Sense and Sensibility

Tenure is just the tip of the anachronism

Days before mad scientist Amy Bishop fatally blasted her way through a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the president of the country’s biggest university suggested ditching tenure.Tenure is the coveted relic that protects academics from getting sacked like the rest of us. Echoing the inklings of many in his profession, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee told the Associated Press, tenure was outmoded.

“Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer,” he told the AP. “In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything.”

News reports indicate that Bishop’s failure to capture tenure was what led the 44-year-old mother of four to unleash her resentment on six colleagues, three of whom later died. Now that her lawyers are saying the fratricidal Bishop is crazy, and not just an assassin whose rap sheet rivals her resume, we may never know. What we do know is that the Harvard-educated Bishop was peeved that some peon from a second-rate university got tenure over her. (The nerve<$>!)

Anybody involved in the tenure quest can attest that its bloodthirsty dynamics could drive one mad. But neither that [--] nor Bishop’s vengeful slaughter [--] is reason to eliminate it. It should be deep-sixed on its own terms. Nobody who draws a paycheck should be immune to dismissal, least of all a university professor with such critical sway over impressionable students. Tenure, which threatens its contenders to “publish or perish,” favors the intellectual remove of professors from their classroom, rewarding them instead for adulation in scholarly journals of mind-numbing prose.

Its defenders say that only with tenure can a professor hazard the intellectual daring that makes possible great strides in research and thought. Heaven knows how defenseless crusaders like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs managed their feats of derring-do.

Instead of being rewarded for inspiring and engaging students, tenured professors are fossilized into a pantheon of untouchables, immune from the economic realities with which the rest of the world wrestles.

And there is just one of its hypocrisies: tenured professors teaching a new generation of leaders to work under strictures to which they themselves are exempt.

But the real problem with tenure, a job protection that exists exclusively in academia, is not so much that it is a relic available to a rarefied few, is that it epitomizes the obliviousness of higher education to reality. To wit: last month, the University of Connecticut’s board of trustees voted to increase tuition for in-state students by nearly 6 percent in the 2010-11 academic year.

When room, board and fees are added, the total for in-state students will increase from $19,788 to $20,968. This is during a time of double-digit unemployment when foreclosures soared 8.1 percent among Connecticut homeowners, 49.1 million Americans face food insecurity and food stamps now feed one in eight Americans .

The University of Connecticut, which ranked a hardly laudable 34th in Kiplinger’s ranking of best public university values, might merit the increase if its salaries and pensions were not among the most bloated on the state’s payroll.

(Kiplinger’s number one value, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with an in-state cost of $15,296, graduates 76 percent of its students within four years. UConn graduates 56 percent of its students within that time frame [--] for nearly $5,000 more.)

In 2008, the 12 highest-paid state employees all worked for the University of Connecticut or the UConn Health Center, according to the Yankee Institute.

Last year, as many of the country’s public universities cut courses and raised tuition, the salaries and benefits of their presidents rose, reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Gee, the president of Ohio State University who recommended the shift in the tenure process, topped the list with a $1.6 million salary. The Yankee Institute reports Michael J. Hogan, president of the University of Connecticut, earned $616,240 last year. That’s nearly $200,000 more than the $436,111 median salary of most university leaders.

All of these increases occurred at a time of deep dips to colleges and significant reductions in endowments. Let’s review that equation: Plunging endowments plus shrinking donations plus escalating tuition costs equals increased salaries. Yup. That university economics makes about as much sense as tenure.

c. Republican American, 2010.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com.

Doubt, seen as our adversary, may be our friend

All I wanted to do was postpone the wedding.

 But there were those invitations, he said.

Of course. The invitaions.

 In 1985 I married a man about whom I had grave doubts largely because we had set in motion a process that seem to have acquired its own momentum.

Within two years, we divorced and I was left with a framed wedding invitation and the not very consoling satisfaction that I had been right from the start. It was cold comfort. Nearly 80 percent of men and women say they believe it was a mistake to marry their spouse, according to a recent suvvey. Some 48 percent of women and 42 percent of men say they were certain before they tied the knot that their nuptials would end in divorce.

So why did they even bother?

