Suchergebnisse

Midway through Men: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation, Laura Kipnis distinguishes between two different kinds of humor. She's been reading a novel by the comic writer Patricia Marx, a parody of a former lover who happens to be Kipnis's ex too. The ex in question is a sleazy romantic type, a graduate student turned shrink who likes to call his lovers "my peach" and cheats on them with his patients. He specializes in "ego studies." But the female protagonist is no less pathetic.

When the artist Donald Judd lived at 101 Spring Street in Manhattan in the 1970s, oil leaked from all sides. The SoHo cast-iron had been originally used as a clothing factory, and over the years oil had seeped into the walls and floorboards and would ooze out at unexpected moments. Black spots afflicted the open spaces where the artist worked and lived, an unwanted reminder of the building's past. Judd, who died in 1994, stipulated that the building be preserved in perpetuity, and in 2006 his foundation sold some artwork to fund a restoration that would preserve the artist's home as a museum.

The first thing we see in Sister Wives, a reality television show about a polygamous family, is the Brown family house. It is a "typical polygamous home," we're told by a polygamous architect. The U-Shaped structure sits on a patch of lawn in Lehi, Utah, the mountain town where the Browns, members of the Apostolic United Brethren (a fundamentalist Mormon church), live. From the outside, it appears boxy and drab, like a cheap attempt at a McMansion. It is not much to look at.

The first thing we see in Sister Wives, a reality television show about a polygamous family, is the Brown family house. It is a 'typical polygamous home,' we're told, built by a polygamous architect. The U-shaped structure sits on a patch of lawn in Lehi, Utah, the mountain town where the Browns, members of the Apostolic United Brethren (a fundamentalist Mormon church), live. From the outside it appears boxy and drab, like a cheap attempt at a McMansion. It is not much to look at. Adapted from the source document.

When the artist Donald Judd lived at 101 Spring Street in Manhattan in the 1970s, oil leaked from all sides. The SoHo cast iron had originally been used as a clothing factory, and over the years oil had seeped into the walls and floorboards and would ooze out at unexpected moments. Black spots afflicted the open spaces where the artist worked and lived, an unwanted reminder of the building's past. Adapted from the source document.

Every summer, thousands of interns descend on New York City in order to work for nothing. They flow into empty dorm rooms or onto friends' sofas to sleep, burrow unnoticed into illegal sublets and surf couches longterm. At work, they occupy desks and offices recently vacated by laid-offs. They file papers, get coffee, and try to make themselves noticed, but not too much so.

No one knows how many of these interns there are, partly because much of their unsalaried work is illegal and therefore covert. Interns as a whole are having a cultural moment: the intern appears on television and in gossip magazines; there are celebrity interns and luxury internships for sale. MTV's reality show The Hills took as its premise that young, beach-blond Angelenos were sick of tanning by the ocean—they wanted internships instead. Kanye West, whose earnings as of May 2012 were $35 million a year, recently completed an internship at the Italian luxury fashion house of Fendi. But the intern's overall place in the workforce is largely unclear. Legally obscure and professionally meek, interns are difficult to classify because their position requires invisibility. One of the intern's great skills is not to cause a fuss, not to raise any trouble.

Work, and in particular white, professional woman's work is at the center of contemporary feminist discourse. Newspaper articles discuss the glass ceiling and the inner lives of female CEOs; opinion pieces advise on proving oneself at the office without neglecting a family. Fall in love with your job so that it doesn't feel like effort, they say. But don't neglect your family: too much time with that BlackBerry could make your child a "smartphone orphan." A sampling of articles in the past year might lead a person to conclude that the key problem facing women today is how to become better workers.

Every summer, thousands of interns descend on New York City in order to work for nothing. No one knows how many of these interns there are, partly because much of their unsalaried work is illegal and therefore covert. Interns as a whole are having a cultural moment: the intern appears on television and in gossip magazines; there are celebrity interns and luxury internships for sale. But the intern's overall place in the workforce is largely unclear. Legally obscure and professionally meek, interns are difficult to classify because their position requires invisibility. One of the intern's great skills is not to cause a fuss, not to raise any trouble. Even though many work far more than the average workweek (Xuedan Wang, an unpaid intern who sued the Hearst Corporation last spring, claimed that she worked up to fifty-five hours a week at Harper's Bazaar), most will never even think to ask for compensation for their time. (Although profit-making companies provide the majority of paid internships, the distribution of unpaid internships is roughly equal between for-profit and nonprofit organizations.) Compliant, silent and mostly female, these interns have become the happy housewives of the working world. The intern's obscurity and uncertainty characterize a labor force that has grown more contingent, relying on part-time, unstable, and insecure work. Adapted from the source document.

The last few decades have seen American families dissolve and transform. Americans are having a smaller number of children. Fewer people are getting married, and more couples are opting to live together before or instead of marriage. Last year the Supreme Court expanded access to this increasingly unpopular institution to same-sex couples.But while families keep changing, not all Americans have equal power over their transformation. Many mourn the end of marriage and the nuclear family, but clinging to a mythical, outdated model of family life is pointless. If we want to fight inequality and improve life for parents, children, and the rest of us, we must look seriously at families as they exist today.