Then it occurred to me that there must be, somewhere on the internet, a gif of Tyra Banks doing the cabbage patch.

Duh, I was right.

Anyway, that’s how I’m feeling right about now, as I’m pretty frickin’ excited to be starting as a staff writer for Washington City Paper at the end of the month.

Flicker / brains the head

On the prescription information for birth control pills:

A third way [this hormone medication prevents pregnancy] is by changing the womb lining, making it difficult for a fertilized egg to attach to the lining of the womb (implantation). A fertilized egg (embryo/unborn baby) needs to attach to the womb to receive blood and nutrients and continue to grow. If an embryo/unborn baby does not attach, it cannot survive.

So, obviously, this last indication — in addition to 1) preventing ovulation and 2) preventing the egg and sperm from getting friendly — is why anti-choice activists are coming out against birth control. To them, it’s the same as abortion (even though it actually isn’t).

That aside, the term “embryo/unborn baby” seems weird. Embryos aren’t viable, so calling them “unborn babies” doesn’t really make sense, since the word “baby” means a newly born human being–and by necessity, one that’s viable outside of the womb. There’s a squishiness about the phrasing that makes me wonder how it got onto the prescription info.

Last weekend was pretty great. I got to witness the marriage of two dear, dear friends, and the next day saw Clybourne Park at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. And then the cherry, of course, was seeing Dolly Parton with friends that night.

#winning, right?

I really, really liked the first act of Clybourne Park. It was moving and beautifully acted, funny, and heartbreaking. (There were a few moments where the audience’s laughter struck me as bizarre, though, because I was tearing up. Anyway!) The second act, however, was unpleasantly farcical at times and as one friend put it, “Gentrification 101.” We speculated the reason why we didn’t much care for it was because it didn’t really delve any deeper than black-couple-is-wary/white-couple-is-offended. I don’t know about you — and perhaps it’s because I’m part of the liberal media — but most young white folks I know are far more self-aware than the couple in the play.

Still, I’m glad I went. The acting was pretty brilliant and the post-show discussion was cross-generational and enlightening. Many thanks to Rachel Grossman at Woolly Mammoth for inviting me to participate.

Now… Can we take a moment to talk about Dolly Parton?

She sounds AMAZING for someone who’s been in the business for so long. Amanda and I were trying to figure out why she still sounds so good — compared to, for example, Mariah Carey, whose voice is a wreck (still love her) these days. She must have a strict vocal regimen. And as someone who doesn’t have a particularly deep knowledge of her songbook, I found laying out on a blanket and drinking Andre while Dolly jammed on stage extremely enjoyable.

And speaking of alcohol — I’ll be at Bar 7 tonight talking about gentrification with some awesome folks brought together by the Humanities Council of D.C. I think things get started at 6:30. Swing by if you can.

Update: Abdul Ali has a piece at City Paper that much more eloquently gets at my issues with Clybourne Park.

This doesn’t actually seem like a bad idea:

Starting August 15, Fox will offer its next-day Hulu options only to subscribers to the Dish Network (or Hulu Plus). Non-subscribers will have to wait eight days to watch the shows, even though in regular, not-Internet life, those with and without the Dish Network can watch Fox programs on DVRs whenever they please, with equal impunity.

New York is operating under the assumption that this move is irregular — but chances are, it’s something all of the networks have been discussing together, or in their own silos.

And why not? TV viewers are beginning to expect that they can watch shows the next day on the internet — and networks are getting very little out of that. Charging a bit for that capability is probably where all networks are headed.

Granted, I may be biased as I’m a happy Hulu Plus subscriber (it’s a critical supplement to Netflix in my cable-less household), but the service is fairly cheap and well worth it.

Flickr / Jon Chiang

The Washington Post ran a lengthy profile of Leroy Carhart, a Nebraska doctor who travels to Maryland twice a month to perform late-term abortions:

Carhart, who once dreamed of becoming a hand surgeon, said he witnessed how abortions often went bad when he was a medical resident in Philadelphia in the 1970s. In emergency rooms, he saw women who had tried to self-abort with knitting needles and coat hangers. Many required serious surgery; some died.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1985, he worked for a few years as a general surgeon but began performing abortions part time at an Omaha clinic at the request of a former patient, also the clinic’s nursing director.

On Sept. 6, 1991, the day Nebraska passed its parental-notification law, his farm burned down. No family members were hurt, but the fire destroyed his house and other buildings, and killed his dog, cat and 17 horses. The next day, Carhart received a letter informing him that the fire was in retaliation for the abortions. Local officials were unable to determine the fire’s cause.

