Hasta La Gadget!

Michael Lewis is best known for milling complicated subject matter like mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations into compulsively readable bestsellers, including Liar’s Poker, The Big Short and Moneyball. His books get churned into movies that star Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling and Sandra Bullock.

In the world of financial journalism ― actually, just in journalism ― the 56-year-old New Orleans native is a king. A rock-star millionaire writer at the top of his craft, far above the kinds of workaday hacks plugging away at places like the New York Post.

But back in 1994, when he was senior editor at The New Republic, Lewis tackled a simpler topic, one that’s back in the conversation this week, courtesy of the Post: The difficulties of a man being with a smoking-hot woman.

“The most ill-conceived work of his career,” proclaimed a lengthy Vanity Fair profile of Lewis written a few years later. “Though it masqueraded as a work of humility, it reeked of the pride that lay just beneath the mask of the naif.”

Lewis’s column drew a fair share of controversy at the time ― angry faxes, phone calls and real-paper letters. Titled “Scenic beauty,” the lengthy piece describes Lewis’s then-wife, a former model who he never names, as “terrifyingly beautiful.” Living in the shadow of that beauty is a “weird degradation,” he writes, at one point describing a scene in which several men gather behind his wife to ogle her butt. “Can you believe that shit?” one says. 

Kate Bohner, then Lewis’ wife and a writer for Forbes, was “blindsided,” by the piece, recalled Joshua Levine, who worked with her. Apparently, Lewis didn’t tell her about the article before it was published.

Lewis’ piece comes to mind this week, as the New York Post catches flack (and lots of shares and clicks) for an article in a similar vein. The Post story, “Why I won’t date hot women anymore,” interviews a man fed up with the difficulties of hooking up with attractive models (and touches on the difficulties woman face dating super-hot dudes).

“Beautiful women who get a fair amount of attention get full of themselves,” Dan Rochkind tells the paper, explaining that he used to only pursue women for their looks. “Eventually I was dreading getting dinner with them because they couldn’t carry a conversation.” He says he has since settled for a woman who is not a swimsuit model, “but is still beautiful.” 

The Lewis column is, of course, miles better written, crafted in his trademark conversational tone. But in the end, they’re the same: stories about what a woman’s looks mean to a man. The women are beside the point. They are shiny objects.

Back in 1994, Lewis’s wife, Bohner, already had an impressive resume: an undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a few years as an investment banker at the prestigious Lazard firm. She also had a master’s in journalism from Columbia.

Even though she wasn’t named in the magazine, Bohner’s colleagues surely knew it was about her. As a woman who works in a newsroom, this reporter can only imagine with horror what the fallout would be like. 

Lewis mentions nothing about Bohner’s degrees or jobs. His article ― essentially a page-long humblebrag about how he bagged a babe ― tells readers only that she once appeared in a full-page New York Times advertisement for the Bloomingdale’s hosiery department. Since there’s no photograph in the New Republic, Lewis helpfully offers a soft-core description of the ad:

“It depicts a young woman, to me terrifyingly beautiful, reclining in midair, clad in a black slip and spiked heels. Her head tilts back, exposing the delicate line of her neck and making a niagara of her thick golden hair,” he writes. “She curls one of her long slender legs under her perfectly shaped bottom; the other she kicks up to the top of the page like a dancer in a chorus line,” he writes. “What is shocking is that the women in it is now my wife.”

The piece offers four “scenes,” meant to demonstrate the difficulties of being with such a precious gem of a woman. At a tennis lesson, the instructor becomes aggressive and makes Lewis look like a loser by drilling aces at him. At a restaurant, a maitre d’ fawns over his wife. At stores, it’s assumed Lewis will pay top-dollar for whatever she wants. At one point, Lewis marvels when construction workers fail to catcall his wife when they’re out together. He calls himself “the tamer of a lionesss,” because in his mind, he’s protecting the construction workers from her. 

“[Of] the many theories that purport to explain and interpret the role of female beauty in our society,” he writes, “none fully captures the weird degradation of being intimately associated with the genuine article.”

Bohner disappears into the story. You could easily swap her out for, say, a very expensive sports car. Owning a Porsche also comes with difficulties ― you pay more for service and parts, valet parkers race to greet you, store salesmen assume you’ll pay full price. The Porsche lacks substance ― it’s just a vessel to make you look good. To Lewis and to his New York Post counterpart, the hot woman lacks substance, serving only to reflect glory on her owner. She is just a pretty hot rod.

The year 1994 was after Clarence Thomas landed on the Supreme Court, even though he’d been credibly accused of serious sexual harassment. But even in that pre-Twitter era, when people were less likely to take offense to sexism, Lewis’s piece raised hackles.

