Why the Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad controversy is good for abortion rights supporters

There's been a fair amount of heated discussion over the past week about CBS's decision to accept an ad from noted conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family to be aired during the Super Bowl next weekend. The ad reportedly features Pam Tebow, the mother of Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow, telling a story about how she ignored some doctor's advice that she get an abortion when she fell ill during her pregnancy with him. Cue the usual firestorm of back and forth between women's advocacy groups and various anti-abortion rights figures. In this instance, though, I think that fighting the decision to air the ad is a bad move. Moreover, I think that the airing of the ad has a lot of upsides for the pro-abortion rights movement that become more apparent on further analysis. Consider:

1. No one is likely to be heavily influenced by the ad.
I'm not one to scoff at the effectiveness of advertising, particularly when it relates to a televised event that most people watch for the expressed purpose of seeing expensive commercials. If advertising didn't work, companies wouldn't be lining up to pay 3 million dollars for a 30 second spot. However, I do think that there's a marked difference between a TV ad that aims to convince you that Bud Light is suitable for human consumption and one that aims to talk you into reconsidering the desirability of abortion rights. And based on the description of the ad, it's not even going to be that heavy-handed. Clearly, Focus on the Family's hoping that the inspirational story of Tim Tebow's mom will convince some abortion rights supporters to change their stance, lest they be complicit in the deprivation of the nation's collegiate athletics recruiters of twenty years from now, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen. Most likely, the reactions of viewers to the ad are just going to reflect their pre-existing beliefs about abortion and things will carry on much the same as they have been.

2. Featuring an athlete in this role is kind of a dumb move that can easily backfire.
In the pantheon of things I can bring myself to give a shit about, college football is about on par with the market price of soybeans. A large part of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that I went to a college that ruthlessly enforces a minimum 27 ACT score for admission and is located in one of the least desirable places to live in America, thus ensuring that nobody even remotely talented at football would be willing or able to go there. As a result, I only barely knew who Tim Tebow was before this whole ad firestorm kicked up. Upon some cursory research, I learned that he's the heir apparent to my longtime nemesis Kurt Warner in combing dual talents at quarterbacking and irritating hyper-proselytization. I also learned that he is dating, or was once photographed standing next to, a woman with an insane rack:
But although my apathy regarding college football runs deep and wide, a substantial portion of America is fanatical about it. Like the abortion debate, college football tends to be a hyper-partisan affair; people have their lifelong allegiances and focus most of their cheering on whatever is going to best benefit their favorite team. So while I'm sure Florida Gators fans will lap up the Tim Tebow Super Bowl as with a spoon, I'm willing to bet that a good percentage of the rest of the college football fans in the country will be wishing that his mom had gone ahead and had that abortion, if only because it could have helped their alma mater get a slightly higher ranking going into Bowl season this year. It would have been more effective if Focus on the Family had gotten somebody more universally beloved, like Justin Timberlake, to star in the ad.

3. It's probably a huge financial boondoggle for Focus on the Family.
While Focus on the Family is putting up north of 2.5 million dollars for this 30 second ad, these aren't exactly boom times for the organization, which has laid off almost 300 employees in the past year and a half. The organization claims that the money for the ad came from donations, not their general fund, but you have to figure that anyone who likes Focus on the Family enough to give them money for the purposes of running an ad would probably also have given them that money to help them keep the lights on, so I think it's safe to say that there's some measure of financial sacrifice involved here. Since the ad doesn't appear to be selling anything except for the idea that each aborted fetus may be costing the world yet another Jesus-powered football wunderkind, I'm skeptical that Focus is going to recoup on expenses. For those who are ideologically opposed to their agenda, each dollar that Focus on the Family spends on this ad is a dollar they aren't spending pushing "cures" for homosexuality or branding mainstream entertainment as "cultural terrorism."

4. The ad actually supports the pro-abortion rights point of view.
Hey, Mrs. Tebow chose life and she loves her son and is proud of his accomplishments. Good for her! It's refreshing to see an adult speak plainly about exercising her autonomy and making a decision that reflects her personal values. Isn't it wonderful to live in a time where the autonomy of citizens to make difficult choices about reproduction is respected and encouraged?

