Poor Miss Utah. She got asked an interesting question about the latest stats showing that 40 percent of women are the primary breadwinners in their households, and she fumbled.

Fumbled is an understatement.

But poor us (America) for continuing to demand an annual pageant where women strut around in bikinis and heels looking like a different shade of Barbie. A pageant that is 99 percent about body and one percent about brain. We demand it, and then we viciously mock these women when every few years one of them majorly screws up a question. Or answers it in a way that we don’t like.

Who can forget when Carrie Prejean got cornered by Perez Hilton on gay marriage, a red-hot question back when the gay marriage battles were waging in her state, California.

Hilton: “Vermont recently became the fourth state to legalize same sex-marriage. Do you think every state should follow…

Continue Reading >

There is going to be a big reveal this week in the world of Marvel Comics. There is even talk that a main character is about to die (in fact, by the time you read this, you may know what the big news is). Age of Ultron, a series written by the star comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis, reaches its climactic issue #10 tomorrow, and the ending is so secret that the comics themselves are going to be shipped in poly bags to prevent unauthorized peeking. Apparently only five people, all of whom work for Marvel, know the final pages.

For the uninitiated, the surprise involves something very simple: several Marvel characters (Wolverine, Spider-Man, Sue Storm, and others) have been traveling back in time to prevent the creation of Ultron, an artificial intelligence robot that winds up replicating itself and taking over the world. It’s all very Terminator. My own…

Continue Reading >

As it currently stands, the San Antonio Spurs are leading the Miami Heat three games to two in the best-of-seven NBA Finals. It’s been an exciting, intriguing series thus far, and fans are being treated to quality basketball being played at the highest level of the sport. Despite the grumblings of those who remember a professional basketball product during the 1980s and 90s that, in many ways, was vastly superior to that of today’s, the National Basketball Association of 2013 undoubtedly features an impressive roster of physical specimens, sharp-shooters, and ball-hawkers who put on spectacles of athleticism night after night.

But I would posit that there is more to this “the NBA used to be better 30 years ago” talk than can be easily dismissed as the ruminations of old-timers who cling to the way things were when they were young. Sports, like politics, are downstream of culture, and…

Continue Reading >

The United Kingdom is telling women to “get fertile.” More specifically, the pregnancy test company, First Response, is running ads featuring British celebrity, Kate Garraway, looking like an old lady in her third trimester, announcing the cause to “Get Britain Fertile.”

I would say that the picture shocked me, except that I basically see it all the time. Pregnant women with grey hairs are actually rather common in my hood. One obstetrician in my first OB-GYN practice, one of the largest in the greater-D.C. area, said I was the youngest pregnant woman she had ever seen in her practice. So did my labor nurse. My baby was born 28 minutes before my 27th birthday, so I’m not exactly teen mom. When I brought my baby in to the pediatrician for her three-day check-up, the pediatrician thought my mom was the mom and said they’d just had a new mom my…

Continue Reading >

Editor’s note: On May 30, Acculturated’s Ryan Duffy published a piece titled, “Dating Miracles Can Happen,” which went viral. In that post, Ryan mentioned Peter Backus, an economist who devised a formula for calculating the statistical odds  of meeting the man or woman of your dreams on any given night. According to Peter’s formula, the odds are exceedingly low—and they get even worse after college. Susan Patton, an alumna of Princeton University, got in trouble recently for pointing this fact out; to help women beat the odds, she encouraged Princeton women to find a mate in college, where they are surrounded by many eligible men. But should men and women who graduate from college single abandon all hope of finding their true love? In a series of posts that we will publish periodically throughout the summer, Acculturated bloggers and writers will weigh in on this issue. Ryan will also periodically weigh in, charting his progress finding “the one.”—Emily

Continue Reading >

What is it about Tim Tebow’s public displays of faith that intrigue us so much? This week’s acquisition of the young QB by the New England Patriots, and the subsequent public chattering, offered an occasion for R.J. Moeller to reflect on this very question. His excellent post earns this week’s Post of the Week honors. Check it out!

Continue Reading >

H.L. Mencken nailed it perfectly, and almost a hundred years ago. The best kind of man, he wrote, always has “a wide streak of woman in him.” That insight is found in Mencken’s 1918 book In Defense of Women.

It’s unfortunate that this axiom is ignored or misunderstood today. As a result, you wind up with a lot of social critics, particularly conservatives, defending men as violent, promiscuous, sex and sports obsessed, and illiterate. Because, you see, that’s just how we are. And women have to learn to like it and stop hounding us.

The most recent example is Men on Strike: Why Men are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream, by Helen Smith. This is a hysterical and hectoring book whose basic claim is that men are verbally, spiritually, and psychologically abused by women, and therefore are dropping out of their marital and societal obligations.…

Continue Reading >

“It’s 10pm. Do you know where your children are?” When I was growing up in New York, Fox 5 used to pose that question every night at ten. If we were all watching TV together, my mother liked to respond, “Yes, they’re right here.”

Similarly, I always like to know where my toddler is and who she’s with, but it seems that Don Draper isn’t quite as picky about his own brood. On a recent episode of Mad Men, Don is working through the weekend, and he’s left his three children with their stepmother, Megan. Of course, Megan has theater plans, and so, when Don still hasn’t returned home that evening, she offers fourteen-year-old Sally clothes in exchange for her babysitting services.

That breezy transfer of authority might be a sign of the times as much as anything, but 1968 Manhattan wasn’t some farm town…

Continue Reading >

In the land of the spiritually-blind, the man with one unwavering conviction is king. Our post-modern, secularized, relativistic culture does not quite know what to do with “true believers.” Not, at least, when it comes to deeper questions of mankind’s existence and our relationship to the Divine. We’re strong-to-quite-strong when it comes to dealing with stuff like vapid celebrity Tweets, the YAC (yards after catch) racked up by our favorite fantasy football player, or the “controversy” of an under-performing new movie on its opening weekend. We’re lousy with politicians and pundits who tell us what we want to hear.

But give us a prominent man or woman with strong, articulated, uncompromising values in the public square–especially if these values are of the traditional, Judeo-Christian variety–and people freak out.

Enter: Timothy Richard Tebow.

When I say that people “freak out,” I do not mean to imply…

Continue Reading >

Writer Jonah Lehrer, who resigned in disgrace last year from The New Yorker after he was caught plagiarizing from himself and others as well as fabricating quotes, is back.

By the age of 31, the pop-science author was a rising star when the tangled web he wove began to unravel. He initially denied responsibility, but eventually released a statement of apology: “I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers.”

Now the New York Times reports that Lehrer has sold a work to Simon & Schuster called A Book About Love. “Jonah Lehrer is an unusually talented writer,” said his publisher’s Jonathan Karp. “We believe in second chances.”

Several years ago James Frey’s memoir of drug and alcohol addiction, A Million Little Pieces, got a bestselling boost as an Oprah’s Book Club selection before his fabrications came…

Continue Reading >