Carl Weisman, who conducted the study, says most of the respondents who admitted their qualms simply assumed that marriage was the next logical step in a relationship. Well, they figure, we’ve got to do something with this ardor and amity, why not marriage? Secondly, and lamentably, marriage is often employed as a salve for loneliness – the great sacramental cauterization of a wound that won’t heal. Anyone with the sense God gave a goat has got to know marriage is about as effective an antidote for loneliness as ginseng, but it doesn’t seem to stop anybody.

Benjamin Frankly famously advised, “When in doubt, don’t,” which seems sage advice in a country where nearly half the marriages end in divorce. But distinguishing between pre-ceremony jitters and justifiable anxiety over what could be a passing fancy is a delicate business. My brother and I walked rings around our Massachusetts neighborhood the morning of his wedding, as he despaired over the wisdom of his decision and I lamely assured him that he was doing the right thing. When it all came undone in a tangle of animosity and disillusionment 15 years later, I rebuked myself for my perfunctory encouragement years before.

“What do you do when you are not sure?” John Patrick Shanley’s play “Doubt” begins. Most of us, like the naïf Sister James in the play, would prefer to sidestep the question all together. Ambivalence is gut-churning and destabilizing and many of us would rather make a decision than  squirm in an eddy of doubt. And yet Shanley reminds us that doubt is not the villain it seems. It is the unsteady electricity on which we feed. He suggests, a bit like the British novelist Graham Greene that it is when we are not sure that we are most alive.

Uncertainty breeds a vigorous engagement with the world, an intensity absent in a life of easy answers and pat solutions. Like any profound experience, including faith, love rides on squally seas. Faith without doubt, the devout tell us, is dead. Is the same true of love? 

From love, not only with spouses, but with friends and family, we seek a certitude that too often eludes us. That may be because we’re never too sure of ourselves.

In the years since my disastrous first encounter with marriage, after having found a deeper, more sincere affection, I have learned to value doubt. It is an instinct, like all of them, there for our preservation — and sometimes our amusement. It destabilizes us. It addles us. It frightens us. But it opens us up, too, in ways that teaches us more about ourselves than we are sometimes ready to learn.  ”Trust me” seems so easy to say but hard to embrace. And yet in matters most important to us, it is the only choice we’ve got.

Set ‘em up Joe I got some Tyler to read

When I was in my mid-teens, my mother used to take me to nightclubs to drum up work.

She was an aspiring cabaret singer and I was a bench-warming jock with too little to do. While my mother talked up her act with the manager in the back, I would sit at the bar, sucking down cranberry juice laced with little half-moon limes.

It was wonderful to sit at a bar during the day time and look at the array of liquor bottles glinting on the shelves, their gothic labels reflecting off the mirrors behind them like shimmering chalices against stained-glass windows. At a bar one day not far from the Boston Common I asked the bartender if people ordered liquor like I plucked candies out of a box of Russell Stover. Did drinkers savor Courvoisier one day and Cointreau the next? Did they sample Amaretto on Friday and come back for the Sambuca on Saturday?

The guy crossed his log-like arms over his beefy chest and considered the shelves of liquor absorbedly. “Funny thing about people and their booze,” he said. “They come in here, order the same damned thing, the same damned way all the time.” He looked at me with the tired, weathered look of a man who had heard too much. “I’m gonna tell you something about people, honey: How they order a drink is like how they live their lives: It’s the same order, over and over. The only thing that changes is the glass.”

I thought about my bartender philosopher after finishing Anne Tyler’s latest novel, “Noah’s Compass.” Tyler has written 18 novels, all of which I’ve read, all of which have received critical acclaim and most of which have ended up on the best seller list. Tyler never gives interviews. She never goes on book tours. She has a Pulitzer Prize, a devoted audience base and a literary stature few American authors can claim.

And yet all of her novels, including her latest, are essentially the same.

Noah, the protagonist of her last book, is essentially Malcolm Leary, the protagonist of “The Accidental Tourist,” who is essentially, Ian Bedloe, the lead character in “Saint Maybe,” who is basically Barnaby Gaitlin of “A Patchwork Planet.” Tyler’s men tend to be hapless, lackluster clods, solitary victims of their own anemic reliability. That they are typically aligned with some of the most impulsive, eccentric women in literature is one of Tyler’s great innovations and probably one of her great lessons, too: What these men need are women whose socks are too bright.

