1. “The Double Lives of High-Priced Call Girls”
“They are three young women practicing the 21st-century version of the oldest profession, inhabitants of the secret world of the high-priced call girl that was thrust into the spotlight last week when Gov. Eliot Spitzer was identified as one of 10 clients of the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. caught on a federal wiretap. None are involved in the case – though Ms. Xi’an said she interviewed with the Emperor’s Club and was turned away for lack of a modeling portfolio – but they provide a glimpse into the prostitution industry, a sprawling and rapidly growing underground universe that in the last decade has almost wholly migrated online.”
“Omaha still doesn’t have a Brooks Brothers, but last July Rachel Jacobson opened Film Streams, a nonprofit independent cinema that is betting on the belief that the town’s interest in movies has – or might be – broadened.”
3. “A Crash Course in Online Gossip”
“Messages skew toward discussions of Greek societies and students’ sex lives: hottest fraternities, ‘sluttiest’ sororities, and who gave herpes to whom. The site’s most-viewed forums usually trade in gossip at small colleges with strong fraternity and sorority systems.”
4. “Postfeminism and Other Fairy Tales”
“The politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?”
5. “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias”
“To scholars, the ready access to updated information online is a net gain for the public. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t mourn the passing of a household icon – a set of knowledge-packed books on their own reserved shelves that even parents had to defer to.”
“That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third.”
7. “A Proposed Diet for the U.S. Budget”
“Expenditures on science, space and technology; arts and the humanities; foreign aid and international relations; and the programs formerly known as welfare – all favorite targets of so-called budget hawks – accounted for only about 4 percent of total government expenditures.”
8. “Against Happiness, by Eric G. Wilson: Woe Be Gone”
“The author is a gloomy man who tried jogging, yoga, tai chi, Frank Capra movies, smiling, good grooming and eating salads, and finally decided to embrace his gloominess. This makes him an odd duck in America….”
“Indeed, as one transmale student I spoke to at Wellesley pointed out, women’s colleges are uniquely suited to transgender students. ‘There’s no safer place for transmen to be than a women’s college because there’s no actual physical threat to us,’ he told me, adding, ‘I have more in common with women because of that shared experience than I do with men.’ And even though Rey chose to leave Barnard for a coed school, he also says that women’s schools can – and should – act as havens for transmale students, that they are, in fact, natural beacons for trans people, because ‘feminists and trans activists are both interested in gender.’”
