That’s because debate is arguing for the pure joy, passion and zeal of argumentation. Clearly, this draws a certain kind of personality. To a true, cross-ex-in-the-bones debater, disputation is simply conversation. The activity of competitive debate is good for him and all of us. When he unleashes his innate disputatiousness in the school cafeteria, he’s annoying. But in the tightly structured forum of debate where his speeches have time limits and there are moments he has to shut up, that orneriness is tamed and polished. He becomes the kind of arguer the world could use more of.

To promote his memoir Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate, Mark Oppenheimer held a debate at his high school alma mater Regis High School in New York City. Oppenheimer and a high school senior debater, Joseph Eddy, faced off against journalist Hanna Rosin and Stuvyesant High School debater Claire Littlefield, debating the resolution, “Is American political dialogue in trouble?”

I walked in the room completely prejudiced. How could anyone not believe that American political dialogue was in trouble? Clicking Twitter headlines from my couch, I cringe at the outrageous statements of entire swaths of the American population. How, I scoffed, could anyone NOT believe that American political dialogue is clearly doomed?

But as the debaters stood and gave their opening arguments, I found myself falling back into an  old pattern from back in my debate days: the tabula rasa. This means your mind becomes a blank slate – all of your preconceptions and prejudices erased, your mind wiped clean, and ready to judge each argument on its merit and evidence.

The men, affirming  that the American dialogue was in trouble, gave their case, and the women argued for the negative side against it. They sparred in cross-examinations and gave rebuttals. As Rosin and Littlefield spoke, I found myself switching allegiances. The aff was so obvious, the neg more nimble. The neg had a harder premise to prove and they were creative and spirited in the way they constructed their case. They were more clever about their arguments. Proving their side took more finesse.

Besides that, I almost always feel inclined to pull for female debaters over male. Being a female debater takes poise and a willingness to go toe-to-toe with men who are bigger than you. When I was a 98-pound little-voiced slip of a thing, I debated oafs who were six feet tall. Their voices commanded the room and their figures dwarfed mine when we got up for cross-ex.  Female debaters face what female candidates and female CEOs do: the perennial prejudice that audiences will view spirit as shrillness and confidence as masculinity. Female debaters must root for one another to succeed.

And yet as the debate progressed and I followed each argument, charting its flow (yes, we call it a “flow chart” in debate terminology), the debate came down to a single question for me. Please remember that I am paraphrasing and both might quibble that I’m omitting certain nuances, but the gist of the argument was this:

The women were arguing that the fringe elements of the American dialogue – the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and Keith Olbermanns – were actually good for American dialogue. They admitted the fringe was fringe but said that despite all that, the fringe was a vital part of American dialogue and denying them their distasteful opinions would be un-American.

The aff argued that this made no sense. If American dialogue is dominated by extremists who care about partisan politics over truth, then how could this possibly be a good thing? If the neg conceded the premise that wingnuts dominated the debate, could they still argue that American political dialogue was just fine? If they admitted extremists were loudest, did they have an argument for why it was good that extremists were loud? I went from one side to the other and back again as I watched the debate. And finally, the question came down not to my personal prejudices but to the question, “Who made the argument the other side didn’t answer fully?” I didn’t hear a satisfying argument for the virtues of wingnuts. If I had been casting a ballot I would have said yes, the American political dialogue is in trouble.

It would be in less trouble if leaders had to debate like those students did. In high school debate, you take turns debating each side of an issue. Imagine if Congress had to abide by the rules of high school debate. Imagine if we presented them with the health care bill and told them they had to switch sides. The Democrats had to come up with the best, most sophisticated arguments against health care and the Republicans had to passionately defend the health care bill against all arguments against it. Whoever won the debate got to choose the outcome of the bill. If Republicans won, they could kill the bill; if Democrats won, it lived.

We would have a different kind of debate I imagine. For one thing, it would be more objective. Each side would be arguing for the side they abhorred, but for the sake of winning for the side they loved. It would cool the heat that comes not from facts but from resentment and fear and pandering. The debate is now about evidence and arguments, not about how you feel.

Doing this helps you see the other side. It helps you see where your own arguments are weakest when you find yourself skewering the argument you believe and questioning the evidence you personally find credible. You discard arguments that are bad and find evidence that has weight.

Afterwards it was said that if students like Eddy and Littlefield were American’s political future, then American dialogue would one day prosper. It was true.

When I was very young, my aunt and uncle gave me a ponderous elephant pendant necklace on a heavy silver chain. It was a necklace befitting a 45-year-old portly professional – the kind of necklace that would go well with an expansive plush suit in a matronly hue.

“We thought of you when we saw this,” they said. I looked at it and said, “Thanks.”

