Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve, has posted a series of incredible, amusing, sorrowful indictments of stodgy, short-sighted corporate thinking. It says something about the essential craziness of the web, that he has created in FakeSteve (Jobs) a character who seems more like Steve Jobs than does Teh Steve (not that we’d know.)  I’ve had a character take over a novel, and the utter realness of these people, it’s hard to explain. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another oldie but goodie from the drafts folder, if anything more pertinent now that Miss Moneypenny is trying to sell herself as, can you believe it, guberantorial material. Read it and try not to weep. Hell, maybe she is just what the Golden State needs to keep us operating—hello, not. Read the rest of this entry »

The Choice Myth — Judith Warner … thinking less about choice, in fact, and make us focus more on contingencies — the objective conditions that drive women’s lives.

The alternative narrative—of constricted horizons, not choice—that might have emerged from recent research has never really made it into the mainstream. It just can’t, it seems, find a foothold …

… our public policy continues to rest upon a fictitious idea, eternally recycled in the media, of mothers’ free choices, and not upon the constraints that truly drive their behavior. Read the rest of this entry »