This Week in Magazines: Jenny Sanford Exacts Revenge, Newsweek Provides Helpful Alien Advice

Some jilted lovers don't get mad, they get even. Jenny Sanford, wife of the South Carolina governor, decided to get Anna Wintour.

"Notes on a Scandal" in the annual giant September issue of Vogue is the de facto national coming out of the spouse of Mark Sanford. And, ah, it's quite the unveiling.

There she is at the front door of the family house on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, attired in a Ralph Laurence Black Label white tunic, a J. Crew hat and K. Jacques St. Tropez sandals. Her hairdo is courtesy of "Tim Rogers for TRESemme/contactnyc" and "makeup, Susan Sterling." She resembles a contented member of the American propertied class on vacation, with perhaps only a nearby gin and tonic, nanny and Jaguar missing.

One can only imagine the race to get Jenny Sanford, praised for her tough but caring initial response to her husband's titillating disclosure that the Appalachian Trail actually makes it to Buenos Aires. One can almost hear the voice mail messages left by network morning show anchors, filling up Jenny's mailbox as they proclaimed their sympathy and high-minded desire to tell "her story" in the fairest, most sympathetic manner. Ditto the co-hosts and producers of our favorite prime time fare.

So it is a surprise that she chooses Vogue (which has enough advertising here to keep the ailing newspaper industry going for a month or two) to expand, at times interestingly, on her husband's frailties (she alludes to "issues" he has) and ego. Along the way, she offers irrefutable insights into the arrogant myopia of many politicians, so often addicted to a universe of sycophants and suck-ups.

"Politicians become disconnected from the way everyone else lives in the world," she says. "I saw that from the very beginning. They'll say they need something, and ten people want to give it to them. It's an ego boost, and it's easy to drink your own Kool-Aid. As a wife, you do your best to keep them grounded, but it's a real challenge."

She refreshingly admits to have Googled the other woman. She chides her husband's "bad choices" and again exhibits a willingness to forgive him, albeit doing so in a $555 tunic and $230 sandals.

My initial, visceral reaction was to roll my eyes, then wonder why she couldn't let her initial, one-page statement suffice. Can our culture somehow stop the now irresistible morphing of our natural compassion for victims into the celebrityzation of them? Then I thought about it some more.

There is the political world's inherent push for victims, usually women, to stand by their miscreant man. In this case, Jenny Sanford decided to stand on her own. Hey, she may be sandwiched between a profile of a Brit fashion tycoon and an essay on the ascension of the bar stool to being the new "hot seat" in restaurants. But good for her.

----"The Rubber Room" in Aug. 31 New Yorker is as a tale of intransigence and rank stupidity in American education, with media entrepreneur Steven Brill returning to his reporting roots and offering depressing detail on the previously-revealed system by which New York City deals with public school teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence. With his lawyer's eye, he shows the befuddling intricacies of a system in which $100,000-a-year, apparently awful, teachers can get paid full salary for doing nothing except show up in a room as their individual cases drag on for clearly unjustifiable periods, often years.

Even if "the stated rationale for the reassignment centers is unassailable: Get these people away from children, even if tenure rules require that they continue to be paid," this leaves no doubt that taking from two to five years for an arbitrator's resolution is nuts. And when Brill delves into individual cases, and thousands of pages of transcripts, one does wonder if the inmates are running the asylum of public education.

This is an important topic, especially when placed against the backdrop of the Obama administration's claimed desire to tie significant education funding to teacher performance. Indirectly, it gets one thinking about the real problem faced by so many committed, idealistic principals, namely how the heck to get rid of rank mediocrities on their faculties. Those teachers may not be guilty of misconduct or rank ineptitude but still may be committing education malpractice on a daily basis.

Having talked to wonderful public elementary school principals in Chicago recently -- each of whom is trying to turn around a mess -- I can attest to the almost Sisyphean administrative task they face in ridding our classrooms of folks who should be working in other fields. Brill's examples may be inherently more vivid, given formal misconduct charges in some instances, but are ultimately no less instructive.