They said this because I made everyone think about elephants. I brought elephants to the mind because I wore shirts that said “W. for President” and had a red-white-and-blue George W. Bush campaign tote bag. I had a collection of small elephant figurines because elderly relatives kept buying them and saying, “We saw this and thought of you.” I was the kind of child who walked her precinct during Republican primaries and attended state Republican party conventions on weekends. I woke up at 8:00 on Saturday morning to attend county GOP meetings. I was accompanied to these meetings by frail old Republican women who wore tapestry suits woven with elephant patterns and dangly elephant earrings. By anyone’s account it was my destiny to one day become a frail old Republican woman in an elephant-patterned suit, in which case the pendulous necklace would serve my wardrobe well.

I did not become that woman, but I have never – even in seasons of political ambivalence – stopped wearing political t-shirts. When a friend of mine said the other day that she would have nowhere to wear a political t-shirt, it startled me. To me, the only wrong place to wear a political t-shirt is church.

In 2008 I was, for the first time, an undecided voter. Never mind the journey that took me from George W. Bush tote bags to a crisis of political faith, but for the first time I felt myself pulled in two different directions. At first I decided not to vote at all, just for the principle of the thing – because it seemed unfair that I should have to choose between so many principles I held equally. But then one bright Sunday I walked through Union Square, which was brimming with campaign regalia from New York’s hippest artists. I could have bought twenty fashionista political t-shirts but my eye lit upon a light blue one with darker blue lettering that said “Blondes for …” Well, I’ll let you guess.

It was perfect. It said, “I am a blonde and I am my own special interest group, like lesbian Latinas or gun-toting Irishmen. This is my vote and while I am confident enough to advertise my vote on my boobs, there is a part of me that realizes if I have chosen wrongly it won’t be the end of the world; but still I am actually making my choice.”

Or maybe I just thought it was cute and I wanted to buy it as a companion for my “Blondes not Bombs” t-shirt. But I bought it – and the moment of buying the t-shirt and the moment of final decision were almost one and the same. My friend said, “Well I guess you’ve made up your mind then.” And I realized I had.

I wear political t-shirts both to make friends and make enemies. It’s my way of stubbornly standing up for myself when I feel stifled, and finding out who’s standing with me. I bought a t-shirt from Brooklyn Industries that showed Sarah Palin crowning a beatifically smiling Hillary Clinton Miss America. The artistry was ambiguous. (Hillary Clinton was hotter on the t-shirt than she was in real life). The message was somewhat ambiguous, too: Was Sarah Palin crowning Hillary Clinton the next woman in the White House because Palin had already won the White House? Or was Palin ceding First Female President to Hillary Clinton? I gave it my own interpretation. I bought it, loved it, got into arguments over it and lost it when I went to a primarily Republican wedding in Ohio – a memory that still makes me bitter as I search eBay for a replacement I have not yet been able to find.

Sometimes I like to buy my t-shirts a little to the left or right of where I actually am. My latest acquisition is a little pink vintage number that says, “Vote Democrat: A clean sweep.” I am not a Democrat, but I wear it to be a little perverse when I meet up with friends who campaign for Scott Brown. I want a t-shirt with a Jimmy Carter slogan of a grinning peanut, but Jimmy Carter is so lame that I’m torn. Perhaps a McGovern t-shirt with a dove of peace instead: obscure enough that pretty much no one will get it but relevant to today.

I wore that “Blondes” shirt right up until and on Election Day. Campaigners loved it. Elderly black women loved it. A boy staggering drunkenly through the West Village on Election Night also loved it. It’s ratty now but I still wear it to the gym, where nobody comments on it anymore. The big 2008 moment has passed. The hope is all tired and worn out – like my shirt – and no one will care to wear political t-shirts until 2012. Except me.

Well, I didn’t keep that resolution. So my goal for 2010 is to become a scarily literate, well-educated, sophisticated person who can summon cogent opinions on every topic from healthcare reform to tannins in wine, and someone whose apartment looks like a page from Martha Stewart Living (if Martha Stewart Living featured apartments in ghetto neighborhoods).

And yet one of the several shrinks my family frequents said that you accomplish big goals by setting very, very small ones. For instance, instead of deciding you are going to batter your lumpy body into the shape of Kim Kardashian’s by next month, you first set the goal of putting on your gym clothes every day. That’s all. No gym, no workout-just wearing your gym clothes. Once you achieve this goal, then you drive to the gym. No working out-just driving your car to the gym. Then, of course, eventually you start working out and then look like Kim Kardashian. Surely.

My final goal is to become the type of person goes to the farmer’s market with a canvas bag and cooks gourmet food and knows what pate is and can totally taste the difference between a locally-grown organic peach and a regular one. But I am currently the kind of person who opens a container of cottage cheese, gets a spoon and eats it sitting next to her computer. I spend about 3.5 minutes total on meal prep and eating each day.

