KARA BASKIN

Half-baked Alaska

KARA BASKIN — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:07:00 GMT

Why is the coldest state such a hotbed of corruption?
Until a couple months ago, did the state of Alaska ever cross your radar? Its chief exports were cute polar-bear screen savers and Northern Exposure .

Until a couple months ago, did the state of Alaska ever cross your radar? If it did, it was likely in the context of some woodsy news-of-the-weird story about a lumberjack mating with a spotted owl. Its chief exports were cute polar-bear screen savers and Northern Exposure.

Those, my friends, were the days of innocence. Little did we denizens of the Lower 48 realize how truly sleazy it is up in the great wild North. Thankfully, the Zeitgeist has since foisted upon us two specimens from the frosty Frontier State: one who looks like she failed a Hooters-trainee program and one who looks like he escaped from a meat locker. Please welcome Sarah Palin and Ted "Pruneface" Stevens, the toxic tundra twins, worse advertisements for Alaska than the Iditatrod.

Palin's instability has been well-documented, from the innocuous (the Tourette's-like repetition of the word "maverick"; debating skills gleaned from the How to Be Miss USA 1959 handbook) to the pathologically disturbing (a grudge-holding capacity on par with Richard Nixon).

Stevens is scarier, if only because he's been swindling people since before Palin shot her first moose. The 84-year-old hottie (suggested campaign slogan, "I make John McCain look spry!") is the longest-serving Republican in the Senate — ever. How's that for an epitaph? He is the type of guy who'd discuss turn-of-the-century hookers with Henry Hyde; the sort of crusty windbag who just kept getting elected over and over again, becoming richer and richer and more and more arrogant. He was an expense-account-loving, pork-barrel-spending, back-slapping hypocrite for whom morals and hubris, after a fashion, simply didn't apply. Unchallenged power will do that to you. That and senility.

Taking care of business
Stevens has been frozen into the Alaskan landscape for eons (and I do mean frozen: the man's facial expressions change less frequently than Joan Rivers blinks) having served in the Senate for 40 years. Stevens once told an Anchorage reporter that "if a man took care of himself," he could live to be 120 years old. Apparently, "taking care of himself" meant free home renovations, sled dogs, stained-glass windows, and, um, a $2695 massage chair. All gifts from his friends in Big Oil. All unreported. Live long and prosper, Ted.

Living la vida Republican

KARA BASKIN — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:45:08 GMT

Because at America’s colleges, even the dangerously misguided have a right to be heard
Trying to find college Republicans in Boston is like looking for a flattering pair of jeans: they’re elusive — either too stiff or completely out of style.

NOT THANKS Brandeis’s Jordan Rothman finds liberals to be intolerant.

Trying to find college Republicans in Boston is like looking for a flattering pair of jeans: they’re elusive — either too stiff or completely out of style. (One young politico I interviewed claimed that homosexuality will hasten the downfall of the Western world.) But this rare species does exist. In fact, once unearthed, many are quite vocal and eloquent. Given the liberal climate on most local campuses, they have to be.

Exhibit A: Jordan Rothman, 21, executive director of the Brandeis Republican club and conservative columnist for Brandeis’s student newspaper. Despite his stature as a high-profile college conservative, Rothman once felt so marginalized that he considered transferring to The College of New Jersey. (Being banished to Jersey for your political beliefs — could it get any worse?)

“I started out on Facebook as a moderate,” he tells me, as though Facebook is a congressional subcommittee. “The liberal bias propaganda did a lot to turn me to the right. This blind pursuance of ideologies that don’t make sense — a lot of people seem to follow them aimlessly. That disgusted me and pushed me to the right. My experience at college was one of the fundamental reasons I became more conservative.”

It’s a thankless position, he says, not least because of frequent Bush-bashings on campus. Rothman calls party foul on his fellow students who claim to be liberal and open-minded, yet shun non-liberal viewpoints. “People stop me, taunt me about Sarah Palin. People Bush-bash and college professors present biased lectures. It’s hard to express opinions without being punished. People verbally assault us, take down our fliers — and we put out these really well-thought-out fliers — these are the same people who say they’re progressive and liberal.” He sighs good-naturedly.

