Jill Biden, who likes to be known as Dr. Jill Biden, in her official 2009 portrait as second lady of the United States. Photograph by Ralph Alswang for the White House.

A 'doctor' in the (White) House

December 16, 2020

The latest skirmish in the culture wars involves incoming first lady Dr. Jill Biden, as she likes to be known.

Biden is not a medical doctor but a doctor of education, and that seems to have stuck in the craw of Joseph Epstein (honorary doctorate), who in a somewhat snarky piece for The Wall Street Journal, told Biden in effect to stow it. Epstein’s commentary was not so much about BIden but about the decline of educational standards in general in this country, something I would heartily agree with, including in the awarding of doctorates, something I would not agree with. My family was enormously proud to see my oldest nephew Matthew receive his doctorate in applied mathematics after years of hard work and challenges that began when he was in high school. The degree has brought him a plum job as a government subcontractor at a prestigious university. So a PhD in any subject is nothing to sneeze at, and we can’t assume it wasn’t well-earned.

Trump and winning in loss

November 15, 2020

Recently, I went what seemed to be about 17 rounds with a publicist seeking to place an appeal for an arts organization who objected to my calling the organization small and struggling, even though it is. I shouldn’t have gotten testy about this. One of the casualties of the pandemic has been my minimal patience. But as a journalist, I always object to publicists trying to control the story, and I was particularly rankled by her waving the dictionary at me via e-mail, as if I were some recalcitrant schoolgirl.

In the end, we achieved a kind of detente, but only because I decided the story was more important than my ego. It always is. Still, I was this close to telling her she used another word incorrectly. Why? Because I wanted to score a point. I wanted to win.

He, she, they: the politics of gender and a place in the sun

October 11, 2020

Recently, I had an experience that redefined the right and the left for me. I interviewed two individuals who began by presenting me with their pronouns, as if they were ambassadors presenting a head of state with their credentials. One of the inidividuals’ pronouns was “she” and “her.” So if I were quoting her, I might say “she” on second reference. But the other person’s pronouns were “they” and “them.” (For the purpose of this post, I’ll call them S and T.)

When I explained that from a journalistic perspective, I worked for a company that used the Associated Stylebook — which allows for “they” in single usage when clarity is not at stake — and standard English, in which the masculine is still the default singular pronoun, as in the sentence “Everyone deserves his place in the sun,” well, things got a bit tense.