On the other hand, the world is not a classroom; the factors
involved in gender parity are not easily solved with a little shouting. I
currently work as a chef (another male-dominated business) and have had some
real battles with male co-workers concerning my level of knowledge and the
authority I had in the kitchen. What did it take to work things out? Intervention, open discussion and
a laying down of the rules about what is tolerated in the
workplace — as well as a lot of gut-level compromise and flexibility on the part of
all the people involved.

Yes, the MIT report leaves a lot to be desired — but where else do you
start? The process of achieving gender equity in the workplace is
long and hard and distasteful in a way — who wants to deal with it? But those
women are pounding on the table at last. Hopefully, this will lead to the
types of study, discussion and resolution that will even satisfy Paglia.

– Beth Twomey

Paglia’s question, “Who gravitates toward science and why?” and her own
answer “It may be … that relatively few women are attracted to
people-free zones” reminds me of the old-time assertions that
neighborhoods need not be integrated because “those people would want to
live with people like themselves anyway — they won’t like it here.”

I have worked for years in science and technology. I have heard men say
“we offered her every encouragement,” and wondered if the woman seemed
like a curiosity, a mascot rather than a colleague. A coach knows that his players need comparable equipment
and time on the field to do their best, but somebody has to pass them
the ball.

It saddens me that Paglia, as a woman, would spend her time and energy
defending the status quo, but it does not surprise me. It is all too
common for women to be the gatekeepers restricting other women,
or snipers taking shots at successful ones. I was one of two women
engineers at a particular firm in 1976, and heard some secretaries
gossiping about and undermining the other woman engineer. The
viciousness was alarming. There was a hatred just because she was there,
taking her place among the men.

It is not “self-pity” to look objectively at a situation and acknowledge
that you have a smaller piece of the pie. It is not special pleading to
say that, when women are not represented in various cultural
environments, there may be unrecognized obstacles for them. It is not
anti-male rhetoric to say that many men haven’t acknowledged the obvious
advantages which still exist. Women gained their shot at equal
employment only because a Southern senator added them to protected
classes in an attempt to defeat the Equal Employment Opportunity Act.
That was only a generation ago.

– Joan A. Hoenow

San Jose

So MIT wants to get more women into science?

Here’s how. They need to underwrite a biopic about a glamorous
woman scientist. Remember the Madame Curie movie? No? My point
exactly.

The conditions:

1. The lead must be played by Gwyneth Paltow. She’s cute and
hotter than a Taos tamale.

2. No sad gorillas or whales. In fact, no sad anything; just
some perseverance and pluck. The lead must drive a sports car and
wear sunglasses: NO dresses. I’m thinking maybe Rachel Carson.

3. A handsome man falls in love with her, and makes the agonizing
decision to sacrifice his career for her love. Gotta be Hugh Grant.

I guarantee, if you follow this prescription, in 15 years the
girls of today will be clogging the groves of science tomorrow,
searching for their Hughie. And some good science will be done along
the way.

– Jim Ward

Divided we stand
BY J.J. GOLDBERG

(04/08/99)

J.J. Goldberg is clearly
out of touch with everything which has been going on in Israel for the
past few weeks.

Perhaps Goldberg should stop basing stories on sources like the
English-language ultra-Orthodox Jewish press in the United States, which represents
less than 5 percent of the Israeli population and has a readership which
probably doesn’t exceed a few tens of thousands. Just because Goldberg
(presumably) cannot understand Hebrew doesn’t mean that he or she doesn’t
have a responsibility to find out what is going on in Israel from primary
sources before lambasting an entire nation.

While Goldberg is correct that Netanyahu and Sharon have been insensitive
to the plight of the refugees from Kosovo, it is incorrect to paint the
entire country and its people in this light. Israelis have already raised
millions of shekels and collected warm clothing and equipment for the
refugees through appeals from the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, public
and privately owned television stations (which run appeals for aid as part
of the nightly newscast), the Foreign Ministry and the army-run radio
station. Planeloads of Israeli military aid are on the ground on
Kosovo’s borders, as is a military field hospital staffed with Israeli
doctors and nurses.