“It is discouraging to know that one of your staffers has nothing better to write about than how women are sex objects and to instruct us that the more successful sex objects get lots of perks,” Sara Wermiel, a New Republic reader from Boston, wrote to the magazine, which ran a half-dozen complaints about the piece in a subsequent edition. “I can’t remember ever coming across anything that reeked of such blatant self-promotion,” wrote Joseph Bornstein of New York City.

The New Republic published a one-line response from Lewis: “And she can cook too.”

Lewis proposed to Bohner after just three weeks of dating, according to Vanity Fair. He whisked her into a jewelry store, proposed, and plunked down $30,000 for a ring.  

One reader predicted Lewis’s marriage to the “Bloomingdale’s model” wouldn’t last.

It didn’t.

Three years after his column was published, Lewis married Tabitha Soren, a photographer and former MTV newscaster. They are still together and have three kids.

He offered a more detailed defense of his article to the Los Angeles Times a few years after it was published:

“It was just a funny little piece, meant to be touching,” he’s quoted as saying. “If I’d written it for Elle magazine, nobody would have paid attention to it.”

Lewis could not be reached for comment for this story.

Bohner declined to comment, but at least we offered her the opportunity to speak for herself. 

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Nicknamed the “Mother of All Bombs”, the MOAB GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb was the most destructive non-nuclear weapon designed (when it was first designed). The first use of this bomb on the battlefield was earlier today, April 13th, 2017, in the Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. This bomb has a blast radius of more than a mile, and was originally … Continue reading

United Airlines CEO, Victor Munoz, appears to be conflicted about the passenger who was violently dragged off of one of his flights over the weekend.

On Monday, he defended his staff and blamed the passenger, whose face was bloodied by aviation security personnel, for being “disruptive and belligerent.” On Tuesday, he apologized: “No one should ever be mistreated this way.”

But as recent as February, before the viral glare of the global spotlight, Munoz was certain that less regulation, i.e., more power and control for major airlines like United, is what’s best for airline passengers. In a meeting with Donald Trump and other airline executives, Munoz appeared passionate about working with the businessman in chief: “We look forward to working together with the president on…modernizing our aviation infrastructure and cutting the red tape that gets in the way of our industry’s ability to deliver the best experience for our employees and customers.”

Sunday’s fiasco lays bare the consequences of “cutting the red tape” and allowing corporations too much power and control. In fact, United is leading an effort to cut the red tape, i.e., privatize, the country’s air traffic control system to capture even more control. The truth is the federal government has been trying to modernize air traffic control through an ambitious program called NextGen. Yet anti-tax politicians in Congress have slowed it down by denying stable funding. So when Munoz and leaders of other major airlines like Southwest say “modernize,” what they’re really doing is making a grab for an air traffic control system the public has spent an estimated $53.5 billion on in just the last 20 years. Privatization would hand that system over to a group of stakeholders—you guessed it, dominated by the major airlines—giving them more say over airfares and what information must be disclosed to the public.

The major airlines see Trump as their best shot yet at privatizing our skies, and they might be right. Trump included air traffic control privatization in his March skinny budget and his administration is packed with privatizers. His top economic advisor, former Goldman Sachs investment banker Gary Cohn, told a room full of executives last Tuesday that privatizing air traffic control “is probably the single most exciting thing we can do.”

But United just showed the world what happens when corporations are in charge. Privatization would jeopardize the busiest and safest air traffic control system in the world by handing it to major airlines like United, who, if what happened on Sunday is any indication, values profits over passenger safety and human dignity. With even more control than they already have, the airline industry could churn out more profits off the backs of passengers and cut off access for rural communities because serving them is less profitable than serving major hubs.

After Sunday, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting corporations like United to control our skies. They belong to us—Trump, Munoz, and the rest of the privatizers should keep their hands off.

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The military dropped its largest, non-nuclear bomb on a suspected ISIS target, or, as the president called it, “this tiramisu is fantastic.” In yet another example of Ivanka Trump’s influential feminism, President Trump signed a bill threatening Planned Parenthood funding. And Trump continued his alleged centrist realignment, meaning we’re only months away from Bob Woodward inking a deal to write an insufferably sycophantic tick-tock about the president’s first year. This is HUFFPOST HILL for Thursday, April 13th, 2017:

TRUMP REALLY INTO BOMBING THINGS NOW – Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Erin Cunningham: “U.S. forces in Afghanistan dropped a 22,000-pound bomb on Islamic State forces in eastern Afghanistan Thursday, the Pentagon announced in a statement. Gen. John W. Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said the bomb was ‘the right munition’ to use against the Islamic State because of the group’s use of roadside bombs, bunkers and tunnels. It is the first time the bomb, called a GBU-43, has ever been used in combat. The GBU-43 is one of the largest airdropped munitions in the U.S. military’s inventory and was almost used during the opening salvos of the Iraq War in 2003. By comparison, U.S. aircraft commonly drop bombs that weigh between 250 to 2,000 pounds.” [WaPo]

