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Rachael, I agree that Dave Lindorff's joke is off-color—I certainly don't think the prospect of Red America wiped out by flood or drought due to global warming is a good thing! And yet I find myself wanting to defend the guy ...
First, Lindorff's revenge fantasy isn't so different from conservative preachers waxing poetic about the apocalypse, when pro-choicers will get what's coming to them (i.e., an eternity of suffering).
Second, beneath the nasty rhetoric, there's a kernel of truth: red staters have already gotten a taste of how poor environmental leadership could affect their everyday lives (the Georgia drought, for example), and yet they drag their feet.
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Watching the tragedy of Benazir Bhutto's assassination unfold Thursday should have provided a sobering reality check for everyone who bemoans the state of politics in this country. We can go on endlessly about how divided our electorate is, about how no one listens to anyone on the other side of the spectrum, but—while we may not be living in a golden age of debate—things rarely get more out of control than some stolen yard signs or missing Ws on the White House keyboards. I might not like it if Hillary Clinton gets to move back into the White House, and you might shudder at the thought of another GOP administration, but none of us are likely to take up arms or wish for the death of their ideological adversaries.
Except for maybe Dave Lindorff, who says, in a column that got play on Drudge and InstaPundit, that global warming and the accompanying rise in sea levels have a "silver lining." He's looking forward to the day (in a shorter time frame than I've seen cited by even the most alarmist environmentalist) when most of Red America is wiped out by flooding or drought. I wish I could write this off as the unhinged rantings of a fringe blogger, but Lindorff is, according to his Wikipedia page and the bio on the article, a two-time Fulbright scholar and a published author.
Before Lindorff next sits down at his keyboard and cackles to himself about how riotously hilarious he is for telling us backward bumpkins in the Midwest that we're gonna git what's comin' to us, he should pause and realize that dying for your political beliefs is a very real possibility in parts of this world, and that there's nothing funny or clever about it.
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You might be right, Melinda, that experience doesn't make Hillary Clinton or John McCain the "safe" candidate in light of the Bhutto assassination. (I'll admit I've found myself warming to McCain while he survived the greatly exaggerated reports of his death, and as the other GOP candidates I thought I might support have begun flailing.) But (via the excellent Ed Morrissey) I hope that we can agree that Bill Richardson is a wildly dangerous candidate in comparison.
Here's what Gov. Richardson had to say:
President Bush should press Musharraf to step aside, and a broad-based coalition government, consisting of all the democratic parties, should be formed immediately. Until this happens, we should suspend military aid to the Pakistani government. Free and fair elections must also be held as soon as possible. It is in the interests of the U.S. that there be a democratic Pakistan that relentlessly hunts down terrorists. Musharraf has failed, and his attempts to cling to power are destabilizing his country. He must go.
Really? He wants President Bush to overthrow the government of another country? This does lend credence, though, to your theory, Melinda, that "experience" might not be what we're looking for. Richardson's own Web site touts his experience and brags that "Governor Richardson knows the Middle East, and he knows diplomacy can work there," and this is the best he can come up with?
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Maybe John is right that the assassination of Benazir Bhutto is apt to win supporters for the "safe'' presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. In much the same way that voters decided it was "safer'' to reward George W. Bush's bumbling in Iraq with ... another four years in which to work more of the same magic. "You don't switch horses in midstream'' was the operative cliché in '04. That's the argument for the "safe'' candidates in '08, as well: To lead in a complicated and dangerous world, experience is required. Unless, of course, voters can be persuaded that experience of the sort that got us where we are today is the problem rather than the solution. In which case, neither Clinton nor McCain looks remotely safe -- or different enough.
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Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated today at a rally near Islamabad. A suicide bomber reportedly shot her at close range then detonated an explosive, killing Bhutto and 20 others. Bhutto was a complicated woman—underneath the traditional veils she was a graduate of Oxford and Harvard, who spoke flawless English. But then under all that she was also a political creature who had mastered the sort of shape-shifting needed to cast herself as a historic figure in the mold of Indira Ghandi or Joan of Arc. This sharp sketch of Bhutto in the New York Times last month suggested that under all the compelling Western-sounding rhetoric, Bhutto was really no different than centuries of predecessors—doling out political favors and reportedly treating the government coffers as the family cookie jar.
What kind of woman survives multiple assassination attempts and persists in attending huge political rallies in an open vehicle? Perhaps if your father and brothers are killed all around you, that starts to feel quite normal.