Israelis are sensitive to the plight of the Kosovo refugees not only out of
basic human sympathy, but out of a clear, historically based awareness of
our unique knowledge of such tragic events and the responsibility that
entails.

– Barry Barancik

Jerusalem

Your article reporting divisions among Jews on the Kosovo issue is
somewhat perplexing. Would you not expect to find similar differences of
opinion among any other religious group?

– J. Oelbaum

Sarasota, Fla.

Living forever
BY MARY ROACH
(04/09/99)

I know this was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek article (at least
that’s the tone I read) but it is rather short-sighted and indicative
of an attitude I find common when people are posed with the possibility
of living for an unexpectedly long time: ageism. Roach assumes that
a 150-year-old person will be cynical, bored and unemployed. The
very question she poses at the end (“What would a society do with its
old people if they refused to die?”) assumes that old people who haven’t
died yet are necessarily a burden. What a crock! Especially with the
premise in the beginning of the article that science will allow us to
live to that age with the fitness of a 40- to 50-year-old.

I don’t know about Roach, but I plan on kicking around for as long
as humanly possible. Hopefully when it’s no longer humanly possible,
science will have advanced enough to make it inhumanly possible. There’s just
way too much to do and be for me to ever get bored and cynical.

– Greg Barton

May God strike me down at my tender age of 23 if I ever, at 50 or 150,
stand to become the mentally frigid misanthrope Mary Roach appears to be.
If life has no more meaning to the author than a cheap movie ticket, a
posh seat on an airplane and a short line at the DMV, why does she even
bother to publish her cynical dribble? Perhaps, underneath Roach’s
hardened soul, lie the remains of someone needing, and, dare I say,
enjoying, the prospect of sharing the human experience with her fellow
unbelievers.

My firm little ass nearly fell off the chair at Roach’s suggestion that by
35 I would be “growing bored with almost everything, and disgusted with
everything else.” Could it be that instead of the world seeming “stale and
pointless” I might be thankful for the opportunity to apply a lifetime of
hard-won wisdom to another 80 or so years of living? What about the chance
to explore another career, to read the hundreds of books I would have
never gotten around to? Or the advanced levels of thought and emotion a
single lifespan would never allow, the rich and textured people we’d
become from so much living?

I have been out of college nary a year and have already grown worn and
slightly disenchanted from wading through the bureaucratic sludge that is
everyday life. But for the one moment, or two, of inspiration and growth I
experience each day, and for my idealism, which takes a hell of a lot more
guts than the author’s tired pessimistic blather, I would take 200
years of lousy parking.

Under the pitiable millstone of so much cynicism, Roach was not even able
to retrieve the one unquestionably redeemable aspect of doubling her
lifespan: Twice as much time to get laid, Mrs. Robinson.

– Karen Gordon

Mary Roach writes: “What would a society do with its
old people if they refused to die?” I find her
sentiments every bit as charming as Milosevic’s.
Roach’s cleansing is ageist, rather than ethnic,
but it is every bit as lethal and every bit as evil.
At least Milosevic leaves some refugees breathing.
Roach’s call for the elderly to “die and make room
for someone new” doesn’t even permit that escape.

– Jeffrey Soreff

Labels of obscenity
BY JON BOWEN

(04/07/99)

In his article, Jon Bowen asserts that professors’
being obligated to disclose the content of their courses would amount to
an infringement of their academic freedom, that it would do damage to
the liberality of a liberal education. He seems to be saying that if professors cannot hide what they are going to be doing in
their courses until they have students trapped in them, their
prerogatives as professors will be infringed upon. This is obvious
nonsense. No one who sells a product — not even the product of
ideas — can claim the right to hide the nature of his product from the
customer until the customer has already bought it. To argue that
academic freedom means that a professor ought in fact to be able to do
so would be to argue that the academic community believes and insists
that it has the right to deceive its customers.