Friendly reminder that bombs kill people: “An airstrike by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State killed 18 Syrian fighters allied with the United States, the military said on Thursday. The strike, on Tuesday in Tabqah, Syria, was the third time in a month that American-led airstrikes may have killed civilians or allies, and it comes even as the Pentagon is investigating two previous airstrikes that killed or wounded scores of civilians in a mosque complex in Syria and in a building in the west of Mosul, Iraq.” [NYT’s Helene Cooper]

Roger Stone is trying to keep the “Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill JFK” rumor alive.

OH, HEY, HERE’S SOMETHING THE PRESIDENT HASN’T FLIPPED ON – Just kidding, he also flipped on this. Also, we can only assume this will bring coal jobs back to central Pennsylvania, somehow. Laura Bassett: “President Donald Trump signed a resolution on Thursday that will allow states to withhold Title X family planning funds from Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers. The resolution overturns a Health and Human Services rule enacted by the Obama administration last year that prevents states from defunding Planned Parenthood or other health providers for any reason other than the provider’s lack of ‘ability to deliver services to program beneficiaries in an effective manner.’ Now, states can withhold federal family planning grants from providers because they offer abortion, even though the longstanding Hyde Amendment prevents any federal money from being used to pay for abortion.” [HuffPost]

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DEMS LOOKING TO PROTECT KEY OBAMACARE ITEM IN SPENDING BILL – Jennifer Haberkorn and Sarah Ferris: “Democrats say they will make funding for a key Obamacare program a top priority in the next spending bill after President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to stop it, raising the possibility of a government shutdown threat over the health care law. Trump said he hasn’t decided whether to fund the Obamacare cost-sharing program, which helps low-income Americans pay their health care co-pays and deductibles. In a Wall Street Journal interview Wednesday, he suggested that the funding for the program — called cost-sharing reductions — should be used as leverage to bring Democrats to the table on health care.” [Politico]

I’M NOT CHANGING, *YOU’RE* CHANGING – Sean Spicer, apparently taking a break from skimming “The Diary of Anne Frank,” spoke to the press about President Trump’s 5,000,000 flip-flops this week. Amanda Terkel: “President Donald Trump has reversed his position on at least six major issues this week, giving up pledges he made on the campaign trail and repeatedly touted to his base. But according to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, it’s not that Trump has shifted his views ― it’s that the world has shifted to Trump’s views. ‘If you look at what’s happened ― it’s those entities or individuals in some cases ―or issues ― evolving toward the president’s position,’ Spicer said Thursday in his press briefing.” [HuffPost]

UNQUALIFIED PERSON LANDS JOB IN TRUMP ADMINISTRATION – Christina Wilkie: “President Donald Trump quietly announced his intention to nominate former Washington state senator Don Benton (R) to be director of the Selective Service System, which operates the nation’s military draft…. Benton had originally been expected to fill a top position at the Environmental Protection Agency…This was before Benton began to infuriate his boss, the newly confirmed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Benton’s habit of interrupting policy discussions to make bizarre comments became so maddening, according to The Washington Post, that senior staff began keeping him out of policy meetings…. Trump’s solution was to give Benton oversight of the military draft. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Benton, who is a sales consultant by trade, will become the first director in the history of the Selective Service who has not served in any branch of the military…. [A] wide-ranging HuffPost review of public records, past interviews, marketing materials, biographies and corporate disclosures reveals that Benton’s career has been marked by lawsuits, ethics problems, public feuds and allegations of cronyism.” [HuffPost]

Our favorite part: “In 2014, he accused a fellow senator of behaving like ‘a trashy, trampy-mouthed little girl.’ The senator also said that Benton followed her around the Senate floor yelling, ‘You are weird and…weird! Weird, weird, weird. Just so weird!’” [Ibid.]

ABOUT TRUMP’S CENTRIST PIVOT… Saying Trump’s policies will be less extremist is like saying TGI Friday’s menu will be healthier because the warm pretzels will be served with one less ounce of beer-cheese sauce. Paul Blumenthal: “No matter what Bannon’s fate, however, his strand of ethno-nationalism will live on in the Trump Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The 70-year-old former Alabama senator has already set the Justice Department on a new path by targeting immigrants, reining in police department reform efforts and curtailing efforts to protect voting rights…. Bannon and Sessions share a long history of mutual support and policy agreement. They spent months together with Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who now works in the White House, plotting strategy on how to enact their shared agenda of limiting immigration to the U.S. in order to maintain a European and Christian identity.” [HuffPost]

Sooooooo, Dana Rohrabacher definitely caused an international incident in Spain.

REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN STILL COMING TO TERMS WITH CAUSALITY – Also, aren’t you legally required to live on a survivalist compound if your name is Markwayne Mullin? Nikita Vladimrov: “Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) faced off with constituents at a town hall this week, telling the members of the audience that they don’t pay his salary. ‘You say you pay for me to do this? That’s bullcrap,’ Mullin said at the town hall in Jay, Okla., according to a video of the incident. ‘I pay for myself. I paid enough taxes before I got here and continue to through my company to pay my own salary. This is a service. No one here pays me to go,’ he added. After constituents pushed back, Mullin reiterated that being a lawmaker is not ‘how I make my living.’” [The Hill]

Town hall bummers abound. “When House Republicans returned home this week for a long Easter recess, they found themselves facing rooms packed with loud, furious constituents — and in some cases relied on extra security. It turns out, governing with complete control of the federal government is harder than Republicans may have expected…. Despite the hostile atmosphere, a number of rank-and-file Republicans held town hall meetings in their districts.” [HuffPost’s Dana Liebelson]

KRIS KOBACH: WADDA GUY – Sam Levine: “Nearly two years after getting the authority to prosecute voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) announced Wednesday he had obtained his first conviction of a non-citizen who had voted…. The Wednesday announcement marked just the eighth time Kobach has convicted someone in Kansas of voter fraud since gaining the ability to prosecute in 2015. Kobach had pushed for prosecutorial authority, arguing he needed it to crack down on voter fraud. However, from 1997 to 2010, there were only 11 confirmed cases of it in Kansas. There were 1,788,673 registered voters in the state as of March, according to the Kansas City Star.” [HuffPost]

Daily Kos is relevant once more, Ryan Grim writes, but when are blogrolls coming back?

MAR-A-LISTERIA – So gross. Jose Lambiet: “Just days before the state visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach private club, Florida restaurant inspectors found potentially dangerous raw fish and cited the club for storing food in two broken down coolers. Inspectors found 13 violations at the fancy club’s kitchen, according to recently published reports — a record for an institution that charges $200,000 in initiation fees. Three of the violations were deemed ‘high priority,’ meaning that they could allow the presence of illness-causing bacteria on plates served in the dining room.” [Miami Herald]

BECAUSE YOU’VE READ THIS FAR – Here are some baby squirrels.

THE DICK CHENEY BIOPIC YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU NEEDED (AND DON’T?) – Hopefully Christian Bale will revive his Batman voice for the role. AP: “Christian Bale said Wednesday he will play Dick Cheney in Adam McKay’s upcoming biopic of the former vice president. Bale was last week reported as being in talks to join the film that will reteam him with McKay following 2015’s Oscar-nominated ‘The Big Short.’ The Oscar winner confirmed he has signed up to star in the untitled film in an interview with The Associated Press. ‘In the same way as it was a journey of discovery with ‘The Big Short,’ Adam was able to take a story that most people would go comatose listening to,’ said Bale of the script penned by McKay. ‘His ability to make it startling and entertaining and intelligent without compromising anything — he’s masterful at doing that.’” [Page Six]

COMFORT FOOD

– A woman accidentally brought her dog to a furry convention.

– Creepy old photos inside a doll factory.

– Speaking of creepy dolls, here’s a Tickle Me Elmo without its fur.

TWITTERAMA

@daveweigel: When I read about the Trumps making $ off the presidency, I think back to Trump voters who argued that he couldn’t be bought bc he was rich

@thinkpiecebot: Are Neo-Nazis Who Missed The Whole “Stormtrooper” Thing In Star Wars Why Teens Can’t Farm?

@KenGude: It’s very depressing that US media is reacting to the MOAB in a similar way to my 3 year old when he sees a train or a dump truck.

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Sunflower Farm Creamery in Maine has churned out something even sweeter than its homemade caramel.

The dairy has released baaa-rilliant video featuring 1-day-old goats in sweaters learning how to jump because sometimes the world is good, OK?

According to Sunflower Farm’s YouTube page, about 20 goats are expected to give birth this spring, and the first arrivals, who are featured in the video, came on April 9. The proud mother’s name is Rhubarb and her kids’ names are Gershwin, Butterscotch, Marigold and Bruno. And if that isn’t cute enough, the babies were dressed in sweaters because the Maine weather was a tad too chilly for their new, fragile little bodies.

While many dairy farms kill animals that don’t serve an economic purpose for the operation ― like males or goats that are no longer producing milk ― Sunflower Farm boasts about being a “no cull” operation that allows all its animals to live out there days in peace.

In addition to treating their “little goats like queens,” the farm also produces feta and chevre, and starting June 1 it will offer yoga on the premises as well. 

We kid you not.

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