Despite wanting to be the Martha Stewart of ghetto New York, I am currently the type of person who gets claustrophobic walking into Crate and Barrel because the thought of identifying two complementary colors is overwhelming. (Ok, honestly-I am not the type of person who walks into Crate and Barrel. Ever.) My apartment isn’t a slovenly hovel. It’s just that I have never gotten around to getting curtains because I’ve been meaning to buy a new bedspread but I’ve never gotten around to that either because I am paralyzed at the thought of finding a bedspread that matches the walls. I have also never gotten around to putting pictures up on the wall because I am waiting until I become an art connoisseur with taste and tens of thousands of dollars.

There are moments at the end of the day, as a writer working from home, that I look around and realize my hair looks like a train-wrecked bum’s, I have been working from on top of my rumpled bed all day while wearing pajamas, my work has spilled over all my home and I can’t get away from it and sadly, I have not talked to a real live soul face to face all day.

So my goal is this: First, to get dressed every morning. Then to make my bed every day. I’m not going to start with cooking one meal a week or even cooking one dish a week. I’m going to start with closing my computer once a day. I’m going to clear the table of electric bills and J. Crew catalogs, put a placemat down, put a fork on the left and a spoon and a knife on the right, fold a napkin, put food -not glamorous, not made-from-scratch, not organic or locally-grown or Whole Foods-bought, just food-on a real plate and sit down and eat.

I want to do these things not for appearance’s sake but to claim order, sanity and humanity. I want to learn to cook not because I want to become more feminine or domestic or more a part of the Whole-Foods-eating New York City crowds. I want to cook because taking the time to sit down and chew and swallow food that you put on a glass plate with a fork on the left and a knife on the right is part of being civilized, which is part of feeling human. Every time I do it, I am telling myself: Having a daily rhythm of rest and work is good. Taking time to nourish yourself will help you do your work better. Getting dressed every morning will tell me: There is a separation between work and the rest of life. When you are working you’re a professional, whether anyone is there to see it or not. When you’re done, you can climb back into pajamas. There is a time to work, and there is a time to stop.

Maybe setting these daily rhythms will help me set others and by January 2011 at the latest I will have become the scarily literate, well-balanced, locavore I imagine I’ll be.

Or not. I have just one more goal, one regarding becoming a wine expert: Drink more wine. Drink more slowly. Learn about brix and bouquets sometime before 2020 or so.

Snake, c.1860. Gold, diamond. Photo: John Bigelow Taylor

Ask Sarah Palin after everyone learned she spent $150,000 on clothes. Ask Cindy McCain after the media slammed her for wearing an outfit that totaled $300,000. Ask Hillary Clinton when the media needled her for restlessly changing her hair style again and again. Ask Michelle Obama after Robin Givhan gushed that when Obama “bounded onto the stage in her sleeveless dresses, with her muscular post-Title IX arms in full view, the definition of a strong woman changed.”

It matters what a woman in politics wears. Every sartorial choice has significance-painting a political woman as shallow or thoughtless or mannish or callous or strong or rebellious or docile. But while women in politics should know all of this, the choices they make are often either thoughtless (wearing a $300,000 outfit while your husband tries to brand his opponent as an elitist) or carefully constrained by the rigid roles the country expects them to play.

The messages are either clumsy and wrong or so subtle that people find in them what they will. For instance, after XX Factor’s Hanna Rosin saw a picture of Obama delicately plying a shovel while wearing a long belted sweater and stylish boots, Rosin said, “I’m beginning to think Michelle rebels against the strictures offirst lady life silently, through her outfits, the sartorial equivalents of a middle finger.” A fashion analyst wondered if Obama wore her famous purple sheath dress at the convention because purple is a mix of red and blue. But who knows?

However, a display at the Museum of Art and Design shows a leader who walks a bold but dainty path in female political fashion. These fashion choices are bold. The messages they send are clear, but they’re also whimsical and utterly feminine.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was the first female Secretary of State and famous for using her collection of costume jewelry pins to send gentle diplomatic prods. The display shows over 200 of her signature pins. Some of them are delicate but most of them are ponderous-the kind of pins you would need a very serious, sober suit to sustain-and so big that they tore holes in Albright’s serious suits, which she then covered with larger pins.

She began using pins to send messages after the state-run Iraqi press called her a serpent in a cunningly titled poem, “To Madeleine Albright, Without Greetings.” It went something like this: “Albright, Albright, all right, all right, you are the worst in this night.” The writer went on to weave in a menagerie of animal imagery, penning, “Albright, no one can block the road to Jerusalem with a frigate, a ghost, or an elephant” and calling Albright an “unparalleled serpent.” The next time she went to Iraq she wore a jeweled serpent entwined around a stick, with a diamond hanging down for its tongue. When the media asked her why, she said it was because the Iraqis thought she was a snake.

She wore wasps when she wanted to send a message with a bit of a sting. She wore a jeweled bug, made of amethyst, chalcedony and gold, to Russia after a Russian official bugged the State Department. She used turtles to complain about the slow progress of peace. She wore balloons to symbolize satisfaction when talks were going well.

