The Rage Diaries

Tossed ethics and scrambled eggs

There's a story in David Brin's collection Otherness, "Piecework," in which the protagonist and her best friend undergo a permanent split when the protagonist works her way out of Britain's welfare class and her friend's career path spirals down. Both are employed as freelance pieceworkers -- manufacturing industrial commodities via biotech implanations in their uteri.

I thought of that story today when I read Wired News's "How Much for a Dozen Human Eggs?" -- not because I think of any egg donor as a piece worker, but because apparently, other people already do. The crux of the issue: the National Academies published a recommendation against women being paid to hand their eggs over to researchers. This presents a problem best summed up below:

"It's really a bind because if you're not paying women, then you're not paying them for something that's burdensome, invasive and time-consuming," said Marcy Darnovsky, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society. "But if you pay them, you're giving them an inducement to put themselves at risk and to discount the risks that they might know about but feel they have no other option."

This really touches on a much larger question: should people have the right to sell their biological assets? Some would argue no:

"People could be paid reasonably for their time and effort," [Arthur Kaplan] said. "But I don’t think they should be turned into egg incubators as a career choice."

But I can't help but wonder -- why frame the issue to imply someone else is conscripting "egg incubators"? What's wrong with someone turning into an incubator by choice?

Too much of a good thing

Every time I go to Costco, I always enact this little mental drama:

1. Gaze upon row after row of household staples we use. Marvel at size of containers.
2. Calculate how long it would take for my two-person household to consume the ginormous quantity of [fill in item]. Calculate cost-per-unit compared to the grocery store.
3. Wonder "We share 1000 square feet with two cats, 1300 books and nine storage boxes of comics. Where the hell would we put a ten-gallon tank filled with olives?"
4. Wonder "Would it go bad before we finished it?"
5. Bypass the presumed bargain, reasoning that any savings are predicated on actually using a vast quantity of parmesan cheese/mayonnaise/eggs instead of merely finding space for them while they live to a rotten old age.
6. Wonder for a moment, "Why don't I organize a Costco collective where two-person households like mine can pool a membership and divide up goods so everybody gets just what they need without losing the advantage of bulk volume discounts?"
7. Remember that I hate organizing group anything. Also, wonder at the likelihood of collecting enough people who share our sundries needs.
8. Sigh over all the bargains I'm presumably passing by.

There has got to be a burgeoning demand for shopping collectives. Some things simply come in unmanagable volumes. I feel this way about magazines too; I'd still be subscribing to the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's if I didn't feel so freakin' overwhelmed by each issue every month. And this is what keeps me from subscribing to the New Yorker -- I want a New Yorker club in which we all read assigned sections and report back to the group when it's time to hand off the next issue's section.

The Boston Phoenix's "Periodical Insanity" (April 22-28, 05) feels my pain. Such a tremendous volume of reading material, and at so little cost! It's overwhelming.

What magazines overwhelm you? And would anyone like to split a Costco shopping trip?

The Return of Sarah J.

To celebrate my impending slide towards demographic irrelevance, The Gap announced  that they're rolling out Forth & Towne, a chain designed to be hipper than the usual retailers purporting to sell to the over-35 crowd.

My problem with the AP's "Gap Inc. Names New Store Concept" was on of terminology:

It all depends on what you mean by "hammer," I suppose

Every once in a while, two unrelated links lead to one very chewy idea. Today's example in serendipity:

True or not true?

We live in the most devout wealthy democracy on the face of the earth. You might celebrate that fact, you might deplore it, but you cannot deny it. For a policy to be right or wrong, there must be a reason. And for the vast majority of Americans, that reason will involve their faith.

-- "Losing Our Religion," CSM, April 20, 05.

What do you think? Do we live in the most devout wealthy democracy? Do we always have to cast social change in terms of religious faith?

Beginneth the hagiarchy

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

-- "Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue," NYT, April 15, 05.

Although my first impulse upon reading this article was to get the screaming willies over the Senate majority leader's open-mouthed kiss with the radical anti-choice religious right, my second one is to wonder whether any genuinely pious or devout people are at all disturbed by the way religious leaders are permitting their faith to be used as a GOP cudgel. The wall between Church and State is meant to protect both sides, you know?

This is the old-school Catholic in me coming out, but we were always taught that in matters of living our faith in daily life, we were to be "political, but not partisan." I don't know if the evangelicals make that distinction, or even understand why it's critical to anyone of faith.

