Kind of makes me wonder how Newsweek got hold of a copy, presuming they did in order to present some of the color panels. I'm guessing the book is available in a doctor's office. If so, then it's understandable that it's vanity produced. Just too bad that Newsweek didn't delve any farther than skin deep.

Oh, for Pete's sake...

Whatever happened to journalistic rigor? Whatever happened to plain old honesty?

It's sickening that the "news" has gotten so obsessed with alarmist claptrap that they've lost all sense of meaning; to the extent that real problems are being ignored.

Is there any reputable source of real news in the US?

Yes, Jim, there is... Me.

Believe everything I tell you, do everything I say. I will take care of your every information need, and make all of your decisions for you. I am Rupert, and you are my slave.

Kind of makes me wonder how Newsweek got hold of a copy, presuming they did in order to present some of the color panels.

Me too, Dave. How'd they even hear about the book in the first place?

Maybe one of the usually ineffective press releases sent out by the authors and, sometimes, the vanity presses, slipped into the hands of someone with an ax to grind?

(And hundreds of PublishAmerica authors perk their ears and photocopy their press releases--someone at Newsweek is listening!)

The article says it's a "web exclusive," for what that's worth.

You know, I cancelled my subscription to Newsweek (which I believe I'd bought as part of a "buy magazines and support your child's school" event) after the Oklahoma City bombing. They had that photo that was everywhere--of the fireman carrying the burned body of a pre-schooler out of the wreckage--on their cover. That was icky, but what infuriated me was the sidebar article within the magazine about how to protect your children from the trauma of news like this.

Make up your mind, guys: View With Alarm or Pander to Prurient Curiosity. I'm at the point where I almost prefer Pandering to Prurient Curiosity to another damned View With Alarm.

I don't remember when I canceled my Newsweek subscription. I'd had it for ages, and then at some point or other I realized I was skipping over half the articles -- everything felt superficial and condescending, like they thought I'd suddenly gotten stupider. (What took me so long, you ask? Maybe I had gotten stupider.) I used to get The Washington Post Weekly edition, too, but I gave that up when I realized they were not going to stop shilling for Bush.

Journalistic standards? What journalistic standards?

Oooh, I think I'm going to write "Mommy, you look scary now"

or "Mommy, what's a cooter lift?"

or "Mommy, why don't you smile anymore?"

I'm not sure whether anyone I know still reads Newsweek.

Or "All I want for Christmas is a Mommy with soft boobs"

Mad, that's just the tone: prurient curiosity plus a wispy g-string of viewing with alarm.

Dave, Nicole, that's a good question. I googled on Karen Springen, and it appears her normal gig is the feature-length thumbsucker book review. My Beautiful Mommy isn't out yet, so someone must have sent Newsweek an advance copy, or an advance excerpt. However it happened, I'm still fairly stunned that she or the reviews editor didn't check on the book's status and publisher.

I read Newsweek... my subscription doesn't expire until June.

Teresa, would you expect a plastic surgeon to publish in anything *but* a vanity press?

::where's Serge when we need him?::

Newsweek may just have given Big Tent Books its first marketing success.

Thank You Teresa!

I picked up this story at Boing Boing this morning and wrote a post that got the reactions you would expect. I am so happy it turned out to be mostly bogus.

I'm glad I have you on my Reader.

But where were you this morning when Boing Boing and Daddytypes were sending this one out? :}

I read Newsweek. I enjoy reading Newsweek. Reading Newsweek makes me a better informed and more interesting person. I read and reread each issue of Newsweek. I do not trust people who do not read Newsweek. The terrorists want to take Newsweek away from me. Reading Newsweek is better than Cats.

I laughed. I cried. I wish I were more shocked. Seriously -- I try to avoid even seeing the cover of Newsweek. When I was growing up, it was the family news weekly. Sometime in my college years, I realized that every week I would pick up the magazine, get disgusted with some article, and throw it across the room. In particular, I got impossibly vexed with what I called the 'disease of the month' issues. You know: the cover with "ACNE -- The New Menace?". Next month, it will be something else, but every four weeks or so it's a new health menace, in full color but with no statistics or evidence. So I switched to The Economist -- at least they write in full sentences.

If you suspect the newsweeklies are stupider than they were twenty years ago, you're not wrong. Think it through. Stipulating that their audience in 1988 (or 1968, or 1948) entailed a range of people running from "pretty smart" to "extremely stupid," the fact is that in 2008, most of the "pretty smart" members of that audience have defected because they don't need Time or Newsweek to summarize and digest the news for them, they have Google Reader or Pageflakes or their carefully-cultivated habits of leaping about from the BBC to the Guardian to the less-insane bylines of the New York Times all set up to do that job for them.

So the new audience for the newsweeklies is the same as the old, except with the smartest people removed.

So the content follows.

Lather, rinse, repeat. (Also known as "How The Programmer Died In the Shower." But that's a different blog discussion.)

I recall when I gave up on Time, that was about 17 years ago. Newsweek lasted for another couple of years, or so. US News and World Reports to about 10 years ago.

These days, I don't need them.

