The Lonely American

This article is part of a package on the golden age of re-engagement. For more, read The Art of a Lively Conversation: Be real. Be brave. Be bold. (And learn some manners.), All in the Neighborhood: Want to see the world? Start by staying home., One Nation, Indivisible: Reconnecting the public with its public servants.

Americans in the 21st century devote more technology to staying connected than any society in history, yet somehow the devices fail us: Studies show that we feel increasingly alone. Our lives are spent in a tug-of-war between conflicting desires—we want to stay connected, and we want to be free. We lurch back and forth, reaching for both. How much of one should we give up in order to have more of the other? How do we know when we’ve got it right?

Two recent studies suggest that our society is in the midst of a dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection. In the first, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), Duke University researchers found that between 1985 and 2004 the number of people with whom the average American discussed “important matters” dropped from three to two. Even more stunning, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled: In 2004 individuals without a single confidant made up a quarter of those surveyed. Our country is now filled with them.

The second study was the 2000 U.S. census. One of the most remarkable facts to emerge from this census is that one of four households consists of one person only. The number of one-person households has been increasing steadily since 1940, when they accounted for roughly 7 percent of households. Today, there are more people living alone than at any point in U.S. history. Placing the census data and the GSS side by side, the evidence that this country is in the midst of a major social change is overwhelming.

The significance of this increased aloneness is amplified by a very

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society psychology

by Alain de Botton, from Standpoint

This article is part of a package on the golden age of re-engagement. For more, read The Lonely American: Choosing to reconnect in the 21st century, All in the Neighborhood: Want to see the world? Start by staying home., One Nation, Indivisible: Reconnecting the public with its public servants.

Modern society is notably sociable in temper. Hermits have long been out of fashion. When guidebooks praise a city, they point to its number of bars and clubs. We’re all meant to know how to keep a conversation going. Having no friends is one of the greater remaining taboos.

Yet it is striking how bad most of us are at having a conversation, chiefly because we insist that knowing how to talk to other people is something we are born with, rather than an art dependent on the acquisition of a range of odd and artificially acquired skills. We rightly accept that improvisation in preparing a meal is unlikely to yield good outcomes, and as a result, the market is flooded with television programs and books promising to take us through the intricacies of assembling aubergine paté or poached pears. But we show no such caution and modesty when it comes to conversation. Here we blithely assume that all will go well, so long as the place settings are attractive and the soup warm. Yet the great majority of conversations we have are rather stale—and it generally remains a mystery how, every now and then, they become more worthwhile. Finding oneself in a good conversation is rather like stumbling on a beautiful square in a foreign city at night—and then never knowing how to get back there in daytime.

Why do conversations go wrong? Shyness has a lot to answer for. We get scared of opening our souls because we falsely exaggerate the difference between ourselves and others. We imagine that others don’t share in our vulnerabilities or interests. We display only our strengths—and hence become boring, for it is in the revelation of our weaknesses, in the display of our mortality in all its dimensions, th

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society psychology

The Artful Codger
By CHARLES McGRATH

THE 69-year-old novelist Margaret Drabble announced last week that she was turning off her word processor. “The older I get, the more I find myself repeating things,” she told friends, according to The Telegraph of London. “So I have resolved to write no more novels.” This will doubtless embolden her older sister, A. S. Byatt, 72, to carry on. The two have been locked in a sibling rivalry for years, with Ms. Byatt even writing a novel in which one sister kills another.

But it’s Ms. Byatt, with a new novel coming out in July, who these days seems to be the norm, not her sister — part of the swelling flood of writers who keep working into their 70s and even 80s. Gabriel García Márquez, for example, at 82 has lately been at pains to quell rumors that he is retiring. “Not only is it not true” that he is quitting writing, he told reporters, “but the only thing I do is write.”