When she met with Vladimir Putin and wanted to send a message about Russia ignoring human rights violations in Chechnya, she wore three chubby, Buddha-like monkeys miming “hear no evil,” “see no evil,” “speak no evil.” When she met to navigate talks about nuclear arms, she wore an abstract representation of an arrow, made of anodized aluminum. A diplomat looked down at her pin and said, “Is this one of your interceptor missiles?” She told him, “Yes, and as you can see, we know how to make them very small. So you’d better be ready to negotiate.”

She seems to wear them with a knowledge too many women in politics forget-the knowledge that’s she’s a woman and not a man, and that any disadvantages to being a woman are best deflected with a sly sense of humor instead of acting like a man. A foreign minister mistakenly told reporters that he enjoyed hugging Albright because of her “firm breasts.” Of course outrage followed, which Albright deflected when reporters asked what she thought and she quipped, “Well, I’ve got to have somewhere to put those pins.” Then, of course, she bought a red fox pin-for when she was feeling flirty-to commemorate the occasion.

She told Newsweek, “I love being a woman and I was not one of these women who rose through professional life by wearing men’s clothes or looking masculine. I loved wearing bright colors and being who I am.” It’s an intentional, dignified use of femininity to send a political message that’s bold and clear. It’s fashion that bends the rigidity of female roles, while at the same time not sacrificing the femininity it’s absolutely just that female leaders keep.

After I watched Bruno, I left the theater desperately praying to gays, blacks, Jews, Arabs, babies, Baptists, and God for forgiveness. Then I stood in line at the Shake Shack for 45 minutes because drinking alcohol felt too dirty and it seemed the wholesomeness of a milkshake was all that could purge my soul.

Disclaimer: I am not a prude. In fact, I went to see Bruno because, frankly, trashiness often beats classiness when it comes to my entertainment choices. For a 24-year-old girl, I believe I am fairly solid on the tawdry bromance list: Pineapple Express, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Knocked Up, The 40 Year Old Virgin, I Love You, Man, and Superbad. Some I enjoy more than others, but I usually don’t mind them. I knew that some Christian organizations thought Bruno a “disgusting, abhorrent movie,” but I assumed they would attach the same warning to every movie I watched, so I blithely went.

And was revulsed.

I realize that Bruno’s humor has a point – shattering political correctness, forcing us to confront our own prejudicial niceties – so the thought kept nagging me: What makes Bruno different from those other crude movies?

The difference is that while those other movies humanize the world’s weirdos, Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor dehumanizes people – and not just a “type” of person but a real person who sits down trusting that the interviewer will show him as he is. Cohen doesn’t just expose prejudice but manipulates it, twisting real three-dimensional people into ugly, one-dimensional caricatures. Take the climactic scene, where he whips people up into a gleeful hatred and then shoves what they hate in their faces, as the camera zooms in on every shade of horror. Of course the prejudice and the hate is already there, and yes, it’s ugly. But the way he teases it out of people – with no thought to their humanity and no grace for their weaknesses – dehumanizes them.

These other movies take the world’s weirdos and even while mocking them, make us see behind their shallowness and love them. I just watched Role Models to contrast the two. A sour jerk (Paul Rudd) and a dim-witted hottie (Seann William Scott) are forced to mentor 10-year-old jailbait (Bobb’e J. Thompson) and a severely socially-disabled young man (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). But in the end, you see that the sour jerk has a begrudging unselfishness, the dim-wit has his own wisdom, the jailbait is sensitive and the socially backward kid has guts. It’s the same with Knocked Up, which helps us love a bong-loving loser, and 40 Year Old Virgin, which humanizes the lame guy who has never had sex.

I’ve said before that I think the very best satire comes from affection for the satirized – a realization that they don’t live up to their worth. Satire, especially the kind that bites the deepest and wounds the sharpest, should have some exhortatory affection behind it.

So yes, I felt sorry for Paula Abdul, because it is embarrassing enough to watch her even when she sort of knows what’s going on, and because apparently this experience scarred her for a year. And I felt sorry for Ron Paul, because I was frankly terrified that Bruno would rape him and because old, quirky statesmen deserve a little peace and respect.

And I felt sorry for the Alabama Christian pastor who tried his simplistic best to help Bruno change his sexual orientation. But I thought his forgiving response when the movie came out – that he hoped his interview would be used for good – reclaimed some of the humanity that Bruno took.

Warning: here may be a few spoilers.

I recently read No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy. A few nights later, I thought I should rewatch No Country for Old Men, to compare the book and the movie and re-grasp the plot, which was fuzzy in the book since I always lost track of where Llewellyn had last hidden the $2 million he had filched from dead drug dealers, and who exactly was after him and who was after the people who were after him.

Exactly five minutes and 27 seconds into No Country for Old Men – after the second brutal murder and right about when Llewellyn is ready to murder an innocent deer – I remembered I hated this movie. I do not enjoy seeing people getting holes neatly blown in their heads by a homicidal maniac with a terrible haircut! Reading the book was squirmy enough. Why did I want to relive this experience?

