Culture

The beautiful muse to great male artists is a tricky figure, omnipresent in history but a bad fit for our fussy time. From Edie Sedgwick to Zelda Fitzgerald, and even some male ones, such as Neal Cassady, they’ve always been part of artistic scenes. In the scene of great Sixties rock, one of the most important was Jenny Boyd. She may not be as well-known as Yoko Ono, or her sister Pattie, who was married to George Harrison. But she may have been as influential. She was in the backstages, the bedrooms and the jam sessions with some of the most iconic musicians of all time. Shortly after traveling around India with the Beatles, she married (then divorced and remarried) Mick Fleetwood. Later, Donovan would write a love-sick song about her, "Jennifer Jupiter." So would Mick Jagger.

England's National Health Service made the major announcement last week that they would limit the prescription of puberty-blocking drugs for transgender children to clinical trials. A report released by the NHS on June 9 states that "there is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment and that they should only be accessed as part of research." The decision is the latest consequence of a multi-year review into how the medical community in England should treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

“Stinky. Sweaty. Hairy. Pimply. Totally Normal.”  That’s the seemingly innocent tagline of the “Puberty Issue” of the New York Times for Kids, which appears in the print newspaper on the last Sunday of every month.  The kids section, which was started in March 2017 as a part of the New York Times magazine department, often looks harmless at first glance. The cover typically boasts colorful and engaging artwork, while inside, children are greeted with cartoons, games, puzzles and mini articles about cool accomplishments by other kids. Past issues covered how kids could spend their summer vacations, interesting facts about bugs and other creepy critters, and how to start growing a garden.

J.K. Rowling’s Twitter feed “creates trans phobias,” writes Washington Post gender columnist Monica Hesse. Listening to Rowling, says Hesse, is exhausting. “It’s exhausting because it requires constant vigilance.” And the constant vigilance, says Hesse, is necessary in order to determine when Rowling’s words stray into “transphobia.” I confess my own “exhaustion” reading opinions like Hesse’s. I understand that “transphobia” has a very extensive Wikipedia page citing supposed medical experts who give the concept a veneer of legitimacy.

One of the most famous lines from the classic 2002 romcom Sweet Home Alabama has leading lady Reese Witherspoon incredulously asking a redneck hometown friend, “You brought a baby... to a bar?” I encounter that incredulity frequently, every time I cart my kids to work events, including those at bars. But a book tour? This was a new one. A book tour with a baby is hard, but babies (and kids) are worth all the hardships. As Scrubs’s wise Dr. Kelso once explained, “Nothing that’s worth having in life comes easy.” That’s a mantra in our home as we wade through the hard times, and it’s a lesson we impart to our kids as we endeavor to raise them into happy warriors and resilient and caring adults.

Reason magazine reported last summer on the rise of sensitivity readers, and publishers have made headlines for their plans to release sanitized versions of Roald Dahl's and Ian Fleming's works. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that publishers are hiring sensitivity readers to purify these books, or the fact that I probably should have had one review my books before they were published. In an ideal world, sensitivity readers would be in as much demand as Betamax repairpersons. But we do not live in an ideal world. We live in a world full of hypersensitive Twitter users who relish finding offense in the unlikeliest of places. Hence the proliferation of sensitivity readers, or "authenticity readers" as they’re sometimes called.

We live in the Golden Age of Revision. Not everyone has noticed, so let me mention some of the highlights of the art of the Michelangelos and Monets of the revisionist moment. First, of course, we have found the path to revising birth certificates and chromosomes on the matter of an individual's sex, or as we have been taught to say, gender. This is revision par excellence, but only the beginning. Then we have the New York Times in the company of many thousands of American school teachers who have miraculously overthrown the burden of snow-capped mountains of historical evidence and wizened learning of generations of historians. Their revision reveals that the real history of America began in 1619 with the arrival of Angolan captives at Jamestown.

The East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment has thrust rural America into the national spotlight. Town mayor Trent Conaway, a hefty, scruffy figure who resembles many a resident of flyover country, has been all over cable news expressing his “frustration” over how the federal government has handled the disaster. “Frustration” is exactly the word I’d use to describe the predominant feeling I encountered last week during my visit to East Palestine. It’s the same attitude I come across constantly in my rural Pennsylvania homeland. The way the East Palestine disaster has unfolded magnifies the rural perception of government, and both sides of the aisle would be wise to take a closer look and listen.

“D’you know what the acronym MBA stands for?” The twenty-seven-year-old who asked me this had a deep tan and fluorescent teeth. He may have winked, but the eye-twitch was more likely a nervous tic developed from looking at himself in the mirror so much. I responded with a look of indifference mixed with fear. “Married” — he paused for dramatic effect and demonstratively looked at my wedding ring — “but available.” I felt nauseated. I was in my first semester of business school in New York City and had so far learned how to make an educated estimate of a company’s optimal capital structure, how to make a balance sheet look balanced and how to use the word “conceptually” to sound smart in strategy class.

Cockburn would usually think twice about celebrating a man that’s under his wife’s thumb. But after seeing reports that Kanye West's new wife Bianca Censori “runs the show,” Cockburn can’t help but think that arrangement is probably for the best. The forty-five-year-old disgraced rapper shocked fans last month when he married the Yeezy architectural designer Censori, in a top-secret ceremony just two months after finalizing his divorce from Kim Kardashian. A source told the Sun, "Bianca runs the show. She has been around Ye for about three years, things got serious really fast in mid-November. "Bianca handles Ye's daily logistics from Yeezy clothing management to construction of the new Yeezy headquarters/ Donda Academy.

My brothers and I grew up in a very active household. We were always busy with sports, schoolwork, and chores, and there was a constant revolving door of friends and teammates. Both of my parents worked full-time as business owners and as our informal chauffeurs. Along with thousands of meals to be prepared, loads of laundry to be done, fights to break up, and the occasional window to be replaced, ours was a house that was never quiet, especially when my brothers tapped their illegal fireworks stash. To an outsider, it might have looked like being in the middle of a domesticated Lord of the Flies. But there was a purpose to the madness and chaos. We learned conflict management, independence, fire safety, and the value of hard work and cooperation.

UFC president Dana White’s new show Power Slap: Road to the Title debuted on January 18 to paltry ratings — a reported 295,000 viewers following a helpful lead-in from the pro wrestling show AEW Dynamite, which had nearly a million — and widespread critical outrage due to the seeming inhumanity of the sport. Those who did tune in watched in mute horror as Chris Kennedy was brutally knocked out, his hands curling up in what Chris Nowinski, a former football player and wrestler turned brain trauma researcher, referred to as “fencing posture,” indicative of serious brain injury — then later proved unable to recollect what had happened to him.

On a windy morning thirty years ago, the FBI staged a surprise attack on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidians were a splinter group of Seventh-day Adventists who followed the apocalyptic preaching of their self-styled prophet, David Koresh. They had been holed up in their ramshackle retreat for fifty-one days. Finally, at 6:02 a.m. on April 19, 1993, tanks broke through the compound’s flimsy walls, firing tear gas at the people inside. The gas was meant to end the standoff by flushing the Davidians out, but Koresh had handed out Army-surplus gas masks. Some of the Davidians took shelter. Others shot at the tanks and federal agents outside. Hours later, fire leveled the compound. Several Davidians burned to death.