A Few Things I'm Thinking About

I'm obsessed with finding doughnuts for Hanukkah (sufganiot, for those of you who like the traditional nomenclature). Gourmet doughnuts are all the rage in Israel (link from Allison Kaplan Sommer). We made sufganiot once, the traditional kind with jelly--it must have been 1997, because we were in the house we rented when we first got to Red State Capital City Suburb--and it was a hassle. Or rather, it could be done, but since one needs latkes as well, and S will be at work 4 out of 7 nights of Hanukkah, including the night when my family will come over, it's not going to happen on my stove. Luckily Jewish Town is just 20 minutes away, and there must be somebody making doughnuts. Time to start calling bakeries.

Meanwhile, in central Pennsylvania, a Republican judge does right (as opposed to wrong, not left) by the schoolchildren of Dover. Of course, the voters of Dover already did right, by booting the school committee that voted in intelligent design and replacing them with a committee committed to evolution. It's great to see some good news for once.

And in other New York Times news, I read Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece about the Times the other day ( actually it took me a few days to read it), and wondered how, well, how believable his disdain for Sulzberger is. That is, the article invited the reader, at least this reader, to take it with a grain of salt, in the very intensity of its evident disgust with its subject.

But then came the story on unauthorized spying which suddenly appeared just as the Patriot Act was up for reauthorization and its author was about to publish a book (sorry for the link to the other side, but they've got a point this time). You start to wonder who's minding the farm.

Then yesterday, they published the article about the teenage boy who became an online child porn star, of his own volition. The article's depiction of the world of predatory pedophiles is horrifying, and I suppose that's its main point. But I found it disturbing in some more subtle ways as well. First, of course, there are the pornographic implications of writing about pornography. Isn't reading the article just a little titillating, even as it is so upsetting? And how many people read that article and thought "wow, I'm going online to find myself some of that teen webcam porn"? Maybe not a lot, but certainly enough. Then there is Justin himself. The boy clearly had a bad homelife: his father abused and abandoned him; his mother seems, at best, not to have been paying enough attention (would you let your fourteen year old go out of town on his own to meet people you don't know? and those untreated ear infections?). The article is quite clear that the attention Justin got from adult men was a huge motivating force for him, as he escalated his pornographic activities. Indeed, he only stopped when confronted by Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald, and that happened only a few months ago (see Eichenwald's accompanying essay). Now he has done a 180: he has a lawyer, he has received immunity, and he is assisting the FBI in a massive investigation. Clearly Eichenwald and the Times thought long and hard about how to do the right thing, both by Justin himself and by the subject matter. But has anyone thought about how this boy, who so craves positive attention from adults, is still getting that attention, just in a different kind of way? I'm not saying that Eichenwald and the FBI and the lawyer are in any way parallel to the pedophiles, but can't they see how hard Justin is trying to please them now? So when Eichenwald boasts, and really it is boasting, about how Justin has turned his life around, thanks to him and the Times, I don't know, I'm a little skeptical of how it will all turn out once the attention dies down.

Wow, not much coherence to this post, huh?