So I switched. To Made of Honor. Five minutes into it, Tom (Patrick Dempsey) – dressed as Bill Clinton – gets maced with perfume by a girl who will subsequently become his BFF and ask him to be her maid of honor, after he discovers he’s madly in love with her. This is more my type of movie. (It stars, after all, not one but two Grey’s Anatomy actors.)

I picked Made of Honor not just for the stunningly witty pun in its title but because I wanted to see an “emotional retard” get severely punished. This is what happens in the original, My Best Friend’s Wedding, when Julia Roberts loses the love of her life because she is a puerile brat. It would be good to see the same happen to the infantile Tom. I reflected – and I should know, because I am a romantic comedy expert – that this actually rarely happens in movies. Most of the time, in the alternative reality romantic comedy world, things work out for the brats and their dreams come true if they can just effect a change of heart.

But about two thirds into it, I got squirmy again. Something was not quite right. I began to remember hearing that Made of Honor didn’t end quite like the original My Best Friend’s Wedding. By the time Tom had filched a Scottish horse and was galloping headlong through the Scottish moor into a church door to tell the love of his life, “I love you” after only having the emotional maturity to say “I love you” to dogs, I was cursing the cruel caprice of the romantic comedy gods. I was outraged. I felt that my sense of justice had been shot like a lamb and minced up like the haggis Patrick Dempsey had served at his best friend’s bridal shower.

I had seen enough. I now felt like watching people get holes blown in their head by a serial killer with a terrible haircut, so I once again turned to No Country for Old Men.

Thirty minutes in, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) has killed four people and would have killed six if not for a toilet flush and coin toss. I had no better grasp of the plot, and the moustaches bothered me very much. I lost track of the murders because I closed my eyes too much. I missed the book’s gentle, troubled inner musings of the sheriff and the way his humanity relieved the brutality.

In the end, Anton shoots his last victim – although, as she notes, he doesn’t have to – steps out on the front porch, checks his boots for her blood, and drives away. There’s a moment where we think that after all this, he’ll get caught. But he walks free.

In the end of Made of Honor, Tom weds his bride atop a skyscraper. In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh gets to waltz off into the sunset with a bone sticking out of his arm. In both our sense of justice is assaulted.

The oddity is that both of them – while Tom’s badness is so much more feeble – are alike in one respect. One character says of Anton, “You might even say he has principles,” just as Tom has untransgressable “rules.” The rules are absurd: Anton thinks that flipping a coin is a fair way to determine whether he will blow someone’s head in and that it would be terribly wrong not to let them call heads or tails on their own. Whereas Tom doesn’t see women two days in a row or say “I love you” to non-canine creatures. “It’s just shocking how you use it as a shield!” exclaims his prescient future love interest. Yes, it is shocking! Shocking that both the serial heartcrusher and serial killer use “rules,” in a twisted way, to justify their sociopathic inability to fathom others’ pain.

But Tom’s happy ending is less realistic than Anton’s. Anton’s ending depends on chance – like the flip of a coin – on forces outside himself. Had he not crashed his car, had the ambulance come just a bit earlier, had the boy not given Anton his shirt for a sling, things might have ended differently. Anton might have come to justice. We can wrap our minds around that: chance can let a guilty man go free.

We can also understand chance thwarting romance. But this isn’t the case with Tom. Tom should have an unhappy ending because his ending doesn’t depend on chance – it depends on his own emotional maturity. His emotional retardation – his too-recent inability to commit to another person for longer than, oh, two days – should make that skyscraper fairytale impossible. Anton’s ending depends on chance, but Tom’s ending should depend on his will – and call me a Calvinist, but his will, which until now has been tyrannized by his childishness, is too feeble to commit.

But the universe is not always just, I suppose. Sometimes the serial killer gets lucky and the serial heart-pulverizer goes free. Sometimes the fat bridesmaid who hubristically squeezed herself into a size 8 receives her due reward when her bridesmaid dress splits. But sometimes all the groomsmen happen to wear kilts and are able to supply massive safety pins to close up the tear. The caprice of the rom com gods causes it to rain on the just and the unjust – and makes the sun shine, too.

In Spoiled: Stories (Random House), Caitlin Macy explores the anxiety of women trying to sidle their way into the next social class, ready to take the next step up in the American Dream. “My book is about this somewhat afflicted group,” she told the New York Times. “These people on the edge of where they’d like to be: almost rich, slightly rich, very conscious of their place in the world.”

The social climber isn’t new to fiction, and neither is the female scrambling up Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The Nanny Diaries shows us the imperious mothers, Candace Bushnell gives us the empowered singles looking for love to round out their status and power, and Real Housewives of New York City shows the reality is not far from fiction. But Macy touches on something different: the anxieties and insecurities behind the irrational cruelties we always see portrayed. And she does it with a talent for delicately needling satire that the others lack.

