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Published on April 20, 2017 00:39

April 19, 2017

2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 20

This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 20 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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After today, we’ll be 67% of the way through this challenge. Only 10 days to go!

For today’s prompt, write a task poem. The task can be some glorious duty, or it can be a seemingly small and insignificant job. Or the poem can take someone to task. It’s your task to figure it out and write it.

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Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.

Click to continue.

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Here’s my attempt at a Task Poem:

“poeming”

the words come easiest
when i’m working on some
thing completely different

like moving numbers in
spreadsheets or looking for
errors in an index

folding laundry & then
putting away laundry
or washing the dishes

but paying all the bills
that produces the most
poems & here we go

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He writes poems even when he’s not writing poems.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

*****

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Two Minnesota Bookstores Announce Expansion Plans

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Moon Palace in Minneapolis and Content Books in Northfield are moving into larger spaces to accommodate customer demand. The stores have both been in business less than five years.

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Published on April 19, 2017 17:33

Sex-Ed for Grown-Ups: A Roundup of Relationship Self-Help

This content was originally published by JUDITH NEWMAN on 19 April 2017 | 2:01 pm.
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Nishant Choksi

If you, like me, are a believer in the precept “Follow the money,” then you understand there is no one better to consult about your sex life than a bunch of economists. According to a 2004 study of 16,000 participants published in The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, increasing frequency of intercourse from once a month to once a week generates the same amount of happiness as an additional $50,000 a year in income. (To my Scottish husband, this fact constitutes foreplay.) Sex and relationship self-help books are here to boost our bedroom profits or, at the very least, offer one or two sales tricks you may have never considered before — if not a particular act, then a way of connecting with each other. So let’s get busy.

Laurie Mintz, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida, wins this year’s award for best book title, pun division, with BECOMING CLITERATE: Why Orgasm Equality Matters — and How to Get It (HarperOne, $26.99). Books teaching women about orgasms have been popular since the 1970s, and I was skeptical of the need for this one. Don’t our bodies tell us all we need to know, without an instruction manual? Well, maybe not. Mintz begins by arguing that our culture conspires to deprive us of satisfaction, since both men and women now take their cues from pornography. Pornography is a happy land of unicorns and rainbows and women’s achieving ecstasy via intercourse alone. She also points out that while Freud was full of many excellent observations about human behavior, women’s sexual needs were not one of them. Once women hit puberty, Freud wrote, “the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.” (In terms of great advice, this ranks right up there with “You should take up smoking — it’ll help you lose weight.”)

At any rate, once we are set straight about the primacy of the clitoris in orgasms, we are told various ways to work it: fingers, vibrators (though curiously, she forgets Ryan Gosling). We are also told to hand over a copy of this book to any willing and interested men, whom Mintz sets straight on everything from the need for a warm-up to the fact that sex toys will not replace them. I do wish, however, that someone had told Mintz to cut! down! on! the! exclamations! Also, while I admire her enthusiasm, I could have done with a little less adorableness. At one point she suggests we come up with a new name for the clitoris, to make us more comfortable talking about it among ourselves. Her suggestions, “Cleo” and “Tori,” mean that to avoid cringing every time I see them, I now have friends I will be referring to as Cleopatra and Victoria.

I like the idea behind the psychotherapist Winifred M. Reilly’s IT TAKES ONE TO TANGO: How I Rescued My Marriage With (Almost) No Help From My Spouse — and How You Can Too (Touchstone, $24.99). The book takes very seriously the notion that, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “We must be our own before we can be another’s.” Reilly writes that just as there are stages of development for the individual, there are stages for couples: symbiosis, differentiation, exploration, rapprochement, synergy. The transition from the first two stages — going from “We are as one!” to “Wait, we aren’t as one?” — is usually where the trouble starts. How we navigate individuation within a relationship can determine whether that guy sleeping next to you is your husband, or your First Husband. What distinguishes Reilly’s book is that she says a warring couple don’t have to agree on the goal of staying together; it takes one person changing, not both, to make a marriage work. I’m not sure whether I buy this argument or not. I do know that since Reilly uses this book to endlessly dissect her own not-really-all-that-horrible relationship, the reader may occasionally feel she’s stuck in a marriage even more tedious than her own.