Yes, it is. But if Focus on the Family had their way about things, we wouldn't be living in one. The truly incredible thing about this debate is that relatively few abortion rights supporters have stopped to point out that the dramatic tension, so to speak, in Tebow's mom's story is entirely due to the fact that she had the legal right to seek an abortion if she so chose. Without that element, it would be a fairly mundane story: she conceived and gave birth to a baby despite some complications. Contrary to the picture painted by fringe elements of the religious right, most proponents of abortion rights aren't misanthopic genocidists who earn a commission on each fetal termination performed, they're people who believe that decisions about reproduction are an inviolate matter of personal liberty. Focus on the Family wants us to applaud the choice that Pam Tebow made and ignore that the people who paid for the ad really wish that she had been denied any opportunity to make that choice in the first place. The most powerful message that abortion rights supporters can send about the Tebow Super Bowl ad is to highlight that simple fact.

I Killed Conan: A Perspective on the Late-Night Hubbub

Like seemingly everyone else on the Internet, I'm a fan of Conan O'Brien, who not only served as a producer on the the two best Simpsons seasons evar, he also wrote one of the show's all-time best episodes. I have fond memories of watching Conan and Andy Richter banter back and forth on Late Night when I was in high school in the late 90s. However, unlike seemingly everyone else, I'm finding it hard to get too incredibly outraged over Conan losing his show, primarily because I haven't watched his show since at least 2003.

I don't think I'm alone in this either. The infrequently-updated Stuff White People Like blog put out an entry last week on Conan that characterized the issue thusly:

"Now, the biggest and most important thing to remember is to never, under any circumstances bring up a Conan O’Brien sketch or joke that has taken place in the last three years. You will be met with only blank stares. For you see, while white people will fiercely support Conan O’Brien in any public forum, they always fail to support him in the only way that actually helps – by watching his show."

That pretty well sums it up. I know that the consensus view is that NBC didn't give Conan enough support in developing his version of The Tonight Show, that Jay Leno stabbed Conan in the back by not retiring according to plan, and that American audiences are insufficiently appreciative of Conan's brand of bent humor. And all these things are probably true to some extent, but they give short shrift to the fact that Conan has a natural constituency: 20 and 30-something fans of The Simpsons and The Late Show, my demographic, and we didn't tune in enough to make the show successful. Why not?

I can't speak for everyone, but here's why I didn't watch. First off, I don't feel that the form and function of the late-night talk show (a monologue, a skit, some celebrity interviews) has the appeal that it did for past generations. As beloved as late-night shows and their various hosts have become over the past half-century, I think they essentially built their massive audiences because of wide appeal and a lack of other options. Watching Jack Paar and Johnny Carson was a communal experience. The viewer knew that millions of other Americans were unwinding in the same way before going to sleep and that there would be some joke or interview to talk about at work the morning after. I imagine that's a pretty powerful motivator to watch, even if you weren't an ardent fan of the host or the guests. Besides, what the hell else where you going to watch? There were only like three channels. And once you start watching a show every night of the week, it pretty quickly becomes a habit.

Now these days, how many people under the age of 50 can even be bothered to watch a show at the time it actually airs? Between DVR and Hulu, it's increasingly uncommon. The late-show format thrives on a sort of relaxed, clubby atmosphere that's perfect for winding down the end of the day; it's the entertainment equivalent of a casual evening conversation over drinks. It doesn't really translate well to regular on-demand watching a day or more after the fact. I don't pay for cable or get decent antenna reception, so all of my television viewing (which basically amounts to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the latter of which probably siphoned off a not-insubstantial portion of Conan's potential Tonight Show audience) is done on Hulu. Basically, I really like being able to control what I watch and when I watch it, and a standard format late-night talk show, even one with a host I like as much as I like Conan, just isn't something that's going to make it to the top of the queue for my entertainment choices.

