From the world of cultural studies, good news about hiphop:

Dr. Muñoz-Laboy spent three years studying the hip-hop club scene, talking to dozens of teenagers and watching them dance. While hip-hop music has been widely assailed as misogynistic, the researchers found that young women were the “gatekeepers” of boundaries on the dance floor, according to research published this month in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality. Even during the highly sexualized form of dance known as grinding, in which bodies rub against each other, the girls in the study “were consistently vigilant about maintaining control over their bodies and space,” the study noted.

Most of the teenagers in the study were sexually experienced. But the researchers found that the overt sexuality of the music and dancing was not the main influence on sexual behavior. Rather it was the old standbys of alcohol, drugs and peer pressure that typically led them into sexual encounters.

From the world of public education, bad news about abstinence-only  programs:

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners” among teenagers, the study concluded.

In the West, it is only in still-Puritan America that we are obsessed with trying to control our kids’ sexual behavior—which is essentially uncontrollable. That behavior is always about the social norms in their peer group, and kids trying to balance their personal values and urges with trying to fit in … somewhere.

[[[ omigod, take three: when I attempted to post the cursed-to-the-ether post of this morning, I screwed up my theme. Here we go again. Apologies to RSS readers. ]]]

The list of reasons to ignore TV “news” gets longer by the day. First there was Fox News, whose jingoistic color scheme

has long been reason enough to surf on by.

Then there was CBS, the “Tiffany Network,” so called for its once sterling reputation. First it shamed itself by allowing Dan Rather and his pals to run roughshod over journalistic integrity (such as it is) and then it hired the know-nothingest dame from the morning side to liven things up.

Now there is the entire GE telecasting family, starting with the Mothership. Fame whore Brian Williams, not content to be the anchor of the flagship show called NBC Nightly News, where, according to Howard Kurtz, he has “gravitas” (ha ha ha HA!), also needs to feel the love from across the entire broadcasting spectrum. What I want to know is why stop with comedians and late-night TV? Why doesn’t he get into cooking with Martha? Meanwhile, does anyone even watch SNL anymore?

Moving down the GE spectrum—down to MSNBC, the lowest rung of the downscale—we’ve got the Big Bloviator, Keith Olbermann, lauded by the New York Times as the standard-bearer of the anti-Bush left.

MSNBC has marshaled behind Mr. Olbermann, who on July 3, in an eight-minute “special comment” at the close of his show, addressed President Bush directly and called on him to resign. Two months later, the channel chose Mr. Olbermann to serve as the principal host of its coverage of a major prime-time address by Mr. Bush.

If I were Olbermann, I wouldn’t rest on my laurels, because Glenn Beck, CNN’s self-described “rodeo clown,” just got himself a much, much fatter payday.

Faithful readers know that none of this surprises me—my blog is called Infotainment Rules for a reason. Namely, because as I’ve been saying for a while now, infotainment rules the airwaves. I only wish it weren’t such cruddy infotainment, because if it had a somewhat higher gloss, people might actually learn something. (As usual, the Brits, with their storytelling tradition firmly in hand, are way ahead of us on this score: they make domestic dramas about current events, like The Queen, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, and The Deal.)

Media critic and professor Steve Boriss doesn’t care how cruddy things get on the news front, though. He welcomes the trend toward the decidedly downscale, because he thinks it harkens back to the golden age of Yellow Journalism, when it was the people—with their taste for sensational and the titillating—who ruled.

Publisher Joseph Pulitzer famously solved [the hard news-soft news] dilemma by developing a formula that came to be known as “Yellow Journalism.” His papers covered the stories that the “respectable public” most wanted, but told them in sensational and titillating ways so they also appealed to the non-elites. Publisher William Randolph Hearst copied Pulitzer’s formula, then he and Pulitzer both bought newspapers in New York and slugged it out in one of the most interesting and competitive business battles in American history. …

… even though this style of journalism was mocked, it had become well-accepted and respected, accounting for about a third of all metro papers across the country. It met the needs of news consumers better than any journalism before or since.

Hey, Jules Crittenden! I love you, man. I read you every day. Thanks for linking to Boriss’s piece. But I’m feeling kind of left out over here at Infotainment Rules. I skewer the pompous, too.

Hey, all you politicos: what have you done for the culture lately?

While some people bitch (and bitch again) about the “neocon agenda” of the New York Times Book Review under its editor Sam Tanenhaus:

bitchin’:

Before the first shot in the Iraq War was fired, its intellectual supporters–future Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus (then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair), New Republic editor Peter Beinart and literary editor Leon Wieseltier; and writers Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff, Joe Klein, George Packer and Jacob Weisberg–struck pre-emptively at many who foresaw reruns of the Vietnam War’s trumped-up pretexts, overkill and quagmires.

bitchin’ again:

If Tanenhaus “balances” his criticisms of Bush this evening yet again with diversionary attacks on liberals and the left, many in his AEI audience will be desperately grateful. They still seem to think that assailing war critics or proponents of national health care will confirm them as guardians of national greatness. But they are giving the nation away because they cannot reconcile their keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with their obeisance to every whim of capital.

Tanenhaus himself is leading a book club of the erudite over at the NYT blog Reading Room, about the new translation of War and Peace.

It’s marathon season in New York, and I’m delighted to announce that a panel of limber readers (see their bios in the right column) have agreed to join me in going the distance with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 1200-plus pages in the new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which we’ll be reading and discussing during the next four weeks.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

Here’s the beginning of Bill Keller’s latest entry:

I reached the final page Tuesday morning on a plane home from Des Moines, after a few days of chasing presidential candidates. Squeezing chapters of Volume IV between campaign events, I found the novel bleeding into my observations of the politicians who would be president. John McCain, with his military breeding and his distaste for sugar-coating unpleasant news, reminded me of a voluble Kutuzov. John Edwards, who has lately amped up his populist fervor (as my colleague Jeff Zeleny recounted in Tuesday’s paper) displays definite Denisov tendencies.

It’s interesting, too, to attend a campaign rally fresh from reading Tolstoy’s disquisition on the impotence of humans before history. A lot of Iowa voters — and certainly all of the candidates — seem convinced that choosing a president is choosing a direction in history, that “genius” moves human life in fathomable ways. I could hear Tolstoy tut-tutting from the press section.

I posted a link-rich item this morning, and it disappeared into the ether.

This time, I’m testing before I go to the trouble again.

Nothing follows.