Dana Goldstein

The History of a Name

I've written before about name sex-changes -- the process by which male names become female. What happens is that parents of girls begin to adopt a male name, attracted to the strength or intelligence it conveys. For a short time, the name is androgynous, but then, at a certain tipping point, parents of boys cede the name entirely. God forbid Daddy's Little Boy be mistaken for a girl, right?

A graphing tool called the Baby Name Voyager shows us exactly how this process takes place. Check out the stats on my own name. Blue is for boys, and magenta is for girls, obviously. The gender on top in the graph is actually the one for whom the name is less common.

Sure enough, "Dana" reached its apogee during the 1980s, the decade of my own birth, when it was among the top 100 names for girls. And as you can see, the name was male-dominated until the 1940s, when it flipped.  Dana Carvey's parents were behind the times when they chose the name for the future comedian in 1955.

You can do a lot of cool things with the Baby Name Voyager such as comparing the number of Bens to Benjamins, for example, or seeing the most common names that begin with any letter. Check it out.

(And thanks to Mark for showing me the site!)

What I'm Doing When I'm Not Blogging

I cook, I read fiction, I sleep...but I also write long-form journalism. One project in partiucular has been important to me these past few months. The article had been embargoed in the Prospect's December print issue, but it's now available online.

In October I spent a week in my hometown of Ossining, New York, reporting a story on this uniquely integrated school district's attempt to close the achievement gap through segregated extracurricular activities. In the almost six years since I graduated from Ossining High School, there's been a profound shift in how seriously the community takes the disparity in graduation rates between white students (over 90 percent) and black and Hispanic males in particular (under 50 percent). So there's a new focus on sociocultural support for boys of color, ranging from weekend trips to plays, to African drumming lessons for black boys, to college prep tutoring as early as middle school.

I spent some time getting to know a group of high school students who call themselves Project Earthquake. This is a sort of masculinty support group for African American teenagers, where they dicuss dating, marriage, and parenthood in the black community; academic achievement; and career planning. The program -- which is funded in large part by a foundation launched by upper middle class white mothers in Ossining -- has been incredibly meaningful for its participants. But underlying the success is concern that girls of color and poor kids of all races are being overlooked, and that in a legal climate increasingly hostile to affirmative action, racially-targeted programming won't stand up in the courts.

This isn't an argumentative piece, but rather a reported look at one district's attempt to deal with so many of the issues at the forefront of our national educational debate. I hope you check it out.

D.C. Most Walkable City in America?

That's the verdict of a new Brookings Institution study that ranks the most walkable American cities in a counterintutive way: Instead of counting the number of daily chores or recreational activities a person can complete in their neighborhood without the use of a car (as other surveys have done), this study counts the number of supposedly "walkable" neighborhoods in a city, and then ranks cities according to how many walkable areas they boast per capita. But neighborhoods where development is boosted by government subsidies aren't included, meaning there's a bias here toward upper-income, white areas. In Washington, D.C., for example, Dupont Circle, Georgetown, the West End, Adams Morgan, and Capitol Hill are called "walkable," but not Mt. Pleasant, U Street, or Columbia Heights, which are all, in my daily experience, equally walkable, but are less affluent. Another flaw, recognized by the author, is that the report also doesn't consider the relative size of walkable neighborhoods. Therefore, midtown Manhattan is counted as one "area," as is Reston town center in suburban north Virginia, a fauxhemian "planned community."

In my mind, New York, which ranks #10 on this list, will always be more walkable than Washington for one simple reason: Your local supermarket will deliver your groceries in New York! You shop at the store, your food is bagged, you pay $5, and an hour or so later, an employee of the supermarket delivers your groceries to your home in exchange for a tip. This beats picking your produce over the Internet. And it makes life without a car much more pleasant.

cross-posted at TAPPED 

This Ad's Gotta Be Worth Something

In some corners of the YouTubes, Mike Gravel and Ron Paul are competing to be the next president of the United States. Don't call it crazy till you hear Gravel rap. Then, er, by all means, call it crazy.