Still, Rothman soldiers on, mainly because he understands why many students find liberalism so “sexy.”

“The educational system is extremely liberal,” he says. “Once you get to college, you’re assailed by professors who have a degree of socialism in their lives; they’re tenured. Of course they’re going to put forth that view. Also, college kids are extremely privileged, which leads them to liberal ideologies.”

He also points out that stances on which Republicans urge reform — things such as taxes and Social Security — are easily overshadowed by more glamorous Democratic talking points like Iraq and gay rights. “Students aren’t worried about Social Security right now,” he says. “They’re worrying about what they’re going to do this weekend.”

Stock stupidity

KARA BASKIN — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:57:11 GMT

Self-declared financial ignoramus revels in the fact that investing ‘geniuses’ probably know less than she does
In my wildest dreams, I never thought my stock-market ignorance would be something to brag about.

In my wildest dreams, I never thought my stock-market ignorance would be something to brag about. But, as you probably know by now — unless you’re even more of a financial rube than me (not possible) — Wall Street has been reduced to rubble. Lehman Brothers? The Jonas Brothers are now more reliable and solvent prognosticators. And the government’s taken control of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG. I’m no economic scholar, but I think this means that the US is now more communist than China.

I won’t attempt to unravel the minutiae of this fiasco, as I’m fairly sure my humble editors frown upon plagiarizing Wikipedia. So I’ll write from the heart, which is where most people are affected by this crisis, anyway (besides their wallets, of course): I’m the type of person who, in better times — in other words, up until this past week — watched with envy as friends bought McMansions with impossibly crafted, illogical mortgages that looked like pyramid schemes. I cursed my stock stupidity when people offhandedly referenced their juicy investment portfolios.

Flipping through Money magazine always left me with load rage. The worst were the profiles of people in financial “distress.” I loathed the smug couples with their cookie-cutter homes and their tales of woe: “But we only have $500,000 in savings! Oh, Tripp, how will we ever afford our second property on a golf course?”

Me? Once, tipsy on Yellowtail chardonnay, I logged onto sharebuilder.com and bought a couple stocks. The only one I remember purchasing is Harley Davidson, and that’s just because its stock symbol is HOG.

As for the rest of my assets? I’ve got one paltry bank account and a slightly anemic 401(k) plan. I don’t know why I never got motivated to learn more about investing. Maybe it’s because I dropped out of math in 11th grade. Maybe it’s because my version of “financial planning” is throwing myself and three pounds of crumpled receipts at the mercy of a robotic H&R Block representative every April 14.

Regardless, I could never escape the feeling that most people out there knew something I didn’t, that I was somehow inferior as a crazy creative type. There must have been a secret investing handshake that no one told me about, because while I furnished my rented apartment with IKEA’s finest plywood furniture, everyone else was leasing BMWs and coming up with fat down payments on mini-manses in Weston.

Fallopian follies

KARA BASKIN — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:38:51 GMT

While celebrity sages salivate over Hollywood babies, Beltway pundits are spinning the latest wave of ovarian escapades. Have girls really gone wild?
Speculating on celebrity baby “bumps” is Hollywood blood sport.

Speculating on celebrity baby “bumps” is Hollywood blood sport. Ashlee, Nicole, the much-maligned Jamie Lynn Spears — all were outed by the press before they could even register for Diaper Genies. (A moment of silence for Lisa Marie Presley, who appeared on the cover of a tabloid looking like Wilfred Brimley in a muumuu and subsequently admitted to carrying twins.) Now, thanks to Sarah Palin’s impregnated teenage daughter, Bristol, trashy baby fever has come to the nation’s capital — a place where, until recently, sex had its proper place: under Oval Office desks and in airport-bathroom stalls. But suddenly, babies have become a campaign-trail tool, like George W. Bush’s cowboy act or Bill Clinton’s saxophone. Will it work?

