The Cultured Girl

Slate today tackles the “trend” among American newlyweds wherein a couple blends their two surnames to create an entirely new last name (i.e. Smith + Miles = Smiles, though I don’t think anyone has actually done that one). Apparently, the U.K.’s Observer newspaper breathlessly addressed the topic last month but only managed to find two examples of the supposedly fast-gaining trend. Writes Slate:

One, at least, is recent: New York Times correspondent Jodi Wilgoren got married last year to Gary Ruderman, an architect and playwright, and they changed their surnames to Rudoren. The only other case of “meshing” the articles mention is that of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who used to be Tony Villar before marrying Corina Raigosa … in 1988. Some trend!

The Slate story takes a more responsible and interesting route, uncovering numerous examples of blended last names over the years. While the practice may not be gaining momentum among American couples, an examination of news stories and wedding announcements shows that it is far more common than you might think. I like the idea in theory, since it forces both parties—as opposed to just the wife—to adjust to life with an entirely new name. With most last names, however, the results sound pretty silly or horribly awkward, though it’s fun to think up the various concoctions enabled by your friends’ unions.

I’m a huge fan of the Lonely Planet travel guides, with their snarky, no-nonsense advice and off-the-beaten path recommendations on everything from the best place to buy shrooms in Amsterdam to an ancient Parisian restaurant once frequented by Victor Hugo. It seemed the only thing cooler than traveling with a Lonely Planet book would be actually writing one, and tromping around an unfamiliar city on a travel publisher’s dime.

But according to this New York Times story, I should probably withhold my envy, because apparently travel writing is anything but a paid vacation. After all, “many of the intrepid young writers scouring the planet doing research for next year’s crop of guidebooks never stopped to consider what those jobs would entail, other than the romantic — and often overstated — prospect of being paid to travel.” Rather than wander leisurely and taking clever notes, writers for companies like Let’s Go are expected to pack in about a week’s worth of tourist activities in a single day. And since the writer is often charged with documenting the sketchy areas of town, it often means wading into very unfamiliar waters with little salary to show for it. According to the NYT, “MTV and Frommer’s, for example, are collaborating to publish a budget travel series for Europe for which they are paying writers $1,500 for roughly 150 pages of work.”

If an Olympic-sized error can befall a major metropolitan daily (albeit, a crappy one), it can happen to cultured girls, too. Don’t forget to spell check! (Note: I understand this is slightly off-topic for readers not in S.F., but I am soon planning to launch grammar and punctuation tips of the day, so I thought it was somewhat relevant.)

Mondays are bad, and the Monday between a semi-holiday weekend and an actual holiday on Tuesday, July 4, is even worse. But if you find yourself slacking off today and daydreaming about barbecues, you’re not alone. According to the consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Monday, July 3, could rival Christmas Eve day and New Year’s Eve day as the least productive workday of the year.  “With the national observance of Independence Day on Tuesday, workers around the country will try to get a four-day weekend out of it by taking off Monday.  Those who were not quick enough to request the day off may be less productive that day, seeing it as a day to ‘take it easy,’” said CEO John A. Challenger. So join your fellow Americans and take it easy for a change.

This month’s issue of Vanity Fair is full of good reads, from Christopher Hitchens’s history of the blowjob to Robert Levine’s profile of legendary Ford Mustang designer Carroll Shelby. But by far the most morbidly fascinating is Nina Munk’s feature, “Greenwich’s Outrageous Fortunes,” which traces the excesses of the noveau riche in the fabulously wealthy bedroom community.

Since the 1920s, Greenwich has been home to massive estates owned by the likes of Zalmon Gilbert Simmons (how’s that for a name?) of Simmons mattress fame and various heirs to the Rockefeller and Morgan fortunes. But today, it’s being overrun by millionaire hedge fund managers who are building homes that put the 100-plus acre estates of yesteryear to shame. And of course, developers are demolishing the stately older homes to clear the way for mansions as large as 32,000 square feet, which, as the author points out, is pretty much the size of the Taj Majal. Writes Munk:

“Let’s think for a brief moment about style, scale, & taste. The average new home in America is 2,405 square feet. In Greenwich, as far as I can make out, the average new home of a hedge-fund manager is 15,000 square feet, about the size of a typical industrial warehouse. For example: the hedge-fund manager Edward Mulé, of Silver Point Capital, and his wife, Marian, are putting up a new 15,045-square-food residence on Dairy Road. Papers filed at Town Hall show plans for a separate 3,296-square foot pool house on the Mulé estate, plus an outdoor tennis court.”

