I pay almost no attention to District politics, but Galley Friend X, who does, sends the following gleeful note:

You can bet that the Post will throw in with Catania, most likely saying that he’s a “reform” candidate who will clean up the DC political swamp. And that means they’ll actually start cracking down seriously on Gray’s corruption scandals.

Rich white gay guy versus Urban black straight guy? This is the liberal political equivalent of the Hunger Games.

The Daily Beast has a fantastic interview with actual porn “star” Sasha Grey. She no longer does porn–but she has a lot to say on the subject of empowerment, the Duke stuff, etc. The two best moments, however, are these:

(1) Talking about whether pornography satisfies male fantasies or empowers women, she says, “So, to say that porn only satisfies male tastes is ridiculous. I went to Russia and Siberia and other fucked up places and I’ve met tons of women who have told me, ‘You’ve changed my life.'”

This dovetails to an amazing degree with Dirk Diggler’s view of porn: “It’s not about me getting off with a million different chicks. It’s about how to get your wife off. If we had done this before, we could have saved a million relationships. I’ve saved thousands.”

(2) Grey has some interesting views about Russia’s demographic and political future:

[Russians] can physically relate [to me], but more importantly, I think I represent a new kind of freedom and ideology among a lot of young Russians that they don’t have right now. I think that, in the next 10 or 20 years, Russia’s going to change. The youth numbers are so huge, so I think there will be a cultural revolution sooner than we think.

Here’s a look at Russia’s youth numbers, courtesy of the United Nations Population Division:

This is an age pyramid and what you’re looking at is men on the left, women on the right, and 5-year cohorts (the horizontal bars). The longer the bars, the more people in the cohort.

You’ll notice that the current 20-30 year old cohort is the largest group in Russia right now–these are the kids born during mini-Glasnost boom. But “boom” really isn’t the right word for it, since this cohort is just a tiny bit larger than their parents’ generation. The really striking feature of Russia’s age profile, of course, is the 0 to 20 cohorts, which are incredibly tiny.

In the next 10 to 20 years, Russia’s biggest cohort will be approaching middle age and big demographic pressure will be felt in the paucity of young adults left. That said, Grey may be wrong on the details, but she may be correct on the outcome: Russia’s age structure does suggest a society that is not necessarily built for stability in the long run.

So now that we know that the Duke porn star (“star”?) is Belle Knox, one quick exit question: If her concern has been student loan debt all along, couldn’t she quit porn right now and make much more money by doing a quickie book? My guess is that some publisher would easily through a couple hundred thousand dollars at her (minimum). Probably more because (a) she’s ready-made for the talk shows, (b) her story is probably kind of interesting, and the details of it aren’t well known yet, and (c) her social vertical is awesome!

Her earning potential from a book will probably never be greater than it is right now and I suspect that it–and all the downstream revenue that comes after–would be significantly greater than her future potential earnings in porn. (Which have probably been enhanced by the last few weeks to a large degree, though only for the short term.)

Plus, if the book was any good and she spent some time thinking through the student loan stuff and the problems with higher education, there might be a job over at Reason or CATO.

)

From Jean-Louis Gassée. First:

At Apple’s size, which is approaching $200B in yearly revenue, a “breakthrough” product would need to generate at least 5%  — $10B — in order to move the needle. That’s approximately one Facebook.

And second:

As our friend Horace Dediu points out,iTunes by itself would rank #130 in the Fortune 500 list (yearly gross revenue of $23.5B, + 34% growth in 2103).

Galley Friend Chris Caldwell has a great essay on Woodrow Wilson in the new Claremont Review of Books. Sample awesome:

In his new biography, Wilson, A. Scott Berg, whose earlier Lindbergh (1998) won the Pulitzer Prize, notes a bizarre compulsion that Wilson acquired in his teens and kept till the end of his life. Any time he became part of a group or organization—from the Eumeneans at Davidson College to the Princeton baseball club to the Johns Hopkins Literary Society—he would dig up and then rewrite its constitution, usually seizing on some neglected provision which, in an emergency, could be wielded to make the system more efficient, hierarchical, and subject to his own wishes. Wilson became a peripatetic academic—studying at Davidson, Princeton, Virginia Law, and Johns Hopkins; teaching at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan; finally returning to Princeton, where he would serve as president for almost a decade—and constitutions were his specialty. . . .