I hope not — it’s a pretty thin MO for someone with as much diplomatic experience as, I don’t know, me. In searching for a vice-president, John McCain sought someone with no knowledge of Iraq, social views befitting a Victorian mixer, and a vagina. I can just picture the crusty Arizona senator sending his minions scampering to find a nice lady politician, someone those pesky women voters could get enthusiastic about after all that Hillary Clinton hullabaloo. If this election is going to be about change, the blustering ex-POW can play with the best of them. “Hey, Obama, you might be black — but I’ve got a girl on my team! And from Alaska, too!” Who cares if she’s a lightweight with as much foreign-policy expertise as Tom Arnold? McCain needed a strident hockey mom as the antidote to Hillary Clinton’s power pantsuits and Obama’s rousing rhetoric. Can you really blame the old geezer?

Too bad Bristol’s fickle fallopian tubes are likely to be her mother’s undoing. You don’t get to campaign as a family-values, pro-woman candidate who also opposes abortion and sex education — because those stances do more for unplanned pregnancy than cheap wine and Barry White. And you can’t exactly sing the praises of abstinence education when your own 17-year-old daughter is a waddling testament to its impotence.

Palin’s handlers would have you believe that she’s just itching to become a grandma. Her office released this statement, which would throw a diabetic into convulsions: “Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby, and even prouder to become grandparents.”

MEFA madness

KARA BASKIN — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:25:54 GMT

No need to panic over student loans. Just pay more.
On July 28, news broke that the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority had fallen on hard times.

On July 28, news broke that the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority (MEFA) had fallen on hard times, and the 26-year-old nonprofit college-loan agency was suspending all lending efforts due to capital-market dislocation. Roughly 40,000 loans totaling a reported $510 million were issued in 2007; this year, the good times are officially over. Students who depended on the agency to help finance their college educations are going to have to look elsewhere for cash.

MEFA issued this grave-sounding statement in the wake of the news: “As disruptions in the capital markets continue, MEFA regrets that at this time we have been unable to secure funding for 2008–2009 academic year education loans. While we continue to pursue every possible option, raising the necessary funds to offer fixed-interest-rate private-education loans is taking longer than originally projected and has become even more challenging. Thank you for your patience during these unprecedented economic times.”

The timing was unfortunate, to say the least. MEFA confirmed its woes just before August 1, when many tuition bills come due. The media was quick to pounce on MEFA’s troubles as a massive crisis, but is the truth quite so bleak?

Well, yes and no. The circumstances that forced MEFA under do indeed indicate a grim forecast for the national economy; however, local students have options — albeit at a price.

Other people’s money
Economic times might be tough, but for what it’s worth, local college administrators don’t appear particularly alarmed. “It seems like more of an inconvenience than a crisis,” says Patricia Reilly, director of financial aid at Tufts University.

While MEFA’s loans were by far the most attractive, thanks to their fixed rate, there are other choices. Federal PLUS loans, at an interest rate of 8.5 percent, are available to parents of dependent students. And other federally backed lending programs — namely low-interest Stafford and Perkins loans — are out there for students who qualify, though the amounts you can borrow through such programs is limited, and there are need-based eligibility requirements.

Students are also free to prowl the private-lending jungle, populated by non-federally-backed lenders offering variable-interest rates.

Though MEFA officially announced its plight at the end of July, those in the know had been bracing for this eventuality for some time. For anyone looking, the writing was on the wall. According to Tom Graf, president of MEFA, the agency had been in touch with parents, students, and colleges as early as winter 2008, warning them that funds might dry up due to economic tumult. Ostensibly, college financial-aid offices were aware of the precarious situation long before the news was confirmed, and should have communicated it to parents.

Sweet madness

KARA BASKIN — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:47:10 GMT

Marya Hornbacher’s bipolar life
Just reading this book exhausted me, so I can only imagine how tired Marya Hornbacher must have been after writing it. Or perhaps it came easily to her. Most things seem to.

NUTS! By turns meaty and aggravating, Hornbacher’s shock-and-awe writing colors the entire book.