Magazine, stuck to my hand

So the National Magazine Awards came out today, and the reason this is noteworthy is because the winners' list at the American Society of Magazine Editors' website has some hyperlinks to nominated and winning articles. This is fine and dandy -- because this is one of the few awards entities in which you can check out the nominees while pretending to work -- but I do have a small gripe. Wouldn't it have been really cool for the ASME to get electronic copies of all the nominated articles and issues, and to offer links to all the nominated issues and articles on their site? I mean, I'm thrilled that National Geographic was in the running for its June, Nov and Dec 04 issues, but if I want to see what's so freakin' special about them, I have to go hunt down the issues in the library. And I can't help but wonder exactly how good all the ASME links will be a year from now, linked as they are to the publications' sites, each of which no doubt has its own archiving policy.

The ASME's archiving and hyperlinking to the nominated works gives avid readers a chance to revisit or discover the publications and articles that are supposedly the best in their field. It also lends the ASME a burnished glow as the arbiter and keeper of institutional excellence. I'm sure the publications all have their assorted paper/Website issues to work out, but surely, if you're going to throw your hat into the awards arena, it won't kill you to give away a few freebies via the ASME site.

For those of you who are all, "Bah! Establishment awards mean nothing!" ... well, there's still a lot to be said for the art and craft of magazine wriitng. Exhibit A: Jason Kottke's review of magazine writing in 2004. His hyperlinked list is considerably more esoteric, and quite enjoyable.

And for those of you who are all, "Bah! I reject you and your list-accepting ways! ... I've got a link for you too: "Time's Tally Proves Listless, Not Timeless." (Boston Globe, April 12, 05)

More signs I may read too many comics

In reading today's NYT piece on wolverines, "Truth in the Wild: A Great Dad That Wanders Wide," I checked out the graphic describing the animal's range and thought, "Hmmm. Canada, you say? That explains what Len Wein was thinking when he came up with the character."

However cool a sociopath with adamantine claws may seem, actual wolverines (Gulo gulo) come off as much cooler. The article emphasizes how little is known about the world's largest, nastiest weasel, but there's a research foundation willing to remedy that with a little help.

Snapshots with sharp edges

I read two pieces yesterday that showed why celebrity profiles are rarely as fascinating as reporting on real lives.

The NYT's April 10, 05, article "Island Girls" (read it now; it'll be gone by next Sunday) examines the intensely local and close-knit nature of life on Staten Island, and how that shapes social lives for women in their 20s and 30s. For someone like me, who had a peripatetic childhood and lives thousands of miles away from my relatives now, reading something like this:

While Island Girl [Lisa Shammas] and her readers could leave Staten Island if they wanted to, they remain largely out of loyalty to the place where they grew up. "My family is all here," said Ms. [Kelly] Gardner, 26, who often pops up in Island Girl's column as Bosom Buddy and is one of nine siblings raised in an Irish Catholic family with deep roots on the island. "I couldn't leave them, and I couldn't live more than 10 minutes away."

feels like being a tourist in someone else's life. It's kind of nifty, reading how other people live; I also loved the deep sense of affection for the place itself that shone through the piece.

The other piece that made me feel like I was getting a sneak peak of someone's life: the WaPo Magazine's April 10, 05, piece "The Woman Who Couldn't Boil Water." Detailing the gustatory arrangements of Francine Levinson, who makes me look like the Barefoot Contessa, it shows what life is like when neither parent likes to cook:

Given that her recipe for chicken entailed just thrusting it into the microwave, still in its plastic wrapper, Francine says, "No one really wanted me to cook."

So their three daughters became restaurant regulars at an early age. They'd start with breakfast, first at Hot Shoppes and in later years at the bagel places that began to crop up around Potomac, where they lived. Francine would wake the girls up at 6:30, invite their friends along and dash out to Bagel City, which would feed the girls breakfast and pack their lunches before Francine dropped them off at school. For dinner the family would usually gather someplace near the lamp store Mel owned on Rockville Pike: delis, Chinese restaurants, Roy Rogers.

I find this sort of feature article simply fascinating. I'm not sure whether the main draw is the writing or the exotic situation, but I adore snapshots of ordinary lives with extraordinary (to me) elements. Do you have any stories like that?

Behold the cafeteria Catholic!

The NYT discovered today what many of us have known for years:

American Catholics, be they Latinos here or African-Americans in Atlanta, or those of Irish, Italian or Polish ancestry in Boston and Baltimore, have come to accept that being Catholic means living with inconsistency ... [T]he Vatican's teachings on a number of subjects, including contraception, the ordination of women and homosexuality, are out of step with the beliefs and lifestyles of most American Catholics. But the Americans mostly find a way to stay in their faith by adhering to values most important to them and quietly ignoring those they disagree with.

-- "Catholics in the U.S. Keep Faith, But Live With Contradictions."

Assuming this mentality is pervasive among self-identified Catholics, things ought to be more interesting over the next few decades, what with the clergy skewing more conservative. The gulf between church and people seems wider each year. ("Catholics in America: A Restive People," NYT, April 3, 05)