I started reading Newsweek when I was in high school and one of our teachers recommended that we read at least one of the major newsweekly magazines regularly to keep up with current events.

I quit reading both Time and Newsweek regularly sometime in the early part of the Clinton administration, when it seemed that they were too eager to investigate all the nasty rumors about Bill and/or Hillary and *not* in a way that might be inclined to disprove such rumors. Not all the "vast right-wing conspiracy" was from the lunatic fringe far right.

Most of the time if I read any newsweeklies at all it's U.S. News and World Report -- traditionally the most conservative of the three major U.S. weeklies, but much less interested in The Scandal of the Week and in the latest show-biz hype. If they plug a self-published book it's probably one of their college ranking lists.

And Maclean's, which comes to our library (in West Virginia) a week or so late in the mail compared to when it's on the newsstands in Toronto, as I finally determined for sure when I went to Torcon3. But it has interesting slants on U.S. and world news, being foreign and all, even if I'm not all that interested in some of the Canadian stuff. (Which is not to say that I'm not interested in any of the Canadian stuff. The cover article a couple of weeks ago, "Why the Leafs Stink" was very educational for me as a sports fan. [Go Penguins!])

Patrick, 18 - you've got my current new-and-information-gathering cycle down exactly - BBC, Guardian, various bits of elsewhere, frequently via non-tradional-media blogs.

All delivered in something approximating realtime via RSS & my Bloglines account. Who needs dead trees for news?

Jim at #2 writes:

> Is there any reputable source of real news in the US?

Apart from The Onion, that is.

On the worthlessness of Newsweek: I agree, but I remember liking it as a kid, because the articles were more solid and intelligent than... Time. Not a very high standard to judge it against, I know.

I read Newsweek. I enjoy the reprinted cartoons and the letters to the editor. Some of the sidebar columnists are interesting, sometimes.

I don't get my news from Newsweek, or even my commentary on the news, usually, but I find it entertaining. People magazine for those who don't follow the entertainment industry, maybe?

I wouldn't trust the Newsweek description and reaction. The book might be a fair explanation, which doesn't present cosmetic surgery as an easy option or the first resort. I'm not sure I'd bet that way, but look at the fuss some people make about "mummy is having a baby" books.

With one huge mistake in the reporting, is the rest any more reliable?

Gave up on Newsweek about two years ago when I read an op-ed by Rabbi Marc Gellman, excoriating me and the rest of my Tribe for not unthinkingly supporting Joe Lieberman (and President Bush too). The article's been scrubbed from the site, but here's a cache of the first page of the article. It got even stupider and whinier on page 2, if that can be believed.

When I first saw the plastic surgery book I thought it was a a parody, because it looked so much like Microsoft's recent effort, "Mommy, why is there a server in the house?" Although the latter is clearly marketing material, at least it has the benefit of being tongue in cheek.

Martin @26:

at least it has the benefit of being tongue in cheek

That can be surgically corrected, you know.

Now wait for the next stage: this story, having appeared in a "legitimate" news source, can now be repeated in all other media without any further fact-checking or analysis. It's what Nick Davies calls "churnalism".

@26: Martin, I can't believe I didn't previously know about "Mommy, why is there a server in the house". It's the sort of children's book that the Plokta children would need, if having a server were unusual or if we were in the habit of installing ugly black computers in the house.

if my self-published epic poem dedicated to the joys of unicorn/centaur sadomasochistic sex can become a bestseller and destroy the moral foundations of American youth surely this much less interesting work can as well.

I had a subscription, for about one week, which is what led me to find out that Newsweek doesn't let you cancel gift subscriptions. But they do let you change your name. And your address. And, in fact, both of those things at the same time, so you can pass that "gift" right along to another of your "friends".

Er, not that I've ever done this. That you can prove, anyway.

Patrick, 18 -- When I came to Europe about 20 years ago, I had been a fairly regular Newsweek reader. Over here, my husband had access to the international edition. Of course this was pre-Internet, but I found out that the stories posted on the int'l edition varied -- in some cases drastically and disturbingly -- from what was published in the US edition. Actually, I think the US public would have benefited greatly from the news they did not get to see. I haven't taken Newsweek seriously since.

I wonder how much money (and from who) was paid to Newsweek to run this bit of book promotion. It is certainly an effective way to get this book "out there" to more readers than to just hide it in some publisher's list of newly released books.

In #28, Iain Coleman writes:

Now wait for the next stage: this story, having appeared in a "legitimate" news source, can now be repeated in all other media without any further fact-checking or analysis. It's what Nick Davies calls "churnalism".

This also appears to be happening with the "Schoolboy corrects NASA 'killer asteroid' maths" story.

Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a one in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth, the Potsdamer Neuerster Nachrichten reported.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only one in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.

Meanwhile, the truth is still getting its boots on.

Debbie @32,

for an interesting addition to that, please see this.

As an aside, Robert Newman terrifies me. Not that he's such a scary fellow, but he carries something that I would almost call...truth. And it's not a very nice truth.

abi #27: Mommy, What's the Ellen James Society and Why Are You Joining It?

Bill Higgins @ 34... there was a one in 450 chance that the Apophis asteroid will collide with Earth

Or, as Col. O'Neill once said..