While Reilly takes the hopeful but dubious tack that a relationship can be fixed because people can change, Michael I. Bennett and Sarah Bennett are under no such illusion. In ____ LOVE: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship (Touchstone, $19.99), this very funny and sensible father-daughter team urge the reader to look at himself less as a lonely guy and more as a corporation: You are the C.E.O. of your life, and you need to watch the bottom line. Your choices can either help you reap a lifetime of profits or run the Business of You into the ground. So the Bennetts go through the traits we are all drawn to and help us gauge their relative importance in the long haul. They map the different levels of need or commitment involved in making every relationship decision. On whether to get married, for example, the authors urge you to examine your own mind-set: Decide if you are making marriage a top priority for good reasons, a medium priority because you are ambivalent, or you can’t even consider this question rationally because you are in a state of existential panic: “You need to lock someone down now so you won’t have to worry about the years when you’re so fat, old and bald or as hairy as a Market Street bear that your genitals will fall off from disuse.” The book is so amusing that you won’t mind that you are essentially being scolded all the time. For instance, in a list titled “Ten Questions to Which the Answer Is Always No,” they ask: “As an adult, can I still use the ‘he/she started it’ excuse?” and “Is it valid to break up with someone using just the emojis of a broken heart, a crying cat and a beeper?” The cheeky title notwithstanding, this is more a relationship book than a sex book, so the fact that it’s written by a father-daughter team is less creepy than you might think.

I was sure that Wendy Strgar’s SEX THAT WORKS: An Intimate Guide to Awakening Your Erotic Life (Sounds True, paper, $16.95), forthcoming in June, would have me rolling my eyes. After all, the cover is Hallmark-card treacly (poppies in soft focus), the publisher is known for its woo-woo titles, and the author, who calls herself a “loveologist,” is also in the business of selling personal lubricants. Instead, “Sex That Works” is thoughtful, well written and dare I say, a little inspirational. Strgar’s premise is that many of us spend our lives self-medicating — with drugs, drink, food, shopping — to escape our true selves. Yet if we want to experience real pleasure, we also need to be willing to feel pain. Not, like, “Fifty Shades of Grey” pain, though that kind is discussed. Rather, the kind of discomfort that comes from being honest with others, and with ourselves. Sounds simple, but anyone who has been faking pleasure for years knows that it’s not. According to Strgar, the rate of anorgasmic women is three times higher in the United States than in Europe, which she attributes to our culture of denial and I attribute to fantasy football.

Strgar makes very good points about how we confuse sexual freedom with sexual license, resulting in a hookup culture that has us faking orgasms like porn stars. Authentic sexual freedom, she writes, means “taking responsibility for our own sexual needs.” The book shows us how to do just that. She talks about how to achieve a state of mental abandonment, how to appreciate small sensual moments, how to love without always worrying every second about being loved back — and how asking for sexual satisfaction even requires a certain level of courage. Along the way, Strgar, now in her 50s, explains how she brought her own sex life with her husband of more than 30 years back from the brink of ruin. She argues persuasively that sexual pleasure, however you define it, is not a luxury but a necessity. I might add that the love oils she sells on her site smell really good. Though thus far I haven’t convinced my husband that sex, as Strgar writes, can be “a gourmet meal of many courses and flavors.”

“I like steak,” he says.

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Published on April 19, 2017 16:30

'Communism for Kids' Sparks Conservative Backlash

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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A new book that purports to teach children about communism, published by MIT Press, has caused an outcry from a handful of conservative media outlets.

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Published on April 19, 2017 15:28

2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 19

This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 19 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, write a memory poem. Pick a memory, any memory. It can be a significant event, but sometimes there are beautiful insignificant moments (that ironically are very significant–quite the paradox). Mine your memories to come up with something good today.

*****

Re-create Your Poetry!

Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

Click to continue.

