Wednesday evening roundup and response to comment

F*ers. You think it's manly to shoot a teenage girl for going to school? Maybe if your mothers had gotten an education you wouldn't be such ignorant assholes. We'll just take comfort in the fact that Malala is alive and has more support in her own country than you'll ever get and she's stronger than you'll ever be. Not to put too fine a point on it: she has more balls than all of you combined. Congratulations on self-generating your own, national (and international) "f* you".

Aaron David Miller tells American Jews to chill the f* out.

Mark Bittman's must-read piece about California's Central Valley (as a microcosm of the potential for sustainable agriculture). Some excerpts:

There must be, I thought (or fantasized) as I traveled through the valley, some movement toward pushing farmers, big and small, to produce decent food sustainably. Because if there’s not, the valley’s problems will only worsen, and we’d be complicit in destroying one of the country’s greatest resources, one that has served us amazingly well until now. Indeed, I found a number of large farmers experimenting with sustainability and scale…

All of this made me wonder what, if anything, big farmers owe a society — not only in terms of what they do to their land but in terms of what they actually grow. The food that’s grown in the valley may be copious, but it’s not necessarily all that good.

Michael Pollan on Prop 37 (much of the piece echo's Ernessa's comment about the infusion of advertisement):

The fight over labeling G.M. food is not foremost about food safety or environmental harm, legitimate though these questions are. The fight is about the power of Big Food. Monsanto has become the symbol of everything people dislike about industrial agriculture: corporate control of the regulatory process; lack of transparency (for consumers) and lack of choice (for farmers); an intensifying rain of pesticides on ever-expanding monocultures; and the monopolization of seeds, which is to say, of the genetic resources on which all of humanity depends.

Grist piles on (to the theme the Times magazine started), with coverage of the Food Sovereignty Prize.

While we're on food, here are some non-dairy sources of calcium.

And here, a response-to-comment, particularly to "I love not having to think about it so much": That sums up how I feel about my weight loss. I love not thinking about it, I love getting into my clothes in the morning without wondering whether they'll be too snug. I was already at that point one year and 15 pounds ago, but I'm ever more there now. It reminds me of a phrase I heard when I dabbled in acting in college, about learning lines: "learn them so you can throw them away." That's my philosophy for a lot of things, including shape and style. I don't dress (well) to stand out; I dress (well) to not distract from everything else I'm doing. Remember when J Crew's creative director was quoted as comparing Nick Paumgarten's extra-half inch on a shirt to "a typo on a résumé”? Ridding yourself of those added distractions frees you to focus on the important stuff.

Julia Gillard says no to political misogyny. See also the New Yorker's take.

Speaking of the New Yorker, this Jesus's wife thing could have been awful in less witty hands, but Paul Rudnick rocked it.

But let's talk about Lena Dunham: yes to both sides. Everyone's right--she's overrated and she's talented. She's privileged and well connected and she's made the most of her advantages. She's not the voice of her generation (hell, I'm Jewish and I don't think she represents me) but it's not her fault that others have anointed her the voice of her generation. There are so many things going on in that last one--I wouldn't blame her for writing about her own life or even naming her show 'Girls.' Yes, you'll recall that I slammed Adam Gopnik not only for being a $hitty writer but for eulogizing J.D. Salinger as a master of "the human" experience; but the problem there is Gopnik, not Salinger. Lena Dunham shouldn't try to write about non-white women; writers should write what they know, lest the end up an Onion parody like "the elderly black woman as depicted by a sophomore." I'm not saying her show shouldn't (or should) include other voices, but if it does, may they be written by writers of those other voices. I, personally, have a hard time writing about anyone whose experience is much different from mine, and wouldn't dare to. I'm not suggesting that all ethnicities are adequately represented on television; I'm suggesting that the fact that they're not is not, shouldn't be Lena Dunham's problem.