The "highly-charged," "gendered" bathroom.

It's a serious area of feminist studies, to the surprise of Boston Globe Columnist Alex Beam:

When I first saw the ''Call for Papers -- Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets" posted on an academic website, my beeswax detector went off. There can't really be two professors planning to publish a book working from ''the premise that public toilets, far from being banal or simply functional, are highly charged spaces, shaped by notions of propriety, hygiene and the binary gender division" . . . can there?

Yes!

Here is some more rhetoric from the book proposal: ''Indeed, public toilets are among the very few openly segregated spaces in contemporary Western culture, and the physical differences between 'gentlemen' and 'ladies' remains central to (and is further naturalized by) their design. As such, they provide a fertile ground for critical work interrogating how conventional assumptions about the body, sexuality, privacy, and technology can be formed in public space and inscribed through design."

I think this is an excellent subject for scholarship, actually, but I will strenuously object if it leads to political action in the form of trying to abolish separate bathrooms for women.

What's for dinner?

Crabcakes and tuna. Cosmopolitans and metropolitans. And lotsa conversation that I cannot relate.

Let's deliquesce and get squibbery!

Over at Throwing Things, they are very serious -- and funny! -- about the big National Spelling Bee, which can be followed at the website, and, tomorrow, on ESPN. I've set the TiVo. I love the spelling bee!

Is a routine political compromise a crime?

Gordon Smith writes about a Wisconsin statute that makes "logrolling" a felony.

List-o-mania.

Here's a list getting a lot of links today: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The first three, sure, but after that, it's more, huh? What's really the game here? The first three seem to be there so we can slam the other things -- "The Second Sex," "The Feminine Mystique" -- by putting them in their company.

But people love lists. People will read lists. There's something so readable about them. In 1977, "The Book of Lists" was a huge best seller. I happen to have a copy here. Let me show you my favorite page:



UPDATE: The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula. The list was based on asking "3,500 international visitors" to the Madame Tussaud Wax Museum in London "which persons -- past or present -- they hated the most."

Possibly the worst sentence I've ever read in the NYT.

I was going to say something about the content of today's Tom Friedman column, but I've decided to say something about the form. Check out this sentence:

Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?

What we "urgently need" is an editor. Talk about "badly deformed or mutated"!

"The boys seem to have a headstart on this 'blog' thing."

Take a look at The Cotillion, a gathering place for conservative women bloggers.