*****

Here’s my attempt at a Memory Poem:

“where are you now”

the day began with a race through the woods
& ended in a random parking lot near the mall

he joked as the incense smoke filled his van
& she shared what she loved & hated & i loved

them both & still don’t know how we got there
or how we got home but that’s how it was

in those days one surprise after another &
feeling like it would never end or begin

every day an adventure that was destined
to end with him laying across the tracks

& she disappeared somewhere in texas
like smoke that drifts out a window

*****

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). He loved his high school days and friends.

Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.

*****

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3 Very Short Books on 3 Very Big Ideas

This content was originally published by DANIEL W. DREZNER on 19 April 2017 | 8:05 pm.
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Of course, just as I was pondering whether “On Tyranny” exaggerates, Trump tweeted that the press is the enemy of the American people. That sounds awfully pre-fascist to me. So approach this short book the same way you would a medical pamphlet warning about an infectious disease. Read it carefully and be on the lookout for symptoms.

THE SOUL OF THE FIRST AMENDMENT
By Floyd Abrams
145 pp. Yale University, $26.

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Claims of American exceptionalism can be exaggerated. But the First Amendment really does make America unique, even within the industrialized democracies. No other country has such stringent protections against government restrictions of free speech and a free press.

Abrams, a constitutional litigator, celebrates that fact in “The Soul of the First Amendment.” The best part of this short primer is his history of free speech jurisprudence in the United States. Abrams reminds us that federal protections of free speech rights are of recent provenance. A century ago, obscenity laws and community standards provided ample reason to justify government censorship. States, localities and courts restricted the freedom of the press without much constraint for the country’s first 150 years. The First Amendment was not applied to state censorship laws until 1925.

Abrams traces the legal history of the First Amendment all the way through to Citizens United, a case in which he represented the plaintiffs. Liberals who despise that ruling would be well served to read this book. Whatever the policy merits of letting corporations spend unlimited amounts on political advertising, Abrams ably defends its legal reasoning.

He is on shakier ground, however, when he compares the First Amendment with laws regulating speech in other established democracies. Abrams acknowledges, for example, that Germany’s Nazi past makes it “understandable” to restrict hateful speech in that country. He then blithely notes that “the United States has been fortunate not to have suffered such horrific events.” I suspect that some Native Americans and African-Americans would take issue with Abrams on this point.

Abrams recognizes but offers no answers to the policy ramifications of Citizens United. He also seems willing to live with the social costs of actors like WikiLeaks publishing documents with no redaction: “What to print? The First Amendment provides no answer to this question. It never does.”

WHY WALL STREET MATTERS
By William D. Cohan
154 pp. Random House, $25.

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Economic populism has produced a bear market for attitudes about Wall Street. Public trust in banks dropped precipitously after 2008 and has not recovered. During his campaign, Donald Trump complained that “Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.” As president, however, Trump has appointed several well-connected financiers. How should Americans feel about that?

The moment is ripe for a short book that explains the merits and demerits of America’s financial sector. Alas, Cohan’s “Why Wall Street Matters” is not that book. To be fair, he tries hard. Cohan repeatedly states that Wall Street is a marvelous contraption for allocating capital to the productive parts of the economy. The problem is that he offers no evidence for this claim beyond assertion. The closest he comes is when he stresses the success of Apple’s initial public offering. On the questions of share buybacks or Libor manipulation or the financial sector being responsible for an increasing fraction of the American economy, he is silent.

Cohan is correct on some important matters regarding regulation, as when he argues that the revocation of Glass-Steagall was not responsible for the 2008 financial crisis. Unfortunately, elsewhere he offers mere bromides. On Dodd-Frank he quotes a Wall Street executive: “Keep the regulations that work and make sense and eliminate the rest.” Good to know.

Part of the confusion lies in what Cohan means by “Wall Street.” He has an introduction entitled “What Is Wall Street?” that manages never to answer his own question. In the introduction he says Wall Street is not some “strange form of alchemy”; but in the next chapter, he writes that “it’s a remarkable bit of alchemy.” This kind of confusion persists throughout the book.

