On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:

Hi Barrett,

Sorry for the delay. Can we say 500 words at $250? Due 3/1?

Best,
Mike

On 2/13/09 7:34 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Okay; do you need anything else from me at this point or should I wait for you to get back to me first?

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Hogan, Michael <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:

That's good! Let's finalize tomorrow.

-----Original Message-----
From: Barrett Brown [mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Thu 2/12/2009 5:21 PM
To: Hogan, Michael
Subject: Re: Query from Barrett Brown

Perhaps, for instance, Thomas Friedman's Ten Worst Predictions of the 21st
Century?

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike-
>
> Okay, sounds good. But could it be ten of his bad predictions in general,
> and not just of 2003? Several of the most significantly foolish predictions
> are from other years, particularly 2001 and 2002. Let me know what you
> think.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Barrett Brown
> Brooklyn, NY
> 512-560-2302
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Michael Hogan <
> Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
>
>>  Barrett,
>>
>> What about a shortish piece titled something like Thomas Friedman's Ten
>> Worst Predictions from 2003?
>>
>> Best,
>> Mike
>>
>>
>> On 2/11/09 12:04 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Mike-
>>
>> Thanks for getting back to me. Off the bat, would you be interested in
>> taking a look at a piece I'm about write on Thomas Friedman and how he's
>> emblematic of the failures of American punditry in general? The bulk of the
>> article would be a critique of his 2003 book *Longitudes and Attitudes*,
>> which is itself drawn from his NYT columns from 2000 to 2002, and which is
>> filled with a great number of failed predictions, weird contradictions, and
>> vapid observations in general. For instance, he asserts in 2001 that Putin
>> will be a great reformer for whom Americans should be "rootin'," claims in
>> 2002 that the "bubble" of ethical lapses among corporate administrators has
>> recently burst, claims in the same column that the terrorism "bubble" has
>> burst as well, claims in 2003 that the very threat of a U.S. attack on Iraq
>>  " has already prompted Hezbollah to be on its best behavior in Lebanon (for
>> fear of being next)," predicts in 2001 that many households will have dozens
>> of web addresses for such things as refrigerators by 2005, and claims
>> several times in 2001 and 2002 that the war in Afghanistan is over, that
>> Afghanis do not really object to civilian casualties as long as the Taliban
>> is overthrown, and that worries to the contrary constitute "hand-wringing"
>> (and in the same column, he worries that the Bush Administration is not
>> sufficiently concerned with public relations and asserts that "I have no
>> doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a
>> long war."  In his more recent columns, of course, he criticizes those who
>> held the exact opinions that he himself held.
>>
>> Let me know if this interests you, and if so I'll send it along to you
>> first. The piece would be moderately humorous along the lines of the clip I
>> sent you the other day.
>>
>> Thanks again,
>>
>> Barrett Brown
>> Brooklyn, NY
>> 512-560-2302
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Michael Hogan <
>> Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Barrett,
>>
>> Nice to hear from you and thanks for sending the clip. By all means, pitch
>> away. We occasionally do get to assign stories on a freelance basis.
>>
>> Best,
>> Mike
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/9/09 12:43 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi, Mike-
>>
>> I understand that you're currently the online editor of *Vanity Fair*,
>> and I wanted to get in touch to see if you'd be interesting in receiving
>> some queries from me or perhaps have something you'd like to assign.
>>
>> I'm a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and author, and my work has appeared
>> in *National Lampoon*, *Skeptic*, *McSweeney's*, *The Onion A.V. Club*, *
>> Nerve*, and dozens of other publications, including trade, literary,
>> regional, and policy journals. My first book, *Flock of Dodos: Behind
>> Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny*, was
>> released in 2007 to praise from Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, Matt
>> Taibbi of *Rolling Stone*, Cenk Uyger of *Air America Radio, *Bob Cesca
>> of *The Huffington Post*, and other sources. I've also served as a
>> copywriter for outlets like America Online.
>>
>> I've pasted a recent sample below; it's an article that will be appearing
>> in the next issue of *Skeptic*.
>>
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>>
>>
>> Barrett Brown
>>
>> Brooklyn, NY
>>
>> 512-560-2302
>>
>>
>>
>> *Adventures in Math and Marriage
>> *
>> *by Barrett Brown
>> *
>>
>>
>> Does the legalization of gay marriage really contribute to the decline of
>> heterosexual marriage? A good portion of our fair republic's cultural
>> conservatives seem to believe that it does, which is to say that it probably
>> doesn't. But perhaps we should check anyway.
>>
>> "[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage
>> [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get
>> married," evangelical kingpin James Dobson told a typically credulous Larry
>> King in November of 2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in
>> greater numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed
>> marrying in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now
>> something greater than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is,
>> young people just don't get married."
>>
>>
>>
>> If what James Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge
>> trouble, and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must
>> already be. Of course, James Dobson is wrong. But whereas James Dobson
>> generally contents himself with simply being wrong in his priorities,
>> sensibilities, instincts, historical perspective, theology, and manners -
>> which is to say, wrong in a mystical, cloudy sort of way - he has here
>> managed to be wrong in such a blatant sense that his wrongness can be
>> demonstrated with mathematical exactitude. In fact, we should go ahead and
>> do that. It'll be like an adventure - a math adventure.
>>
>>
>>
>> First, let's prepare our variables. *X *is any country "where they have
>> tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," as Dobson manages to
>> term these nations with just a little clarification from us. *Y *is the
>> all-important marriage rate among heterosexuals before country *X* has
>> "tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," and *Z *is the
>> all-important and allegedly damning heterosexual marriage rate that exists
>> after ten years of gay civil unions. Now, the Dobson Theorem, as we shall
>> call it, plainly states that "if *X, *then *Y *must be greater than *Z.*" Or,
>> to re-translate it into English, "if a nation allows for civil unions, the
>> marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this occurs will be
>> higher than it is ten years later," because the marriage rate among
>> heterosexuals will of course decline for some reason.
>>
>>
>>
>> Let us now test this Grand Unified Dobson Theorem, as I re-named it just a
>> second ago when you weren't looking. Now, like most things with variables,
>> the Grand Unified Christological Dobson Super-Theorem of Niftiness (which
>> needed more pizazz) requires that *X *be substituted for various things
>> that meet the parameters of *X -* in this case, northern European