It is truly a paradox
of our “enlightened” age that those who occupy the seats of the
brightest among us would actually not only think this but in so thinking
think themselves superior in soul to the rest of our society. If a
professor is going to espouse a given worldview, certainly she will be willing to state so candidly and
allow her ideas to stand in the marketplace of ideas on their own merit,
not on the merit of a policy, particularly a policy of deceit.

– Paul D. Muller

Associate Professor of English & Linguistics

Liberty University

Lynchburg, Va.

However, Cascio seems to blame the software developers for the wildfire growth of Melissa, rather than the users themselves. In my office, I use Word & Outlook on my Windows machine. I received a copy of the Melissa virus before I had heard anything about it.

I opened up the attachment, and since I had configured my Word application to warn me about potential macros, I elected to disable macros while opening the document. When I saw the document, I checked the “to” line of the e-mail (since I didn’t think it likely that someone I worked with would send me a list of porn sites). The mail was addressed to everyone in the company.

This is a very basic and common-sense approach to opening anyWord document that you didn’t create yourself. Unless you know you’re going to need the macros in the document, and you know what they are, disable them. Although I hate to pass up a chance to bash Microsoft, this is a clear case of simple user error, and not lack of security features.

Blaming Microsoft for the interoperability of their products is like suing Master Lock because you failed to lock the door and were robbed blind. There are plenty of things that people can blame Microsoft for. The Melissa virus is not one of them.

– Michael Santora

The author posits that: “an all-Macintosh or all-Unix environment would be nearly as vulnerable to monoculture attacks as an all-Windows office.”

This is most emphatically not the case. UNIX, unlike Windows and the Macintosh, is designed to be a multi-user system. Because of this, it is far more resistant to viruses than Windows and Macintosh. Note that Windows NT, because of its poor setting of default file permissions, is in the same boat as Windows ’9x.

Ultimately, the big difference is that, in a UNIX environment, a virus can only infect a single user directly and cannot do serious damage to the whole machine. On Windows and the Mac, the virus is free to run amok.

– J. Patrick Narkinsky

Rebirth of the cool
BY PHILIP BOOTH

(04/08/99)

The only “prescription for the torpor that seems to ail” jazz is to recognize the inventive and exciting avant-garde jazz music being played today by musicians such as Dave Douglas, Don Byron and John Zorn. The giants of the ’50s and ’60s made wonderful music, but that cultural moment is over and no amount of effort will resurrect it.

– Aaron Hertzmann

New York

The bleak gets bleaker
BY DAVID RIEFF

(04/07/99)

I agree with the author’s rather dour outlook for the Balkan region, but I am unpersuaded by his criticism of the Clinton administration. He suggests that humanitarian aid should have been sent to countries bordering Kosovo instead of Kosovo itself in the time prior to the current deportation policy Serbia is pursuing. I find this an absurd argument. If humanitarian aid intended for Kosovars was sent to neighboring countries, it would have precipitated Serbia’s expelling them to those countries and their aid, if anything. Certainly hindsight is 20/20 here, but as far as I can tell an approach similar to this one, albeit more limited militarily, led to the Dayton accords and at least a tentative peace in Bosnia. There appears to be no good way to pacify the Balkans, but that is not this administration’s doing. Personally I will take Clinton’s foreign policy against any Republican in 20 years.

– Scott Raybern

In their discussions of this Kosovo-Belgrade crisis, many commentators are missing the point when they hold that Milosevic is achieving his aim as a Serbian nationalist in ex-Yugoslavia.

The reality is that as a “Greater Serbia” nationalist, he is a dismal failure. When he became the president of Yugoslavia a decade ago, he was president of a Yugoslavia that comprised Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Serbia, with the Serbs as the dominant ethnic group.

In the last eight to nine years, due to his ethnic chauvinism, his “Yugoslavia” and Serbian hegemony in the Balkans has shrunk steadily. Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia have left the federation; Serbian hegemony in Bosnia-Hercegovina is certainly a shadow of what it was before that conflict. Now, NATO firepower is contesting Serbian hegemony in Kosovo, and raining fire down on Belgrade, bringing war to the Serbian heartland.

