Mo MoDo!

My greatest wish has come true. At midnight tonight, the walls to TimesSelect, the New York Times pay service, come tumbling down. For nearly two years, Maureen Dowd and her pontificating stablemates have been locked way in indentured servitude available only to those willing to pay $49.95 a year. While there were ways around the barriers, I was not one of the lucky ones with a .edu mail address that could sneak under the Times Select fence.

The official reason for discontinuing the service is that NYT sees greater growth opportunities in online advertising revenue than in subscriptions. There is a lot of truth in this. While TimesSelect had a subscriber base of about 220,000 a year, these numbers were soft and not growing. Meanwhile the crown jewels of the Op-Ed page were becoming irrelevant because blogs and other web sources just quit quoting the NYT columnists.

Links are the coin of the realm in the online world. Horizontal links from news aggregators like Drudge Report and Gawker are valuable traffic drivers. Joel Achenbach states that horizontal readers driven in by outside pages are much more numerous than vertical readers that come to a newspaper’s web page and follow stories from the homepage. With Thomas Friedman and David Brooks not linkable, they became invisible. And the opposite of relevance is silence.

In honor of this storming of the virtual Bastille, I have liberated this picture of Maureen Dowd from the Washington Post picture archives. When if I first professed my intellectual lust for MoDo, I scanned in this picture from the WaPo Magazine article about her because I couldn’t find an electronic version of it anywhere. Finally I discovered that it was available from the WaPo Photo Store. They wanted $49.95 for an 8x10 glossy. For that kind of money I could have gotten a year’s worth of her words instead. I even tried to e-mail a licensing request to no avail. Instead I am force to resort to playing the fair use card as posting it as review and comment.

Like TimesSelect, this wonderful picture is invisible on the web, but much coveted. I have gotten GoogleHits from people searching for “Maureen Dowd playing chess.” Taken by the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Williamson, the image succinctly captures the essence of Dowd. She is playful, but whip-smart. She is well-read but not mousy. Casual and earthy but sexy and aggressive, with a gleam in her eye that could cut you to the quick. What is not to like?

Now I will once again be able to hang on every one of her rapier sharp bon mots and relish every deadly accurate pop cultural reference. In the words of a famous orator:

Free at last!
Free at last!
MoDo is free at last!

Multi-Culti Mix-Ups

Two very different articles in the Washington Post this weekend set my mind making connections about race and education. The first was an anecdote by Soledad O’Brien. When her parents were dating while attending Johns Hopkins here in Baltimore they were constantly refused service at restaurants because they were an inter-racial couple. That her mother was black came as a complete surprise to me. I have been ogling watching Soledad since her days as geek eye candy on MSNBC’s The Site. She is now the morning co-anchor on CNN and you have to read pretty deep into her official bio to learn she has been featured by both Essence and Irish American Magazine. That O’Brien surname comes from her Irish-Australian dad.

It turns out that a lot of celebrities are multi-racial. The interminably long Super Bowl preshow featured Hines Ward who has a Korean mother. Many public figures we tend to associate with one race or another actually have much more complicated and interesting ancestries than fit into the random pigeonholes we have established. This website has a rather eclectic list of just a smattering of famous people of mixed race heritage.

Race wouldn’t matter, but people still make decisions based on the ethnic make-up of areas. An article titled "How Not To Pick A School" in the Washington Post Opinion section was perhaps the most nuanced and comprehensive article I have ever read about race and performance in public schools. Brigid Schulte defends her decision to send her kids to a public school where her kid would be in the ethnic minority. She quotes some researchers that note:

White students are the "most racially isolated group of students" in the country, with the average white student attending a school in which only one in five students is of another race.

That can’t happen in my son’s school district. The most lily-white high school in the county is only 71% white and the system regularly posts the best scores in the state. My son’s school brags that they have the most diverse student body in the county. The ethnic demographic breakdown is as follows:

White: 48%
Black: 30%
Asian: 14.5%
Hispanic: 7.5%

Where does my son fit in on this scale? I am about as “white” (or European-American as I prefer to call myself) as anyone can be. I am a blend of Irish, German, and Scottish, all very pale people. My wife was born in Vietnam, but she keeps finding more and more ethnic Chinese in her background. My son doesn’t look identifiably Asian, particularly when in a group like the Math Team. On the other hand, nobody is going recognize him as a son of the Old Sod. Nonetheless, the recessive red hair and blue eyes are in his DNA and could reappear some generation down the line.

It makes me very mad when forms asking for demographic information are not multiple choice. If he answers “Asian”, then what am I, chopped liver? Several years ago, I read a news story about another local school district where two Asian girls were denied a transfer to a magnet school because it would lower the “diversity” of the school they currently attended. Nobody is handing out money to Asian kids to attend college and some very prestigious universities have been caught with informal quotas against Asians. For these arbitrary reasons, I have my son say “white” on forms that make him choose one or another.