Madness: A Bipolar Life | By Marya Hornbacher | Houghton Mifflin | 320 pages | $25

Just reading this book exhausted me, so I can only imagine how tired Marya Hornbacher must have been after writing it. Or perhaps it came easily to her. Most things seem to.

Depending on your taste, Horbacher’s casual brilliance is either infuriating or amazing. She has suffered from bipolar disorder since childhood but wasn’t diagnosed until her mid 20s. We first meet her as a 20-year-old, slicing her arm in a haphazard semi-suicide attempt and being hauled off to the hospital. “It is bloody, it looks like a raw steak, it looks like the word flesh, the word itself, in German fleis[c]h, and the Bastard of Hands has one hand wrapped around my forearm, his fingers and thumbs on either side of the gaping red thing, pressing it together, and he is sticking a needle into the inside part of the thing . . . and he stabs the inside of the thing again and again. . . . I realize I am a steak.” This kind of deliberate, shock-and-awe writing colors the entire book. Sometimes it’s meaty. Sometimes it’s aggravating.

Fortunately, even a wild spirit like Hornbacher is reined in by linear time. The book’s organization is chronological, dated sections taking us like a journal through her spates of madness. After the prologue arm-cutting incident, we see her at age four, flapping through her house, unable to go to sleep unless her mother plunges her into a warm bath. From there it’s on to her teens, snorting insane amounts of drugs, going away to boarding school, starving herself down to 52 pounds, then writing a critically acclaimed book (Wasted, about her eating disorders), ricocheting drunkenly from city to city and high to low and boyfriend to boyfriend until she finds herself in San Francisco, where she alights into an F.-Scott-and-Zelda existence with a suave, handsome man.

Life in California, according to Hornbacher: “The neon lights that blur in the rain and seem to smear across the sky; the open doors of bars spewing out laughing, shouting people and sucking more of them back in; the thundering, pounding bass in the clubs that seems to shake the street outside. And the parties, and the darling little restaurants, and the spectacular lofts, with their to-die-for views of the city and the bay, and the gorgeous clothes, . . . the endless, ever-present players playing their incessant little games, the stakes as high as a fortune to be made or lost overnight, or as small as getting the haughtiest woman in the room into bed. . . . ”

Nowhere to hide

KARA BASKIN — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:03:27 GMT

College gossip blogs exposed
Google-fucked. That’s what you are when a potential employer searches your name and discovers that you — you of the 4.0 GPA, you of the charity work — are also the sluttiest person on campus.

Google-fucked. That’s what you are when a potential employer searches your name and discovers that you — you of the 4.0 GPA, you of the charity work, you of the magna cum laude education — are also the sluttiest person on campus. Or a raging drunk. Or just a pompous, crashing ass.

A few years ago, the scenario would have been unthinkable. College detours into nymphomania and hedonism were confined to campus, the shield of anonymity fostered by lack of technology. With the advent of (mostly) benign social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, people’s capacity to put themselves on display increased, of course, but this was still largely self-regulated — even the most homely lass, it seems, can manage to post a glamour shot of herself on her Facebook profile; even a moron can claim to love Proust.

This seems almost quaint, now that reputation can be defined and cyber-immortalized by self-appointed journalists. The seamy world of Gossip Girl has come to college campuses, and it’s turning campus nobodies into quasi-celebrities, snoopy students into paparazzi, and student journalists into gods who can make or break reputations.

Juicy Campus (juicycampus.com), whose mean mentality seems to hover somewhere around that of a 14-year-old loser, is the most egalitarian of these ventures, covering gossip at college campuses nationwide. (A current discussion: who’s the hottest dining-hall worker at Cal State Long Beach?) However, the Ivy League is leading the charge in terms of targeted gossip reporting, thanks in large part to three blogs: Sex and the Ivy (sexandtheivy.com), GossipGeek (gossipgeek.blogspot.com), and IvyGate (ivygateblog.com). They’re also the three blogs that have gotten the most publicity — stories in the New York Times, book proposals, the usual. Sex and the Ivy is written by Harvard’s Lena Chen; GossipGeek also chronicles social life at Harvard; and IvyGate takes on the trembling underbelly of the entire Ivy League.