The good reputation enjoyed by the Yugoslav federation and the Serbs before the civil war(s) has been ruined. Yugoslavia, what is left of it, is an international pariah besieged by sanctions. Commentators have failed to see the big picture in this regard. Milosevic by his own “standards” of Serbian nationalism is an utter failure.

– Joel Abrahamsohn

Story love
BY JEAN HANFF KORELITZ

(04/08/99)

Hats off to Jean Hanff Korelitz for her essay on the merits of good, old-fashioned storytelling. She’s right, the problem with the current literary landscape is that great works like the “Odessa File” and “Presumed Innocent” are too often crowded off the shelf by all these so-called artists that publishers insist on shepherding into print. What this country needs now is less art and more entertainment! See, folks like me and Jean are so busy that we barely got time to think, much less read, and you gotta be out of your mind if you think we’re gonna do both at the same time. I mean, come on. Don’t we already got enough to worry about? I can’t wait to check out Jean’s new book at Barnes & Noble as soon as I get a chance … Or maybe, me being so busy and all, I’ll just wait for the movie.

– Benjamin Alsup

Guitar refugees
BY DAVID BOWMAN
(04/06/99)

It’s always interesting to see what racial and cultural slurs are still acceptable, as in David Bowman’s passing knock “the notorious Frog poet Paul Verlaine” in his article about Tom Verlaine. Later in the piece he says that T. Verlaine seemed to him “more like a haunted male Sylvia Plath than any fancy French poet,” which suggests that plain French poets are unknown to him, or that he has a big, big sense of cultural inferiority to the French. It wouldn’t surprise me. After all, Yanks often do.

– Kate McDonnell

Montreal

– Jay O’Rear

I‘m sorry to see you repudiating your “magazine” title and resorting to the information-overload layout so common to other news sites. The old categorized layout I came to know and love eased navigation and put the focus where it should be: on the excellent writing. Suddenly my beloved Salon has become just another caffeinated portal-wannabe trying to be all Web things to all people, and I’m being forced back to the newstand.

– Courtney Graff

I couldn’t believe what I read in this morning’s N.Y. Times, but, here I am, and it’s true! You’ve had a fantastic makeover, and captured www.salon.com, while you were at it .

Your changes impress and excite me. I can’t help but feel a bit proud, too, even though I’ve been part of your community for only a few months. You maintain balance on the Web, and you’ve continued to mature as you grow.

Intelligent, witty, on the spot.

– Rick Adair

What’s up with the new graphics? They’re pedestrian and ugly. It’s like running into an old friend who’s had unfortunate plastic surgery and a really bad haircut.

What’s up with the content? Can’t find the columns for the ads, and the “new” stuff, like Amy Reiter’s People column, is old and redundant. It’s as bad as returning to that favorite neighborhood boîte and finding it’s now a Pizza Hut.

Do these changes have anything to do with the new and very prominently displayed relationship with Microsoft? Please tell us you haven’t sold out … if you can’t do that, then please publish a link to the new site where your creative team has gone, because this new look isn’t the smart site with the slick graphics I’ve come to know.

– Mary Alice Thring

Toronto

Love the site, and have been reading for months, but after reading Joe Conason’s review of the Isikoff book, and then seeing the “printer friendly version” button at the bottom of the article, I had to write to say “well done.” I often print out your articles to share with friends and family (especially those who are Webless). Thank you for thinking of this. Keep up the good work, both in writing and design.

– Bruce R. Wolff, Ph.D.

Waterloo, Ontario

Darkest Europe
BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

(04/05/99)

What exactly is the point that the otherwise intelligent and sensitive Rodriguez is making? It’s a “race thing” ? How convenient, it seems, that the complexities of the current and past Balkan crisis can be reduced to skin tone. Pardon my lack of sophistication if I can’t appreciate the metaphor. His half-hearted history lesson only underscores the continued existence of a “dark underside” in our world at large. Why add to the mire by taking pot shots at churches, language and established order. Change is inevitable, yet it offers no guarantee that the new and improved (multicultural) will be more humane or just.