Even the word “Asian” is astoundingly broad. Howard County is a mecca for Korean immigrants because of the quality schools. There are also substantial Chinese and Indian communities in the area. According to a 2005 study, the top five foreign languages spoken in the county are Spanish, Korean, Chinese (three different dialects), Urdu, and Vietnamese.

The quasi-city of Columbia was one of first deliberately integrated developments in Maryland. As a result of the aggressive integration, inter-racial couples and their offspring rarely raise an eyebrow in this area. I have no idea how these kids fill out their ethnic check boxes either. My guess is many just skip it altogether.

Call America a melting pot or a mixing bowl or whatever you want. When you put different groups of people together the boundaries blur. We are all more alike than we are different. Hopefully someday the differences that separate us will disappear. My son is proud to be of mixed heritage and I am proud of him.

Updated (2/6/07): I updated the ethnicity percentages to match published 2005-2006 school year information.

Hottest. Columnist. Ever.

I am one of probably a fairly small sick group of fetishists that watch Sunday morning political talk shows for the eye candy. I find brainy women talking about politics very sexy. Cokie Roberts is not only smart and well-connected, she is firmly in the Grandmother Division of the MILF Hall of Fame. Her salt and pepper well-sculpted hairdo tells me she can bake me cookies any time. I pray for Supreme Court controversies because they give Nina Totenberg more air time, adding new meaning to legal affairs. Mara Liasson makes Fox News Sunday bearable. I wait all year for Ellen Goodman’s Equal Rites Awards. But none compare to Maureen Dowd who is the crème-de-la-crème of female punditry.

Maureen Dowd is a particularly fascinating columnist, not just because she is the only regular New York Times Op/Ed inhabitant without a Y-chromosome, but also for the rabid, drooling, mouth-breathing fan base she has developed. Google “Maureen Dowd is hot” and you get 90 hits. “Eleanor Clift is hot” did not match any documents.

The Washington Post Style section has an astoundingly long puff piece by Howard Kurtz on MoDo (as internet shorthand refers to her) and her new book, Are Men Necessary?. New York Magazine has an even longer more fawning article. And these are her competitors. Wonkette calls the media orgy over her a "mogasm".

So what makes Maureen such an object of desire? It can’t be just looks. Although at 53, she gives Rene Russo a run for her money in the well-preserved category. She is famously single and has been at different times connected to Michael Douglas, “West Wing” genius and mushroom aficionado Aaron Sorkin, and new NYT stablemate John Tierney. Her red hair is the taking off point for many a descriptive metaphor for her fiery snarky prose.

If power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, being the New York Times premier female columnist just reeks of pheromones. She took over the Anna Quindlen Endowed Chair Of Female Commentary in 1995, just in time for the Clinton-Lewinsky media feeding frenzy where she got to play both directions by condemning Clinton’s crimes against decency AND the conservative war against him. Right wing blow-hards and ideologues have made her the columnist they love to hate. And her most recent smackdown of Judith Miller firmly establishes her as the Queen Bee of the Gray Lady.

But the brain is the most important erogenous zone. Both critics and fans cite her prose as being exceptionally crisp and frequently acid-tinged. Her pop-culture references are sharp and creative. She stays just this side of the ad hominem precipice that Ann Coulter has thrown herself down. She is disingenuously dismissive of her skill as a columnist and borders on Katherine Hepburn-esque reclusiveness when she doesn’t have a book to flog. She keeps her Sunday morning appearance infrequent enough to not wear out her welcome. All of this adds to this image of the valedictorian hottie that sits home on prom night because everyone is too nervous to ask her out.

The recent move of her column behind the NYT Select VIP room red rope and her conspicuous silence on the move has only enhanced her rock star appeal. The Post’s Joel Achenbach had a hilarious blog post about people furtively meeting to pass along bootleg copies of her column to the cold turkey addicts that need their hit of MoDo.

The two photos the Post published prove that Maureen is hotter fully clothed than anything Esquire had of the half-naked Jessica Biel, the current Sexiest Woman Alive poseur. The second photo unfortunately is not available on the Post website, so I am flirting with cyber-stalkerdom (not that I haven’t been there before) by scanning and cropping it here. The thoughts I get imagining myself in a book-lined room with Maureen Dowd leaning across a chessboard about to capture my rook are so wrong I should go take a very cold shower and scrub myself with a steel wool falafel loofah.

Forgive me, Maureen. I’m happily married and can’t possibly be the man you deserve, so I will quietly step aside. I just ask that you find in your heart the pity to e-mail me your new columns so I don’t have to scrounge through the recycling bin at Starbucks any more. They're starting to get suspicious that I'm there for more than the over-priced highly-caffeinated milkshakes.

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