Chris Beam, the affable, articulate son of the Boston Globe’s Alex Beam, founded IvyGate with fellow Columbia student Nick Summers in 2006. The Phoenix reached him at his Slate office, where he’s now a reporter. He explains the motivation of IvyGate as if he’s in a business meeting discussing the future of Google. “Every successful blog targets a niche in some way, and there’s this niche of college readers who didn’t really have campus blogs. And any time that there’s a collective identity — and Ivy Leaguers are a good example, obviously, because Ivy Leaguers are sort of self-interested. It boggles the mind to imagine how some of them got in. The culture of the Ivy League is people who have very high self-regard, the goal was to try to expose that a little bit, and to tear it down.”

The kids in the hall

KARA BASKIN — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:41:27 GMT

Teen pregnancies are up. Can on-campus student-parent services be far behind?
Someone is going to get pregnant.

’Tis the season of surprise pregnancies. First Keisha Castle-Hughes. Then Knocked Up. Then Juno, and Bella. Then there was the blessed-event bulletin from train-wreck-in-training Jamie-Lynn Spears. It was only a matter of time before wholesome teen idol Hannah Montana herself, Miley Cyrus, was rumored to be pregnant. (A number of Facebook groups are devoted to the debate. Cyrus denies being with child.)

Us Weekly, meet the CDC: for the first time since 1991, according to Center for Disease Control statistics, teen pregnancy is on the rise. In the United States, approximately 750,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19 become pregnant every year. Eighty-two percent of these pregnancies are unplanned; 29 percent result in abortion. Massachusetts, for its part, has the third-lowest teen birth-rate of any state. Meanwhile, here, 43 percent of teen pregnancies are aborted.

It’s not shocking that these numbers don’t specifically address college students. Traditionally, public-health stats focus on the plights of high-risk, underprivileged, uneducated women. But this is changing. Currently in committee, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Pregnant and Parenting Student Services Act of 2007 would establish a pilot program that, through grants, would encourage eligible higher-education institutions to operate pregnant and parenting student-services offices for affected co-eds.

Meanwhile, the price of birth control continues to spike. According to the American College Health Association, about 38 percent of female college students use oral contraceptives. But discounted birth-control pills that once cost between $5 and $10 are now going for as much as $50. Why? As Slate recently reported, when lawmakers passed the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, they overlooked college health centers on a list of providers eligible for pharmaceutical discounts. And, sadly, there’s no such thing as a morning-after pill when it comes to political screw-ups.

So with pregnancy coming to the mainstream, I decided to do a little sleuthing. Surely some women on college campuses who do get pregnant, whether they planned to or not, might actually want to keep their babies. What happens on the leafy campuses of Boston’s elite institutions of higher learning? Does Patagonia make maternity wear?

My first stop, just for some perspective, was Boston College. As a Jesuit school, the Eagles push for family values. At BC, pro is used more often in the context of football; choice, not so much. Of course, this cooks up its own issues: as the BC student newspaper The Heights reported this past spring, the Women’s Health Initiative, a group of pro-choice campus activists, met secretly, off-campus, to escape administration scrutiny. The group is gaining momentum, but they’re still a vocal minority at conservative BC.

Loving abuse

KARA BASKIN — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:50:30 GMT

No one can be ruder than your family, and the holidays provide the perfect stage for the kindest cuts of all
Oh, the holidays.

Oh, the holidays. Gravy, stuffing, and something in the eggnog that turns even your twittering Aunt Agnes into a cloven-hooved menace with two-pronged horns and a yen for Gestapo tactics. The action never stops at my house, and when there’s a lull in conversation, someone always asks: “Guess who died?”

Love life?
I come from a very large, fabulous family of blunt, vivacious people. Love ’em all, but my self-esteem deserved a medal from the Special Olympics by the time I was 21. Chances are, some of you are used to being prodded like a turkey as well. For most young women, the most common line of questioning encountered when reconnecting with far-flung relatives is this: “So, seeing anyone special?” This is Chinese water torture disguised as casual inquiry. (I’m married, so you’d think this would eliminate me from such hazards. Not so. Two years ago, I spent a family holiday gala hiding from an overzealous cousin determined to marry me off to a guy named Scooter.)