– Ron Graziose

Mill Valley, Calif.

Richard Rodriguez’s take on Europe was so bizarre it made me laugh out loud like a lunatic for 10 minutes. I’m surprised he didn’t finish off the article with ” … and now children, the moral of the story is: White people are evil and all the poor, oppressed victims of the Eurocentric Devil Religion will one day inherit the Earth.” Will someone please set Camille Paglia on this guy.

– Joe Stocker

London

The working mom myth

BY SHARI THURER

(04/06/99)

Shari Thurer dismisses those who study differences between children of nonworking and working mothers as “hair splitters” who ought to spend their time solving “real” problems like crumbling schools and drug addiction. Fine, but from where does she suppose these problems arise? Teen pregnancy, drug addiction and gang violence occur across the religious, ethnic and financial spectrums. Yet a glaring commonality of life in the United States is that the majority of families no longer have a stay-at-home parent. Of course we should continue studying this. If we can better determine both positive and negative effects, then families can make better decisions, alleviate any unnecessary guilt and try to compensate for problems that come with this type of living situation. If Thurber took her own advice and set aside her own particular agenda, she might see that.

– Erin Strathmann

San Francisco

Working moms can never rest easy because the next study purporting to show that an employed mother is the root of all evil is inevitably around the corner. Right-wing think tanks can’t fund enough of those things, no matter how flawed the research might need to be. Shari Thurer is right: The people who demonize welfare moms (who have the hardest time getting adequate day care) for not working are the same people who can’t bear to think of a middle-class mom escaping the kitchen and nursery.

The only solution is a thick skin. I’ve promised myself that next time I read about a study showing how working moms are the bane of society (funded by the Heritage Foundation or some other right-wing outfit), I’ll just shrug before I put the kids on the school bus and I pick up my briefcase to head to work.

– Ivonne Rovira

Louisville, Ky.

– Bernard G. Schneider

Amy Reiter must’ve been a bit desperate for material on April 5. Picking on Bill Gates for a charitable donation to help Kosovo refugees was petty and pointless. Sure, $1.5 million is a small percentage of the Microsoft mogul’s net worth, but it’s probably 100 percent more than Reiter’s donation.

– Rob Carson

Loveland, Colo.

The great Pretender
BY JOYCE MILLMAN
(03/25/99)

Very, very nice work. Chrissie Hynde
scared this 19-year-old male back in 1980 (albeit in a good way). But I
had good company: Pete Townshend, in that wonderful 1980 Rolling Stone
interview (the one with the picture of his bloody hand pressed against his
face, published back when that magazine meant something), expressed the same awe. I didn’t need Squeeze to croak “it’s a woman’s world” — as you so aptly
illustrate, such matters were seemingly irrelevant to Chrissie (even her
first name was at odds with the rest of her persona). But even then, in my
less-evolved teenage male state, I thought there was something
counterfeit about the commodification of Pat Benatar (and, of course, I
couldn’t stand the music), while Blondie left me cold. Your article
rightly crowns Chrissie, putting her at the head of the class.

Although I was never a huge fan, that band was special. I refuse to allow
the output since 1984 (even Johnny Marr couldn’t help re-create the
magic, and other than “Last of the Independents” I haven’t purchased
anything since “Learning to Crawl”) to tar her contribution, because what
she gave me circa 1980-82 was more than sufficient: It kicked me in the
ass and reminded me that all of the “new wave” bands I listened to
(remember the Lambrettas or the Headboys?) were, although
well-intentioned, the real pretenders. Thanks so much for the “shiver of
recognition.”

– Fred Harring

Batter Up!

BY JON BOWEN
(03/25/99)

If Little League wants to reduce injuries, the first thing that should be considered is not a softer ball, but a larger diamond. An 11- or 12-year-old Little Leaguer, capable of throwing a ball 60 mph, stands only 40 feet from the batter. His pitch is the equivalent of a 90 mph fastball on a major league diamond: No wonder kids get hurt. In addition, if the batter is lucky enough to make contact with such a pitch, the ball takes off like a rocket from modern aluminum bats, putting the infielders at risk.