>> countries. Luckily, Dr. Dobson himself has provided us with some. During the
>> Larry King interview, Dobson mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian
>> countries" as fitting the description. We'll also need values to punch in
>> for *Y *and *Z.* These may be obtained from all of the countries in
>> question, which have famously nosy, busy-body governments.
>>
>>
>>
>> Conveniently enough, these numbers may also be obtained from the October
>> 26th edition of the *Wall Street Journal *op-ed page. It seems that
>> William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor of jurisprudence at
>> Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York investment banker, had
>> recently written a book called *Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse?
>> What We've Learned From the Evidence*, and had chosen to present the
>> thrust of their findings in op-ed form.
>>
>>
>>
>> Denmark, the authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989.
>> Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 10.7
>> percent. Norway did the same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexual
>> marriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995.
>> Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 28.7
>> percent. And these marriages were actually lasting. During the same time
>> frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in Denmark, 6 percent in
>> Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.
>>
>>
>>
>> As the Reader will no doubt have determined at this point, the Dobson
>> Theorem or whatever it is that we've decided to call it is obviously bunk,
>> since it stated that countries which allow gay civil unions will see a
>> decline in the marriage rate among homosexuals, when in fact the opposite is
>> true. But since we've already gone to the trouble of expressing Dobson's
>> goofy utterances in the form of a theorem (or rather, since *I've* gone
>> to the trouble - you were no help at all), we might as well punch in these
>> figures just to make absolutely sure:
>>
>>
>>
>> *if X, then Y will be greater than Z
>> *
>>
>>
>> We punch in Denmark for *X, *Denmark's marriage rate in 1989 (*n*) for *Y
>> *, and Denmark's marriage rate in 1999 (n + n(10.7)) for *Z*:
>>
>>
>>
>> *If Denmark, then n will be greater than n + n(10.7)
>> *
>>
>>
>> Well, that's obviously wrong, since *n *is not a greater number than *n *plus
>> any other positive number*.* It is, in fact, a smaller number. If
>> Denmark's policies reduce marriage, the residents of Denmark have yet to
>> realize this and act accordingly.
>>
>>
>>
>> Where is Dobson getting his information from this time? The culprit in
>> this case may be *Weekly Standard *and *National Review *gadfly Stanley
>> Kurtz, who took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back
>> in 2004, before they were published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses them
>> as "unpublished" not once but twice in the course of his article; now that
>> they have appeared more formally, Kurtz will no doubt praise them as
>> "published"). Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in
>> Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian
>> marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer
>> mean what they used to."
>>
>>
>>
>> Brushing aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent
>> from 1990 to 1996, Kurtz countered that "just-released marriage rates for
>> 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark." He failed to note that they were
>> down in 2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of
>> course had no civil unions anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access
>> to the figures, he couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian
>> rates went back up in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate
>> "has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance.
>> Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples
>> 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be,
>> but at any rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in
>> fact constitute a sign of "the institution's decline." So Kurtz's
>> position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are
>> younger people getting married at a higher rate, but older people are as
>> well. I don't know what Kurtz's salary is, but I'm sure it would piss me off
>> to find out.
>>
>>
>>
>> Kurtz also wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's
>> true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked
>> better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has
>> been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting
>> married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce
>> rate than the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of
>> calculation that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant.
>> Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8.
>> Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage Foundation, which also
>> sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage poses to the heterosexual
>> marriage rate.
>>
>>
>>
>> Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of
>> wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have
>> unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of
>> second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage is
>> lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry after
>> having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course of
>> predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions continue
>> to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.
>>
>>
>>
>> Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting
>> married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do
>> with gay marriage - unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz.
>> "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the
>> seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the
>> 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." Of
>> course it was more disturbing to Kurtz. By the mid-'90s, the Scandinavians
>> had all instituted civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established
>> trajectory of such a trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet
>> of the homos simply by establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that
>> was obviously going to be reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many
>> ways more disturbing," and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of
>> the gays. By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the *Weekly
>> Standard* in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth.
>> Sure, that population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but
>> the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways
>> more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down. Of
>> course, this is faulty reasoning - by virtue of its unparalleled support for
>> the invasion of Iraq, the *Weekly Standard* has actually done its part to
>> keep world population down.
>>
>>
>>
>> Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think
>> it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as
>> is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a
>> child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States.
>> Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient to feel
>> this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells
>> us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork
>> with the proper federal agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps
>> they'll all die. Or perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American
>> counterparts in math and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>