Liam Pennywell is, like so many Tyler anti-heroes, a man who has had, as an ex-wife says, only a “glancing relationship with his own life.” The book begins with Liam trying to remember what may have been the most exciting event of his life [Dash] an assault. That he was unconscious for the crime is a metaphor for his own sodden existence, which he has not so much lived, as lived through. “I am not especially unhappy,” Liam muses, “but I don’t see any particular reason to go on living.”

It’s easy to see Tyler’s own unbroken string of successes as mirroring that of her characters; they keep living the same pallid lives; she keeps writing the same book. But Tyler is too smart and too resourceful for that. I suspect that in her books she is trying to tell readers the same thing my bartender friend told me 30 years ago. As Willa Cather put it, “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

In one of her rare interviews (by e-mail, naturally) Tyler told The New York Times that “The real heroes …in my books are first the ones who manage to endure, and second the ones who somehow are able to grant other people the privacy of the space around them and yet still produce some warmth.”

It is not a bad lesson to absorb in the maw of this recession, where the country’s obsession with positive thinking can make many feel a bit guilty for our lack of pluck. Happiness, we are told can stave off cancer, prevent heart attacks and help us live longer. And yet scientists also tell us that there is likely a set point for cheeriness, just as there is for weight. We have, as many of Tyler’s characters discover, chances to adjust that a little — but only a little.

My bartender may have a point. What Tyler’s work reminds us is that we can always apply a little extra sparkle, always exert a little more warmth.

Jenny Sanford’s Pious Ramblings

More magazine named Jenny Sanford one of its 10 Women Who Wouldn’t Shut Up last month. 

At the time, South Carolina’s first lady had done a lot of shutting up, most famously not dishing dirt on her priapic husband, Mark Sanford, when the rest of the country wanted her to squish him like a bug. It was Mrs. Sanford’s decorous dismissal of her husband’s philandering

How refreshing not to have a wronged wife stand dry-eyed by her husband’s side like an anesthetized doormat. No more steely-jawed chumps pledging eternal fealty to some skirt-chasing slug who got his Dockers docked.

The more Jenny Sanford distanced herself from the bumbling bawler who claimed he lost his heart in Argentina, the classier she looked and the more farcical he looked. Jenny Sanford said a mouthful when she said next to nothing at all.Now Jenny Sanford is talking.

And it would have better for all of us if she’d just zip it.

The wronged wife is now criss-crossing the country, promoting her new book, “Staying True.” In it, she reveals what we all guessed about her: She’s an intelligent, pious, doting mother who happened to marry a sniveling, self-centered boob.

It happens.

Sanford said she wrote the book because she thought she could “help women cultivate character and faith,” which is a motivation a lot more gracious than most of us could muster.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say. But in what is fast developing into a separate literary genre — the wronged political wife memoir— fury has been defanged.

That’s a little deflating for the feisty among us who were dying for these martyrs to get up off the mat and deck these self-indulgent worms. Instead, most of what we get is pious homilies about the virtue of suffering and the balm that faith can bestow.

Forgive a little venomous vengeance from this woman of faith, but I was really hoping at least one of these wronged wretches would kick these rakes in the teeth. Oh, for a little Ivana Trump!

At least Elizabeth Edwards admitted wrestling with her faith:  “I cannot understand how I merited these blows,” she wrote.

If there is a tale more tawdry than the Edwards’ hillbilly hoedown, Maury Povich has yet to find it.This is Southern Gothic with DNA and video. If it wasn’t humiliating enough that Edwards’ husband was thinner and prettier than she was, he took up with a spicy blonde while his wife was still battling terminal cancer.

Don’t wait for the school to do it

My mother told me about sex over the dinner table when I was about 12.

My brother had come home from playing in a kid’s tree fort, puzzled by a graphic hand gesture one of the boys had made. He wanted to know what it meant.

And so, over a plate of elbow macaroni and ground beef drenched in Puttanesca sauce, I learned the facts of life.

Unsurprisingly, I lost my appetite.

I was also temporarily incapable of looking anyone over the age of 20 in the eye for several weeks. For months, the convent loomed attractive. I might have joined if I wasn’t certain my mother would summarily disown me.