The biggest problem with “Why Wall Street Matters” is its black-and-white framing. Cohan asks at the beginning whether Wall Street should be thought of as a force for good or evil. The obvious answer is “neither.” Wall Street should be thought of as an amoral collection of profit-seekers. Alas, Cohan remains a prisoner of that dichotomy for the length of this small book.

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Published on April 19, 2017 13:25

Amazon Opens Second Bookstore In Massachusetts

This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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Amazon opened its second bookstore in Massachusetts on April 18, with the opening of a store in the northeastern town of Lynnfield. With an emphasis on faceouts, customer reviews, children’s books, and cookbooks, the store follows the model of its sister store, which opened 21 miles away in Dedham, Mass., in February.

The Lynnfield Amazon Books occupies 4,200 sq. ft. in a large retail center. Prominent displays feature the company’s host of digital devices, and cross-promoted products are interspersed with the selection of books. Unlike the Dedham store, there is no café. Books are discounted for members of the company’s Prime service, and are otherwise full price.

The store will host its first event later this month, opening its doors for nearby Boston’s citywide literacy initiative ReadBoston. According to Amazon spokeswoman Deborah Bass, the store will donate 100 books to the program as part of World Book Day.

Amazon has made substantial inroads in Massachusetts in the last year. In September 2016 the company opened a 1 million sq. ft. distribution warehouse in Fall River. Earlier this year, The Boston Globe reported that the company was looking for as much as 200,000 square feet of additional corporate space in Boston and Cambridge. The company signed a lease in Boston’s Back Bay in February for an undisclosed amount of space.

The Lynnfield store is the company’s sixth to be opened nationwide, and currently has a staff of ten. Books are selected by a team of offsite “curators,” according to Bass. Five more Amazon bookstores are slated to open this year.

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Published on April 19, 2017 12:25

Elizabeth Warren Lays Out the Reasons Democrats Should Keep Fighting

This content was originally published by PAUL KRUGMAN on 18 April 2017 | 5:38 pm.
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Then came the Trump upset. Now prominent Democrats need to figure out how to be effective leaders of the opposition — as the party’s base sees it, the resistance. Warren’s new book is in effect a manifesto offering one vision about how that role should be played. Is it persuasive? The answer is complicated.

Warren lays out a position I’d call enlightened populism. She rails against the growing concentration of income and wealth in the hands of a tiny elite; argues that this concentration of economic rewards has also undermined our political system; and links unequal wealth and power to the stagnating incomes, growing insecurity and diminishing opportunities facing ordinary families. She puts a face on these stresses with capsule portraits of middle-class travails: a Walmart worker who needs to visit a food pantry, a DHL worker forced to take a huge pay cut, a millennial crushed by student debt.

She also makes good use of the autobiographical mode, contrasting her stories of modern hard times with the opportunities her (and my) generation had in a more generous, less unequal era. Her own success story, she tells us, depended a lot on the now-vanished availability of high-quality, low-cost public universities, plus a relatively high minimum wage — “a $50-a-semester tuition changed my life.”

But how can the harshening of life for ordinary Americans be turned around? Warren calls for restored financial regulation, stronger social programs and renewed investment in education, research and infrastructure. Isn’t this the standard Democratic position? Yes and no.

Yes, what Warren is preaching sounds very much like the second coming of the New Deal — as she herself acknowledges: “We built it once, and we can build it again.” But: Warren brings an edge to her advocacy that many Democrats have shied away from, at least until recently. Even the Obama administration, while doing much more to fight inequality than many realize, balked at making inequality reduction an explicit goal.

Furthermore, Warren comes down forcefully on the left side of an ongoing debate over both the causes of inequality and the ways it can be reduced.

One view, which was dominant even among Democratic-leaning economists in the 1990s, saw rising inequality mainly as a result of ineluctable market forces. Technology, in particular, was seen as the driver of falling wages for manual work, and attempts to fight this trend would, the argument went, do more harm than good — raising the minimum wage, for example, would lead to job losses and higher unemployment among precisely the people you were trying to help.