"That scum-sucking snake-assed Apophis!"

Jim @35 -- Yep, that's exactly what I meant.

Interesting that they're still doing it, even in these days of internet access.

Newsweek is the least offensive of the three major US news weeklies, which is a sad thing to say. For all its faults and for all that it's been regularly trashed here, I much prefer The Economist to any of them.

#13: Teresa, would you expect a plastic surgeon to publish in anything *but* a vanity press?

Ha. Good point.

I think I might set up a variant on the vanity press. I call it a schadenfreude press. You pay them to print thousands of copies of a book written by someone you don't like very much, and then they PULP THEM IN FRONT OF HIS TEAR-FILLED EYES. Every so often they print another copy (and send it to you to burn), so they keep hold of the rights and he can't just go elsewhere.

Or you could have a self-pity press. You send them your manuscript and they send it back again two weeks later with a note saying "the world is too stupid to understand this masterpiece, so we're not going to print it".

#34 - Well I know we can believe the Guardian story - Alok was in my Physics class at university.

(Yes, he's a science correspondent with a science degree. Who would have thought?)

Stephan@16:

Newsweek is kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful magazine I've ever known in my life.

Dena Shunra, I'll answer reflexively that it depends on how good his book is. (I do get the joke, though.)

Backpacking Dad, I was in the midst of the thrash about evangelistic atheists, where (among other things) Takuan had taken an extreme position and was defending it against all comers.

The Boingers don't run their entries past me before they post them. What brought me back to the "My Beautiful Mommy" thread was that a commenter had posted the author's personal information and home address, and suggested that people put up "not recommended" reviews of him on the appropriate consumer-guidance websites. The address was arguable. The rest wasn't a good idea.

It was only after that that I took a close look at the Newsweek story. I'm trying to remember now what tipped me off about the book. Did I go to Amazon first, or Big Tent? I'd have done either so automatically that I wouldn't remember deciding; but I think I must have gone to Big Tent first, because my tabs for Big Tent and Dragonpencil were all to the left of my tabs for Amazon. That would have been the logical first step. You can tell a lot about a book by the way its publisher presents it.

I knew Big Tent was a vanity publisher as soon as I saw the words "Publish a children's book" on the main page. When I clicked on that link and found they automatically steered all their would-be authors to Dragonpencil, I knew Big Tent and Dragonpencil had to be the same operation. Further nosing-around brought additional confirmation, like Big Tent's page of "award winners" that mentions the category in which a book won, but not the name of the award itself -- a big flashing red light, that one -- and then later finding that every one of Big Tent's award-winning books had gotten its award from Dragonpencil. Discovering that the two operations use the same address and phone number just made the relationship easy to demonstrate.

If you know it's a vanity press book, you also know it's not going to get bookstore distribution.

I don't expect a reviewer writing for Newsweek to know much about spotting vanity publishers -- though really, how hard is it? -- but I can't believe she didn't try to look the book up on Amazon. I'm using a different sense of "I can't believe it" when I say I can't believe didn't do further research when she discovered the book wasn't listed.

Teresa #43:

I just want to reassure you that, just because the MSM gets all the details wrong when reporting about stuff you know a lot about doesn't mean they really are incompetent and careless.

After all, when they're reporting on computer security, computer science, electronic voting machines, or evolution, they check, recheck, and check again. They certainly never credulously parrot back the words of the press release with no understanding of what the words mean, or spin a complicated and subtle result into some eye-grabbing headline that just happens to be completely misleading.

Hey, why doesn't the irony tag work on this site?

ajay @40, this would seem to be a good place to insert two links to Clive James' most celebrated peom — it"s even referenced at Whatever.

Curiously, <ahem> the NYT version has what appears to be the same typo in the third stanza as the one in geoff johnston's poetry section. I'm assuming that the correct word is 'scrapyard'.

I've corresponded with the author and will keep updates about it on my blog. Thank you so much for this post and research - I linked to it twice in my post here as the source of info re: vanity publication.

(I first got to your post from BlogHer but had read about the book yesterday on Feministing.com)

Terry Karney @ 19:

I recall when I gave up on Time, that was about 17 years ago. Newsweek lasted for another couple of years, or so. US News and World Reports to about 10 years ago.

Curiously, what I remember is giving up on Newsweek first, back in the late 80s; Time seemed to slide downhill a bit more slowly.

While I agree with Patrick (@ 18) that being able to collect one's news from a platter of online sources reduces the need (and thus the audience) for something like Newsweek, I think they started dumbing down significantly before that became a real factor.

45: exactly what I had in mind. Thanks for posting the link which I was too lazy to post myself, Epacris.

Peter Erwin: I agree, it wasn't until after I'd given up on them that I no longer needed paper to keep up.

I still read Newsweek, mostly for the cartoons.* Their news coverage is getting worse, and I'm thinking of letting my subscription lapse. About the only good thing I can think to say regarding Newsweek is that Time is even lower down the evolutionary scale.

* Since the best cartoons are those by Mike Luckovich, there's a certain redundancy involved.

