There are far more productive ways to spend one’s evening than in front of the TV.  If you are an attorney, for example, you can bill some quality hours at home at night (and indeed I do, when I must).  You can read – The New Yorker, for example, or a book for your book club (which you never attend because you never have time to read the book).  You can go to bed early, so that you can get up early and do something productive in the morning (such as exercise).  Despite my post yesterday extolling the benefits of breaking out of routine, however, generally I just like to watch TV.  I’m a pop culture junkie, and I’m proud.  Other than on Friday nights, when both my People and Us Weekly have arrived and I curl up in bed with my celebrity gossip trash at 8 p.m. (not sure they count as productive reading), I like to curl up on the couch with a glass of wine (not these days, sob!) and decompress in that most American way.   

I didn’t watch a lot of TV until I went to law school.  I read a lot.  I wrote.  I went to sleep early.  In fact, for a few years, I didn’t even own a TV (perhaps Iwas living out an intellectual aesthete’s fancy? That was misguided.).  In law school, however, after a day and usually part of an evening reading case law in very fine print, your brain is quite literally unable to process another word.  TV becomes the ultimate — and only — escape.  I watched so much TV in law school that I was even DVR’ing re-runs of Cold Case on the USA network.  Happily, these days, the queue is much smaller (sort of):

60 Minutes — I DVR this, but rarely go back and watch if I haven’t caught it live, but it has become our Sunday night tradition to eat dinner in front of Morley and the gang and make fun of Andy Rooney. (By the way, Lesley Stahl’s biography, Reporting Live, is very good.)
Gossip Girl — although I’m about to give up on this. Somehow everyone has ended up at NYU together, and sex and alcohol are just not as racy in college as they are in prep school. That being said, I’m surprisingly enchanted by Hillary Duff’s guest appearance! And I love this weekly recap.
The Biggest Loser — essential to only watch this on the DVR, not live, as you can blow through the interminable challenges and weigh-ins and focus in on the good stuff, like all the crying, as Father Scott so accurately depicts every week, here.
The Good Wife — perhaps my favorite new show. I should have thought of the concept: newly divorced mom (her husband, the former Cook County DA was caught with a prostitute and is now in jail for perhaps using state money to pay her…) goes back to work as a first-year associate at a Chicago litigation firm. (Love that Josh Charles from Sports Night is in this too. Have always thought he was cute/dreamy in a nerdy way.)
Glee — OK, this is the best show on TV, despite the slight RT* factor of the musical numbers. Will devote a whole post to it at some point.
The Office — even though it gives me the RTs. I love Jim.
30 Rock — I literally guffaw at this show. I love Tracy Morgan, I’m sorry. And Alec Baldwin. And my father’s law firm was (is) in 30 Rockefeller Plaza.
Supernanny — for some reason, even though it couldn’t be more formulaic week to week, we love this show. Schandenfreude?
Saturday Night Live — I just fast forward through this in case something funny happened (e.g., “Dick in a Box”), which 95% of the time it has not.
The Daily Show — on DVR, you can get through this in about 15 minutes.
Curb Your Enthusiasm — almost unwatchable due to the amount of RT’s produced, but this season is much fresher and funnier than it has been as of late. Even though as of late was like two years ago.

Shows I tried this season and rejected:
Cougar Town
Community
Parks & Recreation (I love Amy Pohler, but it hasn’t won me over yet)
Modern Family

Shows on hiatus but usually programmed on DVR
Entourage — have always liked it for the LA-industry references, but it’s getting old. I’m just about over it.
24 — total addiction, even though I don’t like suspenseful movies or shows. If Tim’s not around, I end up fast forwarding through the suspenseful scenes to see how they turn out, and then I rewind and watch them after I know the outcome.
American Idol — I refused to watch for years, but now I’m at the point where I text in my votes! This is a show that you can’t DVR, however, because you’ll inevitably hear about it before you have a chance to catch up. How brilliantly conceived is a show that forces you to watch it live — like in the old days!
Royal Pains — it stars Mark Feuerstein, for whom I have a soft spot since he went to my alma mater and I met him once at a post-college party in Brooklyn. I am so hip.