In a diary she wrote for Slate just over 10 years ago, Bhutto offers a few clues. Balancing her duties as opposition leader in the National Assembly of Pakistan against her responsibilities to her children, she sounds like any working mother: “I do not like my children watching cartoons,” she writes “But I am feeling guilty. I have to catch a flight to Islamabad where the Parliament is based. So I cave in.” But what really pervades this weeklong account is a feeling of walls closing in on her. When she hears of threats to burn down her home in Islamabad, she acts to relocate her children to schools in Dubai. From her veil that keeps slipping off to the inability of an unaccompanied woman to “hail a taxi or drive a car,” in Pakistan anymore, Bhutto seems forever pressed to be smaller than she wants to be. References abound to retorts she doesn’t offer and comebacks left unsaid, “I get angry. Stop it, I say. That's what they want. You are not going to play their game.”
Interspersed between the almost mundane recitations of who in her government has been kidnapped, arrested, or released each day are Bhutto’s frequent references to the small indulgences—the pizza binges and chocolate cakes and the books—Western trappings in which she indulges almost helplessly.
After finishing Caesar's Women by Colleen McCullough, Bhutto reflects “Here we are heading towards the third millennium, and the conduct of men and women still mirrors the style of Caesar's age.”
“Does time go forward or backward or just stand still?” she continues. “Do we fight the same demons in each era and in each century only with different methods and in different styles? Are we condemned to a cycle of patterns that keeps turning and ending up where it started?” For Bhutto, at least, the choice was to repeat the patterns set by her family—fighting her way to center stage, and dying larger than life.
In her diary there is an exchange with her then-7-year-old daughter, Bakhtwar, that reveals a Bhutto who may have nevertheless believed she could defy that pattern. As her mother leaves for the airport Bakhtwar looks up at her mother and waves casually, "Bye, it was nice seeing you. Come back soon," she breezes.
"What do you mean," replies Bhutto. "I am your mother. I am stuck to you like that arm of yours for life."
"But, Mama, my arm keeps going away," she complains.
"But it always comes back," says Bhutto.
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As Melinda said, for everyone who chuckles at the photo of Hillary looking haggard, there’s at least one other person whose vote will be tipped in her direction if they sense she’s being picked on for being a middle-aged woman who looks like a middle-aged woman.
I thought of this when I saw another photo—the Huckabee family Christmas card from back when he was governor of Arkansas. You know this photo is going to be passed around by Huckabee haters with a disingenuous “What a lovely family!” type of remark. Or it’ll be an vehicle for undisguised smirks and jokes. It’s not just the plus-sized lads, it’s the matching outfits, and the weird elbow patches.
But for every laugh, there’ll be someone who sees the photo and recognizes their own family or the happy clan they wish they were. And there’ll be lots of people who hear those smirks and giggles and remember how much they hate the snobby bicoastal elites who live on coffee and breath mints and have such contempt for family life.
In other words, can we all skip the photo fun? It’s not only slimy, it wins friends for your enemies.
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I’m not sure if the bedraggled Hillary will win women’s sympathy. But it blows my minds that college students who can no longer get low-cost contraception at school aren’t getting much sympathy from Slate readers. College health centers have long gotten discount pills from drug companies, which the companies are apparently happy to provide. Restoring those discounts involves a tiny technical fix that costs taxpayers nothing. And yet, check out these comments from the Fray. From Lloyd 667:
“I am all in favor of cheap birth control. In fact, I favor universal health coverage that includes prescription drugs of all kinds. But why should college students be especially favored here?”
And from burgettk, a “female, recent college graduate”:
“…I can't think of a single female who couldn't find an RA or female friend to drive them to a Planned Parenthood, where birth control can be had for free or inexpensively. Even after price hikes, I was still able to get mine for $20/month, and I was classified as a 'higher-income' patient.
“The consequences of not being a responsible sexually active person are just too great. If my choice comes to having a new pair of shoes or not having a baby before I'm 100% ready to do so, I'll go barefoot every time.”
But wait a minute. Supporting this fix does not imply that college women aren’t resourceful or that none of them could find other options if they needed to. But why make it harder for them than it needs to be? Drug companies are willing to give the discounts. Students clearly benefit. You and I pay nothing. Unless you’re basically hostile to family planning, where’s the downside?
