Archive for December, 2008

My review of the TV show Real Simple Real Life ran today on Culture11.com.

From the review, “It’s a seductive concept, that all that stands between us and a perfect life is labeled bins in our closets. Indeed, as a daily barrage of emails and stuff threatens to overwhelm the good intentions of American women, decluttering has practically become the religion of the modern era. With its promise of redemption from chaos, Real Simple Real Life is closer to the Old-Fashioned Revival Hour than the usual reality TV sludge. That fundamentally optimistic (if unrealistic) premise makes you want to keep watching – even if the show is so awkward at times that its uncanny sense of the cultural zeitgeist is all that keeps you hooked.”

I’ve been watching with some interest the self-righteous denunciations of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell Pres.-elect Obama’s vacated Senate seat. According to various stories, Blagojevich wanted to exchange the seat for a high-paid position for himself somewhere, board memberships for his wife, campaign contributions and other such things. As he noted, “I’ve got this thing and it’s (expletive) golden… I’m just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing…”

Of course, it is unseemly (and illegal) to consider a Senate seat your personal property to dispose of in exchange for goods, services, or cash, but for all his indelicacy, Blagojevich is right. A Senate seat is worth a considerable amount. The Club for Growth released a back-of-the-envelope calculation stating that it was worth $6.2 million — for 2 terms at salary, plus a cushy lobbying job after and a pension.

This is an interesting number, since according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the average amount spent to win a senate seat hit $6.5 million this year. Not only would the new Senator Blagojevich tapped have earned $6.2 million over his/her lifetime from the post, he would have avoided having to drum up $6.5 million from other people. Again, this is a thing of value.

And some people spend a lot more than $6.5 million winning their seats, particularly in Illinois. Back in 1998, Peter Fitzgerald spent over $14 million of his own money unseating Carol Moseley Braun. Blair Hull vowed to spend $40 million of his own money trying to win the seat Obama ultimately landed. For him, a campaign contribution of a few hundred-thou would be quite a bargain.

Given that your personal lifetime earnings from a Senate seat aren’t that huge, why would so many people pay so much more for the post? Perhaps it’s a desire for public service. Some certainly think they can make the world a better place. Another answer, of course, is that the $6.2 million number isn’t the full picture. Senators can direct millions of dollars toward their own personal causes, giving them influence over far more dollars than their salaries show. It’s $3 million for sugar cane here, $24 million for sugar beets there and soon you have a lot of grateful people. What do these people do? They ask you to speak once you retire. They hire your children and neighbors. They hold dinners honoring you. They crowd around you at parties acting all deferential. And when you have clout over lots of money — even if it isn’t yours — you feel powerful. Power, Kissinger noted, is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Why wouldn’t Blagojevich try to get something in return for bestowing that upon someone?

People have all sorts of ideas about how to reduce the influence of money in politics. The easiest way to reduce money’s influence, though, is to reduce the influence of politicians over money. A federal government with a far smaller budget would be a much less tempting target.

I have a profile of Ilan Kroo, one of the pioneers of sustainable aviation, up on Scientific American’s site. This is part of the Where Are They Now? series, which has run weekly for about seven months, and looks at the lives of former finalists in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search.

I have a column in today’s USA Today called “Real Kids Real Research.” It highlights the intense high school research programs that produce many of the finalists and winners of the big high school science contests (Intel, Siemens, Davidson). These programs tend to start in 10th grade or earlier, and teach kids exactly how to do real science. Surprise! It’s not about textbooks and quizzes. Too bad more kids don’t know that.

Today I stepped back to my daily journalism roots, going to a press conference this morning and filing a story by early afternoon. It’s always a bit of a rush — even moreso today since it’s my first time trying it with a sick toddler at home. Anyway, the story was the announcement of the winners of the 2008 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. You can read my article on Scientific American’s website here.

What’s interesting to me? The top three winners all went to specialized public residential high schools for math and science. The team winners both went to the North Carolina School of Science and Math (which my older brother and sister-in-law attended). The individual winner is a student at the Texas Academy of Math and Science in Denton. The Indiana Academy was also represented among the finalists. As an Indiana Academy graduate, I think these public residential schools for gifted kids are among the best investments a state can make. About a dozen states have such schools. Frankly, all of them should — and the Siemens Competition certainly made that point today (to the tune of $100,000 for the top individual and team).