Macy’s protagonists live by what David Kamp calls in this month’s Vanity Fair, “the outmoded proposition that each successive generation in the United States must live better than the one that preceded it.” Children of unglamorous beginnings, they inch their way up with looks, luck and bitchiness, by letting the drama teacher feel them up so they can get the lead, and by running roughshod over other girls in the designer stilettos they once had to buy on the clearance rack. They marry up, and thus view their husbands with a near-resentment. Their mothers embarrass them, with their TV dinners and their apologies to panhandlers for only having change. They make their own children even more imperious and sophisticated.

But Macy shows the crippling diffidence beneath the sophistication. These women collect props-the model nanny, the Old World cleaning lady, the hedge fund-manager husband-not for the life they have now, but for the life they seek. They are anxious about what the actually rich think (one character crushes another with the line, “Oh, you’re just renting?”), but their insecurities extend to the “help.” Will the model nanny love my child best, and how dare the cleaning lady say my small apartment is easier to clean than a “classic six”? These insecurities manifest themselves in acts of flailing, childish cruelty. One character accidentally hires a cleaning lady who is too much like her old self-”a young woman she might have hung out with, in her single days, on a Friday night.” She reacts to the woman’s confidence with an act of sabotage that finally allows her to exercise a condescension that fulfills her fantasy.

Macy writes like her characters talk: with a wounding, unobtrusive pleasantness. She has a knack for details that capture unconscious snobbery and for lines that impale in passing. (For instance, children are “little trophies, one presumed, to fill up that bottomless pit of dissatisfaction” and pregnancy is “an absurd moment in their otherwise genderless lives”). Yet she’s not without compassion. The “spoiled” in her title seems too dismissively judgmental, since Macy can make us pity even her most repellent characters. Those characters, though, are hard to differentiate since they have similar backgrounds, live similar lives, marry similar men (the type who makes money and reads The Economist), are at the same “almost-rich” stage, and share the exact same neuroses. Their personalities and stories blend together until it feels like the same story told over and over again-albeit with a clever turn of hand.

In a time when everyone worries not just about moving up but about sliding back, their anxiety touches an uncomfortable chord. These women could accept the fixity of their position, could strive less frantically and learn to live with less-but so could we. Kamp says over the years the American Dream has morphed from a simple desire to achieve within our abilities, to the “unattainable” need for “stardom or extreme success.” It’s become “a moving target that eluded people’s grasp; nothing was ever enough.” Frederic Morton recently made the same point in the Los Angeles Times, saying the American Dream “soars beyond check or balance; it is updated continuously by whatever glitters beyond the edge of our means.”

There’s an economic toll to this bloated dream, but Macy’s protagonists show the real price of always grasping for what’s just out of reach. One woman reflects on the fact that no matter how hard she works to bring in x amount per year, only time can increase it: “But time ate up your life. … A decade, two decades of your life would have gone by before you attained it. The fixity of x was the most bittersweet thing I had thought of in ages.”

The woman chooses to let the chasing of x swallow her life over time. It’s a choice we also make, and one that Morton asks us to reconsider when he asks, “Do we have the courage to free ourselves from the fixation on the exceptional? Shall we try to dream a dream less extreme?” Macy shows the extremity of the dream, and the absurdity of the cruelty it inspires.

This article originally appeared on Patrol, a daily web magazine that covers the arts, culture, and politics in New York City.

Watching Everlasting Moments, Sweden’s official 2008 selection for the Academy Awards, is like walking into one of those old sepia photographs and learning the stories that set the lips into grim lines and sketched weary furrows onto the faces.

Even the warm, golden tints of the cinematography give that feeling the film its aged quality as it slips into the lives of a poor family living amidst the commotion of early twentieth-century Sweden. A young couple named Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt) and Maria (Maria Heiskanen) win a camera at a fair; he insists it’s his, she says he’ll have to marry her to keep it. Their union immediately produces a brood of children, and Maria forgets the camera until Sigfrid slips deeper into alcoholism, goes on strike in a fit of socialism, and begins philandering. The family slips into the same dissolute slide foreshadowed in a song the children sing at a temperance meeting early in the film.

Maria tries to sell the camera to a kind photographer, Mr. Pederson (Jesper Christensen), to get money for rent. Instead, he teaches her how to use it. She begins documenting her life in snapshots, developing the pictures in the kitchen at night by draping a blanket over a chair. The estranged Sigfrid watches her from outside, through a crack in the door. The camera that started their romance now digs at their rift as Sigfrid becomes jealous of her friendship with Mr. Pederson and her obsession with the world that she sees through her lens.

Everlasting Moments is about the dignity that art brings to even the worst human conditions-the ability to see beyond the squalor of this world into another. Its most uncomfortable moments play out like a sprawling series of shameful vignettes. In one of opening scenes, a coveted visit from Maja’s (the oldest daughter) teacher ends abruptly when Sigfrid stumbles in, wasted and singing at the top of his lungs. Later, he walks off with another woman at a picnic-in broad daylight, in front of the children-and doesn’t show up until the next morning, when he takes the family careering through the streets in a drunken carriage ride. Maria-pregnant after Sigfrid essentially raped her-has to take the reins as her husband’s head sinks to his knees.

