Salon.com > Anna North

I hate books

Fri, 28 Jun 2013 23:30:00 +0000

Earlier this month, I moved for the seventh time in eight years. My mom says I've filled up a page in her address book; a family friend recently told me that when she thinks about me, she always imagines me amid boxes. I maintain that moving a lot doesn't make me especially unusual -- a friend of mine recently moved out of her apartment, stayed away for six months, and moved back in again, a sort of real estate Grover Cleveland. But constantly having to transport my possessions across town and across the country has led to certain uncomfortable realizations. The most recent among them: I love reading, but I hate having books.

Books are heavy. They're bulky. When you finish one, it's suddenly useless, and you have to carry it around for the rest of the day, or the rest of your vacation. When you move, it's one more bricklike object driving up the cost. Move two of seven for me was a cross-country one, and shipping a dozen boxes of books to my new address cost hundreds of dollars. Then I had to cantilever each box down the stairs to my basement apartment using a rolling backpack. After that I've never forgotten how quickly an entertaining read becomes a millstone.

London Review of Books editor: “We are getting better” on gender equality

Fri, 21 Jun 2013 18:21:00 +0000

The London Review of Books has come under fire for its dearth of female reviewers. But Deborah Friedell, an editor at the publication, wrote to Salon to argue that gender parity at the LRB is improving. Her response, in full:

I started reading the London Review of Books in college, in part because one of my favorite professors, Ruth Yeazell, regularly wrote for it. In its pages I first read Hilary Mantel, Anne Enright, Terry Castle, Jenny Diski, Rosemary Hill, Jenny Turner, Bee Wilson, Jacqueline Rose and Marina Warner -- all much better known now in America than they were ten years ago. I went to graduate school in England to study with Hermione Lee, who also wrote for the paper, but I left academia when the LRB gave me a job. I've since written for the magazine about Pearl Buck, Lorrie Moore, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Elizabeth Taylor, Wendy Moore, and Condoleezza Rice, and my review of Lionel Shriver's new novel is in the current issue. The magazine's editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, and deputy editor, Jean McNicol, both women, coaxed, cajoled, flattered and threatened me into finishing my pieces, and then improved them through the kind of painstaking editing that's now almost completely out of fashion. Even when I write for one of our competitors, I usually end up asking Mary-Kay to go through my drafts: she makes fun of my chutzpah, and marks them up.

On the editorial staff, men are now in the minority. The LRB should have more female contributors, but we are getting better, particularly when it comes to promoting and publishing the next generation of female critics. Mary-Kay pushes me -- and my colleagues Joanna Biggs and Alice Spawls (who also paints many of our covers) -- to write frequently, and we're proud to feature work by Elif Batuman, Lidija Haas, Chimamanda Adichie, Sheila Heti, Emily Witt, Katrina Forrester, Amia Srinivasan, Emily Cooke and Pooja Bhatia. We're trying; we'll try harder.

Bloomberg’s Siri joke slights female engineers

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:56:00 +0000

Michael Bloomberg has gotten a lot of attention for his commencement speech Sunday at Stanford University, in which he urged grads to come to New York to pursue tech careers. In New York, he told the crowd, "There’s more to do on a Friday night than go to the Pizza Hut in Sunnyvale. And you may even be able to find a date with a girl whose name is not Siri."

For Stanford's straight male engineering grads, the latter might be attractive. But for those female engineering majors who date men, the availability of hot non-Siri girls in New York may not be much of a draw.

Women made up 30 percent of the undergraduate class at Stanford's engineering school in 2010-11. That's not an insignificant number -- certainly enough that any commencement speaker should presume some female audience (leaving aside for the moment the share of male grads who might prefer to date dudes). Stanford has also turned out a number of high-profile female engineers, from Marissa Mayer to Clara Shih; anyone who thinks the face of Stanford engineering (or engineering, period) is uniformly male isn't paying attention.

Could older moms cure menopause?

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:45:00 +0000

Scientists have long wondered why women's fertility declines after a certain age. Now researchers have a new theory: It's all men's fault. And over the long haul, older moms could have a solution.

Biologists Richard Morton, Jonathan Stone and Rami Singh have created a statistical model they say could explain how menopause evolved. If men choose to mate only with younger partners, Stone told Salon, this preference "allows mutations that otherwise would be removed by selection -- because the mutations cause negative effects like reduced fertility at older ages -- to accumulate in a population." Essentially, if women were all bearing children early in life, they were able to pass along these age-related mutations to their offspring -- they never got weeded out by natural selection. Over time, mutations conferring infertility may have built up in the population, leading to menopause for all women.

The study authors note that if women preferred to have kids with younger men, this trend would be reversed -- men, essentially, would go through menopause instead.

Expert: Whistle-blowers “tend to be conservative”

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 18:18:00 +0000

Whistle-blowers like National Security Agency surveillance leaker Edward Snowden may seem like rebels, rising up against the system. But according to experts who work with them, the average whistle-blower is actually deeply loyal, and not rebellious at all.

C. Fred Alford, a professor of political philosophy and author of the book "Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power," told Salon that most of the whistle-blowers he talked to had intense allegiance to the organizations they worked for: "One of them said, 'I wasn't against the system, I was the system.'"

Nor, despite news that Snowden may have donated to Ron Paul, are they more likely to be libertarian. "My experience is that whistle-blowers are not politically radical people," said Alford. "They tend to be conservative in the sense that they expect people to do the right thing. They expect the game to be played the way it's supposed to be played." And when it isn't, "they're genuinely shocked." Added Alford, "they're not as cynical as the rest of us."

Woman who photographed alleged cheater: “I just thought he was such a pig”

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 15:00:00 +0000

When Stephanie snapped her fellow train passenger's picture on Wednesday and posted it to Facebook with the warning that he was loudly bragging about his infidelities, she never expected to get inundated with emails. But since her Facebook posting went viral she's received hundreds, she told Salon, "all of them extraordinarily positive." And she doesn't regret exposing an alleged cheater to Internet ire.

"I just thought he was such a pig," said Stephanie, who asked that her last name not be used (that's also not her above). She said she didn't worry at the time about what effect her posting might have on him, since she was so disgusted by what he was saying. "I was just so fed up with the two-hour train ride and listening to this person be so vulgar," she said.

Later, she added, "A friend of mine said, 'Have you thought about this might hurt his wife's feelings?'" But Stephanie said if she were his wife, she'd want to know: "I would be thinking if I were in her shoes, knowledge is power."

Alleged cheating husband gets shamed on Facebook

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:40:00 +0000

"If this is your husband," wrote a Facebook user on Wednesday, "I have endured a 2 hour train ride from Philadelphia listening to this loser and his friends brag about their multiple affairs and how their wives are too stupid to catch on. Oh please repost ..." And people did -- the post currently has over 27,000 shares.

The "if this is your husband" pic is just the latest in a long line of public shamings on social media, the latest and most controversial being a tweet by programmer and tech evangelist Adria Richards. When Richards tweeted a picture of men she said were making inappropriate jokes (about "big dongles," specifically) at a tech conference, she was deluged with threats and eventually fired from her job.

The reaction to the "if this is your husband" poster (whose name we're not posting at this time) has been the polar opposite of that, with vitriol aimed at the purported husband and congratulations to the poster -- "Get him girl" is a representative comment. The husband poster had the advantage of being on a commuter train, not at a tech conference. At the latter, women are already often unwelcome, and speaking out against dudes, in Richards' case, only made things worse. But everybody hates a train loudmouth -- even more so, apparently, if he's an adulterer.