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Just remember: Some women who do not love Hillary Clinton will nonetheless rally to her side if she's roughed up, looks like she's been roughed up -- or even, as John suggests, just looks like she had Ho Hos for breakfast and hasn't slept since Thursday. They are just one over-the-top, anti-Hillary email away from deciding to support her after all - which is why, at this point, the whole Clinton-hating industry might as well be on her campaign's payroll; knock yourselves out, guys.
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John (our intrepid political correspondent, who is who knows where in New Hampshire) read our exchange about the Drudge photo and has this to add:
Hillary needs to look like shit right now because her message is that she's out there working like a dog for votes and for the American people (see this piece) and because she wants sympathy from women in Iowa (who she's courting with lots of humanizing outreach lately). The picture will bring her both because a) they'll think she's working hard and b) they'll feel like she's a human woman who can look bad if caught at the wrong angle. Drudge is doing her a favor.
Maybe Drudge is still in her camp after all.
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Terrible photos are just irresistable, aren't they? This one of
Hillary reminds me of the scary one of Mark Warner that ran on the
front of the New York Times Magazine back when he looked like a
viable presidential candidate. Remember it? His teeth looked like
chicklets, and the general effect was Scary Used Car Salesman. If I
recall, the color turned out to have been doctored.
The Warner photo shows that both men and women are vulnerable.
Hillary's haggard look evokes the noun that must be the root of that
adjective, a gendered term if ever there was one. But if someone posts
a photo of John McCain looking old, worn, and sick, won't that conjure
a parallel image of male weakness? In both cases, unlike the Warner
photo, I don't think these pictures can do much damage. The candidates
are too often on camera for one picture to do real harm. So, Rachael
maybe you're right that the sympathy element matters more. I imagine a
lot of women would share your reaction. No one wants to look at a
picture of herself like that!
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I'm seeing this remarkable photo of Hillary Clinton all over today. On Drudge, first and foremost, but also on blogs that are discussing it. Like Ann Althouse, I first reacted with disbelief. Then a million questions popped into my head. How much of our reaction to this photo is based on Hillary being a woman? Probably a lot. Is that fair? Probably not. On the other hand, if the rigors of the campaign trail are leaving her this bedraggled, how is she going to weather the demands of the presidency? Also, weren't Drudge and Hillary pals just a few months ago?
Lastly, I wonder if Hillary can use this to her advantage in a small way. I've never cared for her personality or her politics, but as a woman, I'm sympathetic. I feel for her. No one likes to see pictures of themselves having a bad hair day, or after missing a few trips to the gym. And that's without the fate of a presidential campaign—her life's ambition—hanging precariously in the balance. The sympathy doesn't last long when I remember the way her campaign has tried to exploit other candidate's perceived weaknesses (see: Obama, drugs), but for once my visceral reaction toward her is not one of immediate dislike.
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Bill Clinton's remarks on "Charlie Rose" last week had more than a whiff of frustration. They made Hillary's campaign seem a little desperate. And so it's not surprising to read this morning that some of her advisers wish he would tone it down. I wonder if he should just shut up altogether for a while. I know Bill is her contra-Oprah celebrity asset, but he is making her look small by comparison while he flails around. Forgive the psychobabble, but he seems like a husband who either wants something for his wife too badly, or is acting that way to cover an act of subconcious but supreme sabotage.
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Don't miss our books round-up (how's that for an inside plug?), which has convinced me to spend my winter vacation week reading about, what else, work. Like Michelle Tsai, who along with Torie Bosch recommends Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, I'm missing out on office life, which helps explain the allure of this busman's holiday. There's nothing like working away in an attic for a decade to make you wonder whether you've missed out on a revolution in the workplace lifestyle, at least among "creative" workers. The latest developments in workspace dynamics, I learned from Lisa Belkin's "Life's Work" column yesterday, feature what is known as "white space" (the non-desk place where you really work) and "hot desking" (choosing different spots for different tasks): it all adds up to never sitting still in one place. Both concepts evidently derive from the insight, reported by consultants on "the future of work," that much about the distracting workplace is antithetical to doing one's most innovative and thoughtful work. So you might think we flexible at-home workers have it made. In many ways, we do: I can sit at my desk undisturbed (if I get off-line), or go anywhere else I please. But I'd point out that we homebodies are missing something the consultants may not appreciate: the spur to concentration that comes with the need to escape colleagues. Me, I'm always looking for occasions to be distracted by company.
