Author Archive

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: The already-infamous ‘Tim Tebow Anti-Abortion’ Superbowl ad hasn’t even aired yet, but it’s already stirred up plenty of controversy.

JEFF MORROW: The Tebow ad sounds like a rare piece of abortion-related advocacy that earnestly tries to persuade. For a pro-life ad, that’s pretty pro-choice.

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: No longer just a patronizing corporation with a moral-superiority complex, Whole Foods is showing that it cares enough about its employees to do what it can to lower its company healthcare costs.

JILLIAN LOVEJOY LOWERY: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey seems to have forgotten that people come in all shapes and sizes, that things like blood pressure and cholesterol are sometimes hereditary, and that even smokers might like to purchase their avocados at a greater discount.

JEFF MORROW, INC.: Finally, I belong.

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: I don’t understand why everyone is so concerned about the fact that corporations are now free to donate massive sums of money to promote the political candidates of their choosing.

AKIE BERMISS: When it comes to writing in books I’m at once a reverent love and a practical modernist. I feel like the sacred nature of books is a relic of ages past when a single book to quite some time to make. And getting a copy was pretty much impossible unless you were a person of great wealth or great importance. Nowadays, I can walking to a Barnes&Noble and buy four copies of Great Expectations faster than you could say “Who’s Charles Dickens?” So there’s really no need to be overly cautious about getting book marked up, or wet, or whatever.

ZOË RICE: I can’t say I understand treating a book like a revered object. In fact, I even marked up my own novel. I think I did so for my readings; I made notes and crossed out a passage or two that wouldn’t make sense without previous chapters. But I’ve always written in books. A note here and there about something I was thinking at the time, a star for a passage I particularly liked, perhaps a name of another book or a memory I recalled. And I love those notes. I love that I’ll be able to look back on them later in life and see what I was thinking years prior. The book is mine, and I’m certainly not erasing any part of it, so why not annotate here and there? Why not personalize?

HOWARD MEGDAL: I have now been through the process of publishing my own book. And let me tell you- it isn’t easy. You need to find an agent. You need to polish up a proposal. You need to find a publisher. You need to complete a manuscript in time. You need to go over edits, making certain that just because an editor didn’t know any vaguely Jewish terminology in a book about Jewish baseball players, that the entire point of the book isn’t obscured. You need to fight back against the idea that any joke that won’t be understood by a ten-year-old child should be excised from the book, reminding everyone involved that it is not, in fact, a children’s book.

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: I’m not sure about Apple’s claims that the iPad will change the way we experience the web, but maybe they meant that in a subtle way—kind of like how crazy straws have changed the way we drink juice.

AKIE BERMISS: The laptop is the home-computer now. Its flexible for any kind of living situation, takes up less space, and works well for typing up long items like term-papers, or business, proposals, or books. Its not the fun, young, hip and sexy girl at the prom anymore.

That’s the iPad.

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: It has recently come to my attention that the New York Times is planning on charging for access to its online content in the near future. Although I am a big fan of free, learning this filled me with relief.

STEVE MURPHY: Lots of people agree with Molly, and believe that high-quality content is so valuable, it shouldn’t be given out for free. But that assumes that value can only be set by the end user of the content.

AKIE BERMISS: As a male, my interaction with “the pill” (in its various forms) is always at least one-degree removed.  Much though I may be invested in someone I’m with and whether or not they are “on the pill”, I…

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: Electronic cigarette, you are so clearly not actually burning. You are not a real cigarette. Stop trying to be unobtrusive and realistic looking.

HOWARD MEGDAL: While I am against the electronic cigarettes Molly mentions above, let me be clear: I am even more wholeheartedly against what I though e-cigarettes were prior to researching this article, which is paying of real money for virtual cigarettes, either in jpg form or smoked in some kind of Second Life/The Sims kind of way.

AKIE BERMISS: I smoke cigars. I have a habit. Some would call it a bad habit. In fact, everybody calls it a bad habit. And I don’t mind. I don’t go down to the bar and slap the sugary cocktails out of their mouths and they don’t come to my house (while I’m watching Glee) and knock the cigar out of mine. To each their own, I say. We all have our vices: smoking, drinking, television, pornography. Not horrible things that ruin the lives of those around like (like, say, a fetish for public indoor urinating) but the things we love to enjoy in the privacy of our private places. Vices are usually bad or bad for you, or considered bad form. Fair enough. As well they should be.

EMILY SAIDEL: Beautifulpeople.com should be congratulated for setting a standard, as inconsistent as it may be with different members having different concepts of beauty, and sticking to it, rather than choosing the politically correct option of quietly ignoring the complaints.

ZOË RICE: The whole point of niche marketing is that for a given product, you know what the audience is. On my facebook sidebar alone I see ads every day to “Meet Christian Men,” “Find Black Singles,” “Marry A Millionaire,” “Meet Your Big and Beautiful Match,” “Wed Jewish.” So if a site that seeks to offer nothing more than “beautiful people” decides you are no longer beautiful…well, you should have known what niche you were getting into to begin with, no?

MOLLY SCHOEMANN: Personally, I think that a lot of what I find attractive in other people, I put there myself. It’s not necessarily there to begin with.

AKIE BERMISS: I don’t know much about internet dating. Or how its really any significantly better than just the luck-of-the-draw that most of us utilize when picking a mate. But I do know one thing: the internet is a skeevy place — and you’d best be very wary when crossing technology and matters of the heart. For while technology allows the better angels of our humanity to flower and proliferate without deference to distance — it allows the same freedom for our worst demons. Yes, while the internet certainly helps us to donate money toward aid in Haiti, it also makes it easier to buy harvest organs on the black market (hypothetically…) It is the same internet which — in 2008 — helped to elect President Obama, that — in 2009, provided his right-wing detractors with the ability to hobble health care reform and climate control efforts.