Dear Miss Kidd,Ursula K. Le Guin writes extremely well, but I’m sorry to have to say that on the basis of that one highly distinguishing quality alone I cannot make you an offer for the novel. The book is so endlessly complicated by details of reference and information, the interim legends become so much of a nuisance despite their relevance, that the very action of the story seems to be to become hopelessly bogged down and the book, eventually, unreadable. The whole is so dry and airless, so lacking in pace, that whatever drama and excitement the novel might have had is entirely dissipated by what does seem, a great deal of the time, to be extraneous material. My thanks nonetheless for having thought of us. The manuscript of The Left Hand of Darkness is returned herewith.
Yours sincerely,
The Editor
21 June, 1968
James Sayers (1748-1823), The Comet, 18 February 1789. Etching and aquatint. Published by Thomas Cornell, London. Collection of Princeton University Library.
So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.
All of which is to say that Kubrick, in his intellectual way, is offering us the experience of the mind breaking down, rather than telling a story about a mental breakdown. As such, if we are to keep our heads we have to surrender to the experience, for a time, but remember that, like Dick Halloran says to Danny about the nightmare visions he has, it’s just pictures. It isn’t real.But not everybody can keep their heads.
Abigail Rines weighed in with a terrific post called “Feminist Housedude,” complete with a picture of her bearded, tattooed husband vacuuming with their son strapped to his chest. She describes her husband as “a cloth-diapering wizard, an amazing cook, a master gardener,” explaining that he has established a “seamless rhythm” with their son that is simply beautiful to witness.“ The dads who write for Dadwagon have been insisting on many of the same points - that they are not only just as good as their wives but often better. Matt Vilano wrote a great post on Motherlode entitled "I hate being called a good dad,” pointing out that women stop all the time and tell him what a good dad he is when he is doing absolutely basic parenting tasks for his daughters. He notes the “heinous double standard,” that he is praised for behavior that in a mother would be regarded as routine, and that “the act of labeling someone ‘a good dad’ suggests that most dads are, by our very nature as fathers, somehow less than 'good.’”
I’m quoting this not because I think it — or any of the articles it cites — is especially insightful, but simply in order to register my frustration with this whole debate. In our 32 years of marriage Teri and I have never had one single conversation about what “men” or “husbands” or “fathers” or “women” or “wives” or “mothers” should be doing. We’ve just looked at the situations we’ve been in and tried to figure out how to divide the labors in ways that worked, in terms of efficiency and also in terms of our happiness.
For instance, when Wes was a toddler I had all my classes in the mornings and Teri worked in the afternoons. She didn’t get home until nearly six, and it was a high-stress job, so it made no sense for her to cook. If I cooked we both enjoyed the meals better, and then she didn’t mind cleaning up afterwards. So that’s the pattern we fell into, and after a while I became a pretty good cook. But in the past couple of years Teri has not been working outside the home, in part because of some health issues, but she has generally felt good enough to cook, which has been great for me because it’s been a very busy season of my life. When her health hasn’t allowed her to cook, I’ve picked up the slack.
None of this has anything to do with gender or even with roles as such. It’s just about figuring out (a) what needs to be done and (b) who, at the moment, is better placed to do it. It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that, does it?
Nature and truth. Money and markets. Men and marriage. Faith and reason. They’ve all ended. Power ended in March, but that makes sense because leadership ended last year. History ended more than two decades ago, while the future ended just two years ago.On the plus side, illness has ended, along with poverty, racism, war — even homework.
If you thought these things were still around, just pick up “The End of Sex,” by Donna Freitas, published last week, or Moises Naim’s “The End of Power,” which came out last month. Try David Wolman’s “The End of Money” or David Agus’s “The End of Illness.” Those came out in 2012, the same year that Hanna Rosin affirmed “The End of Men” and John Horgan imagined “The End of War.”
One could dismiss this proliferation of “The End” as a plea for attention by publishers, magazine editors, authors, bloggers, TED talkers and the rest of the ideas industry — a marketing device signaling little more than the end of imagination.
But it is more than that. “The end of” is also the perfect headline for our age. It fits a moment that fetishizes disruption over stability. It grabs an audience enamored of what is next, not what is here. It suits a public debate in which extreme positions are requisite starting points.
But I also think culture and economics, ideas and incentives, are all entangled at a deep level, working in cycles and feedback loops rather than in simple causal arrows — and thus it’s a mistake to treat changes in what people believe, and particularly the sweeping generational changes in how Americans conceptualize the links between sex and marriage and procreation, just as epiphenomena of economic pressure. And it’s a particularly convenient mistake for social liberals, because it enables them to downplay the fact that these changes are also their own ideological victories — victories that have been accompanied by, well, many of the negative consequences that social conservatives warned against in the first place. In large ways and small, and now at a suddenly-accelerating pace (today gay marriage, tomorrow marijuana legalization, etc.), we’re getting the culture that social liberalism wants — less traditionally religious and more socially permissive, with fewer normative ideas about how sex and love and childbearing fit together. And if conservatives would profit from acknowledging the economic forces shaping these realities, liberals would profit from acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, a cultural transformation that they’ve long favored is coming at a cost.