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We often hear of the freedom from being judged by their sexual attractiveness experienced by Muslim women in traditional covering. Can we agree, however, that such freedom is compromised when it comes under threat of death? Here are two horrifying stories. In one, a young Shiite fighter in Iraq enters a girls' high school and says, "If the girls don't wear hijab, we will close the school or kill the girls." In the other, a Canadian Muslim immigrant is charged with strangling his teenage daughter. Her classmates say since she stopped wearing a head covering, her arms had been covered with bruises, and she was terrified her father would kill her. Where is the outrage from the Muslim community, from feminists, over atrocities such as this? Spokespeople for two Canadian Islamic groups say this murder was simply a sad example of "domestic violence" and, incredibly, the result of raging teenage hormones. It was about rage, all right, but not the teenage-hormone variety. I went to the National Organization for Women Web site, and I would be thrilled if someone could find the place in it in which NOW denounces forced covering and "honor" killing. When the Washington Post's fashion writer wrote about Hillary Clinton's cleavage, NOW was outraged. Their section on violence against women seems to cover every possible permutation except that of Islamic extremism.
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Dahlia's right: Female fun in the movies is a dangerous thing. There's a 1994 movie by that title,
Fun, in which two teenage girls meet, form an instant, high-spirited and giggly bond, and then decide to murder an old woman together just for kicks. The obsessive bond between two wildly imaginative girls in
Heavenly Creatures ends in a similarly gruesome joint undertaking. For all the diverting comedies about guy high jinks (guyjinks?), it's tough to come up with female equivalents in which somebody doesn't end up pregnant or dead. Thelma and Louise have a blast together, but then they have to crash their car into the Grand Canyon. (
Thelma and Louise II: Two mangled bodies in a ditch.) There are some brilliant movies about female friendship—
Heavenly Creatures is one, this year's Cannes winner,
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 4 Days, is another—but they tend to focus on women helping each other through crises rather than goofing off together as a creative act. I'm racking my brain to think of exceptions; will post if I think of any.
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I thought of one Emily. Little Children -- smart woman cuts loose without regard for her responsibilities. Allows her child to gallivant with pedophiles as a result.
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Good question, Emily. The best example of a driven yet playful female character I can think of is Nikita in La Femme Nikita. She's a spy/assassin who's just as tough as the toughest guys, but what she really wants to do is put her gun away and goof off with her boyfriend. Also one example from TV: Starbuck from Battlestar Gallactica. She's a great pilot and also plays a mean game of poker (or whatever card game it is they play in space).
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Meghan's great lament about the humorless fate of the women in Knocked Up has me thinking: In what movies has Hollywood come through for us and provided what we might indeed want more of--women who are smart and also know how to play and cut loose? It's easier for me to come up with examples from the past--Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Audrey Hepburn--than from the present. Drew Barrymore? The Sex and the City gals? I feel like I should be able to do better than that. Hey Dana, or anyone else, help me out here.
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Juliet, your post on the Dutch couple who abandoned their adopted child is a nice bookend to this story I'd wanted to blog about: According to (also!) the Daily Mail, the world's oldest mother—she gave birth to her sons last year at 66—is seriously ill. Carmen Bousada , who apparently lied about her age to be eligible for IVF now faces the prospect of leaving her twin sons orphaned. She has no spouse or partner. The folks who criticized Bousada's decision to give birth last year are getting their "I told you so" moment early, and reigniting the big Wendy Wasserstein debate about single women who choose to have babies alone, later in life.
Frankly I don't know what it means to be too old to parent, or too culturally myopic to parent, or too selfish to parent. But your story of the Dutch parents has an extra layer of grossness to it, Juliet. Apparently the parents are "traumatized" and "in therapy" for their decision to ditch their 7-year-old daughter for not fitting in.
Oh barf. It's one thing to be hopelessly selfish but quite another to expect folks to pity you for it.
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Via the Daily Mail, a Dutch couple living abroad abandoned a 7-year-old South Korean girl that they had adopted as a baby. Apparently, the couple took in the girl after failing to conceive. Subsequently, they had two biological children, and then decided that their adopted child didn't "fit in" with their lifestyle—that she was struggling to adapt to their culture, and that they just couldn't take it anymore. Now the girl's in foster care in Hong Kong!