I played baseball as a kid in Holyoke, Mass., and as 8- to 10-year-olds we and kids in the surrounding cities used the standard Little League diamond. However, as 11- and 12- year-olds, we played on a larger diamond, with 75-foot base paths and the pitcher’s mound at 50 feet. This gave the batter enough time to get out of the way of an errant pitch. It also gave fielders more time to react to a sharply hit ball. A larger field combined with bats engineered to transmit less energy would go a long way toward reducing injuries. In addition, the larger field lessens the importance of pitching and puts more emphasis on hitting and fielding — much to the delight of fans and 89 percent of the players.

– Daniel R. Gaulin

Little League Inc. has been well aware of the dangers of its sport for many years; the failure to mandate the use of safer equipment is bewildering and shameful. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, more children are killed each year playing baseball/softball than any other sport. The primary cause of death is ball impact to the head or chest; two children are struck by a ball every game. Until parents band together to force Little League to consider the safety of children, we’ll just have to accept the inherent danger of what should be a safe and enjoyable pastime.

– Ericka Lozano

Los Angeles

Short attention spawn

BY ANDREW O’HEHIR
(03/25/99)

After seeing “The Matrix,” I was wondering what Salon Magazine’s review would say. After all, most of Salon’s writers have a delightful combination of technical savvy and literateness. Unfortunately, they seem to have assigned the wrong reviewer to this movie. Andrew O’Hehir states that “There’s no point defending ‘The Matrix’ on intellectual grounds.” There certainly isn’t, if you miss every single literary or scientific reference in the script. Just off the top of my head I can think of several places where O’Hehir missed the boat: misinterpreting a very funny reference to Harlan Ellison’s classic science fiction story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” as “melting his face,” for example, and missing the multiple levels of irony when Neo stores his secrets from the Agents in a postmodern text on simulacra.

Furthermore, O’Hehir’s article completely ignores the excellent references to computer science in “The Matrix” — from the rather obvious use of “Agents” and the reference to humans as viruses to the skillful manner in which Hugo Weaving imitates speech generation software in his performance. It’s true that a lot of the most delightful references in this movie require somewhat thorough and esoteric knowledge. But that level of knowledge is something I’ve come to expect from Salon.

– Ryan Shaun Baker

But who is causing the suffering? There can be no doubt that Milosevic
and his henchmen are playing a large role in it, but let’s remember: There were no refugees from Kosovo until the NATO bombing started. I won’t presume cause and effect, but to completely ignore it, as do Rozen and other Albanian/U.S. propagandists is disingenuous.

Also, where is Rozen getting her information? Remember she is in Macedonia, not Kosovo. Her information is from 100 percent Albanian sources — the same sources who, when the bombing started, spread apocryphal tales of tens of thousands of able-bodied Kosovo Albanian men being force-marched to unknown locations. Now we learn that these marches did not happen and that, instead, the Kosovo Liberation Army is “drafting” (often at gunpoint) those aforementioned able-bodied men.

And what about the Kosovo Liberation Army? Rozen speculates about “arming” them. Well, guess what? They are armed, and have been well-armed for the past several years (ever since they received a huge shipment of stolen arms from Albania) and have been waging a guerrilla terrorist war against the Serb presence in Kosovo with massive support from the Albanian civilian population in that area for the past 10 years. Yes, surprise! There is a war going on in Kosovo. Both sides are armed and fighting. Rozen and many other American journalists never mention this.

– Steve Hesske

Havre, Mont.

Limp Willy?
BY FRANK SMYTH
(03/25/99)

I half-accept the anti-Serb bias in punditocracy
enclaves, but Salon too? You use the word “genocide” in your deck. Of course, this is
the “line” right now, but there is no firsthand
evidence! Are the KLA and Kosovar refugees to be
completely trusted on this? Are you nuts?