What I got from my mother were facts. I also got, from an unlikely source, a religious perspective on sex that I didn’t get three years later in public high school. My mother told me that sex was a “gift from God.”

Earlier this month, a study published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine Monday found that 12-year-olds given an abstinence-only message were significantly more likely to delay having sex than those receiving more comprehensive sex education.

As the Christian Science Monitor put it: “Abstinence-only education does work. Sometimes.”

The qualifier is critical.

A plethora of early studies, including federally funded studies by the Cochrane collaboration and the Mathematica Policy that found abstinence education had no effect on teen’s sexual behavior. Finally, a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health looked at 934 high school students, specifically scrutinizing those who took the “virginity pledge.” That study also found no difference in the rate of teens having sex between those taking the virginity pledge and those who did not. What it did find was that those who took the virginity pledge were less likely to use contraceptives.

In spite of the program’s demonstrable ineffectiveness, funding for it tripled, from $73 million a year in 2001 to $204 million per year in 2008.

So what was different about this last abstinence-only program? For one thing, the students it targeted were quite young –12—and the moralistic tone of the instruction was ripped away. Instructors,counseled participants to delay sex “until they are ready,” rather than until marriage, the Monitor reports, adding, “The program also did not include a moralistic tone or disparage condom use, and instructors discussed contraceptive use if the subject came up during the course of the class.”

The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the industrialized world, with some 750,000 teens getting pregnant annually. From 2002-2006, Waterbury’s teen pregnancy rate was either double or near double the state average. It is fourth in the teen pregnancy rate, behind Hartford, New Britain and Windham.

If we can’t figure out a way to stop kids from having kids, we’re going to have more kids living in poverty, failing in school, suffering family violence and sexual abuse, landing in jail or becoming teen parents themselves. All of these outcomes researchers say are more likely to teen parents.

And while we fulminate about whether sex education should be given with a cudgel, with a condom or with a cautionary tale, we might want to look at what, when and how we tell our own children about sex. Squeamishness about “the talk” means that more kids are learning the most crucial facts of life from anybody other than their own parents. And yet when you ask them, more teens, 38 percent, pointed to their parents as the biggest influence on their sexual behavior ‑ more than friends, the media, educators, siblings, or religious organizations.

So don’t wait for the school to tell your kid ‘No, never; Yes, sometimes” or “Sure, use this.” Have the talk. This country has the highest birthrate and abortion rate thanany other country. That can’t continue. We need a little bit of morality here and a lot of sense. That begins at home, at the kitchen table, before it ends up on the street.

Why the skies are not friendly anymore

Somewhere around the sixth concourse of Hell, I began to feel that the terrorists had already won.

I was in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, ferried from one franchise-encrusted terminal to the next by human conveyor belt that makes me feel like a box of Sugar Smacks headed for the UPC scanner. After a two-hour delay, my flight had been cancelled, and I and hundreds of other bleary-eyed, acquiescent voyagers were heading with somnolent resignation into the bleak night to lick our wounds.

“I never want to get on a plane again,” one man groaned, as a trio of red-shirted Delta salesmen proffered “free round-trip tickets” for those who sign up for its frequent flyer program. “What’s second prize?” a guy next to me quipped.

It was hard to imagine that anyone en route to this River Styx would weigh anchor again, but hope is about all the airlines have left.

American airline passengers are among the most dissatisfied in the country, according to the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction index. Of the 19 industries the group asked consumers about in 2007, the only groups that scored worse were the cable and satellite TV industry, reports. Even the IRS did better than the airline industry. A similar study by JD Power Associates found that overall customer satisfaction with airlines in 2009 declined for the third consecutive year to a four-year low, in spite of a five-minute improvement in on-time arrivals. But none of that improvement has been reflected how passengers actually feel about flying.

Never mind that the U.S. Department of Transportation reports that 88 percent of flights in this country land when they say they will. People on these planes find the experience wretched. Largely, this has to do with the in-flight experience, in which airlines insist on squishing the most obese population in the world in seats designed for Giacometti sculptures. Too, the cutbacks in the meager alimentary perks make flying on an American airline a bit like being freighted by cattle car.