The Dutch couple's story just doesn't make any sense. The girl grew up with them, how could she fail to "adapt"? If I'm reading the story correctly, the couple's suggesting that the girl's innate South Korean-ness has made it impossible for them to care for her as a daughter.
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Our son insisted that we watch Sand and Sorrow on HBO last night, and I am filled with shame after seeing it: Not only has our government done little to stop the ongoing genocide in Darfur, but have I so much as dropped a note to my elected representatives? No. There are schoolgirls in Batavia, Ill., who have done more to raise awareness about the some 400,000 innocents who have died in the province since 2003, when the Sudanese government began sending the janjaweed in to crush a rebel movement by slaughtering the region's non-Arab civilian population. President Bush correctly labeled the situation but was slow to do anything more, and the film suggests that that's partly because the CIA thinks it is getting such good al-Qaeda intell out of the government in Khartoum. (Quality stuff like this? Or on the contrary this? Or in any case this?)
One of the African Union observers sent in to watch and take notes is living the experience of the Nick Nolte character in Hotel Rwanda. He returns to his barracks at day's end and doesn't always feel like eating, because the kids he's seen all day are going hungry. In his tent at night, he's freezing under two blankets but can't sleep for thinking of the families not far away who don't even have one to share. On a daily basis, people who live in Darfur must decide whether it is better to send women and girls out to look for firewood—knowing they might be gang-raped—or men, who would be killed. But the real question for the rest of us, as Harvard's Samantha Power says in the documentary, is which country is going to send in real troops with a real mandate to do more? Any hands there in the back? Not so far, and this slow-motion horror show has been playing out for four years already.
Until we step up, even humanitarian aid is hard to get where it needs to go. In an op-ed this morning in the Wall Street Journal, Mia Farrow quotes Oxfam's director in Sudan, Alun MacDonald: "Our staff are being targeted on a daily basis. They are being shot, robbed, beaten and abducted." The security situation, he insisted, "is the worst since the entire conflict began." Seven aid workers were killed in October, according to Macdonald. "These aren't conditions we can keep working in." What would it take to change those conditions? The political will, of course. The movie includes footage of Barack Obama taking the lead on this issue in Congress, along with now-former presidential aspirant Sam Brownback.
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Via Matt Yglesias, a story about Jamie Leigh Jones, a former employee of Haliburton/KBR who told ABC news she was gang-raped at a KBR camp in the Green Zone in Iraq, then held in a shipping container without food or water and threatened with termination if she sought medical treatment. All this allegedly happened over two years ago and the Justice Department has still failed to bring charges. The State Department and KBR have failed to investigate. Evidently no court has jurisdiction over the contractors, and no agency has any responsibility to pursue the matter.
If Jones’ allegations are true, the lesson is that this government's convenient little “law free zones” at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world don't discriminate between "us" and "them." If an innocent American finds herself in such a law-free zone, she’s as unlikely as any alleged terrorist to find her day in court.
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There's a great discussion going on in the Fray about the varying IQs of older and younger siblings, featuring Norwegian study author Petter Kristensen and psychology writer Judith Rich Harris. Check it out.
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Reading the story about the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes that Dahlia points to, I couldn't help being struck by an eerie parallel. This story is unfolding a couple of days after the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the latest case about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees have any right at all to get to federal court. Days after an earlier go-round about Guantanamo at the high court, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib story broke. The timing raised eyebrows because at oral argument, Paul Clement (now solicitor general) had answered "no" to a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether the government ever engages in torture.
There was no moment like that at argument this week, and the timing of the CIA story seems driven by the New York Times, which says that it told the CIA Wednesday that it was about to report on the tapes' destruction. And yet the parallel is there: This week, the government assured the court that the detainees had more rights than anyone in their situation before. Never mind that we're destroying the evidence of how we've treated them. Just don't look behind the curtain.
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Remember that whole big legal debate we were having last month about water-boarding? Remember when we were trying to understand why Michael Mukasey wouldn’t just come out and say water-boarding is torture? Remember when everyone thought the Bush administration was just trying to provide legal cover for the torturers???
Wrong. Why provide legal cover for the torturers if you can just destroy the evidence?
