No, the other one–Donald Young. It seems he and Patrick McEnroe–who only gets by because the USTA is run like USA Dance–are having a Twitter fight. McEnroe decided that the USTA’s at-large bid to the French Open would go to the winner of a small tournament. Donald Young–who, up until about three years ago was The Future of American Tennis–believes that he should have been given the bid because, well, he was once The Future of American Tennis.

Without choosing sides in this fight, boy, Donald Young was awesome back in his prime. Movement is the most under-appreciated weapon in tennis. “Moving well” sounds so stupidly simple, but it combines a bunch of different elements: speed, acceleration, the ability to change direction, and, most importantly, the vision to put yourself in the right spot with the most economy of effort.

The great movers look like they’re gliding on glass. Young didn’t move like Richard Gasquet, but he was close.

Best mover of all time: Federer, by a mile. You can credit his 16 Slams to the forehand and the serve and the shotmaking. But his really amazing achievement–the 23 consecutive Slam semis–goes to the movement. Even when his shotmaking was having an off-day, the movement was always there. Federer could smother even top 10 players with his footwork.

Lane goes with the crotch chop and everything.

I know Friedman’s a joke to everyone except Davos attendees, but this is avert-your-eyes embarrassing.

In researching the fertility industry, I came across this old piece by Melanie Thernstrom in the New York Times Magazine. In it,Thernstrom details her long struggle with infertility–the medical regimes, the IVF routines, her attempts at adoption. Finally Thernstrom and her husband decide to employ an egg donor, secure two eggs, have them fertilized through IVF, and then implanted in two separate gestational carriers. It’s quite an ordeal, spanning years and costing at what the author hints at are astronomical sums. (You get the sense the the final tab is somewhere in the scores of thousands of dollars.)

Thernstrom’s journey results in two happy, healthy babies. Which is wonderful, of course.

Throughout her essay, Thernstrom expresses her unhappiness with people who do not both (1) fully approve of her expedition and (2) use all of the terminology that she, herself, prefers. For instance, “surrogate mothers” are “gestational carriers”; the children are “twiblings.” She seems particularly displeased with people who use the term “biological mother” in discussing her children. She insists that her babies have no “biological mother.” Parents can be finicky.

The kicker comes about three quarters of the way through the piece, when she details some unhappiness she with the improper reaction of her nanny.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Lots of wonderful parents use wonderful nannies and surely there’s nothing wrong with farming out portions of child care.

But it does put the rest of the piece in a slightly different color.

So an extra on Glee tweeted some super-secret spoiler about the show. She got fired. That’s fine. However, not content to simply dismiss a low-level employee who acted improperly, Glee co-creator Brian Falchuk publicly insulted her: “Who are you to spoil something talented people have spent months to create? Hope you’re qualified to do something besides work in entertainment.”

What a gent.

Pursuant to the discussion the other day on Obama’s odds of re-elect, RealClear’s excellent Sean Trende has the first part of a deep analysis. His basic conclusion:  Obama’s position is weak relative to the normal position of incumbent presidents–but not necessarily fatal.

John Podhoretz has a really wonderful obit on Sidney Lumet that includes a link to this amazing Stephen Hill performance.

Nintendo8.com

Blades of Steel. Zelda. Metroid. Ikari Warriors. Tecmo Bowl. Double Dribble. Everything.

That. Just. Happened.

Over the weekend I reviewed Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. It’s a pretty charming book, even though I don’t fully sign-up with his estimation of the cost of children.

Also, I’ve got a long-ish piece in the Standard on Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s WikiLeaks book. There will not be a quiz.

Update: Galley Reader X just sent me this little post by Peter Robinson about the Caplan review. Robinson says I give the essay a “nasty” twist by pointing out that study after study shows that parents are less happy than non-parents. Here’s Robinson:

Parents, less happy?  I’d missed all these studies.  More to the point, the finding runs counter to pretty much all I’ve observed throughout my life.  When my college buddies and I were in our twenties, those who remained single, making good money as consultants, jetting here and there, buying sports cars–sure.  At some superficial level, they may have remained “happier.”  But by the time we were all in our mid-thirties, that had changed.  I think of one friend in particular who had a rocket of a career as a management consultant, living the life while the rest of us settled down and raised our families.  On his own admission, he got sick of it.  At 49, he finally married.  At 50, his wife had a child.  He’s happier now–incomparably happier.

None of this is to suggest that non-parents can’t be happy.  Manifestly, they can.  But the idea that non-parents are systematically happier–well, as I say, it runs counter to all my experience.

Can anyone help me here?  Has anyone seen these studies?  What am I missing?

I don’t know Robinson, so maybe I’m mistaking his tone, but it kind of sounds like he thinks I’m just making stuff up. If he looked back at my piece, he’d see that I give Caplan enormous credit because Caplan himself is the one who gamely acknowledges all of this data–even though it runs counter to the thesis of his book. (Caplan’s cheery acknowledgment of the hurdles his argument faces is one of the reasons his book is so good.) If Robinson would like to get acquainted with Caplan’s survey of it, he should start on page 14 of the book. New York Magazine touched on much of the same data in this high-profile piece from last summer. If Robinson would like to look at study data in more detail, Caplan helpfully points the way in his book’s end-notes.

In the comments, Robinson’s readers seem to agree with him that I’m just a kid-hating crank because, gosh darnit, they have kids and just like Robinson, they’re super-duper happy. I’m not even sure how to respond to this. Except to say that

(1) The world is bigger than the experience of any individual. People saying that they’re happier because of their kids–so kids make you happy are like the aid to Walter Mondale on election night in 1984 whispering, “But everyone I know voted for him . . .”

(2) My criticism of Caplan’s book was not that people shouldn’t have children because babies make us unhappy. Rather, it was: On the evidence, babies tend to make us less happy than we would be otherwise. But we should have them because “happiness” is a superficial goal and children are a key component of a well-examined and well-lived life. My point was precisely that we should have children because there are bigger things in this world than ourselves and personal happiness. The commenters can, perhaps, be forgiven for not having bothered to read my review–Robinson doesn’t provide a link to it, linking instead to Caplan’s Amazon page.

It’s unfair to hold Robinson responsible for his readers, but that thread reads an awful lot like a Mark Levin Facebook page.