Mr. Mom Chronicles: An update

I've finally figured out one key tool to working/parenting at the same time: the baby gate. I confine kid to his room and let him play in there while I'm writing. It's a small apartment -- his doorway looks out into the living room, where I work. So if he needs anything, he just has to peek out and ask. We're still together, but he's not trying to climb around in my lap while I try to make turn developer-speak into English for Macworld's readers. Very helpful.

Moose the Mooche

Pandora is giving me The Dirty Dozen Brass Band version of this song this morning:

On Social Security, Bernie Sanders gets support from the right

Here’s another problem: Does anyone think that Congress will be able to hold this “one-year” holiday on a portion of Social Security taxes to just one year if unemployment, come Christmas 2011, is still closer to 10 percent than to 5 percent? Politically, it’s going to be hard for members of either party, ahead of an election, to start taking more cash out of people’s paychecks.

via nationalreview.com

That's Nicole Gelinas writing at National Review -- and it's pretty much the same point that Bernie Sanders made during his Friday Filibuster: the payroll tax holiday is going to feel pretty nice this coming year, I'm certain, but if it remains a permanent feature of the tax landscape -- and it's going to be difficult to reinstate -- well, that will do more to undermine Social Security than all the failed privatization plans put together. If Nicole Gelinas and Bernie Sanders can agree on this point, who is left to disagree?

The religious cleansing of Iraq

The Christians and other smaller minority groups here, however, have been explicitly made targets and have emigrated in disproportionate numbers. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these groups account for 20 percent of the Iraqis who have gone abroad, while they were only 3 percent of the country’s prewar population.

More than half of Iraq’s Christian community, estimated to number 800,000 to 1.4 million before the American-led invasion in 2003, have already left the country.

via nytimes.com

It's a tragedy. And it should act as a cautionary note. We don't know what native forces we're going to unleash when we decide to make war on a country that we don't actually need to make war upon. Because we don't know that we can make things better by using our armed forces to create regime change, perhaps we should only do so when a given situation is going to become intolerably worse. That wasn't the case in Iraq in 2003.

Stu Bykofsky's frustrating column about Spring Garden school

Byko's column in today's Daily News tries to seem profound but doesn't tell us anything. Spring Garden school a K-8 outfit at 12th and Melon, outperforms other schools serving poor and disadvantaged populations in the city, and Stu wants to know why.

We still don't know. Bykofsky wants us to believe that the teachers are extra-dedicated or that Spring Garden somehow has higher expectations for its students. Perhaps he's right. But he never tells us how Spring Garden got to that point, how the school fashioned a culture that earns the loyalty and hard work of its teachers and that in turn produced above-average student achievement. Was it pure luck? Was there a design of some sort? If what Spring Garden is doing can be reproduced in other schools around Philadelphia, maybe it should be. That's presumably Byko's intent. But we need a little more information beyond the platitudes we get here.

Netflix Queue: 'The Assassin Next Door'

Have you seen 'La Femme Nikita'? If you pretend like it's set in Israel and stars a very forgettable Bond Girl and is much less entertaining, you can skip this movie. The lesson? Jean Reno should be in every movie about female assassins ever.

Bag O' Books: 'The Finkler Question'

Three thoughts about Howard Jacobson's "The Finkler Question":

* This novel has very much the feel of a 1960s' Philip Roth comic novel -- in its obsessions with questions of sex and Jewishness -- only told from the point of view of a British Goy, Julian Treslove. I myself have made jokes about wanting to "convert to secular Judaism," for many of the same reasons that Treslove embarks on a (doomed) quest to adopt a Jewish identity for himself. His quest is usually hilarious, but his ardor for the Jews at times feels like it actually contains traces of anti-Semitism. 

* Roth's novels seem meant for a wider, non-Jewish audience. But one gets the sense in Jacobson's novel (if one is Gentile) of peeking into a private conversation about the nature of Jewish identity, how much of it is bound up in the nation of Israel, and how much non-Israeli Jews should burden themselves -- and be burdened by others -- with Israel's role in the Middle East. Julian is meant, I suppose, to be the character the rest of us identify with in viewing those conversations, but he's so oblivious to his own ridiculousness that we're kept at arm's length. On reflection, that's probably intentional. 

* That said, it all really comes down to penises. And a passage in the novel in which Julian waxes rhapsodic about the erotic power of his (very Gentile, very uncircumsized) penis is a masterpiece in the long and storied annals of literary dick jokes. It's probably no accident that the most true-seeming character in the novel is Hephzibah, Julian's girlfriend and accidental guide into Judaism -- and the only woman character whose thoughts we're permitted to hear directly. Unlike Julian or his friends, Finkler and Libor, she doesn't seem to embody a point-of-view on the questions mentioned above; instead she lives her Jewishness, and encompasses (literally, it seems) all of the contradictions that the three men have with each other. She's messy. So is life. And so, often, is identity.