Today is my birthday — the milestone one! I am now officially a grown-up, though I guess I have felt fairly grown up for a while. Birthdays are always a time for reflection. I was having a great reverie last night about how my life is so much better than when I turned 20. Even random, relatively inconsequential things are better — like having better hair and clothes (this is a function of having more money and carefully cultivating a sense of style by 5 years of reading Vogue, Elle, Glamour, et al, and 2 years of watching TLC’s What Not to Wear). At age 20 I had yet to discover Princeton’s Glee Club. Now I’m the executive director of a chorus here in NYC and have sung in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. I may have a few more lines on my face but I am definitely in better shape. At age 20, I would have had a hard time running a mile. Now I have finished two half marathons, and signed up for another in May. I’m working full-time as a writer for real publications. I had hoped for that at age 20, but I am not sure I thought it was possible.

Anyway, I was having this great reverie. Then I woke up because my 18-month-old son was screaming. He’d thrown up all over the place. Yes, the norovirus epidemic has hit the Vanderkam-Conway home. So we were up until 2:30AM of my birthday morning doing laundry, sanitizing surfaces, etc. Ah, life.

I have an article on Culture11.com today called “Ghosts of Christmas Past.” The teaser? “The evolution of Good Housekeeping shows that much has changed for women over the past 50 years — but not always in the way people imagine.”

For the article, I compared Good Housekeeping magazines from 1958 and 2008. The article is based on the December issues, but I also looked through the November issues just to make sure my thesis still held. Here’s the gist: “Reading the [1958 issue] is like visiting a lost civilization, in which women were obsessed with domesticity, but less so with their children, and time really didn’t matter — an equation that, fifty years later, has been thoroughly reversed.” Give it a read and let me know what you think!

Every morning, the Wall Street Journal seems to carry bigger fonted headlines of economic woe. Bailouts. Bankruptcies. Credit crunches. Stock market declines. Foreclosures. With all the gnashing of teeth, it’s no wonder that a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that zero percent of Americans think the economy is “excellent” and only 4% think it is “good.” A full 58% give a diagnosis of “poor.”

But, fascinatingly, when asked about their own economic situations, a full 56% of Americans say they are doing “excellent” or “good.” Why would equal proportions of Americans give the economy as a whole an F, but themselves an A or B?

This is a standard problem with media coverage. We tend to think school shootings are more common than they are, or deaths during marathons, because the ones that do happen get a lot of coverage. A hard-working young family losing their house is a newsworthy story — one that will grab readers and sell papers. The family that continues to go to their same jobs, earn a little bit more each year and pay their mortgage as usual is just not that exciting. So while we know that the latter is closer to our own experience, since we read more about the former, we tend to assume the former is more common.

The truth is that, as economic problems go, we’re not that badly off here. Zimbabwe has almost infinite inflation. Us? Gas is back under $2 a gallon. Our unemployment rate is rising, but even at 7% or 11% (which it reached in 1982) this means that the vast majority of people who want jobs have them. They may not be perfect jobs, or pay as much as we want, but they are jobs nonetheless. When most people who want jobs have them, that means that most Americans will continue paying their mortgages, buying some amount of goods and services and the like. This puts a floor under how bad the bust can turn.

My personal forcast is that the Dow will end 2009 around 10,000 (up 20 percent from where it is now). The economy will come out of recession around the 2nd quarter of 2009 and unemployment will max at 7.1% — higher than any point since 1993, but below the historical averages for these things. I may revise this as I think about it more, but hey — this lack of commitment is part of the fun of a blog.

I am featured in a Q&A over on Dan Schawbel’s “Personal Branding Blog.” You can read the post here. The message? You don’t have to spend your life in a cube! There are other options. These days, all of us have to be Brand You — thinking more about our own career paths than the path up any one company’s hierarchy.

I am a total bookworm. Back when I worked at USA Today, I used to help myself regularly to books from the pile of review copies sent to the newspaper. I particularly enjoy business, economics and policy books. Fortunately, these days I get to review such books for various publications. I don’t get paid much for this — far below my usual per-word rate — but on the other hand, I like books so much that I view this is my equivalent of getting paid to watch TV. I mean, I was reading Gina Kolata’s book to review it while I was in labor (we have photos from the hospital proving this). Here are some links to recent reviews:

“All You Need is Help” — review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, City Journal.

“Still Made for You and Me” — review of Barbara Ehrenreich’s This Land is Their Land, City Journal.

“Soft Targets” — review of Stephen Baker’s The Numerati, City Journal

“Choosing Wisely” — review of Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s Nudge, City Journal.

“Meet the Middle Class Millionaires” — review of Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff’s The Middle Class Millionaire, The American.

“An Apology for Judicial Activism” – review of Clint Bolick’s David’s Hammer, The American.

“Rethinking the Obesity ‘Crisis’” — review of Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin, The American.

“All Play and No Work” — review of Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, The American.