---Aug. 31 Time's "The Real Cost of Cheap Food" is Bryan Walsh's argument that "Unless Americans radically rethink they way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs -- and bland taste. Sustainable food has an elitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plant -- and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you." This is especially notable on the "hidden costs" of our reliance on heavily fertilized corn, leaving us with cheap food, and leaving many of us overweight (though one might occasionally wonder about our collective inability to exhibit sanity with a modicum of portion control).

--"Afghanistan, The Growing Threat of Failure" is the Aug. 22 Economist cover and part of a spiraling body of analysis that we may be getting deeper into a foreign misadventure. "Americans, relieved to be getting out of Iraq, and caught up in a national row about health care, are paying little attention to the place. But if things there continue to slide, Afghanistan could turn out to be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency."

---Aug. 31 Newsweek's "Aliens" cover informs us that there's water on other planets; indeed that there are many thousands and thousands of other Earth-like planets. It's thin but engaging and may prompt some to seriously contemplate the possibility that we're really not totally alone. "We're not at the Star Trek stage yet," this concludes, but makes clear we shouldn't close the door to civilizations elsewhere.

---September Martha Stewart Living has a sneakily engaging opus on sofas, "Layer of Comfort." It's a reminder of how little we know about the sofa we purchase, namely what exactly is under all that fabric? This is a primer on what to look for, including what actually constitutes a top-quality frame.

---And this week's Journey into the Obscure, for a piece about which my five-year-old might exclaim, "This makes my head hurt!" might, in fact, not make it hurt. In fact, the five-year-old might offer some counsel on "Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience" by Thomas Malaby, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, in New Literary History. How has the rise of games, in particular online games, altered the traditional distinction between work and play?

"The rise to prominence of games in recent years, particularly online digital games, has attracted new scholarly, policy-making, and popular attention, both to games as a cultural form and to play itself. One of the most important developments has been the way in which this explosion in games, together with the increasing recognizability of game-like elements in other domains of experience, has challenged the longstanding distinction between work and play. It has become difficult to deny that play is often productive and that work, rather than always a matter of routine, can be shot through with the open-endedness we most often associate with play. Along the way, it has also become more difficult to sustain claims that play is essentially about "fun," "pleasure," or other positively charged sentiments. While it is obvious to anyone who has studied gambling that playing games can be powerfully compelling without being fun, this realization is starting to make its way through the rapidly expanding scholarship on games and play."

"I suggest, however, that it is surprising that this questioning of our ideas about games and play has taken so long and especially surprising that my own field, sociocultural anthropology, did not lead the way many years ago. That field's hallmark has always been a willingness to move past Western preconceptions. It is characterized by an unflinching interrogation of inherited, seemingly foundational concepts, leading to the demonstration of their situatedness in Western modernity. Its work on such concepts as family, identity, race, and illness may constitute anthropology's greatest contribution to the academy over the course of the twentieth century. But with a few important exceptions, play was, for the most part, left out of this critical project as anthropology on this issue stayed firmly within the modern tradition."

"In what follows, I outline the tendencies of twentieth-century anthropological work on play and argue that anthropology, despite its ostensible neglect of the matter, nonetheless has much to offer the current aim of rethinking play. I begin by suggesting that, while the ingredients of a more useful conception of play as a disposition (as opposed to an activity) were always present, and even found expression on occasion, the field as a whole stressed only two viable possibilities: play as nonwork and play as representation. Departing from this pattern prepares us to recognize a better model for thinking about play, one that draws ultimately on the pragmatist philosophers' portrayal of the world as irreducibly contingent.

On this view, play becomes an attitude characterized by a readiness to improvise in the face of an ever-changing world that admits of no transcendently ordered account."

Comments

[RuthHouston]

An infidelity expert's analysis of Jenny Sanford's Vogue interview.
Controversial comments from an infidelity expert on key points from Jenny Sanford’s interview with Vogue magazine. http://bit.ly/zjprz
Why Jenny’s curiosity about her husband’s mistress is normal, her amazing insight into the dynamics of her husbands affair, a husband’s susceptibility to extramarital affairs, emotional infidelity and how it begins, should a wife seek revenge, how far should a wife go to reconcile with a cheating husband, why women stay with men who cheat, and more. http://bit.ly/zjprz You can also access this article through my Infidelity News and Views Blog.

[S1m0n]

She probably COULD have let her initial statement stand, but why should she want to?