Maria’s husband is a constant source of shame, disgrace, and fear, but her photography-that ability to see the beauty in a disabled child or an icicle hanging off of a barn-awakens something in her and makes her life bearable. She feels guilty sometimes but can’t stop, even when she tries. Pederson tells her she has the ability to see a different world when she looks through a camera lens, and “those who see that world can’t close their eyes.”

When Sigfrid tries to kick out the people whose photographs she’s taking, she finally stands up to him with a kind of dignity so deep it transcends anger. Her art has awakened that part of her humanity that gives worth apart from being loved or abused, and strength to make an unhindered choice about whether to keep or leave him.

Despite its tenuous beauty, Everlasting Moments has its flaws. It’s a sprawling family history that covers over a decade, and some of the details are haphazard. The film is based on a true story-the story of a real Maja’s mother-but the film’s perspective is inchoate. Maja is initially presented as the narrator, but she drifts in and out, and her character stays hazy. We’re far more interested in what’s happening inside her mother’s head, so it’s hard to see what Maja’s filter adds. Sigfrid’s character also seems inconsistent; He’s capable of both sincere penitence and the deepest brutality, and the things that trigger either one don’t quite make sense.

The ending leaves you feeling wistful and unsettled because of what it keeps untold, but some of the final lines are the most evocative. Maja remembers that when her mother took a picture she would say, “Just imagine it-we’ll always be here. These moments will be everlasting.” For a woman who endures so many degrading moments, the ability to see and capture another world lights her way.

“Everlasting Moments” opened on March 6 in New York and Los Angeles.

This article originally appeared on Patrol, a daily web magazine that covers the arts, culture, and politics in New York City.

T. is a rebellious teenager who wears a thong poking above her low-slung jeans and a zebra bra flashing through her top. Buck is a biker who watches porn and crushes cigarettes in his son’s muffins, which he mocks as “homo-made.” Alice walks out of the 1950s and all over everyone in her high-heeled shoes. And they all are really the same woman: Tara, a beleaguered mom who suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which splits her personality into T. and Buck and Alice. “Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain,” sighs Tara. “Only you’re passed out cold while everyone else is trashing the joint.”

United States of Tara, just premiered on Showtime, could be a gutsy look at the confusion of human identity – if the producers use Tara’s split personalities as more than a plot device. It boasts a starry cast of Toni Collette as Tara, John Corbett as her long-suffering husband, and Rosemarie DeWitt playing almost the same self-righteous sister she played in Rachel Getting Married. Diablo Cody writes and produces it, with Steven Spielberg as consulting producer.

The show so far has explored the question of whether Tara’s “alters” are really her, and suggesting that maybe all of us, on some level, are a mess of different identities. The writers put this idea in the big mouth of a vacuous vitamin salesperson whose house Tara is redecorating. When it becomes clear that Tiffany knows the gossip, she tries to reassure Tara: “I kind of feel like everyone has it, you know, a little bit. Like in the course of a day, how many different women do we have to be? Like ‘Work Tiffany’ or ‘Sexy Tiffany’ or … ‘Dog Owner Tiffany’!”

The thought is suggested more seriously when Tara is talking to her therapist and says she worries that her husband only wants to have sex with the alter identities but not Tara herself. The therapist says people want what they can’t have.

“He can have me,” Tara says.

“He can’t have all of you.”

“The alters? They’re not me.”

But are they? The prim Alice tells Kate, “I want to let you know that even though I deeply disapprove of the way you carry yourself, your mother loves you very much.” She means that Alice disapproves of Kate but Tara loves her anyway; but Tara – when she’s in full possession of her true identity – deeply disapproves, too. She just doesn’t know how to say it, so Alice says it instead.

Maybe we all adopt different personas to face different situations. The show seems to suggest this in the first episode, when we see alternate identities echoed in her children. Her son is a soft-spoken, sweater-wearing, sensitive kid. Her daughter is a rebellious punk-ass with a swathe of blue hair and chains hanging off both her army fatigues and her boyfriend. But it’s impossible not to see an echo of Tara’s alternate identities when her daughter has a dance concert and is suddenly transformed into a pirouetting china doll, and when the soft-spoken son suddenly starts pummeling the pierced boyfriend.

The paradoxical wisdom of insanity comes through, too, when Tara’s insanity is more in tune with reality. Tara’s alters say the true things no one really says. Buck says that Marshall is gay, Alice says that Katie is a slut and that Marshall’s teacher (Tony Lane) picks on the nerdy students because he never fit in himself.

