1000voices

If you’re a man like me, Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic cover story, “The End of Men” lassoed your balls and yanked ‘em tight like a choke collar. I held on strong for a while, but eventually I was blue in the face and begging for mercy like a little bitch. Stop it Ms. Hanna you’re hurting my masculinity! Ouchie!

I’m joking of course, but, Rosin’s piece has been the target of considerable frothy vitriol. To be honest, I haven’t actually heard any of the criticism, but I’ve got no trouble imagining where it’s coming from. Writing in the Nation, Katha Pollitt offered what should be, for all my whimpering/threatened bros out there, a little consolation: “The End of Men” isn’t about how men will suddenly cease to exist or be relevant. it’s about how men will cease to economically and socially dominate women.

Is that so bad?

The point isn’t so much that women are better suited to the post-industrial world—Though Rosin does spend a lot of her piece treading in the snow around this claim. The lesson for the would-be threatened is that the traditional male-dominated spheres are disappearing, and men won’t adapt. Women on the other hand are willing to focus, adapt, study, and work hard to get ahead. Isn’t that what our idea of meritocracy is all about anyway?

To my bros: Quit icing each other and get to work.

Sometimes I appreciate being told straight up whether or not I will enjoy something. (“Steve Carell and Tina Fey should be able to carry even the floppiest script, but don’t go see Date Nate because it will render you flaccid for weeks.”) On the other hand, most of the time, Mr. Smartypants entertainment critics, I want to read something interesting and maybe, god forbid, entertaining. While enterprise Googling my way through a slow afternoon looking for ideas, I stumbled upon this Sasha Frere-Jones piece about rock critic Lester Bangs. The concluding paragraph might be one of the better reflections I’ve read on good criticism.

Picking an All-Time No. 1 in any category is an exercise that’s generally more fun than scientific. This is especially true when picking top critics, a breed who succeed precisely by being in and of their time. There’s a good chance Bangs owns the ’70s but carving him in marble for all time does his gifts no service. Bangs would be the first to point out that the new Lester Bangs, whoever he or she is, wouldn’t read like the old Bangs because the needs of the present are different. Hip-hop, dance music, feminist punk, and an avalanche of homegrown music all over the world have redrawn the playing field several times over since Lester left the earth. It is unlikely even a rookie critic now would invest as much as Bangs did in his idols and then work so hard to prove it hadn’t been a mistake choosing them as idols. That kind of naked investment would be too painful in the instant feedback world of the Internet. The cynicism that permeates much rock criticism would annoy Bangs more than anything. You can see him now, grabbing a critic, shaking him and saying, “HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS ISN’T A GOOD RECORD? JUST BECAUSE IT’S BAD DOESN’T MEAN YOU GET TO SLAG IT!”

Amen.

There’s been a few amazing ones recently.

David Samuels writes in the New Yorker about the Pink Panters, a Balken ring of brazen diamond thieves. “The Pink Panthers”

Joshua Bearman writes in Wired about an obscenely clever ATM hacking thief. “Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief”

Mark Bowden writes in the Atlantic about the rise of the uncrackable computer worm Conficker. “The Enemy Within”

That should be enough to get you to lunch.