“It used to be we would get free snacks on a plane,” said David Van Amburg, director of ASCI. “Now, not only do we not get a meal, but we’re charged for a bag of chips. There’s a perception that we’re paying more in bits and pieces we’re not getting any more for it.”

The security that is the necessary byproduct of a precarious world feels not only onerous, but humiliating, protracted, futile and absurd to the point of inanity. Most of us are willing to endure certain personal intrusions [Dash] removal of footwear, rummaging through baggage, being irradiated metal detectors [Dash] in the interests of public safety. But when fanatics slither through seamlessly, it’s easy to feel that confiscating one’s Yoplait is somewhere between excessive and futile. The answer [Dash] additional and more intrusive scrutiny taxes [Dash] one’s logic, wallet and nerves. It can be enough to cause one to give up on air travel entirely [Dash] a crippling economic blow surely relished by our enemies.

Beyond the rigors of flawed security, though, there is this bungled logic: Capitalism is about many things, but fundamentally, it’s about choice. That’s why Starbucks has 14 types of coffee. This plethora of choice, as Barry Schwartz has noted, can be dizzying to the point of numbness. But how is it that although I have 47 types of toothpastes to choose from, when it comes to travel, I have only two: the highway, or the skyway?

Granted, the country still has Amtrak, a perpetually debt-ridden rail service that only makes money here in the Northeast. But while its trains putter on at 35 miles per hour, trains in France and Japan hum through the countryside at speeds approaching 200 miles an hour. Riding one of these trains in France was among the most pleasurable travel experiences I’ve had. The trains are clean, efficient, comfortable and prompt. When I ride Metro North into Grand Central, I feel fortunate if I can find a lavatory, let alone one with toilet tissue.

Last year, the president announced an $8 billion push for high-speed rail to begin work on 10 high-speed rail corridors as an alternative to driving or flying. He added another $8 million this year. But the money will all be spent before we see a single train in place. Perhaps some innovative capitalist, a modern-day Cornelius Vanderbilt, will see the gapping crater in the nation’s infrastructure and figure out a way to give Americans the alternative they demand – and deserve.

So Women Are Smarter and Richer, What Now?

My friend is a “Sugar Mama.”

She’s got a six figure job, a mansion in a stately Boston suburb, a house on the Vineyard— and a husband to stay home with the kids.

This arrangement has given her pause over the years. There have been acute spasms of guilt when she was ready to ditch the whole stiletto-and-Blackberry thing for Silly Putty and Build-a-Bear. But her less-marketable husband could never pull in the Croesus purse that she does, and so the couple has decided to do what many others have done, have one parent stay in the cave and the other slay the dragons.

Except that in my friend’s case, the woman is the dragon slayer.

And in the eight years that she has been pulling this off, a lot of women have joined her.

A new study finds that married women are making, as Katie Couric might say, a lot of jack.

The study, from the Pew Center for Research, found that more women are marrying men with less education and lower earnings. Men, increasingly, are marrying women who are better educated and make more money.

The Pew study followed news that the number of working mothers who are sole breadwinners in their families rose last year to an all-time high, while the number of stay-at-home dads inched upwards. The U.S. Census reported that in most of the homes with women as breadwinners, both parents had worked until the recession, which sliced with particular ferocity into male-dominated jobs like finance and construction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports hat 78 percent of jobs lost during the recession were held by men, and that women’s wages have risen by 1.2 percent more than men’s over the past two years.

Anybody who had been following education trends was unlikely to be surprised at the findings; women have been outpacing males in college enrollment for some years now. College degrees tend to increase earning power, even in a landscape when women still earn 78 percent of what men earn. At some point, those women were going to marry, produce children and face the thorny question of who was going to sacrifice what.

It seems hard to believe that only a few years ago, hard-core feminists were lobbying grenades into the “Mommy Wars” lambasting uber-educated women for “opting out” of the labor force to spend time with their children. Fewer women are able to do that today; the Census reports that the number of stay at home moms declined from 5.3 million to 5.1 million last year.