*If you don’t know what “RTs” stands for, email me and I’ll tell you privately — it’s not quite PC enough to explain here! Basically, though, it stands for the feeling you get when you’re just so embarrassed for the characters on the show that you cringe and can barely stand to watch and would fast-forward through those parts if your husband didn’t grab the remote away and call you a wimp.

Have you heard of Radio Ink magazine?

What, you haven’t? I’m shocked. Well, let me introduce you, here (scroll to p. 26).

David Rhode is a Times reporter who was kidnapped by the Taliban on his way to interview a Taliban commander in Afghanistan. As it turned out, he was taken hostage by the very subject he was supposed to be interviewing (though he didn’t find this out until weeks later) and was held for seven months, until he escaped. This week, the Times has run a five-part series by Rhode, recounting the experience. (Read the first installment, here. Then read the rest. It is worth your time.) It was big news when he finally escaped because the Times and other news organizations had never publicized his abduction to begin with. Rhode’s story is incredible, not only because of the obvious — he was kidnapped by the Taliban — but because of its insights, as a result of his capitivity, into what is actually going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan (for example, how utterly brainwashed these uneducated young men are in their anti-American thinking).

Afghanistan, the news media has recently let us know, is the big story right now. Bigger than Iraq. And, yet, it’s difficult to understand why. Who is the army? The militia? The Taliban? Al Qaeda? Rhode’s reporting starts to delineate the “enemies” from the “allies,” and yet also underscores how difficult it is to tell one from the other.  It helps one understand why the decision to send more troops there is so fraught. 

My interest in this area also has recently been piqued by Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War. Filkins, another Times reporter, does not merely recount the stories he already reported from this region. Instead, he opens up the rest of his reporter’s notebook — his observations and personal analysis of his reporting in Afghanistan and Iraq, before 9/11 and before and after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. We read about his interactions with warlords, politicians, soldiers, and the often overlooked civilian. I was given this book by a pro bono client, whom I’m representing in his application for political asylum. My client, an Iraqi, is mentioned in the book several times. (After reading Filkins’ accounts of some of the things my client went through — things my soft-spoken client plays down — I have moments where I am so glad I am a lawyer and can help someone like this and yet despair that I can’t do enough.) I haven’t read many other books on the conflicts in this region, so I can’t compare Filkins’ approach or effectiveness, but his book has given me important background into why the U.S. is finding it so difficult to accomplish what it wants and needs to in both of these countries.

Last night I attended a seminar on social media networking for journalists led by one of my former professors at Columbia J-School, Sree Sreenivasan, who has become a kind of new media/technology guru. At the time, he taught a course called something like, “New Media for Journalists,” in which we learned how to use the Internet for research and maybe how to create a webpage. In other words, there wasn’t much to the class (frankly, I remember finding it irrelevant — no offense Sree. You were just way ahead of all of us — I mean, I only acquired a legit email address in 1995…).

Of course, little did we know back in the mid-1990s how integrated journalism and the internet would become, and how this integretation would “threaten” traditional media. If I were still a print journalist right now, I would be fighting like hell to get as many Twitter followers as possible (Sree mentioned that some guy had just scored a book deal based on his Tweets — blogs are, like, so over) and would of course have a blog. Yet, were my employer a newspaper, they’d probably be fighting me every step of the way, lest I give my content away for free.
>My brother-in-law, the internet-savvy Pax Arcana, had a witty (as always) — but yet astute and insightful — post yesterday analyzing this impass and the looming failure of traditional media. Yes, it will cease to exist as we know it. And until recently I was one of the traditionalists who would argue, “You can’t let a newspaper fail.” But face it Bostonians: someone is going to buy the Boston Globe, sell off its cumbersome assets (printing presses, trucks), outsource weekend delivery, and move almost everything online.
Anyway, the overall point of the seminar was that the conversation (the big, meta conversation) is now online. It’s on Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. So journalists have to get in there – to get story ideas, to make contacts. This may seem obvious, but if you think about it philosophically (or even from a marketing perspective) it can be kind of overwhelming.* And, of course, media companies have to be where the conversation is, as well, so they too need Facebook pages or Twitter feeds. (That’s why CNN and Astin Kutcher apprarently are locked in an epic battle to be the first to claim one million Twitter followers. For reals.)
And, to that end, Marbury v. Madison Ave. has to be there too — so you can now follow me on Twitter (where you’ll get a Tweet each time I have a new post, or with links to other articles and tweets, and/or whatever else I figure out you can do on there).