I think that generational fickleness is the key to understanding why Conan struggled. Contrast my viewing habits with those of my parents, who tuned into Leno religiously. People give Leno a hard time for being soft and unfunny, which is a hard accusation to dispute in any serious way, but I think that overlooks Leno's real appeal as The Tonight Show host, which is that he works tenaciously hard to put on a show as broadly entertaining as possible. Leno's monologues, which are two or three times as long as those of other hosts, are his bread and butter; my parents would usually watch Leno's monologue and skit and then turn off the show before the interviews. My thought process while watching a Jay Leno monologue is something like "this isn't very funny and I'd rather be doing something else," which probably tracks pretty closely with the majority of Leno detractors. I imagine my parent's though process while watching the same monologue is "he worked hard and told a lot of jokes, and I laughed once or twice, which is enough entertainment before bedtime." Two years ago, during the writer's strike, Sam Anderson essentially made this exact argument in New York Magazine, in the best and most incisive account of Leno's appeal I've ever read.

Now Conan's ratio of hits vs. misses is far higher than Leno's, but as long as we're being honest, I don't really feel like I missed out on a whole lot by not watching his show all these years. I've never found myself in the middle of a conversation as the odd person out as everyone else trades punchlines and favorite moments, as I would have if I didn't watch South Park, and until this meltdown over the past three weeks, I've never logged onto Facebook to a see chorus of status updates trumpeting the must-see moment from last night's Conan, as I so frequently do (and contribute to) with Stewart and Colbert. I like and respect Conan a great deal, but he's not a terribly relevant presence in my daily existence, and I honestly don't know what he or I could have done differently that would have changed that.

At the end of this mess, I wish Conan hadn't gotten fucked over in the way he did, and I hope he goes on to have a lot of success at Fox or wherever else he winds up. However, much as I might like to, I'm not going to pretend that this whole affair has affected me in some significant way, or even that it represents some sort of resounding cosmic injustice. Rather, I feel like it's an unfortunate thing that I didn't really pay much attention to when it might have mattered and that I probably won't think about much after it ends. Sorry, Conan.

Why personality testing won't be the future of medical school

I stumbled upon an interesting article in the New York Times a couple of days ago about medical school admissions. Apparently, academics have returned to contemplating the age-old mystery of how medical schools are so hard to get into and yet produce so many doctors who are complete assholes. The Times article raises the question of whether the MCAT, or the SAT of medical school, is really the best sole predictor of whether or not someone should be a doctor. It discusses this question in reference to a recently published study in which researchers administered what I assume to be the NEO-PI-R personality measure to Belgian medical students and followed up on their success in education and practice to see whether personality factors contributed to performance. This test utilizes the Five Factor Model of personality, which is a theory so ridiculously well-supported that competing theorists have more or less been reduced to arguing for slight variations on it rather than challenging it outright, so the researchers seem to be standing on fairly solid methodological grounds.

Anyhow, the results rather unsurprisingly indicate that personality factors can have a large impact on medical school performance, with the factor relating to emotional distress having a negative effect across the board, the factor relating to discipline and planning having a positive effect, and the factor relating to social extraversion having a great deal of impact when the budding docs start to do clinical practicums and residencies. To the layperson in psychology, all this probably seems like a "no shit" kind of thing, but the fact that these influences exist isn't the real news here - it's that they exist and we can measure them in a meaningful way. Indeed, the study authors come out with the logical conclusion: that medical schools should administer personality tests and take their results into account when deciding who to admit. It's all perfectly logical, and it will never, ever happen.