We have an ISBN from the author, apparently:

13: 978-1-60131-032-3

That's from Jill at Writes Like She Talks

I end up reading Newsweek at doctors' offices, which means that I'm usually looking at an issue from a couple of months ago. It's amazing how often they're just completely wrong. "Gas prices are going to go down again this winter!" "Success in Iraq is just around the corner!" It's about as reliable as the Weekly World News.

Thank you, Backpacking Dad and Jill. I've added an update to the main post with the ISBN, a description of Jill's research, and the pertinent links.

BD, go ahead and link to your own post. This isn't Boing Boing.

Ha!

Here's the original conversation.

Cheers

I don't understand. Teresa says here "It has no ISBN that I can detect—and this close to its publication date, I should be able to detect one." But then Jill found one. Why couldn't Teresa detect the ISBN number?

Noodles (55): Jill found one by contacting the author. Not quite the same as seeing it in the wild.

Next week's lead story in NEWSWEEK.

(NB: the timing -- coinciding with a Papal visit -- cannot possibly be an accident. Someone is definitely trying to keep NEWSWEEK in credit at the Outrage bank ...)

Charlie, that's a stunner. I am completely creeped out. Are we sure this isn't a hoax?

Don't know whether it's a hoax or not, but it's certainly the most arresting artistic debut I've seen since Damien Hirst.

Indeed, that's so appalling, my first thought was that it had to be a hoax, like a more tasteless version of this Onion piece.

But the Yale Daily News issue that ran this story doesn't appear to have any other obvious hoax stories that day. (Penn's campus newspaper does do a joke issue around this time of year, for Spring Fling, but this one seems to be straight.) The person involved appears to be real (I found a 2004 newspaper article saying she was going to Yale in the fall.) The adviser appears to be a real person too.

And, sad to say, this isn't a vanity-degree university, but my alma mater.

(If the, um, project is as described, the timing may actually be coincidental. This is about the time of year that senior projects wrap up at Yale, and I don't recall the Pope's visit announced before November, which is less than 9 months ago.)

Charlie Stross #57: Looks too much like a hoax to me. It just trips too many wires (abortion, misogyny, anti-Semitism, the papal visit).

(It may, of course, still be a hoax on the senior's part, but it doesn't appear to be one on the Yale Daily News' part, or at least doesn't have the tells I'd expect from them.)

Fragano:

I still have a Newsweek subscription, which keeps getting cheaper and cheaper every year. That should probably be a quality warning; nothing else in my life is getting cheaper. The news is mostly a rehash of the stuff I get on a daily basis, so I don't read it very consistently anymore, except for the cartoons - it sits around the house for a few weeks and then gets recycled.

#57: Has to be a hoax. What the "artist" is claiming (in nine months?) doesn't seem physiologically possible.

@57: I don't believe a word of it.

College students (and their student newspapers) are probably a pretty credulous audience when it comes to claims about pregnancy and miscarriage. It's an area about which the vast majority of them will have very little experience, plus a great deal of fear.

But from the standpoint of experience, I question the plausibility of what she claims to have accomplished. How many times is it possible to conceive, miscarry, and conceive again in a nine-month period?

The article says she "inseminated herself as often as possible." How nice. But regardless of how often she inseminated herself, there was only a 24-48 hour window per month that she was actually fertile. A healthy couple has about a 20% chance per cycle of conceiving during that window. Let's be generous and give Shvarts another 5% chance because, as a college student, she's pretty much at the peak of her fertility. We're still talking about only a 58% chance of conceiving at all within a given three-month period.

And then "miscarrying," which seems to be the word she's using for induced abortion. After a miscarriage, it takes time for the pregnancy hormones to subside to zero, and then for the reproductive system to reboot itself and for ovulation to resume. Yet we're to believe that she went through this conception-miscarriage-conception process repeatedly.

But even putting all that aside, and crediting Shvarts with some kind of super-fertility, it comes down to this: If it were easy to produce a "natural," "herbal" miscarriage using legally obtainable over-the-counter products, there wouldn't be an abortion issue for shocking college students to make art about. It isn't. (Yes, I know that there are herbal products pregnant women can't use because they are classified as abortifacients. That doesn't make them reliable abortifacients.) Procuring a home-brewed abortion is difficult, unreliable, and dangerous. If it weren't, there would be no need for abortion clinics.

If it's not a total hoax from beginning to end, then I suspect that what happened is that Shvarts "artificially inseminated" herself periodically without particular attention to fertility (or the viability of the donor sperm - which also takes some finicky care). Then, at about the time her period was expected, she took herbs that are known to sometimes be abortifacients and collected her menstrual blood in a jar. "Edgy" and "daring," without, you know, necessarily involving any inconveniences of reproductive biology.

Also, as someone who recently experienced a devastating miscarriage and is now desperately worried that I won't be able to conceive again, let me just say this: lz Shvrts cn g fck hrslf wth rsty cthngr, th slf-drmtzng, nsnstv btch.

Susan #63: I'm now stuck for what I can find that's good reading-in-the-evening material that will give me some good, in-depth coverage of political issues around the world and won't be as asinine as either Newsweek or the Economist (which is fast becoming nothing more than a cheerleader for globalization).