“That was when I decided I would not be part time,” he said. “It’s where my tenacity comes from.” He resigned his hospital privileges. He began training other doctors. He opened his own abortion clinic the next year.

“I decided I wasn’t going to just be a provider, I was going to be an activist.”

Carhart sees about 60 women a month in Maryland — about half of whom are local. And that number shocked me. It’s amazing to think that there are 60 women who have fetuses — fetuses that they wanted — and have to go into this tiny clinic and say goodbye to their babies before they’re even born, because of anomalies (Carhart says all of the late-term abortions he performs are because of developmental problems). And it’s frustrating to think that in this time of great sadness, they’re faced with willfully ignorant protestors accusing them of murder.

I saw the Washington Post story right after reading a Kate Sheppard profile of a woman who had an abortion at 29 weeks because her daughter had major brain development issues:

Weinstein was faced with the prospect of giving birth to a baby that was expected to suffer from nearly constant seizures, could have required feeding tubes to stay alive, and could have been in a vegetative state, if it survived at all. She decided to end the pregnancy rather than continuing for another two months and prolonging the suffering. It was a very personal decision, she says, one made between her, her family, and her doctors. “We wanted her and loved her,” Weinstein says. “In some ways I feel a little bit lucky, in that she was so sick that the decision was almost made for us. I don’t wrestle with guilt.”

Even though she lived in Maryland and saw a doctor in Washington, DC, Weinstein found it difficult to obtain an abortion so far along in her pregnancy. There were no doctors, at the time, that offered the procedure at her stage in the Washington area. She had to travel to Dr. Warren Hern’s clinic in Boulder, Colorado, far from her support network. Weinstein spent a week in Colorado between the initial visit with the doctor and the actual procedure, all the time worrying that the baby was suffering. It wasn’t until July 14 that she was able to undergo the procedure. “I don’t have words to describe the agony of those days,” she says. But, “knowing how sick the child was, I can’t imagine ever being forced to carry the baby to term.”

The ordeal was expensive. The Weinsteins racked up $17,500 in medical bills, and it took a lengthy fight with their insurance company to get the procedure covered. There was also airfare and the hotel stay to cover.

Weinstein, of course, went through this before Dr. Carhart started serving the East Coast — and she’s lucky she could afford to cover the expenses to get her out to Colorado.

I’m pretty excited to be participating in a talk after a production of the Pulitzer Prize winning Clybourne Park at Woolly Mammoth Theatre this Sunday. The play is a response to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun and is about the 1950s white neighborhood that freaks out when the black family moves in — and how 50 years later, a white couple moving in sparks a similar freakout.

Post-play, I’ll be talking with Washington City Paper’s Lydia DePillis and DCentric’s Elahe Izadi about the role of the media in telling the story of gentrification.

You can get tickets here (use code 1285 for a 20% discount), or, if for some crazy reason you just want to see us talk, no need to buy tickets. The post-show discussion is open to the community; which is just one more reason to love Woolly.

Mr False Pretence, you don’t make sense
I just don’t know you
But you make me cry, where’s my kiss goodbye?
I think I love you

– “Take The Box,” Frank (2003)

Having learned an important lesson in 2003 when The Da Vinci Code was released, I rarely read books while they’re at the height of their popularity. Sometimes this is good, because they’re not time-sensitive and they’ll likely be satisfying whenever I get around to them (The Warmth of Other Suns). Admittedly, sometimes it’s contrarian (Game of Thrones, Harry Potter). Mostly, though, it’s a way of saving myself from reading books that are bad but aren’t recognized as such until the backlash arrives (The Da Vinci Code; Eat Pray Love). The books I’ve read in the last two months illustrate to me why I should remain intractable on this point.

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010) hits all three of these points to varying degrees. The chatter around it oversold the book a bit for me. It wasn’t as good as that one episode of RadioLab promised, or as the five star reviews from friends would have me believe. It was longer than it needed to be, and Skloot’s personal interactions with the Lacks family weren’t as compelling to me as a reader as they clearly were to her as a writer. (Funny enough, in the intro, she mentions an editor who was “mysteriously injured” after asking her to take Henrietta’s family out of the book — the implication being that the spirit of Henrietta did it. I think that editor was onto something.)

Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential (2000) is another book that didn’t live up to the hype. It was heavy on the seediness Bourdain participated in and observed, and light on cooking. Unfortunately, he managed to make days-long coke benders sound boring. Kitchen Confidential is also an example of a book of the moment — there hadn’t really been anything like it, which was why readers were so impressed. I read it 11 years after it came out, and in the meantime, Bourdain has become a bad boy celebrity chef (ugh, stupid phrase, but) and hopefully a more interesting writer.

Tina Fey’s Bossypants (2011) was not good. Fey writes exactly how she delivers jokes, and that only works for so long before becoming a tired device. Clearly, the Da Vinci Code rule holds here. Bossypants is a book that I read only a month after it came out, and I wish I’d just read some comics instead.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay (2008-2010) add up to a series I’m both sad I didn’t read until now (because it’s so good), and glad that I didn’t read until now (because I didn’t have to wait between books). I devoured them, reading all three in the span of a week. The trilogy isn’t great art by any means, but it is tightly paced and plotted, with plenty of satisfying foreshadowing. For the kind of story Collins is writing — YA novel about a teenage girl (sure, a teenage girl literally fighting for her life) — she really avoids treading old ground.

Despite enjoying The Hunger Games trilogy, it feels like I’m making bad choices. Perhaps I should go back to my old method of reading books: Anything as long as it was written more than 30 years ago. The only choice in that category I wish I could take back was the wretched Jude the Obscure, after the publication of which, Thomas Hardy correctly stopped writing novels.

It’s not so much this profile, which is really not so much a profile as a chronicle of hanging out with an action star, that read as odd to me. It’s that Zimmerman’s piece comes on the heels of the March issue, in which GQ published Jessica Pressler’s account of spending the night with Channing Tatum, a couple of Snuggies, and a bottle of tequila. For GQ, sending out a female reporter to get tipsy and a little frisky with an otherwise indistinguishable slab of beef appears to be their stab at creating a novel and enduring journalistic form, akin to the New Yorker’s revealing anecdote, followed by a statement of a larger problem, followed by an origin story. At this rate, I’ll be making it rain in strip clubs with Ryan Reynolds by November.

Her point about Jessica Pressler’s night with Channing Tatum is somewhat well-met. But it’s also fairly common for GQ profiles to boil down to a few hundred words of “I hung out with this person.”

Still, I think Alyssa is missing what made the story so wonderful. Chris Evans is essentially a nobody (an up-and-coming nobody, sure) in Hollywood — he’s not a great actor, and he’s not even playing a great hero (sorry, Captain America fans). If Edith did this with a person who was important or particularly interesting, like Barack Obama or even Robert Downey, Jr. that would be one thing. But Evans is exactly what Alyssa describes him to be: an indistinguishable slab of beef (who is apparently much loved by his mother, as all boys should be).

So, what do you do when faced with an assignment to profile of a handsome movie star whose credits include “Harvard Hottie” in the Nanny Diaries and the lead in Push, a movie I think I was the only person in America to see?

I guess you could dig around and try to find out what makes him interesting. Or you could take this opportunity to explore the absolutely bizarre experience of writing a celebrity profile. Edith writes:

Despite his publicist specifically telling him not to, he invited me to come to his going-away party. “My poor publicist,” he said. “She knows I like to drink. She was like, ‘Please don’t drink too much, please just don’t drink too much—you’re gonna take this person out, and they’re going to ruin you.’ “

We were heading our separate ways for dinner first. I said I was going to call a cab, but Chris laughed and insisted on his driver taking me back to my hotel. In the vast backseat, Chris was even more flirtatious than before, touching my arm and my knee. At this point, which was a…number of drinks in, it was easy to forget that it really was an interview, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that something might happen (and that we’d go to the Oscars and get married and have babies forever until we died?). But there was always the question of how much of it was truly Chris Evans, and whom I should pretend to be in response.

Let’s face it: most celebrity profiles are completely worthless. Either you suffer through Hirschbergesque atmospherics like what the weather is like and if the person has a purple couch (for 95-lb female stars, it’s all about how much pasta, or burgers, or beers they consumed), or you get long, winding profiles that will ultimately conclude that so-and-so is “complicated.”

Maybe it’s because I’m a journalist, but I’d much rather read a story about what it’s like to try and interview a handsome, charming celebrity and spend time in fancy places and fall a little bit in love with one’s subject. In divulging the ethical roadbumps all journos in these situations are sure to face, Edith is telling us more than we would ever learn by reading what Evans’ workout routine is. And that is writing by a woman that I can get behind.