When he urged Americans to “make the world safe for democracy,” he was not so deluded as to think the country was in danger of being invaded. Nor was he talking about vindicating America’s system of government. On the contrary, he meant to reform it out of recognition. He meant to establish the League of Nations, which he had already begun to sketch out in his speeches as a “league of honor.” That was America’s casus belli, as Wilson wanted to see it. In 150 days of combat, over 100,000 Americans died, fighting, so their families and neighbors assumed, to defend their country. But once it was over, Wilson, the great rewriter of constitutions, drew the world’s attention to the fine print of his oratory, and, like a trial lawyer triumphantly waving a contract that some wronged party had been bamboozled into signing, informed them that they had fought for no such thing. “If the Treaty is not ratified by the Senate,” he said, “the War will have been fought in vain.” This terrifying sentence was not rhetoric.

There’s a lot more. If you’ve ever suspected that Wilson was History’s Greatest Monster^TM, this will be catnip.

I haven’t seen Twelve Years a Slave in part because I didn’t see any of the movies nominated for Best Picture this year and in part because of essays like this and in part because of over-the-top praise like this. That said, if it manages to make a movie star out of Chiwetel Ejiofor, that would make all the bleating “racism in America” columns worth it, because Ejiofor is awesome.

Remember a few years ago when everyone thought it would be so great to have Idris Elba play James Bond? That was a classic error of recency. Elba is great, but he’s all wrong for Bond. It would have been, This guy was in The Wire! Look! A black James Bond!

Ejiofor, on the other hand, is perfect for 007. Plug him into the series and I doubt anyone would even think about his skin color after the first 3 minutes. I hope Ejiofor makes piles of money and gets tons of work from here on out. Because he is a bona fide leading man.

All of that said, I’ve been thinking about the cultural climate surrounding 12 Years a Slave and wondering: If Seinfeld was in production today, could you have an episode where the gag revolves around two characters making out in the theater during a showing of 12 Years a Slave? If not, why not? Could Bernie Mac have done it if his show was still around?

The Duke porn star (“star”?) has legs, evidently. Here we are on Wednesday and she’s still in the news, this time with something approaching a full-on manifesto.

Two points: (1) Since she elsewhere professes to embrace real-deal libertarianism as part of the explanation for why porn is a no-shame lifestyle choice, I found this bit curious:

Of course, I do fully acknowledge that some women don’t have such a positive experience in the industry. We need to listen to these women. And to do that we need to remove the stigma attached to their profession and treat it as a legitimate career that needs regulation and oversight.

I had always supposed that the Libertarians for Regulation and Oversight club was pretty small. But maybe not.

(2) Then there’s this section:

It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.

I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and CHOOSE to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.

Without taking sides in the Patriarchy vs. Duke Porn Star fight (although if you don’t take the Patriarchy plus the points, you’re a sucker) I am struck by the lack of historical perspective.

Once upon a time, we had this amazing research device called Lexis-Nexis. It stored information from a whole host of places and it was easily searchable via an electronic interface. You could go back to stories from the New York Times in the 1970s with a few keystrokes; could pull up transcripts of every newscast of the last 30 years. It was awesome. Anytime you wanted to research something, you’d sit down to Lexis-Nexis, spend a few hours, sifting through documents, print yourself a couple hundred pages, and then hunker down to read them. Research has never been so painless.

And as a result, everyone knew that before you opened your mouth about anything, you really had to go to  Lexis-Nexis first, so that you didn’t sound stupid.

But then the internet happened and the Google. And people pretty much forgot about Lexis-Nexis. So research became a jaunt through the first three pages of Google results, maybe a footnote or two from Wikipedia, and that was that. Entire careers were made out of this sort of “research.” The net effect of which was that, to the internet culture, anything that came before the internet and wasn’t catalogued by Google simply didn’t exist.

Yet at the risk of sounding like an old fogey, it would shock you how much stuff isn’t on Google.

But then came Twitter, which is essentially unsearchable. Oh sure, you can theoretically search Twitter and you can sift backwards through timelines, but not with any real dexterity. And the net effect of Twitter on the internet mind was to convince people that every single thought was brand new.

I mention this because Nina Hartley was making the intellectual, sex-positive case for feminism from within the porn industry back when the Duke porn star’s dad was still learning to shave.

You wouldn’t know it from her Wikipedia page, which only gives a brief nod to Hartley’s feminist work. Or from Google searches–PageRank can’t really disentangle the “porn” from the “feminism”–but Hartley (and with lesser acclaim, Annie Sprinkle) were up on these ramparts decades ago. (And, if we can be candid, with more intellectual panache.)

All of that aside, I’m pretty much down with Duke porn star’s middle-class critique about college costs and the rigged game of financial aid. She’d be much better off trying to be “A Voice of her Generation” on that score than laying siege to the Patriarchy.

But then, I would say that.