The geriatric writer, the one who persists into the twilight years, is something new. There were always exceptions, of course — long-lived authors who defied the actuarial tables. Thomas Hardy, for example, wrote (poetry, not novels) well into his 80s and once modestly confided that he remained sexually active as an octogenarian. (He was too old-fashioned to think there might be a connection.) But by and large writing used to be a profession whose practitioners, the great ones especially, died relatively young. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë both died in their 40s. Balzac, Proust and Dickens all checked out in their 50s — spent, if not burned out — and so did Shakespeare, come to think of it.

In this country the record was just as bad. Fitzgerald, it’s still shocking to remember, died at just 44. Hemingway and Faulkner both made it to their 60s, but by then their best work was way behind them. It used to be practically a paradigm, in fact, that the great novelistic career in America was one that blazed early and then fell into premature, often self-destructive decline.

What has changed, obviously, is im

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society books writing

The Bigots’ Last Hurrah
By FRANK RICH

WHAT would happen if you crossed that creepy 1960s horror classic “The Village of the Damned” with the Broadway staple “A Chorus Line”? You don’t need to use your imagination. It’s there waiting for you on YouTube under the title “Gathering Storm”: a 60-second ad presenting homosexuality as a national threat second only to terrorism.

The actors are supposedly Not Gay. They stand in choral formation before a backdrop of menacing clouds and cheesy lightning effects. “The winds are strong,” says a white man to the accompaniment of ominous music. “And I am afraid,” a young black woman chimes in. “Those advocates want to change the way I live,” says a white woman. But just when all seems lost, the sun breaks through and a smiling black man announces that “a rainbow coalition” is “coming together in love” to save America from the apocalypse of same-sex marriage. It’s the swiftest rescue of Western civilization since the heyday of the ambiguously gay duo Batman and Robin.

Far from terrifying anyone, “Gathering Storm” has become, unsurprisingly, an Internet camp classic. On YouTube the original video must compete with countless homemade parodies it has inspired since first turning up some 10 days ago. None may top Stephen Colbert’s on Thursday night, in which lightning from “the homo storm” strikes an Arkansas teacher, turning him gay. A “New Jersey pastor” whose church has been “turned into an Abercrombie & Fitch” declares that he likes gay people, “but only as hilarious best friends in TV and movies.”

Yet easy to mock as “Gathering Storm” may be, it nonetheless bookmarks a historic turning point in the demise of America’s anti-gay movement.

What gives the ad its symbolic significance is not just that it’s idiotic but that its release was the only loud protest anywhere in America to the news that same-sex marriage had been legalized in Iowa and Vermont. If it advances any message, it’s mainly that homophobic activism is ever more depopulated and isolated as well as brain-dead.

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society

How to Raise Our I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.

After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

Intelligence does seem to be highly inherited in middle-class households, and that’s the reason for the findings of the twins studies: very few impoverished kids were included in those studies. But Eric Turkheimer of the University of Virginia has conducted further research demonstrating that in poor and chaotic households, I.Q. is minimally the result of genetics — because everybody is held back.

“Bad environments suppress children’s I.Q.’s,” Professor Turkheimer said.

One gauge of that is that when poor children are adopted into upper-middle-cl

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society

TV Royalty, but No Longer a Housewife
By RUTH LA FERLA

LUANN DE LESSEPS lives in a glass house, and until now she has liked it that way. As one of six aspiring socialites whose foibles are copiously detailed on “The Real Housewives of New York City,” the countess, as Mrs. de Lesseps is known on the program, has placed her shopping sprees, her charitable works, her family life and her estate in Bridgehampton, N.Y., on public view. Every Tuesday night, and in weekly recycled episodes on the Bravo network, she can be seen enjoying the front-row seats at fashion shows, the tennis matches and the benefit galas that are the fruits of money and rank.

But glass houses are fragile, and in recent weeks the edifice constructed by Mrs. de Lesseps, a former nurse from Connecticut, has splintered around her in shards. Last month, her husband of 16 years, Alexandre de Lesseps, 59, brusquely informed her that he had taken up with a much younger woman. The news, delivered in an e-mail message and promptly picked up by the tabloids, left her devastated, she said.