Movies and TV usually use DID as a cheap plot trick – to create the surprise ending where we find that the villain and the hero are the same person. But DID is a dark disorder, usually developed to cope with shattering childhood trauma. The alters do emerge when the real Tara can’t cope. T. comes when Tara doesn’t know how to relate to her daughter. Buck comes when Tara needs to drop-kick Kate’s abusive boyfriend. Alice comes when it’s time for chaos to stop running their lives.

But DID develops when you experience a shattering trauma that you can’t escape except by becoming someone else. So far, there’s nothing about Tara’s life that is harder than anyone else’s. Her daughter is your average rebellious teenager but her husband and son are saints. The show hasn’t hinted at a traumatic past and if there was one, Tara’s put-together sister Charmaine (Rosemarie DeWitt) doesn’t seem to have shared it. There’s a moment when “Dog Owner Tiffany” suddenly blurts that she was abused as a child to draw the attention from Tara to herself. The moment is supposed to be mocking but many people who suffer from DID were abused as children. Was Tara?

Instead of just using DID as a plot trick to let Collette to show off her acting skills, United States of Tara has an opportunity to show the side of human identity – not just Tara’s but everyone’s – that’s laced with darkness and deep confusion. If they can show the darkness while still depicting the journey towards clarity, this could be a truly thoughtful show.

Eric Parker is a 28-year-old billionaire asset manager who wakes up with one mission: to go across town for a haircut as he wagers his fortune in a daring financial bet. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis describes Eric winding his way through Manhattan in a limo glittering with the latest technology – meeting with his advisers and encountering his young wife, exiting the limo for sexual encounters and food. He pops into a rave, stops for a funeral procession, and has his limo defaced in an anarchist protest. He feels the thrill of possible death as he sees assassinated titans on his limo’s TV screens, and rumors of his own assassin follow him.

The whole time, he is pouring millions away in his bet against the yen. As he sinks his fortune in the belief that the yen cannot go higher, the yen continues to climb and his millions dissipate. Finance tumbles along with his fortune.

The novel is about a suicidal, mad pursuit of knowledge – about the desire for immortality through information – and the crash that follows. It is one of those prescient books that resonates more today, with our own financial titans falling, than when it was written in 2003. The story is set in 2000 – pre 9/11 when New York seemed invincible – “all this optimism, all this booming and soaring,” as one character put it. When you add the shadow of 2008 to the shadow of 2001, Parker’s fall is even more spectacular.

Eric bets against the yen because he believes that he – with his financial omniscience that hasn’t failed him yet – can see a pattern that no one else can see. Deep beneath, beyond detection through analysis, there must be a pattern in the chaos – “a pattern latent in nature itself, a leap of pictorial language that went beyond the standard models of technical analysis and out-predicted even the arcane charting of his own followers in the field.”

“There’s an order at some deep level,” he tells his chief of finance. “A pattern that wants to be seen.” Eric seems to have a hyper-consciousness that sees the future in his security cameras seconds before it occurs. But even with this heightened sensitivity, the yen defies him. The yen can’t go higher, he tells his chief of finance. That’s right, she says: “Except it just did.”

Eric worships information. He and his chief of theory emerge from his limo to watch data roll by on the electronic tickers – too fast to read, too fast to absorb – and to genuflect in information’s glow: “We are not witnessing the flow of information as much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable.” It’s this hidden knowledge that Eric seeks. He wants to read the unreadable. Analyze what defies analysis. He believes that he knows – and if he really knows, he has to act.

So he acts, but financial forces act beyond his control. Knowledge is out of his reach and when he grasps for it he falls. His chief of theory tells him he may seek a pattern but he cannot control frenzied forces that act on their own:

You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you’re dealing with a system that’s out of control. Hysteria at high speeds, day to day, minute to minute. People in free societies don’t have to fear the pathology of the state. We create our own frenzy, our own mass convulsions, driven by thinking machines that we have no final authority over. The frenzy is barely noticeable most of the time. It’s simply how we live.

This is where the novel resonates so deeply with our situation today. Suddenly this frenzy – these mass convulsions – are no longer barely noticeable. We finally feel the hysteria that drives the market forces and our helplessness to control it. The individual decisions of people – whether they happen to feel panic or confidence on a day – create mass convulsions. Stocks rise and fall. Hysteria swells and bubbles burst, and it all acts outside our authority.

Eric is exhilarated by his own destruction. Pouring money away lends a kind of euphoria – a way to feel his power to create his own convulsions. As his assassin tells him when they meet, “Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others.”

It’s the classic Faustian story: A man trades his humanity in a desperate thirst for knowledge because he believes that through information, he can somehow live forever. Eric’s chief of theory tells him, “People will not die. Isn’t this the creed of the new culture? People will be absorbed in streams of information.” At the story’s end, as Eric faces his killer, he wishes he could “live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.”

But then he realizes his prosaic humanity – the pain he feels in his wounded hand, the ache in his knee, the wart on his thigh – can’t transfer to a chip of data. His own bloody crash nears, and Eric realizes the impossibility of immortality through information.