It’s tough to know how to play this question. If you’re not seeing anyone special, honesty runs you the risk of looking like a complete loser. “No, there’s no one in my life. I spend Saturday evenings in the fetal position wrapped around a glistening tub of Haagen Dazs watching MacGyver reruns. Sometimes I crochet. Yes, I have considered both liposuction and suicide. Pass the potatoes?”

If you are seeing someone special and deign to say so, congratulations! You’ve just boarded the express elevator to Socially Acceptable Behavior, with a pit-stop in hell. Let’s eavesdrop on this typical family.

“Who is he? That nice doctor from your building who held the elevator that one time? He’s hunky!” (Your mother, aggravated you’ve not told her until now, but hopeful nonetheless.)

“It is a he, right?” (Your florid great-uncle, har-dee-har-har, whose homophobia increases with his Wild Turkey intake. Pants are unfastened.)

“So, when’s the wedding? We’ll totally have to go dress shopping! David’s Bridal is having a sale right now.” (Your cousin from Methuen who reads In Touch because Us Weekly has too many words.)

“I’m so glad you finally found someone. Honey, let me tell you, it’s murder out there!” (Your leathery Aunt Cleo, whose longest relationship has been with a pack of Virginia Slims.)

Boston's green heroes

KARA BASKIN — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:28:42 GMT

Small steps and super-human efforts

Celibate at Harvard

KARA BASKIN — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:36:32 GMT

Can true love ever replace campus hook-ups?
A year ago, a conservative revolution was born in the throbbing heart of liberal Cambridge: a True Love Revolution (TLR), that is.

A year ago, a conservative revolution was born in the throbbing heart of liberal Cambridge: a True Love Revolution (TLR), that is. Harvard couple Sarah Kinsella and Justin Murray embarked on a campus-wide campaign to promote abstinence. Through mailings, ice-cream socials, and editorials in the Crimson, they urged their classmates to wait until marriage to have sex, lest they feel cheapened, objectified, or hurt (blue balls aside). Today, for the more than 100 student members of TLR, love means never having to say, “Your dorm or mine?”

College has always been a petri dish for sexual rebirth. Let’s face it, at a dimly lit kegger, even the most timid soul can fling aside his emo glasses and get lucky. On a national level, 71 percent of college students report being sexually active. These base instincts don’t discriminate: it seems that, when it comes to loin-locking, even the brilliant minds at Harvard turn to horny mush.

According to Justin, Harvard’s sex-ed freshman orientation events cater to the majority, treating sexual activity as a forgone conclusion — on par with hangovers, say, and the freshman fifteen. TLR acknowledges an alternate reality, and its founders practice what they preach. Justin and Sarah, now in Washington, DC, are saving themselves for marriage (and yes, they do hope to marry one another).

This past Valentine’s Day, the TLR crowd made themselves known with greetings stuffed in student mailboxes. “Why wait?” the cards read. “Because you’re worth it. Yours, True Love Revolution.” The flip side to being “worth it” is, of course, being “worthless.” Students took exception to the implication. Undergraduate Rachel Singh editorialized in the Crimson: “It’s a symptom of that culture we have that values a woman on her purity. It’s a relic.” People took sides online and at overcrowded dinner debates, and eventually the couple was even accompanied on a date by the New York Times.

Leo Keliher ’10 and Janie Fredell ’09 — a purely platonic duo — took the helm this year, and, heathen that I am, I didn’t know quite what to expect as I scurried across Harvard Square to meet them at Za. Bible-thumping dwarves wielding chastity belts? I took great care to dress appropriately — sensible button-down, pressed jeans, wholesome smile — but I just knew they’d smell impurity on me, the way dogs can smell fear. I straightened my posture and stepped inside, where I came face to face with two smiling, texting undergrads.