Sitting modeling-school erect at her kitchen table in Bridgehampton last week, Mrs. de Lesseps made it clear she was equipped to carry on. In trying moments, she said with theatrical flair, “you stand tall, walk to the door, and move on with the next part of your life.”

Alas for the countess, her reality series, taped before she and her husband separated, has yet to run its course, showing scenes of the couple in happier days. (Four original episodes are scheduled through May 5.)

Despite the intrusion of reality into “reality,” the program continues to deliver the voyeuristic pleasures common to series about the rich, offering viewers an occasion both to envy and to sneer at its arriviste heroines. The women on the program bicker nakedly, flaunting diamonds — and talons — with equal hauteur. And to the mixed horror and delight of her fans, the countess does not always rise above the fray.

Mrs. de Lesseps is unmatched at the kind of brinkmanship routinely practiced o

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tv society

Gay Marriage Issue Steering Clear of the Supreme Court
By ADAM LIPTAK

WASHINGTON — And now there are four. In the space of a week, the number of states allowing same-sex marriage has doubled, with Iowa and then Vermont joining Massachusetts and Connecticut. In California, gay and lesbian couples were exchanging vows for five months before voters put a stop to the practice in November. Californians are still talking it over, though, and loudly. New York and New Jersey may be next to debate the question.

In other contexts, this sort of turmoil might amount to an invitation for the United States Supreme Court to step in. But there are all sorts of reasons the court is likely to keep its distance, and a central one is the endlessly debated 1973 decision that identified a constitutional right to abortion.

“The concern about creating another Roe v. Wade looms large,” said Nathaniel Persily, who teaches law and political science at Columbia. “At least five members of this court, if not more, would probably be reluctant to weigh in on this controversy, especially given the progress that is being made in state legislatures, state courts and public opinion.”

Court decisions on issues like school desegregation, abortion and same-sex marriage can raise questions about the judicial branch usurping the democratic process. But there are strategic issues as well. The Supreme Court not only decides cases but also decides which cases to decide. In jurisprudence as in life, timing is everything.

Even some strong supporters of abortion rights believe, for instance, that Roe went too far too fast and may have been counterproductive. One of them is Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“The court bit off more than it could chew,” Justice Ginsburg said in remarks after a speech at Princeton in October. It would have been enough, she said, to strike down the extremely restrictive Texas law at issue in Roe and leave further questions for later cases.

“The legislatures all over the United States were moving on this question,” she added. “Th

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society

If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone
By MATT RICHTEL

Juliet: Fakn death. C U Latr.

Romeo: gud plan.

Conspiring with a distant lover? Try texting. Lost in the woods/wilderness/Ionic Sea? Use GPS. Case of mistaken identity? Facebook!

Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don’t pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage. (It’s Odysseus, can someone look up the way to Ithaca? Use the “no Sirens” route.)

Of what significance is the loss to storytelling if characters from Sherwood Forest to the Gates of Hell can be instantly, if not constantly, connected?

Plenty, and at least part of it is personal. I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Then I started talking to fellow writers and discovered a brewing antagonism toward today’s communication gadgets.

“We want a world where there’s distance between people; that’s where great storytelling comes from,” said Kamran Pasha, a writer and producer on “Kings,” the NBC drama based on the story of David. He says even the unfolding of the Bible would have been a casualty of connectedness. In the Old Testament, for instance, Joseph’s brothers toss him into a pit. He is picked up by slave traders and taken to Egypt, a pivotal development in the Exodus narrative that is central to Judaism. Imagine if, instead, he dialed for help from the pit. “It’s humorous to think that if Joseph has an iPhone, there’s no Judaism,” Mr. Pasha says.

Must we now hit “delete” on tension that simmers for hundreds of pages as characters wonder, for instance, what’s happened to a lover? Certainly Rick Blaine would have been spared the aching uncertainty of why Ilsa stood him up at the train station in “Casablanca.” (

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