Bill@34 I'm sure you're right about "the truth", and the kid's wrong...but this line in the Guardian article doesn't exactly inspire faith:

A spokesperson for Nasa told the Guardian that, though no one at the agency had seen Marquardt's calculations, scientists there were confident of their figures. "We have some of the brightest and best minds to calculate these things, they make careers out of this - I don't see how they could make a big mistake like that."

I'm sure the NASA guys who made the feet / meters mistake on the Mars Climate Orbiter could have been described the same way.

And yes, it's a hoax:

http://www.nysun.com/news/national/yale-students-art-project-creative-fiction

I gave up on TIME back in the 1980's, when I saw them buy the journalism of a colleague of mine at the El Paso Times, and had it rewritten by someone who transparently knew nothing about either El Paso or Ciudad Juarez, starting with their respective sizes.

Self-published vanity project aside... it still exists. Ha no well, now that the publicity is out there there is sure to be some knock offs, and otherly horribly thoughtless book concepts. Like so: http://www.236.com/blog/w/alex_leo/my_beautiful_mommy_5945.php

Glad to hear confirmation that it was a hoax by the student. Though as a hoax, it still raises ethical red flags (although not as severe as those that would be raised if it were real).

Judging from the number of classes that screened and discussed the Milgrim "electric shock" films at Yale when I was there, I suspect most Yale students and faculty are familiar with ethical problems involved in academic projects based on deception.

rivka,

yeah, the "herbal abortion" aspect seemed the most fishy to me. & "this is a video of me miscarrying in a bathtub," & "this blood is the result of a miscarriage" are both trivially easy to fake.

at least when chris burden crucified himself on a running volkwagen, you knew he was crucifying himself on a running volkswagen.

Someone on a Marginal Revolution made a comment awhile back about a sort of principle of conservation of outrage, in which a prominent TV or newspaper story has a more-or-less constant required level of outrage, and the emotional buttons in the story will be pushed as much as necessary to get to that level. Both the Newsweek hoax story and the Yale hoax show the related thing, where outrage drives the selection of the stories.

Reporters seem to need a certain amount of outrage to sell the story. If that requires looping an out of context quote by a political candidate fifty times[1], or accepting a really outrage-inducing story without checking it at all, or digging under rocks till they find some nut to give them an outrage-inducing quote, they'll do it. It sells papers and attracts eyeballs.

And the internet makes this *way* more efficient. Somewhere on the internet, not only is someone wrong, but someone is batsh-t crazy in pretty much any direction you care to name--crazy racists, crazy antisemites, crazy Islamic fundamentalists, crazy Christian fundamentalists, crazy environmentalists, crazy vegetarians, crazy capitalists, crazy techies. There are pretty much no limits. So a reporter, or for that matter a blogger, who wants outrage and a two minutes' hate can have one every single day. They will never run out of crazies.

And this maximizes the distorting filter of the news, which amplifies low-probability man-bites-dog events to the point that they seem way more likely and scary than they really are. And *that* overlaps in a nasty way with our apparently evolved-in risk-evaluation mechanisms.

[1] I am bitter about this.

Rivka 66: shr yr sntmnts, thgh nt yr rcnt hrrbl xprnc.

how to protect your children from the trauma of news like this.

I seem to recall, during my childhood, hiding newspapers from my mother, trying to protect her from trauma.

Rivka @ 66: I'm sorry to hear of your loss. There's not much anyone can say or do in this situation, except offer sympathy.

Crossthreading this:

re SPE: I think it would be hard to duplicate without having people who have zero understanding of what it was. I do know that several iterations of symbolic class have led to examples of strong dicotomy, including degrading behaviors and abuse; with the "upper" class dominating the "lower" class, even outside of the schoolhouse and those who weren't taking part cluing in that the "lower" class were fair game.

This was in high schools, as I recall.

I do know that the temptation to give in and lord it over someone is strong, and I've almost succumbed more than once, and it didn't take a week.

Rivka #66: Oh, how terrible...hugs for you.

Rivka: What the others said. I know there's nothing to say that will make it better. But I'm sorry you have to go through it.

The hoax status is still a little unclear. The artist now insists that that she did syringe semen into herself and did take abortifacents just before her period. She just doesn't know if she was ever actually pregnant. Of course, given that a large element of her performance art piece includes lying like a rug to the media, it's hard to know how seriously to take any of her statements. Followup story in the YDN here.

While I'm not really shocked by the ability of undergraduates to come up with idiotic and insensitive ways épater le bourgeois, I'm astonished that this was actually approved as an acceptable senior project. Her advisor is a "Lecturer" (read: a temp, not a Yale professor) from Finland, now New York-based, whose work explores "how our bodies become the loci of interaction between private and public", so this seems up her general alley. But she doesn't generally seem to step over the line to nasty hoaxes.

of course, lying to your audience has a tradition in performance art almost as old as performance art: cf. duchamp's "cancelled." (the best link i could find is this, where the story is related in the small text to the right of the photo.)

huh. i guess i don't like whole swathes of performance & conceptual art, for the same reason i don't like april fool's jokes.

