Cultural Briefing
Tokyo-based blogger Sean Kinsell eviscerates this WaPost story purporting to find a new girlyness among Japanese men. For a primer on how important local knowledge is to understanding any supposed trend, this post is hard to beat. (Don't get me started on the willful ignorance of suggesting that Vanity Fair readers will understand the contemporary South by reading Christopher Hitchens interviewing communist-turned-agrarian Eugene Genovese. That was a couple of VF issues back: I read it on the newsstand.)