*And exciting. Last night’s event reminded me how passionate I am about the media on that very meta/philosophical level — as much about the industry and its scope as about the craft itself.

While I suspect the majority of my readers are lawyers, it’s never too soon (or too late) to plan your escape. Thus, I provide as a family-oriented (my family!) PSA, a link to weei.com’s “Next Great Sports Blogger” contest — kind of like an American Idol search for new bloggers for the site.

In case you don’t know — or, if you live in Boston but under a rock — Weei is Boston’s sports talk radio station and is sort of an anomoly in the radio business in that it’s incredibly successful just by having people rant about the Patriots all day. But I guess in this town, that’s not surprising. Anyway, they have relaunched their website (a damn fine website, I might add…), and are looking for “talent.” (Law-school Lindsey — consider it!) You could be the next Bill Simmons…

Am putting myself on finals lockdown for the next two weeks, which for me means writing three very large papers that I have, of course, known about for months and months. I did, however, want to post a link to Marci Alboher’s Times blog, Shifting Careers, as well as to her personal website, heymarci.com.  Marci is a big believer in the “slash” (as in, actor/director) and believes that not being able to give a simple response to the question, “What do you do?” is actually a good thing.  Instead, professional happiness might be a direct result of embracing diverse interests, and she explores this idea in her book, One Person/Multiple Careers.  For example, you could be a teacher/writer, a doctor/violin maker, or a lawyer/model (heh heh).

I am a writer/barista/teacher/wine store employee/editor/nanny/lawyer and have always been somewhat uncomfortable about my many slashes (and how they translate on my resume).  Marci’s theory, then, cheers me right up, and I especially appreciate her thoughts and articles on being a lawyer/something.  She and I actually share three of the same slashes (writer/teacher/lawyer, although our trajectories are reversed), and as a result just had a nice email exchange.  I will write more about this concept and about Marci soon, but, alas, I must return to the world of Justice Breyer (yet again…)
                                                                                              
Such a distraction

Mike Scully just posted a summary of his theories on journalism in the Internet age on his blog, here. As predicted, they are much more intelligible than my attempt to retell them below!

Gretchen Rubin’s blog, The Happiness Project, is at times a bit too self-congratulatory for me (I’ll admit that this is just because I’m jealous), but being the sucker that I am for anything self-improvement related, I like her general premise. One of her “happiness resolutions” (or whatever she calls them) is to “show up.” I know this is an area in which I could make some major improvements, starting perhaps with not over committing myself in the first place. Drinks with the girls, a board meeting, a lecture:  I put them in my calendar with genuine eagerness, but the realities of work, school, and Little Bug often lead me to either cancel or attend begrudgingly. However, in the end, I’m often glad I did go to whatever it was I was dreading. (The lesson is, again, to schedule with restraint so that both the anticipation and the after-effects are pleasant…)

As a direct result of my own vow to keep commitments, then, yesterday I embarked on a long-planned visit with my journalism school classmate, Mike Scully (no, not the Summit Mike Scully—a mistake my sister made when she quickly friended j-school Mike Scully on Facebook only to find his profile to be vastly different from her expectations) in Bristol, RI, where he is a journalism professor at Roger Williams University. I toured the ocean-front campus (which is home to the only law school in RI, and where Justice Scalia happened to be speaking yesterday), we had lunch in the cute, historic town center, and I sat in on his media law and ethics class, during which Mike deftly discussed pornography and the First Amendment in a way that elicited almost no adolescent snickering. Mike was the president of our j-school class (or something akin to it) and went on to a series of big-time journalism positions, but told me that he spent the first part of his career feeling like he was butting heads with the newsroom hierarchy. He’s certainly found his stride in teaching, and he’s very good at it.