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Emily, thanks for bringing up Dick Cheney's bragging; I thought I was doing OK without Jon Stewart, but now I see I was only fooling myself. Speaking of which, poor Mitt: He had to address the Mormon question, but then did so in a way that told us absolutely nothing about the faith, which made it seem like the less the rest of us know, the better. Since the No. 1 knock against Romney is that his beliefs are so flexible even he can barely keep track of them, I don't see how it helps to give a big speech that boils down to: "Don't stress; I'd jettison my closely held religious beliefs with no more of a backward glance than I gave my previous closely held beliefs on abortion and gay marriage." And if he was supposed to be charming me with his nod to "the profound ceremony of the Catholic Mass,'' he failed. (Glad you like our quaint and colorful folk ways. But can a ceremony even be profound? Pander better, please.) Maybe the most interesting thing about the speech was the intro, provided as it was by Poppy Bush. Is this as close to an endorsement as the Bushes can come without damaging their preferred candidate? Oh, but I forgot: The current commander in chief is pulling for Hillary.
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Dick Cheney has some observations in Politico about how his old House colleagues are faring under Speaker Nancy Pelosi:
Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.).
... [H]e scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year.
Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”
... When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”
Obviously, if Dick still cares about his old buddies he will arrange to have some Viagra slipped into the congressional bean soup.
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Via Ann Althouse comes word of an annoyingly frivolous potential lawsuit. Outraged over the fact that the University of Iowa outfits the visitor's locker room at its football stadium entirely in pink, a former law professor at the university is threatening to sue the school under Title IX.
Some background: Decades ago, then Iowa football coach Hayden Fry, a psychology major in his undergrad days, had the visitor's locker room painted pink "because it had a calming and passive effect" on people. It always seemed like more of a stunt to me, something to make the boosters chuckle as they make out those five-figure checks to the university, or to distract opposing teams.
But professor Jill Gaulding complained about the locker room in 2005. She was rebuffed and cites the issue as a reason she left the school. Now Iowa has a new president--a woman, incidentally--so Gaulding has renewed her efforts, thus far to no success, and so is threatening a suit.
Title IX has been a boon to women for more than 30 years: More than 55 percent of college students are women. Before Title IX passed, about 16,000 women played college sports every year; now the number is more than 150,000. I hate to see an instrument of so much good abused because someone has an ax to grind. But even worse, to me, is the single-minded devotion to victimization. It's these kinds of stories that make me reluctant to indentify as a feminist. Aren't we strong enough to laugh at something like this, even if it bothers us?
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Writing in Slate, former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein has gone on an impeachment tear this year—calling for Bush's impeachment, Cheney's, and maybe Nancy Pelosi''s next. He has also co-written a play, with Richard Lasser, "I—The Impeachment Trial of George W. Bush.” It's being performed in January as part of a series on impeachment and general teeth gnashing, put on by The Culture Project in New York. I can't vouch for Bruce's playwriting skills, but as the administration wanes without ending, it sounds like a night of fantasy.
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I wrote last summer about a Norwegian study on birth order that was being treated as definitive proof that first-born kids have higher IQs than their siblings--and that the IQ edge is due to social rank, not biology. (Actually, the results are about brothers only, since the study was confined to boys, but much of the coverage generalized to girls, too.) At the time, I asked the authors about some numbers that were missing in the paper. I recently heard back from one of them, Petter Kristensen. He charmingly said that the omission "is embarrassing, but I have no one to blame but myself" and sent along a file with the figures.
I sent the numbers to psychology writer Judith Rich Harris, author of No Two Alike. She points out that the numbers Kristensen sent weaken the claim that social rank explains the IQ difference, if it exists. Here's the context from my piece last summer:
The report in Science relies on a clever comparison to prove its key point: that the average 3-point IQ difference between firstborn and second-born brothers comes from the boys' varying "social rank" in the family, not differing biology. Kristensen and Bjerkedal looked at second- and third-born brothers who had an older sibling (male or female) who died in infancy. They found that second-borns who grew up as the oldest child in the family, because of a sibling death, had average IQ scores equivalent to firstborns. And third-borns who moved into second place in the family had average IQ scores like second-borns (one point higher). This is supposed to show definitively that family environment and expectations account for the intelligence boost.
It turns out that the number of third-borns in the study is only 81, and that the data point is shaky because there's a wide confidence interval, which means that the conclusion drawn from the data is relatively unreliable. Harris also points out that Kristensen and his co-author controlled for birthweight, which is a mistake if whatever causes younger brothers to have a slightly lower IQ (if they do) also causes them to be smaller at birth. That's what a biological explanation might show (scroll down).