[JerryLevy]

Does anyone read Newsweek anymore. I would love to know what their circulation is. This once weekly news journal is now a left leaning opinion journal (a/k/a New Republic) and much of their commentary is irrelevant to our lives.

[maori]

Hilarious, snappy writing, a pleasure and a cheer -up to read.

Thank You :-)

[SonyaInTx]

If a man announces publically that he has to learn to fall in love with his wife again.....it's time to admit having tried and move on to divorce. Both of them are a terrible example to their kids. Mark for showing them that he cheats and isn't even ashamed of it....and Jenny for staying after being publically told that Mark's soulmate is on another continent. Pathetic!

[StreetSense]

I've read that Jenny Sanford *still* wants to reconcile with her husband but I'm not expecting that to happen. When she said in Vogue "it wasn't a love match" about her decision to marry to him, I can't imagine a comment that would hurt someone more. She completely burned the bridges he first torched with his adultery and lies. There's no point in continuing a marriage in which each partner has admitted a less than whole love for their spouse.

I do hope Jenny Sanford finds a joyful "love match" for her life. She deserves it.

[wft21]

What's a magazine?

[SonnyBono]

In Jenny Sanford's case - its a place where ammunition is stored until it can be used on a target.

[TheWanderer]

What a great life lesson for her kids to learn - the best way to settle the score with a philandering ass of a husband is to pose in Vogue, and "get back" at him in the media. I think they both love attention more than each other. They should let the octo-mom have their kids, they'll probably get more love and attention.

[Broderick]

I think Jenny needs to get in touch with reality, the problem is not the woman it's her cheating husband. The fact of the matter is that this woman did not make a vow of fidelity with her, her philandering husband did, she needs to cut her losses and move on, this man is definitely a "zero"

[larry278]

Why has HP double posted the same blog on 2 differant places on HP's, "Home", aka front page?

[larry278]

Very much off thread: Slate killed "Today's Papers" today. The probability that the papers that TP scanned daily, once could be considered newspapers of record, are in danger of folding & no longer are reliabale is what killed TP. Slate's reasons for killing TP are amusing. Mr Poleti's catty remarks about HP & other successful news aggregators are gratitious. HP regularly scoops & points out errors in the papers who formerly were considered to be newspapers of record. HP & other sites destroyed the newspaper of record myth. The self-annointed newspapers of record are killing themselves.
Slate got out of the business of covering newspapers of record well after all of them went into Chein(sp?) Stokes breathing, aka death rattle.
Magazines have symptoms of respiratory problems too.

[larry278]

Abject confession of grave error: I named the wrong person as the author of Slate's obit for "Today'sPapers". Look at TP for 8/24/09 for his correct name & if you're updating your list of semi-lucid, inane, nonentities in the MSM.
I apologize to Mr Poleti for my grave error.

[totaldisbelief]

The Roman Empire in it's final stages.

[den1953]

America these are the people we are electing into politics it just shows why money is the root of all evil in the political world with out it your nothing! This is a family that self implodes because of greed and egos i often wonder how they would react if they had no money at all?

[thockman]

I stopped at the $550 tunic and $230 sandals. What? Who would spend over $500 on a shirt and $230 for shoes that are nothing more than slabs of rawhide with little straps??? Would anyone notice if you spent $50 on the blouse and sandals versus $800? If being rich means wasting money like this, I'm not seeing the advantage of being rich.

[kuhler]

Perhaps the tunic and sandals were provided by Vogue or the designers for her to wear during the photo shoot? Several paragraphs earlier, the article does state that her hair and makeup are "courtesy of . . ." It seems logical that this type of loan arrangement would be the norm for any high-end fashion publication. In fairness to Mrs. Sanford, I'm just sayin'.

[JBCinSD]

The advantage of being rich is that you can pick out a tunic you like and buy it - without looking whether it costs $50 or $550.

[Mohanna]

The more revealing and hilarious story is her Father is going after Marky for all money he or his family made/donated to Marky's campaign. If the best revenge is living well, Marky is in the poor house. Jenny Sanford has the money, looks, education and brains. Marky has a soul mate (thats it).

[bosunj]

Looks?

[totaldisbelief]

you better ask the "soul mate" if she's still the "soul mate".....she may have taken the cure.