Why I’m glad I drove down to Bristol:  a whole hour each way—by myself­—in a car with top 40 radio, coffee, and my thoughts; being near the ocean; and reconnecting with my love of the news, writing, and journalism. There’s something fun about talking shop journalism-style (no discussion of legal precedent! Or studying for the bar! Or associate pay advances!), especially as the journalism we studied at Columbia is all but defunct: beat reporting, newsrooms, and even what then counted as online journalism have morphed into something we couldn’t have foreseen, much less even imagined. Mike is rightly teaching the importance of mixed-media skills: reporting and writing, but also shooting digital video and creating stories for the Internet reader.  In lieu of textbooks for his Digital Journalism class, for example, are tiny $150 Canon digital video recorders with which his students shoot footage to embed into online stories. I’m going to mangle his lucid theory of Internet journalism, but basically he believes that we writers are like bees and the Internet is a beehive (ooph – forgive me Michael for slaughtering your analogy – feel free to comment and restate more eloquently!), and at this juncture, we’re all making it up together as we go along and every one of us million bees can have a comb. The most important thing for a writer, then, is to stake a foothold online. How to do this? Blogs, of course.  Blogs that incorporate not only text, but still and video images that bring multiple layers to a story. And then each story itself becomes the tradable unit of knowledge – replacing the greater structure of the newspaper. For example, the average citizen who blogs about the zoning decisions at a city council meeting provides a greater service than can the struggling small-market daily who can’t afford to send a reporter out to cover the same meeting.

Before I get too deep into the theories of internet journalism—which, after talking with Mike, I now even more fully embrace—I’ll circle back to my original point: reaching out, connecting, making the effort can yield important results. Mike urged me to incorporate more images into my blog (iPhone, here I come!), and to start thinking about, even if not on this particular blog, making myself an “expert” in an area that will draw readers (if indeed I still want to keep my finger in the journalism currents). More important, I was able to make a tangible connection to a potential future for my combined interests (and prior experience) in journalism, teaching, and the law.  And most important, I was reminded why my journalism school experience—both in terms of its professional breadth and its personal connections—is still so relevant.

I popped up to Christopher’s in Porter Square last night to meet Lindsey and Alison for a quick sauv blanc (since LMR was there, on the rocks, natch) after “work.” It was a warm and lively night at Porter, and it made me miss living in Cambridge. Our conversation was fun and fast, and during its course, Lindsey urged me to share a few lists on my blog. What a good idea because, as it turns out, I love lists! (See someone who has cornered this blog niche, here.) As Lindsey and I lamented the fact that we are too ADD these days to actually read real books (Alison apparently is far too erudite to subsist on magazines, as we do), the first such list is the ridiculous number of magazines I consume each month. Tim gives me a hard time for this, but considering my vices are pretty much limited to Starbucks and magazines (wine is an elixir, not a vice), I would counter that it could be worse.  

 People
US Weekly (yes, I do subscribe to both…)
Newsweek
The New Yorker
Sports Illustrated (Tim gets this, along with half-a-dozen golf publications—one of which, Women’s Golf, is inexplicably addressed to me—but I actually do read portions of SI from time to time. I have always thought that sports writing can be some of the most creative and fun to read journalism.)
Parenting
Fitness
Cooking Light
Domino
Vogue
In Style
Real Simple
Oprah
O at Home
Yoga Journal
PAW (I do read it! Every week!)

And then, if the cover happens to be intriguing that month, I’ll pick up at the grocery store or drug store:

Boston Magazine (I like to see what Boston freelancers are in there, e.g., Jeff Klineman)
Vanity Fair
Cookie

Marie Claire (have a friend who is an editor there)
Elle Décor

Metropolitan Home (have a friend who is an editor there)

Bon Appetit (to see if any of Amy’s pieces have made it in)  

Entertainment Weekly (though I buy this less now that Troy has left)

Runner’s World (it’s true: I buy it when I need to get inspired)

I can justify some of this because I used to be in the “business” – I like to look at the mastheads and see who is doing and writing what. But I could and should cut back on the subscriptions. Fitness, for example, is a total waste.  I also rarely read through Parenting, but for some reason get it for free (I think it came with a 1-800-Diapers.com membership?).  And it’s not like I’m pulling recipes out of Cooking Light these days. But when a big, fat In Style, Domino, or Vogue appears once a month, I look forward to climbing into bed that night. And the weekly People and US Weekly delivery is like a martini in the mailbox – utter Friday night brain candy.

