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Media
September 21, 2005
Surveying Ivy League Motherhood
Note: This article has been updated. See the end of the post for details. One likely reason that Louise Story came to the conclusion in her front page New York Times article that most Ivy League women would rather be stay-at-home moms than part of the workforce: A skewed sample. She arrives at a conclusion about "women at the nation's most elite colleges" based on spot interviews with students from a few Ivy League schools and then a survey with students at one school: her own. Last year, Story sent out a 37-question survey to a group of freshman and senior women at Yale University, her (and my) alma mater. While it is indeed possible that 60% of those who replied said "they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely" when they had kids, as Story writes, it's doubtful that those who replied are representative of all Ivy League women.
Media
September 19, 2005
2005's Best-Reviewed Steve Carell Movie
In this week's edition of Blurb Racket—the Gelf feature in which we take a close look at those critic blurbs that are a fixture of ads for movies, books, and more—see breakdowns of blurbs for 40 Year Old Virgin, HBO's Rome, I Am Charlotte Simmons, and more. While if you click through you'll find an outlandish claim in the ad copy for Virgin, this week's winner of the Bogus Blurb of the Week award comes in an ad for Indecision, a book by Benjamin Kunkel:
Media
September 16, 2005
Kaplan Rocks, Sez Kaplan
Metro, one of the Top 10 free commuter dailies in New York City, has a special section today about business school. An article about preparing for the GMAT, entitled "Countdown to test day," has exactly one quoted source, from Kaplan Test Prep. Her name, in a delicious coincidence, is Susan Kaplan. She delivers several candid, unbiased tips, like "It's such an investment to go to business school, so take the time to invest in prep."
Media
September 14, 2005
Google Images
Perhaps in an effort to burnish its reputation as the master of all things internet-related, Google today launched a website that allows people to search the content of blogs throughout the web. Given that there is still much confusion about how many blogs are out there (see Carl's WSJ.com column), as well as dissent about what defines a blog and how that content should be searched, Google may have some work to do before it reels in smaller competitors in the field like Technorati and Ice Rocket. But surely Google's blog-search tool doesn't deserve the picture the BBC assigned to it.
Media
September 12, 2005
Those Lucky Celebrities
New York's Metro newspaper, Gelf's favorite free commuter daily, had this hot scoop last Thursday:
Media
September 9, 2005
What Would Sistani Do?
In this week's edition of Zooming In, Gelf's quasi-weekly round-up of undercovered local stories from around the world: Japan's Jayson Blair; robotic camel jockeys; the mobile phone throwing world championships; and China's newest pop idols. One of our favorite stories this week concerns advice given out by a certain Ayatolla.
Media
September 6, 2005
Putting it in Perspective
In the aftermath of great disasters, sports columnists are in a fix. They need to write about sports, but they don't want to seem so callous as to not address the national emergency at hand. Hence the "putting it in perspective" genre, in which the writers announce that, at a time like this, sports are pretty silly. Within the genre, though, there are subdivisions. Columnists can declare whether this silliness is a good or bad thing, and opine about how the tragedy has changed the sporting world. Gelf breaks them down:
Media
August 31, 2005
Rising Faster Than a Pensioner on Viagra
In our second Gelf Cliché Watch, we have compiled even more of the assorted random pop-culture references that journalists like to sprinkle on their prose. Here's one of our favorites, but there are plenty more after the jump. Ballard's problem is that he's filling a niche that has been shrinking faster than Lindsay Lohan's waistline. He's a master of the cinematic endangered species known as "family film"—Chicago Tribune, August 5. The astute Gelf reader will remember that the exact same phrasing about Miss Lohan was used in a Newsweek article about Blockbuster profiled in Gelf's first Cliché Watch. Gelf does not believe that there are proprietary rights to similes.
Media
August 30, 2005
Is 'Mail-Order Bride' a Racist Slur?
John Brogden, a prominent Australian politician, was poised to take over as the premier of New South Wales after the resignation of his long-time political rival, Bob Carr. But celebrating at a bar soon after the announcement one month ago, Brogden committed a series of public gaffes that led to his resignation as the leader of the Liberal Party. Certainly, Brogden is a grade-A sleazebag. But is he being vilified for the wrong thing?
Media
August 29, 2005
Celebrities Who Give Interviews Deserve Their Privacy
In an interview with Time magazine this week, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she doesn't like the way celebrities publicize their relationships in the press. "Our marriage is between us," said Paltrow of her relationship with Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin, in an interview she granted to a magazine with a circulation of 4.1 million. "If we decide to continue being together or not, it's our business." (You can read more in this Associated Press story about the Time article.)
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