Here's why: the Five Factor Model has two main features that make it such a spectacular measurement of personality: first, it's been replicated across numerous cultures, and second, it's been strongly linked to genetic influences. These things are great because any theory of personality pretty much ipso facto needs to demonstrate some degree of universality and stability, otherwise it won't fit in with what pretty much everyone, including scientists, consider personality to be. The second fact, however, poses a huge problem for competitive medical school admission, and not because it wouldn't actually improve the quality of the trainees (it probably would). Consider a hypothetical: Student X has worked diligently in his or her undergraduate biology and anatomy courses and managed to score in whatever passes for the decent to good range on the MCAT. He/she applies for their dream medical school, only to be denied admission because the personality test has (accurately) pegged him/her as an aloof and unpleasant person whose bedside manner would almost certainly not be highly rated by future patients. What action will this person take, particularly if he/she discovers that the personality factors that the test measures have a strong genetic component and as such, were mostly beyond their control? To make matters worse: research has generally found that women are on the average higher in the emotional distress factor that the researchers found to be a negative influence on medical training, which puts the grim specter of sexism into play. To put it bluntly, any medical school who implements this type of procedure in their admissions ought to turn around and file suit against themselves, just to be able to say they did it before it got all trendy.

Astute readers will note that the MCAT, the current medical school qualification uber alles, is itself constructed to be a general measure of intelligence, which also has a lot of research suggesting it has a strong genetic component, and nothing has stopped medical schools from continuing to utilize it. While that's inarguably true, it's a lot harder to make the case to the legal system or the general public that intelligence shouldn't be a factor in picking out future doctors, because while very few people are against dumb people having jobs, most people are against them having jobs that directly endanger their lives. Whereas doctors with unpleasant personalities, which lead them to do things like make you wait 3 hours for a 15 minute appointment and work to thwart the creation of national health insurance for 90 goddamned years, are practically a storied tradition in America.

Youth in Revolt review

I think that by this point, pretty much every Arrested Development fan who's followed Michael Cera's movie career has wondered when he's going to stop playing the same character. You know the one: the brainy but awkward and passive 'nice guy,' the type that Michael Cera now defines so completely that the movie industry had to invent Jesse Eisenberg to take on the roles he turns down. After Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist and Year One which I didn't like and didn't see, respectively, I figured that his shtick needed to evolve or die. On that basis, I probably wouldn't have gone to see Youth in Revolt if I hadn't gotten a positive vibe from the trailer and read a couple good reviews of it. As a Michael Cera fan, I'm glad I did, because Youth in Revolt lets him out of his comfort zone, albeit just a bit, and the results are pretty funny.

The advertising for Youth in Revolt pitches it as a teen sex comedy in the vein of Superbad, (a film I think will be remembered as one of the deathless classics of the 2000s), but that's not really accurate. Where Superbad and the long line of preceding comedies of its type are mainly about how horniness and awkwardness create common bonds between teen boys, Youth in Revolt focuses almost exclusively on Nick Twisp (Michael Cera's character) and the circumstances that separate him from his love interest Sheeni Saunders. One of the pleasant surprises of Youth in Revolt is that Nick and Sheeni actually get into a semi-relationship early in the movie, which allows the movie to mostly avoid portraying Sheeni as a typical sex comedy love interest (i.e. an aloof and unattainable figure with a basically oblivious attitude toward the lead until the climax of the film). The dramatic tension mainly comes from Nick's efforts to reunite with Sheeni after a variety of circumstances conspire to separate them. The central gag of the movie is that Nick invents 'Francois Dillinger,' an alternative persona transparently based on Jean-Paul Belmondo's character in Breathless, to overcome the passivity that prevents him from taking bold action to pursue Sheeni.

The interplay between Nick and 'Francois' is one of the high points of Youth in Revolt. 'Francois' is the type of smooth, confident person who exists only in the imaginations of awkward people like Nick, who rely far too much on fiction for an understanding of what qualities other people find appealing and why, and Cera does a great job of working this evident fact into his performance. The sections where he plays 'Francois' are probably the best argument yet for Michael Cera as an actor with range. Suffice it to say that I'm really looking forward to what he'll pull off in this summer's Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World.

Beyond Michael Cera-related matters, the most apt way I can describe Youth in Revolt is that it doesn't so much transcend the conventions of its genre as it tweaks them just enough so they aren't irritating. For instance, Nick and Sheeni basically use the same reference-heavy quirkspeak that was so retrospectively annoying in Juno, namechecking Yasujiro Ozu and Serge Gainesbourg and what have you, but instead of treating it as a signifier of how totally awesome the characters are, Youth in Revolt takes the far more realistic tack of using it to highlight how alienated they are from their surroundings. There's a great exchange early in the movie where Nick runs into a female classmate in a video store who then asks him what he's renting; when he shows her Fellini's La Strada, she exclaims "So random!" Then her boyfriend comes up behind her and asks him "Does that movie come with a tampon for your pussy?"