All of this is a seismic shift in American marriage; only 40 years ago, teachers, stewardesses and others were summarily fired if they got married. “Marriage is a different deal than it was 40 years ago,” Pew economist Roger Fry, told USA Today. “Typically, most wives did not work, so for economic well-being, marriage penalized guys with more mouths to feed by no extra income. Now most wives work. For guys, the economics of marriage have become much more beneficial.”

Marriage has always been a good bet for men. As Elizabeth Gilbert points out in her new book, “committed,” Married men live longer than single men; . . . married men accumulate more wealth than single men; married men are far less likely to die a violent death than single men; married men report themselves to be much happier than single men; and married men suffer less from alcoholism, drug addiction, and depression than do single men.”

And now it’s even better.

None of this means that men are “opting out” of wingtips for Webkinz. Stay-at-home dads represent a mere 1 percent of the population. And many women agonize over the wrenching decision between maternity and material needs. But certain aspects of marriage and society are sure to change. In spite of their increased involvement with housework, men still lag significantly behind women in household chores. The National Science Foundation reports that while married women with more than three kids spend about 28 hours weekly on housework, married men spend only 10.

More critically, as Gail Collins points out in her new book, “When Everything Changed,” for all feminism has accomplished, it has left the question of caring for children in the dustbin. Women still wrestle with questions of child care that continue to baffle, dishearten and divide them.

Most women are not Sugar Mamas. But in two-thirds of American families, according to the Shriver Report, they are either the primary or co-breadwinner. Most of them haven’t the luxury of a stay-at-home Dad. For those women, sprinting from work to home, where they confront the “Second Shift” of laundry, cooking and shuttling kids to and from activities, the news that women make more and are educated better is an abstraction cloaked as a victory. They don’t feel empowered; they just feel tired, and harbor a sneaking suspicion that if men bore children, this question would already be solved.

When You Care Enought To Send the Very Least

This year, the recession and technology combined to produce a simulacrum of holiday warmth: The e-mail holiday greeting.

For those of us who care enough to send the very least, e-mail offered the opportunity to prove our desultory commitment to good cheer. If your office was anything like ours, it was noticeably lacking in the heartwarming holiday cards businesses send to ensure first place in your hearts in the coming year.

Instead, businesses cut costs and talked turkey, finally acknowledging the perfunctory nature of the exercise by mass-mailing e-mails to hordes of near-strangers on whom their fortunes rely.

It was a peculiar acknowledgement of the obvious: seasonal greetings have become empty gestures, one more hollow obligation of civility that we can no longer afford and whose worthy we roundly doubt.

I am one of those endangered oddballs who actually look forward to Christmas cards, ever expectant that they will contain more than a salutation and signature and will, in fact, contain something resembling novelty and earnestness. A lot can happen in a year, particularly a year like the one we’ve just endured, and Christmas cards, from friends, family or businesses allow the opportunity to connect in ways that we have convinced ourselves we are too busy to do the rest of the year.

So desperate am I in my quest for intimate expression that I have come to relish those self-congratulatory “family newsletters” where everyone is smarter, richer and better preserved than I.

In his new book, “Yours, Ever: People and Their Letters,” Thomas Mallon revisits the world where apprehension, hope and the mailbox were inextricably linked. It is, for most of us, a lost and romanticized world, mourned and over as if its demise was engineered by external forces and not of our own making. We have abandoned the letter; it has not abandoned us. And yet most of us pose as victims, rather than agents of its destruction.

“Yours Ever” is a buoyant, wistful ode to what we have discarded, and perhaps a clarion call to resurrect an art form we have come to believe as technologically redundant. No one who knows anything about language or emotion can reasonably claim that e-mail replaces the letter any more than “LOL” substitutes for a friend’s hearty laugh.  What, as Edmund Morris has noted, might have been the effect if Ronald Reagan’s announcement that he had Alzheimer’s disease had been e-mailed. It was the pained rawness of Reagan’s hand-written letter that gave his revelation poignancy.

In a more penurious time in my life, the only obstacle that kept me from letter-writing was the cost of a stamp. In college, my obliging grandmother would send me a book of them along with her hastily penned, rambling and indiscriminate reflections whose receipt I treasured. It was my grandmother who showed me that one could write a letter about anything, even a joke whose punch-line one could not remember. What was important was the spirit behind it and the jauntiness inherent in it.