Given this view, even liberals generally favored free-market policies. Maybe, they suggested, rising income inequality could be limited by spending more on education and training. But limits on income concentration and support for workers would, they assumed, mainly have to come from progressive taxes and a stronger safety net.

The alternative view, which Warren clearly endorses, is all for taxing the rich and strengthening the safety net, but it also argues that public policy can do a lot to increase workers’ bargaining power — and that inequality has soared in large part because policy has, in fact, gone the other way.

This view has gained much more prominence over the past couple of decades, mainly because it’s now backed by a lot of evidence (which is why I call Warren’s populism “enlightened”). At the beginning of her book Warren talks about her frustration with politicians refusing to raise the minimum wage even though “study after study shows that there are no large adverse effects on jobs when the minimum wage goes up.” She’s right. Later, she writes about the adverse effects of the decline of unions; that, too, is a view supported by many studies, from such left-wing sources as, um, the International Monetary Fund.

So Warren in effect gives intervention in markets equal billing with taxes and social spending as a way to combat inequality, marking a significant move left in Democratic positioning.

But why has actual policy gone the other way? Here Warren, both in the Senate and now in this book, has been harsher and more explicit than most Democrats have been in the past, condemning the corruption of our system by big money — and naming names.

A case in point, recounted in “This Fight Is Our Fight”: Back in 2015 there was a congressional hearing on the Labor Department’s proposed “fiduciary rule,” requiring that investment advisers act in the interests of their clients. (No, that wasn’t already the case — and kickbacks for giving bad advice were a regular part of the scene.) When a prominent financial economist associated with the Brookings Institution, Robert Litan, testified against the rule, Warren did what most politicians wouldn’t: She pointed out that his research supposedly making the case against was effectively a piece of paid advocacy on behalf of a big mutual fund manager. (Litan ended up severing his ties with Brookings, which said he had broken the rules.)

So “This Fight Is Our Fight” is a smart, tough-minded book. But is it an effective blueprint for progressive political revival? The evidence suggests that it’s incomplete.

Consider the case of West Virginia, where Obamacare cut the number of uninsured by about 60 percent, where minimum wage hikes and revived unions could do wonders for workers in health care and social services, the state’s largest industry. That is, it’s a perfect example of a state that would benefit hugely from an enlightened-populist agenda.

But last November West Virginia went almost three-to-one for a very unenlightened populist who made nonsense promises to bring back long-gone coal jobs, and has tried — so far unsuccessfully — to gut Medicaid, which covers more than a quarter of the state’s residents. Why? A lot of the explanation surely involves identity politics — white and male identity politics. To her credit, Warren repeatedly acknowledges the political importance of prejudice; she’s not one of those people who insist, as Bernie Sanders sometimes seems to, that bigotry won’t be a political factor if only your economic program is progressive enough. But she doesn’t offer any good answers. And let’s be honest: Republicans have gone after Warren herself, in a way they haven’t gone after Sanders, in part because of her gender.

But maybe it’s a matter of time, and what Democrats need right now is a reason to keep fighting. And that’s something Warren’s muscular, unapologetic book definitely offers. It’s an important contribution, even if it isn’t the last word.

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Published on April 19, 2017 02:14

‘The New Book of Snobs’ Updates the Shifting Science of Social Cues

This content was originally published by DWIGHT GARNER on 18 April 2017 | 7:49 pm.
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It’s among the contentions of D. J. Taylor’s clever and timely “The New Book of Snobs” that the world would be a poorer place without a bit of insolence and ostentation. “The cultivation of an arbitrary superiority,” he writes — whether we are in a refugee camp or a manor house — “is a vital part of the curious behavioral compound that makes us who we are.”

Often enough, you’d need a hydraulic rescue tool, a Jaws of Life, to pry apart snobbery from a simple human desire to get ahead. As Taylor puts it, “not all social aspiration is snobbish” and “to want to succeed and to delight in your success is not necessarily to betray a moral failing.”