Youth in Revolt also benefits from its surprisingly strong supporting cast, which includes Ray Liotta, Steve Buscemi, Zach Galifianakis, Jean Smart, M. Emmet Walsh, and Fred Willard. The movie essentially focuses on Nick, rotating the background players in and out liberally as the plot progresses. The result is a constant parade of new characters, none of which are onscreen long enough to wear out their welcome. The best out of lot is Adhir Kalyan as Vijay, a hyper-articulate classmate of Nick's who helps him sneak into a French-speaking boarding school in one of the film's best sequences; I really wish he'd gotten more screen time.

In all, Youth in Revolt isn't exactly a movie that you'll kick yourself for missing in the theater, but it's definitely worth seeing, particularly for fans of Michael Cera who've been disheartened by his recent work. It's not a reinvention of the genre, but it's a well made and funny movie that does a great job of capitalizing on its strengths. At a minimum, keep it on your radar for DVD or cable.

CNN brings journalism back from the dead

The cynics who say the news media has stopped serving the public interest have officially been put on notice with CNN's scoop today that Avatar, the most expensive and therefore best movie ever made, is causing audiences to slip into bouts of depression because of the sheer awesomeness of the special effects. This hard-hitting investigation, which incidentally revolves entirely around the emotional lives of people who post on movie fan sites, reveals the plight of afflicted heroes like 'Elequin', who mourns:

"That's all I have been doing as of late, searching the Internet for more info about 'Avatar.' I guess that helps. It's so hard I can't force myself to think that it's just a movie, and to get over it, that living like the Na'vi will never happen. I think I need a rebound movie."

I hope he doesn't pick Steel Magnolias or something like that, because I think he'd probably slit his own wrists before he hit the credits. Says another user, 'Mike':

"Ever since I went to see 'Avatar' I have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I can't stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers I got from it," Mike posted. "I even contemplate suicide thinking that if I do it I will be rebirthed in a world similar to Pandora and that everything is the same as in 'Avatar.' "

Did 'Mike' actually see Avatar? If I'm not mistaken, the defining feature of Pandora, besides 'sparkliness', was the fact that it was jam-packed with merciless killer space-dogs, space-rhinos, space-panthers, and space-flying-Komodo dragons. Plus, suicide seems like seems like kind of a risky plan. Think of all the repeat viewings of Avatar that 'Mike' will be missing out on if the whole Pandora-resurrection hypothesis doesn't pan out. Not to mention the special-edition Blu-Ray boxset, the inevitable sequel/s, and the chance to own what will probably be a very respectably detailed set of action figures.

As any respectable journalist knows, something isn't a real trend until you can find three separate people to attest to its existence, so behold the third member of the Avatar-caused depression epidemic:

"Reached via e-mail in Sweden where he is studying game design, Hill, 17, explained that his feelings of despair made him desperately want to escape reality."

J'accuse, Avatar! Not even a teenage boy pursuing a field of study widely associated with social isolation while living in a country with a 97% suicide rate is immune from your siren song of melancholy.

Fortunately, the article ends on a note of hope for these young men, who were almost certainly not suffering from any sort of mental issues before they bought a ticket to Avatar, or as CNN probably calls it, James Cameron's Abattoir of Souls. As is so often the case, they can find solace in the wisdom of their brethren:

"Within the fan community, suggestions for battling feelings of depression after seeing the movie include things like playing "Avatar" video games or downloading the movie soundtrack, in addition to encouraging members to relate to other people outside the virtual realm and to seek out positive and constructive activities."

It was good of them to throw those last two suggestions in there as a last-ditch resort, in case the whole playing video games and listening to the soundtrack thing somehow doesn't pan out.