This week’s Newsweek cover story is a profile of Michelle Obama.  It was a thorough story, and I think more interesting than the actual story itself (as a piece of ground-breaking journalism or anything) was the choice to put her on the cover.  Would they do that for Cindy McCain? I can say with some certainty:  obviously not.  Michelle does play a significant role in her husband’s campaign.  But more important, her appearance on the cover almost celebrates that she’ll be a wholly different model of First Lady — she will reflect the growing cadre of us out here:  women who live first and foremost with intelligence and integrity and, in doing so, can love their jobs, children, and husbands equally. 

To underscore that idea, even more compelling was an accompanying first-person essay by Raina Kelley, “A Real Wife, In a Real Marriage.”  Kelley writes:

Part of Michelle’s strength is that she has been immune to the mommy wars that tripped up Hillary during Bill’s campaigns. The baking-versus-working tension is irrelevant for her; black women have never been burdened with the luxury of choice. Our heritage does not include the gilded cage, and we certainly never fought to labor outside the home—black women have always worked. This is why many of us never inherited the remorse about balancing work and family that plagues our white counterparts. For Michelle, voters have read this as self-assurance—appealing to young voters who are optimistic that they will find a balance between career and home.

This particular passage struck a real chord with me:  how fortunate I am to have the option to work or stay home with my child in the first place.  This hand-wringing and remorse that saturates the internet (blogosphere), fiction (see, e.g., Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It), journalism, and even current television shows (hello Lipstick Jungle/Cashmere Mafia) about women who try to have it all (and, as the story line would go, find out we can’t) is experienced really only by a privileged minority of (white? upper class?) working women.  Yet because it has been built up to have such a modern cultural prevalence, do we perhaps assume this remorse without even truly feeling it?  I think about my own working-mom friends:  amazing women who run their own businesses, practice law, are intricately involved in the world of finance — they know there are sacrifices, but they don’t spend their days going back-and-forth about it.  I particularly think of my doctor friends, who have just six weeks of maternity leave (five if the baby was late!), and with the purpose-driven stoicism so characteristic of physicians, drop their babies at day care and go save lives. 

The “baking-versus-working” tension became culturally relevant during the 1992 Clinton campaign, and Hillary’s clumsy handling of it did nothing to give it any complexity.  At the same time, I can’t blame her:  it probably caught her off guard.  Like Michelle Obama, she had been a high-achieving lawyer and, until others foisted the issue on her, probably engaged in very little back-and-forth remorse about working or staying home. 

I read with some sadness — but little surprise — how isolated and uncomfortable Michelle felt at Princeton; indeed, her senior thesis (which, the article notes, is no longer publicly available at Firestone.  I simply cannot imagine that someone would actually want to read my own thesis, which I can guarantee will never, ever leave those archives…)   was entitled “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” By illuminating this cultural difference, then (why had I never thought of it? I feel like Kelley hit me over the head…), Kelley’s analysis of Michelle Obama’s example for a new generation of women articulates a new cultural touchstone.  Instead of “you have to choose, but if you don’t choose, you’ll fail at both,” Michelle’s shining example reframes the issue:  “you are going to work, you are going to have kids, and you are going to find a balance.”  (Even if, as in the Obama’s situation, right now that balance is largely achieved with the help of Michelle’s mother — that’s OK too!)  No hand-wringing, no drama, no remorse.  As one of my favorite law professors and mentor tells me often:  never, ever be defensive about or second-guess the peace of mind that comes with providing for your family when, in fact, for you that might be as an important a part of motherhood as being home with fresh baked goods at 3 o’clock.  That is not, of course, to demean those who are able to provide that.  Rather, what Michelle Obama has crystallized for me is that working — whether as a babysitter or waitress or lawyer — doesn’t have to be labelled (as our society is so wont to do) a right, or a privilege, or a burden, or a luxury.  If it’s what you are going to do, it just is.  Stop over-thinking it and go be a kick-ass lawyer.*  Just get it done.

*Her choice to leave her big-law firm for lower-paying community-focused endeavors is a whole other posting…