John Donne confessed to Sir Henry Wootton in 1628, that he “preferred writing little, and that in a rather slovenly manner, to not writing at all.”

But the letter has always been prey to expedience. Writing to Gustav Flaubert in 1869, George Sand bemoaned the effect the telegram had had on the letter and worried about “how full of fact and free of uncertainty life will be when such procedures have been still more simplified.”

Uncertainty, as Sand presciently divined, is the bete noir of the modern world. It is why we have SUVs impaled with GPS’, cell phones, Blackberries and televisions bleating in every public square. Nothing is worse than being out-of-touch, except, as any anxiety-ridden CEO will tell you, being constantly in touch.

And yet in a world in which delayed gratification has taken on the mantle of hard labor, a letter sent from a friend can be a rare and exquisite delicacy, a bit like personal customer service unscathed by a 1-800 number to Bangalore. The letter, reviewer Stacy Schiff notes is part of “that forgiving territory where you could safely park your despair, issue a cry from the heart, offer advice, share the ancillary epiphany, exact revenge; where you might be, in short, melancholy, tentative, beastly, sulky brooding, nuts.”

Every month or so, I receive a letter from a dear friend whose hypnotic Palmer script and juicily sprawling letters have become a singular luxury. My friend typically includes carefully scissored newspaper articles, often with passages underlined. The letters themselves can ramble about anxiety over an impending family visit, or gently grumble about this or that political imbroglio, or share a moment that seemed mundane but turned epiphanaic. I savor them like an after-dinner liqueur, waiting for the precious interval between wakefulness and sleep. They bring my friend nearer in a way no HTML can. They are the gifts that defy imitation, an intimate gesture in a world otherwise barren of them, the last vestige of authenticity in a world in which the simulated will never entirely replace the real.

Contact: Tracey@traceyosh.com

It’s Diane v. Katie: Snore….

Now that it no longer matters, women are taking over the nightly news.Diane Sawyer joined the Holy Trinity of network news anchors on Monday, taking the ABC anchor desk over from the retiring Charles Gibson. She joins Katie Couric, the ultimate morning gal whose move to The CBS Nightly News in 2006 was a riveting television moment of self-immolation.

 

Since that “jump the shark” moment, Couric has dog-paddled her way back to some respectability. Her Sarah Palin interview was among the most news-making moments of the last presidential campaign, revealing that Palin could not recall a single newspaper or book that she had read. (In a twist of irony so ridiculous as to be sublime, Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” is now at the top of The New York Times Bestseller lists.)

Television loves a cat fight and media critics (most of them male) have clucked over the Sawyer-Couric rematch as being somewhere between Tanya and Nancy and Alexis and Krystal. Nobody really wanted to see the avuncular Gibson take on the dapper Brian Williams in a mud-wrestling match, but evidently the Betty and Veronica myth dies hard. Let the girls have at it.

The irony of all of this is that 33 years after Barbara Walters first took to the nightly news anchor desk with the surly Harry Reasoner, the evening news is less newsworthy than ever. On a good night, the best you can hope for is a little Tabasco sauce on Brian Williams’ tie.

Most people today are too busy wrenching off their own ties or slipping out of their low-heeled pumps to even consider turning on the tube at 6:30 p.m.. Many of those are lucky enough to have enough time to pre-heat the oven. Because the news is everywhere [--] scrolling across your cell phone like an Indiglo caterpillar, blathering away at you in the doctor’s office and the gas pump, the evening news has devolved from “must-see” TV to a “maybe-if-I-have-a-second” afterthought.

Most of us get our news from local TV, which is to real news what Salisbury Steak is to Angus Porterhouse. In 1980, nearly 52 million Americans watched the nightly news. Today, the evening news leader, NBC, is lucky to grab a hair under 10 million.

Never mind that health care costs are on track to eat up 20 percent of your income or that kids in suburban D.C. think the only thing better than an Alexandria townhouse is a tent in Helmand Province, what “Today Show” audiences want to know is: will David Goldman have his little boy back in the U.S. of A. for Christmas?

For advertisers, the big bucks are in the morning shows, which have become such a vehicle for pumping products they’re only a 1-800 number away from infomercials. The only topic the morning shows seem to like better than virtual catalog shopping is missing children.