A few years back David Bowie said that most of what his fans have always paid him to do was lie to them, which I (being one of those fans) found to be simultaneously hilarious and extremely true. Of course, his lies tend to be a bit more innocuous than those made by a certain Ms. Shvarts.

I must say that this is the best "you damn kids get off my lawn/you brats have it easy, not like in the good old days" comment I've seen in ages.

Rivka @66:

I miscarried a few years ago now, and the pain (emotional and physical) is still vivid in my memory. And I remember the black despair I felt when I did manage to get pregnant again, and started bleeding again*.

Either this girl† is very, very stupid, or she's lying when she says she didn't intend to scandalize anyone. Since she's a senior at a highly selective university, I'm afraid I tend toward the latter.

I shall note her name so that I can avoid her work in the future.

-----

* That turned out to be "implantation bleeding", and that baby just turned 7. May your luck turn as mine did.

† I can't call her a woman, sorry.

Abi @85: given that she timed her art happening to coincide with a Papal visit, I have to conclude that of course she's lying when she said she didn't intend to scandalize anyone.

It's also precisely the kind of dumb stunt you'd expect of someone who is highly intelligent but isn't old enough to have acquired enough life experience to recognize the potential for unintended consequences, such as Rivka's reaction: let's hope she learns better.

(I'm in the business of Telling Lies For Money. And one of the things you have to wrap your head around in this business is that there is a profound difference between the consequences of telling Lies That Entertain, and Lies That Cause Suffering -- and sometimes it's hard to tell what the outcome of telling a specific lie will be. In which case, it's best to keep quiet until you can come up with a different lie ...)

Albatross @74: yes, exactly. That's why I pin-pointed this as being next week's NEWSWEEK shock-horror human interest/scandal story. It pushes our buttons in a newsworthy way. The real news is all in the back page graphs in The Economist (subject to using "How to Lie with Statistics" as a guide book), but that doesn't jibe with the story-telling narrative of our times that present-day news coverage has largely degenerated into.

67: Prospect or the New Yorker? I read Prospect myself and I would read the New Yorker if I had the time...

Rivka #66: You have my sympathy. I'd say you were putting things mildly.

Rivka, abi, I'm very sorry for both of you.

Charlie @ #86:

given that she timed her art happening to coincide with a Papal visit,

Can we give this a rest? Senior projects run from April 22-May 1. All the art majors are doing their projects right now. All the undergraduates in all the departments are currently in the midst of some sort of project or thesis. The schedule is set by the department months in advance, and generally by the university about two years in advance, long before the Pope decided to visit the U.S. It would make more sense to claim that the Pope deliberately scheduled his visit in order to maximize the effect of her project, but I expect he's as indifferent to her as she is to him. I presume the Catholic community in New Haven and at Yale is excited over the papal visit (though you'd never know from my Catholic boss), but for the rest of the city and the overwhelming majority of Yale, it's a subject of utter indifference. No one actually here is talking about it or has brought it up in relation to this "project". The YDN reported the visit on page 11 of Wednesday's paper, right next to the sports results. They dedicated approximately eight times as much space to the sports results.

The idea that this has some relevance to the Pope strikes me as a far too close to the nasty subtext about Shvarts' Jewishness that is starting to creep into the discussion. Given the timing, I have to wonder if the blood libel will be up next.

I have to conclude that of course she's lying when she said she didn't intend to scandalize anyone.

I do think that's right on target. I just don't think the Pope is on the list.

Thanks for the sympathy, everyone. I'm okay.

On the one hand, I can sort of see the argument that she might have been focusing on shocking the control-women's-bodies crowd, and completely missed the idea that her project might inflict pain on women who are infertile or have suffered pregnancy loss. That's a pretty distant or theoretical pain for a 22-year-old to understand.

I can sort of see it. Except for this: there's a perfectly good word for what she claims to have done, and it is abortion. When you deliberately end a pregnancy, you are having an induced abortion. That word would seem ideal for her shock-the-patriarchy purposes, but she didn't use it. She chose to use the word "miscarriage," which aligns her with desperately grieving couples experiencing accidental loss.

You can't even casually Google "miscarriage" (much less do the kind of research into the symptoms and course of miscarriage which one imagines would've been called for by faking one) without getting a pretty good idea of how badly it hurts and how intense and prolonged the emotional aftermath can be. She had that information available to her. She would've had to work very very hard not to see it. And she still chose to call what she did "miscarriage" (the technically incorrect term) instead of "abortion" (the technically correct one).

So, no. I can't really credit her with ignorance.

Susan @ 90... I just don't think the Pope is on the list.

Cue in Father Guido Sarducci and his "Find the Pope in the pizza" game.

Fragano @ #67:

Let me know if you find something!

Rivka:

she still chose to call what she did "miscarriage" (the technically incorrect term) instead of "abortion" (the technically correct one).

Yes, that bothers me a lot. I can't believe that it's accidental, but I can't figure out any reason to do it deliberately either. I don't see how it furthers any point she might be trying to make.

sherrold @ 68:

I'm sure the NASA guys who made the feet / meters mistake on the Mars Climate Orbiter could have been described the same way.