And that’s just the beginning of the excesses detailed in the article. Honestly, it’s like a car wreck you just can’t turn away from.

I’m normally pretty bored by the whole baby-or-no-baby debate. It seems that some people are absolutely certain they want kids, others are almost violently opposed to the idea, and the majority of us seem happy treat the issue as a big, scary unknown. For that reason, I almost skipped over Emily Yoffe’s thought-provoking column in Slate this week, addressing the baby question. Yoffe’s story actually began a few weeks ago, when she fielded an advice-column question from a woman in her 30s who was about to get married but didn’t want kids. When Yoffe suggested the woman not dismiss the idea so quickly — she might, after all, decide she wants kids someday — it prompted a flurry of angry letters from happy, childless people essentially asking, Why the hell would anyone want kids? Yoffe admits that she used to be one of those people: “If I had stayed childless, I would also have felt I had dodged a sippy cup to the head.” But, she argues, the horrors of child rearing really aren’t as extreme as most of her detractors make it out to be. Regardless of what side you are on, the story will get you thinking, and it’s definitely worth a read.

If watching the World Cup isn’t exciting enough for you, check out this nerdy breakdown of player birth dates, wherein maverick economist Steven Levitt attempts to answer the age-old question of whether great athletes are born or made. (By the way, if you haven’t read Freakonomics , the book that Levitt co-wrote with Stephen Dubner, I highly recommend it for brain stimulation and cocktail-party conversation). On the subject of the World Cup, Levitt surmises:

“because the FIFA cutoff date for determining a child’s age for international play is January 1, we would expect that a disproportionate number of the players in the World Cup would be born in the early part of the year. The idea is that these kids will get special treatment and attention when they are teenagers because they will be developmentally almost a full year ahead of kids born in the latter part of the year.”

But here’s something even cooler: Levitt also realized that FIFA’s January 1 rule didn’t take effect until 1997, so players born after 1979 aren’t really affected by it. So he separates out the birth dates of players born before 1979 and players born after that year, and the results are pretty fascinating:

” … among players born in 1979 or later, making them 18 or younger when the FIFA January 1 cutoff took effect … 32.4 percent of the players were born in the first three months of the year, 25.2 percent of the players were born in months four through six, 21.5 percent in july to september, 21 percent in the last three months. Exactly what the theory predicts.

How about for the older World Cup players, those born before 1979? A very different pattern emerges … For the older players, only 20 percent of the older players were born January to March. 24 percent were born April-June. The months July-September were the most common.”

If only my economics class had been this much fun, I probably wouldn’t have gotten a C-plus.

The other Bush—that is, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush—has just signed a statewide education overhaul, called the A-Plus-Plus program, requiring high school students to declare majors and minors like college students. While the FL education system needs fixing, I agree with many critics that the problem is really an over-reliance on standardized testing, so I can’t understand what problem “majoring” is going to fix. Considering how much trouble college students have choosing majors—and how high school is more a time to figure out what interests you—this seems like a misguided idea to me.

It’s becoming more and more acceptable—almost expected—for cultured girls to slack off a little between between college and “adulthood,” whether that means taking six months off to travel or bouncing around aimlessly between jobs. After all, don’t all successful, creative people have a little bit of slacker in them? That’s the premise behind Tom Lutz’s entertaining book, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America. The funny and fascinating chronicle traces the concept of laziness from Adam and Eve to the ancient Greeks to the Beatnik movement and Generation X. It’s full of fun tidbits, like the fact that Benjamin “Time is Money” Franklin took “air baths,” which involved lying nude on his bed for at least one hour a day. The book itself is a sort of lazy person’s education: In a mere 360 pages, you can brief yourself on such important historical subjects as the Calvinist movement and Marxism. Sure, we all have to work for a living, but if you believe Lutz, everyone needs some slacker time too.

If left unchecked, I can be a somewhat negative person. Which is one reason I actually like this site, Lovelines (thanks, Saheli) , which is devoted to things that people love. It scans blogs, flickr pages, and the like for sentences that begin with “I love…” (such as “I love the endurance test that is the sample sale”) and then links to the lovable things in question, everything from “i love ponies” to “i love that truck too much.”

If you’re feeling more curmudgeonly, there’s a whole separate section devoted to things sentences that start “I hate,” which, because it isn’t nearly as fulfilling to read, serves as an argument in favor of positivity.