Taylor’s book takes its title and inspiration from William Makepeace Thackeray’s “The Book of Snobs” (1848), in which that Victorian novelist defined a snob as one “who meanly admires mean things.”

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D.J. Taylor, author of “The New Book of Snobs.”

Credit

David Levenson/Getty Images

Snobbery is no longer so easy to define. As in a string of binary code, the ones and zeros keep flipping. In a world in which reverse snobbery is often the cruelest sort, it can be hard for the tyro to keep up.

This is where Taylor’s book comes in. “The New Book of Snobs” will not help you navigate the American status system. It’s a very British book; so British that there are currently no plans to publish it in the United States. (I’m reviewing it because it’s new and interesting, and because copies can be easily found online.)

To understand Taylor fully, it will help to be conversant with the humor magazine Viz, as well as with the humor magazine Punch; with the reality-TV star Katie Price as well as with the writer Nancy Mitford; and with the Kray twins and the rapper Tinie Tempah, as well as with Evelyn Waugh and Beau Brummell.

Writing is hard because thinking is hard. Writing about class and snobbery, in particular, is so hard that doing it well bumps you a rung up the class ladder. In America, no one has made a serious attempt to unpick the multiple meanings of status cues since Paul Fussell did in his wicked book “Class” (1983).

As a myriad-minded social critic, Taylor is not quite on Fussell’s level. (Almost no human is.) But he’s astute, supremely well read and frequently very funny. In its combination of impact with effervescence, his book puts me in mind of a Black Velvet, that curious cocktail made from Guinness stout and champagne.

The English class system, with its hereditary titles, is vastly different from ours. But snobbery — class’s meddlesome twin — is a lingua franca. There’s plenty for an attentive student to learn here.

We are in the age of Trump, and, clearly, some forms of attempted snobbery will always take the form of conspicuous consumption. Taylor correctly points out, however, that the wiliest snobs “pursue their craft by stealth.”

He’s excellent on the distinctions that can be conveyed “by an agency as subtle as an undone button, a gesture, a glance, an intonation, the pronunciation of a certain word.” In England, it’s possible to be crushed by the sound of an attenuated vowel.

Americans in Britain, Taylor suggests, must remain on alert. Upper-class Brits like to ridicule American vernacular by stressing our usages, as in (the italics are his) “I think she’s gone to the restroom,” or “We’ll have to take a rain check on that.”

Don’t think you can escape this sort of game. “The man who most loudly proclaims his lack of snobbishness,” Taylor writes, “is most likely to be a snob.”

Taylor’s book is filled with small, tart taxonomies. He lists the great snob heroes of fiction, including Lady Catherine de Bourgh in “Pride and Prejudice.”

He offers tidy profiles of notable snobs, including the journalist and politician Tom Driberg (1905-1976), who would write the managers of hotels in advance, “demanding an assurance that there would be no sauce bottles or other condiments on the dining tables during his stay.”

The author probes some of the class resentment behind Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. President Trump is not mentioned in this book. But leaning on George Orwell and Charles Dickens, Taylor discusses nationalism as “an extreme form of snobbery.”

A great deal of strong writing about class has been emerging from Britain in recent years. I’m thinking, in particular, of Owen Jones’s book “Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class” (2011). Taylor’s book is vastly different from Jones’s, but, in a sense, these men are climbing the same mountain from different sides.

To linger on the topic of class can seem like a sign of a sick soul. The subject can make us touchy, whether we are highborn or low or someplace in the middle. The critic Dwight Macdonald was a man of the radical left, yet a descendant of the old Dwight family of New England. In one grouchy 1947 letter, he wrote, “We can’t all be proletarians, you know.”

With nearly all status signifiers in flux, books like Taylor’s are more important than ever. Snobbery and immense learning, he makes plain, do not always walk hand in hand.

But in 2017, it pays to heed the advice of Ian McEwan, who wrote: “It is quite impossible these days to assume anything about people’s educational level from the way they talk or dress or from their taste in music. Safest to treat everyone you meet as a distinguished intellectual.”

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