Are They Heavyweights or Just Average?
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Written by Dorothy Harrigan to
People Magazine,
May, 2007

Dear Editor:
Re “Modeling’s Heavyweights!” in the May 7, issue of People.

It’s interesting that in order explore a purported change in American women’s body confidence, you automatically look to models as the accepted index of beauty. The models you point to aren’t just any models, they are “Heavyweights!” What does this say about us that we consider these women to be above average weight? The women presented in your article, if not rail-thin, still embody unreachable, digitally enhanced physical ideals.

This has nothing to do with the average weight in the country or even the world. Since we have always held up certain types as ideals, not much has changed here. We used to measure a person’s nose, or “facial angle” to find out his or her worth. Now it is a person’s weight—above all—that matters.

Anorexia and other eating disorders are still a major problem for young women. Photographs like these—depicting supposedly “heavyweight” beauties—are not encouraging or healthy for a young girl with body-image problems to see.
Of course you present this as a story about beauty inside and out. For every woman you describe as “beautiful” you back up that statement with an adorable quirk about them, or a snippet about their charity work.

Let’s call a spade a spade. These celebrities are nothing more than racehorses being trotted out for the world to see and measure itself against. This issue of your magazine claims to represent the new ideal, but it’s the same old thing. Just as noses and foreheads were associated with pure lineage and intelligence hundreds of years ago, weight is now accorded the same virtue and credit. Form without substance is one of the central flaws in American consumer culture. Why perpetuate it?

—Sincerely,
—Dorothy Harrigan
—Brooklyn, NY

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On the Significance
of Juxtapositions.
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Written by Alfie Kohn to
The New York Times Magazine,
July 23, 2007

To the Editor:
Facing the first page of your special section on the growing “gap between rich and poor” (June 10, 2007) was an advertisement for a private bank that boasts of its long history of “protect[ing] legacies” and “preserving wealth” for the privileged few — the effect being, of course, to perpetuate and intensify inequality.

This particular ad occupied only one of, by my count, 32 pages in the magazine that offered luxury homes, fancy jewelry, and investment advice, all interspersed among essays about the terrible persistence of poverty.

Who says irony is dead?

—Alfie Kohn
—Belmont, MA

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Antiwar novels are
“belligerent”?

Written by Tony Cristini to
The New York Times,
regarding Richard Eder’s review
of Peter Ho Davies’ The Welsh Girl,
May 2, 2007.

To the Editor
Richard Eder (“Crosscurrents of Identities, May 2, 2007) writes, “The Welsh Girl is a distinguished, beautifully written example of a small but enduring genre. Call it the counterwar novel. Not Antiwar, exactly; it lacks the belligerence.” Antiwar like, say, Homefront? I wonder what a pro-war novel, or a status quo war novel, could then be called? “Compassionate,” I suppose.

There is scarcely an explicit antiwar novel about the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Why is that?

Might it be that the US has a culture a lot like that of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s? Too many “good Germans” and “good Americans”? Too many critics and others who think antiwar novels are “belligerent”?

As Tony Kushner notes (in Theater):
“I do not believe that a steadfast refusal to be partisan is, finally, a particularly brave or a moral or even interesting choice. Les Murray, an Australian poet, wrote a short poem called ‘Politics and Art.’ In its entirety: ‘Brutal policy / like inferior art, knows / whose fault it all is.’ This is as invaluable an admonishment as it is ultimately untrue.”

—Tony Christini
—West Virginia

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posted on a daily basis.

Bias, Ignorance and
the Didgeridoo.

Written by Peter Zummo to
The New York Times,
January 26, 2007

To the Editor:
In his brief portrait of trombonist Wycliffe Gordon (January 19, 2007), Nate Chinen scoffs that Gordon will play the “didgeridoo, on which proficiency may not be the point.” The statement demonstrates an ignorance of the depth and beauty of aboriginal didgeridoo playing and technique. The great American trombonist Stuart Dempster, who visited Australia and conducted fieldwork in 1973, wrote in his book “The Modern Trombone: A Definition of Its idioms” (University of California Press, 1979) that “No other lip reed seems to be in such a high state of development, western brass instruments included.”

—Peter Zummo
—Staten Island, New York

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posted on a daily basis.