Here’s a typical morning’s headlines on the “Today” show’s web page: “Sarah Jessica Parker ’shocked’ at Hugh Grant’s nails” and “Missing Mom’s husband acts ‘abnormal.’”

 

 

 

The pedigreed Sawyer (Cornell, Georgetown) initially seemed like she was slumming it on “GMA,” like a night-club chanteuse expected to lead round-robin sing-a-longs at pre-K, but she was a real gamer. She and co-host Robin Roberts seemed to have genuine chemistry, an authenticity in stark relief to the forced chumminess of the “Today Show,” where they’d like us to believe that Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry go off and have pedicures together.

Nothing has been the same on morning television since Couric left. She had the empathy, sincerity and, alas, perkiness that all of us should have at 7 in the morning. But her charm has not translated well to the evening news, where she seems like the chirpy sorority gal forced to button down and get serious for her first job at a law firm. Sawyer has always seemed a natural for evening, with a poise and dignity finely calibrated to the seriousness of the task. Her overdue capture of the anchor chair is symptomatic of a news business still male-dominated.

While media critics have been licking their chops over the Diane v. Katie matchup, the real story is that the nightly news is Williams’ to lose. Couric’s CBS lurks hopelessly in the cellar with scarcely a spider hole of hope. NBC leads the nightly newscasts by nearly a million viewers. It is king of the evenings just as it has been king of the morning, deserving or not.

If Sawyer can muster the audience to topple Williams from his throne, that will be news only in the sense of The Wall Street Journal besting USA Today in the circulation wars. When the world has stopped paying attention, any victory is pyrrhic at best.

c. Republican American, 2009.

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Viewers

Danny before; Danny after

Being the biggest loser, is, of course, a winning formula both for the leviathans who compete to reduce their portly physiques, and for NBC, which gains in ratings nearly what contestants lose in pounds.

But there is a manipulative stench about the sad sack narrative of “The Biggest Loser” that should give dieters pause. Yes, it’s a wretched thing that these people have walled themselves in through their own gluttony, but surely there is more to these people than their girth.

The program presents them as oafish slugs who can’t get through a few push-ups without begging for a Yoo-Hoo. Once transformed, their emaciation produces a kind of mania that prompts them into ludicrous convictions. “Anybody can do it,” a rabbit-eyed Cahill told “Today Show” viewers a bit too ecstatically. Well, if anybody could do it, Danny, then anybody would<$> do it and we would not have a country in which obesity-related diseases are threatening to derail the already tottering health-care system.

And that’s only one of “The Biggest Loser’s” dangers: It makes the implausible seem not only probable, but swift, dramatic and life-changing.

The bigger problem is that losing the equivalent of a college football linebacker in a shade over six months is dangerous, probably temporary and potentially deadly. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” Dr. Charles Burant, of the University of Michigan Health System told the New York Times.

Ryan C. Benson, who lost 122 pounds on the program in 2005, is now approaching his 330-pound starting weight. He, like a few other contestants, has spoken publicly about the fasting and dehydrating techniques that left him urinating blood. Other contestants, like Alaska’s Kai Hibbard, who lost 118 pounds in the series’ third season, told the Anchorage Daily News how she forced herself to vomit and swallowed laxatives to lose weight, only to gain most of it back. Eric Chopin, who lost 214 of his 404 pounds in 2006, has also gained nearly 122 of those pounds back.

Others maintain their weight loss by exercising four hours a day or limiting their intake to Jell-O and leafy green vegetables.

Unsurprisingly, most of us don’t have the four to six hours that most of these contestants spend in the gym. We also don’t have draconian trainers who alternately cajole, humiliate and embolden us.

Still, we love to buy into the fantasy. So never mind that Oprah Winfrey, one of the world’s richest women with a battalion of chefs, trainers, doctors and experts, can’t get her weight under control. It will be different for us.

But when you’re dealing with a population, 64 percent of which is overweight or obese, you have to start by telling the truth. And the truth is that the best weight loss is a slow, steady, painful lifestyle shift in which exercise is a non-negotiable component. As Dr. Harvey Simon, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the Los Angeles Times, “People who set unrealistic goals often end up seeking solace in the pantry, thus becoming the biggest losers of all.”