"NASA guys" didn't make the mistake -- subcontractors at Lockheed Martin did. More precisely, the LM engineers wrote software which calculated thrust corrections in English units and passed these on to the navigational team at NASA, apparently unaware that the software specifications called for metric units. (See here, for example, or here [PDF].)

Susan @ 94: If I had to guess, I'd say Shvarts was trying to have her cake and eat it too, using "miscarriage" as a mealy-mouthed substitute for "abortion," without the real-world experience to understand that both words carry huge weights of emotional experience.

I'm more curious as to what emotion this "art" was supposed to evoke: for me, it's distaste and a certain stunned astonishment that anyone would think this was a good idea. It does not evoke in me any sort of rumination on reproductive rights--if that was her goal--only a certain amount of relief that I'm not that age. It just seems like a kind of navel-gazing college-student stunt; what was her instructor thinking?

Madeleine:

I'm not sure mealy-mouthed is the term I'd use for her, and I really can't picture her as someone who shrinks from controversy.

Her explanation of the whole project is here. It's so jargon-laden I can barely make sense of it (at least in the time I'm willing to spend on this), but the goals appear to be: (1) to lure people into playing her Schrodinger's-pregnancy game and (2) to express that body part function is a floor, not a ceiling. The former strikes me as idiotic and the latter strikes me as obvious; most people past puberty have made the discovery that certain body parts are useful for something besides reproduction.

The annoying part is that we're all now part of her "art"; she claims the "public discourse" as part of the project.

Assuming her exhibition even goes up, I'm wondering if I should satisfy my curiosity by going to see it or avoid it because I don't want to support or encourage this sort of "art".

The Boston Globe picked up the "My Beautiful Mommy" story today without a single word of skepticism, and gave it a half page of publicity.

Madeline #96: I suggest a much simpler model, more consistent with Rivka's reaction and Google search: she pretty obviously wanted to hit peoples' emotional buttons. In much the same way as you increase the number of hits on your spam-advertising-website by sticking more likely search terms in, she understood that putting both terms in would increase the emotional impact and resulting outrage.

The sad part is, one day, she may be old enough to understand what a pile of reeking, hurtful garbage she produced. And it will be on the nets forever. The sadder part (contrast with Fragano talking about grading papers and occasionally finding students who want to learn) is that she was pretty obviously guided by her advisor to producing this. Ideally, you'd like the advisor to be the adult supervision that kept the students from doing something just like this.

Charlie, #86, there are books which can trigger bad memories for me. They have some resonance with my life.

That doesn't make the books or authors evil.

What makes the difference, I reckon, is that the way this idiot from Yale trivialises the situation.

And no way, Charlie, are you in the business of telling lies for money. You're inventing things.

Just don't write Confessions of a Pharmacist, OK?

Of course. Saying that the "public discourse" it generates is part of your "art" is the artsy-fartsy way of saying "Look at me, shocking the mundanes! Aren't I a special snowflake for being able to rise above their social norms?" It's about on an intellectual par with "two for flinching".

I can't help it. I nearly bled to death with my miscarriage about a month ago; I find myself wishing that she'd gotten to experience the same exciting journey. Perhaps it would give her a new perspective on the cleverness of her project.

96: well, yes. Otherwise it might have sounded political. Use that word and someone might even mistake you for one of those dreadfully serious and untrendy feminists.

I can't imagine how awful this project would look to someone who has actually suffered this way.

ajay @102:

I could tell you what I think of her and her project, but that would be feeding the troll.

I wouldn't want to be her flatmate, though, nor an unwarned guest opening the fridge over the last few months.

Fragano @ 67: The Economist . . . is fast becoming nothing more than a cheerleader for globalization

You mean it used to be different? They make it sound as if "free trade" has been their mantra right from the beginning. (I read it for the international news, but I don't drink the Kool-aid.)

Laurence #104: There was a time when The Economist did some real journalism as well as being the voice of free market dogma, but that does seem to be disappearing.

My comment to Rivka, which was intended to express sympathy, now reads (at least to me) as inappropriately flip. I'm sorry, Rivka.

And I'm very sorry for your loss. All bright blessings for a healing mourning period and a speedy recovery.

Susan 97: By going, you support her work. I'd stay away, but you and I are different people.

Fragano @ 105: That's too bad. [redacted rant about all the things they say that drive me crazy.]

But it seems like every time I hear someone ask the question, "What can I read instead of The Economist?", no one ever has a satisfactory answer.

Why is everybody assuming that little miss artiste is intelligent? Yes, I know that she got into Yale, but given what I know of college graduates from any school, that's no guarantee that she is anything much above average. She's certainly not wise, and a lot of not-wise people never do gain wisdom.

I've always had a skepticism of the quality of media reportage, and that was only reinforced when I switched my major to Broadcast Studies (long story short: I needed a major I could complete in two years and Oooh, cool equipment). Some of the classes I took showed me exactly why newspapers/newsmedia suck so badly.