This propaganda is what is pushing the U.S. public to support the
introduction of ground troops to the region (which
otherwise appears to be a deadly, foolish idea). You
had better be very sure it is accurate, or you are
hoodwinking the American public into getting their
sons and daughters killed for no good reason.

– John Haberstroh

Honeymoon Turbulence
BY ROSEMARY BERKELEY
(03/25/99)

Can somebody please explain the decision to publish Rosemary Berkeley’s
“Honeymoon Turbulence”? A humorless woman has to take a long flight with
a broken bathroom and on which she doesn’t get her choice of entree. This merits being posted on Salon? Please show some editorial judgment.

And as far as the homophobic stereotypes that Berkeley throws around in
describing her flight attendant, well, they’re almost too tired and clichid to get worked up about. If Berkeley is going to try her hand at mocking homosexuals, she could at least try to come up with a new shtick and some fresh barbs we all haven’t heard before.

– John Newton

From ballet to B&D and S/M?
BY EVAN ZIMROTH
(04/01/99)

Abuse comes in all kinds of packages — the Catholic church, Southern
Baptist marriages, White House internships, etc. As one who practices
B&D and S/M, I see no more potential for abuse to occur in my chosen lifestyle than in any other arena; in fact, I see less.
The one thing we can all agree on, I hope, is that children should be protected from harm.

Whether its a sexually deviant ballet instructor or a
pedophilic Catholic priest, it is not Catholicism or love of ballet
or propensity for S&M that makes these people criminals. It is their
disrespectful, unloving, selfish — not to mention illegal — actions toward a child who is under the age of consent determined by our legal
system. We all should work to protect the children, and separate our own judgmentalism and intolerant moralizing from our common and rightful belief that children are to be protected from abuse in any
form.

– Ann Marie Olsen

I would like to point out that sadistic
ballet teachers cannot be legitimately compared to S/M. Safe, sane and
consensual S/M is for consenting adults, not children. You do a serious
disservice to the S/M-leather-fetish community, who are attempting to
educate and provide support to consenting adults exploring their sexuality. To confuse adult sexuality with the abuse of young women in ballet classes is chilling and wrong, and simply perpetuates stereotypes.

– Susan Wright

Breaking the surface
BY ANNE LAMOTT
(03/25/99)

Did they INVENT the phrase “holier-than-thou” for Anne Lamott? I
personally don’t believe in religion — any religion — but I have no
problem with those who do. I have friends who are Catholics, Mormons,
Jews, etc., and if it makes them happy, then I’m all for it. But
self-righteous blathering like Lamott’s reminds me of what I find so
annoying about religion and religious holidays. Can’t you just
celebrate and be happy without trying to cram it down everyone else’s
throats? Please, the rest of us really aren’t interested.

– Eve Golden

New York

Conned by a Jewish mother
BY INDA SCHAENEN
(03/25/99)

Inda Schaenen is right to doubt the vision of the “authentic”
Jewish mother stirring the pot and dispensing pithy wisdom.
But conned? Maybe not. “Molly Goldberg” was the matriarch of
“The Goldbergs,” a radio serial and later the first TV show with
identifiably Jewish characters — which, as such, were both a repository of
shtick and a vessel of ethnic pride. Gertrude Berg, the first
author named on Schaenen’s cookbook, played Molly Goldberg
and wrote the scripts. Molly Goldberg is surely a “literary
construct,” but not just an excuse for a book of recipes.

On the other hand, though the recipes may be backbreaking and
god-awful (would you cook out of a Marge Simpson cookbook?), that
might be all the more signature of their authenticity, whatever
“authentic” means when it comes to Jewish-American food. Molly
Goldberg’s cookbook is not a con job, but an artifact from the
forgotten history of Jewish-American assimilation.

– Benjamin Weiner

Pasadena, Calif.

“Conned by a Jewish mother” was pretty cute.
But if Schaenen really had the claimed pre-enlightenment relationship with “Molly Goldberg,” then for sure she would know that noodles don’t make it as a side dish for Passover. They are chometz. She should go back to potatoes.

– Hart Friedman