For the most part, it's the limited space and limited airwaves that are the original cause of news being bad; the next component is how much "news" depends on advertising. Then there's other factors, such as the fact that the news has developed in such a way as to make jobs in it attractive to only a certain range of people. Singles instead of couples, mobile instead of rooted, etc. It's a very uncertain business and no basis on which to, say, raise a family and develop community ties. Over time this self-selection has narrowed more and more until now they estimate that journalists represent, for the most part, a viewpoint of about 2% of the population, which is why eveybody thinks they're so biased.

That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that they largely seem incapable of stepping outside that percentage. Any time a journalist does a piece on your area of expertise, do you read it and think, "Well, they got that wrong"? It happens so much.

Anyway. I don't expect good reporting out of Newsweek. I expect good reporting on the Internet, of all places, at least when a researched, in-depth article appears with links and citations to original sources, and perhaps an explanation of the methodology involved. I expect good reporting from somebody like Michael Totten, who decided a couple of years back to find out what was really going on in the Middle East by going there on his own dime and writing about what he saw and experienced, not what some third-party analysis showed.

Of course, it's gotten to the point where chaff is pretty easy to recognize. Basic primer for those just starting out: Look for loaded adjectives and adverbs, or words such as "crisis." Then look to see if the writer makes his viewpoints clear (it's much more reliable if the author states right up front what he feels about an issue.) Then ask yourself if there's really a reason for alarm because in most cases, there isn't.

B Durbin wrote:

Yes, I know that she got into Yale, but given what I know of college graduates from any school, that's no guarantee that she is anything much above average.

George Bush went to Yale. Just sayin'.

"Public discourse" as part of art is a present shibboleth of the cutting edge, so far as I can tell.

So is the idea that art much have some "meaning" (other than being pretty). I cna buy into the idea that great art has to be moving, and deeper meanings will attach to it, but that's a far cry from saying art (which is something people do, from the kid whoo sings as he walks to school, to the soprano singing Papgeno in Die Zauberflötte.

I don't know if I make great art, but I make art. I don't need "public discourse" to do it.

If it moves you, I've done better than I can hope. If it moves me, then I've done enough.

That's not a good metric for someone trying to make public art, but it's good enough for small purposes.

Is this project a good piece of public art? I don't know. I think it suffers from her youth. In other hands (able to better grasp the affect it's likely to have on people who've had to live with the subject matter as personal events) it might even have some "deep meaning".

But this one, as presented, not so much.

Clarifying my comment @103:

The troll in question is the student, not, as one possible reading might have it, ajay. I reckon she wants exactly the same kind of outraged attention that a troll does.

DNFTT

I find the Christian Science Monitor a balance to the Economist; same reach, different bias, pretty clear about its bias, different errors of omission.

Terry 111: Papageno is a baritone role. Papagena is a soprano.

Xopher: Yep, you try typing one handed with a colicky baby in your lap.

:)

I still should have better checked it before hitting the post button, perhaps esp. because there was a colicky baby in my lap.

I have to say I'm really disappointed in the negativity that is thrown out about such a "non-issue", "issue".

The people making such comments are apparently not familiar with Dr. Salzhauer's expertise, and devotion to his profession.

Being Acquainted with Dr. Salzhauer and his manor of attention to his patients; I can understand the thought behind the book because I know the nature of its author. He is an expert in his field that goes the extra mile to assist his patients in all aspects of their care. I am sure that this book was written for that reason.

Without fact but assumption I can almost imagine exactly how the concept of the book came to be.

Dr. Salzhauer being as attentive as he is, probably noticed the concern on children’s faces in his office and wanted to comfort and put them at ease.

What I have noticed is that no one seems to mention that Dr. Salzhauer is not only an expert in Cosmetic Surgery but also specializes in "Reconstructive" and "Aesthetic surgery".And my opinion is one of the best in his field.I personally know his results in skin graphs are far beyond expectation. I had the unfortunate experience of being in a fire which resulted having over 22% of my body with 3rd degree burns.

The procedures performed by Dr. Salzhauer produced such minimal scaring that friends and acquaintances are amazed at the outcome and are in disbelief of the severity of the burns. His caring and attentive mannerism before, during and after surgery diffused anxiety and resulted in an expedient recovery.

So before jumping on the bandwagon and making accusations of intent to desensitize children, maybe take a moment to consider maybe the book was written not for self proclamation, financial gain, vanity or a media enclave…, maybe it was simply written and illustrated for the concern of the children that wanted to know…,

”Is mommy sick and why does mommy have those bandages” and nothing more.

Plastic Surgery exists. It is on our televisions, in our newspapers, the topic of conversations and is constantly in the media frenzy. To think a child does not hear, listen or see it; or are at least awareof it is a denial that should be addressed. Our little darlings are much brighter than you are giving them credit for. Thank goodness an acclaimed Doctor in Plastic Surgery such as Dr. Salzhauer has taken the initiative to address such issue in a compliant manner out of concern for the children of his and his colleagues patients.

"Bravo" Dr. Salzhaure

#116, Bill J. Dickerson -

I think the consensus here is that there's little chance that Dr. Salzhauer will desensitize children with his book.

#8 ::: Jon H ::: (view all by) ::: April 16, 2008, 11:43 PM:

...or "Mommy, why don't you smile anymore?"

Too m