television Cheerleader Girlfriends and Sinus Infections

Maybe it's time to retire the practice of weaving radio broadcasts through shows about high-school sports teams and the small towns that pulse to their rhythms. Thus, last year, began the still-fantastic Friday Night Lights—a man on the airwaves giving you twangs of exposition about the Dillon Panthers. Thus, last Monday, began Nimrod Nation (Sundance, 9 p.m. ET), an eight-part nonfiction series about the boys' basketball team at Watersmeet Township School, a K-12 outfit in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. That's apparently in the northern part of the USA, so when the radio hosts aren't fretting manfully about whether the team will return to the state tournament, they say things like "at least we'll get above zero today, by the looks of things," and "it's 27 below zero," and "we'll get up to absolute zero this afternoon." And thus, on Thursday, Varsity Inc. (ESPN2, 11 p.m. ET) begins spiraling around the football team in West Monroe, La., where, with no drama to be milked from the daily weather report, we simply hear the talk-show hosts berating teenagers, stoking quarterback controversies, and forging the local consciousness.

The radio device is obviously enticing to producers, what with the economical way it readies the viewer for the play-by-play voice-over of game day and creates a vision of a community joined by hanging on a natural narrator's every word. And yet it lacks hustle. Please cut it out.

According to going cultural prejudices, I ought to describe Nimrod Nation as a documentary and Varsity Inc. as a reality show. The former—directed by Brett Morgan, best known for The Kid Stays in the Picture, the memoir of the talented and overtanned Hollywood producer Robert Evans—makes a greater effort at telling a story about a community. Its herky-jerky narrative involves a teenage pregnancy, the despoiling of nature, and the erosion of Native American culture. Horribly, its music is Very Serious. Nimrod Nation has been defaced by its own score, strings and reeds that constantly drip and gloop and burble over with pathos no matter what's happening on-screen: tipoffs, buzzer-beaters, free-throw practice, whatever.

Meanwhile, Varsity Inc. is all quick cuts and slow burns. It's rather like Friday Night Lights on steroids, which is to say that it's irritable, overly aggressive, and kind of oily. Early in the first of its six episodes, the coach tells the young men that there are no stars on his team. A little bit later, we meet the stars of this show: the quarterback with the cheerleader girlfriend and the sudden sinus infection. The second-string QB who may or may not be ready for the big time. The cocky fullback who's suddenly all thumbs. And then we have the coaches, who ceaselessly yell with the hoarse authority of drill sergeants, or so it would seem, if, half the time, they weren't yelling at the players for walking away from them while they were yelling.

Both of the shows come tantalizingly close to offering intimate glimpses of awkward relationships. Up in Watersmeet, the coach, George Peterson III, is also the school principal and one of his starters, George Peterson IV, is also a C student. Down in West Monroe, the two rival quarterbacks' fathers—one a white policeman, the other a black pastor—each ditch work to watch practice, trading good-natured jokes as they size up their sons. But both Nimrod Nation and Varsity Inc. are really geared to evoke nostalgia for the viewer's adolescence and for Normal Rockwell's America. They're cheerleading for the simple and clear-cut life of victory and defeat, home and away, and why not? Go, fight, win.

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As for volcanos, you know, I get about two e-mails on that topic per week. At first I dismissed them, but now I'm wondering where the meme started, and how much truth there is to it. Another future column topic...

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Knoxville, Tenn.: If excess carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of global warming, then why are we still recycling paper? Shouldn't we be placing it in landfills to put the excess CO2 from the fossil fuels back in the earth? Also: The global economy is based on continued economic growth and expanding populations, and is fueled by petroleum. What are the implications of this on the global environment, and is the global economy doomed to fail in the near future as petroleum production declines, leaving a population demanding even more from environment than ever before?

Brendan Koerner: Two great questions. On the first, while what you say makes sense, there does seem to be a viable market for recycled paper goods. When it comes to recycling, it's really up to the private sector to decide what they want and what they don't. Here in NYC, for example, the city doesn't recycle plastic takeout containers because there's simply no market for it. But perhaps that will change as technology improves.

On your second question, there's no doubt that the world economy will have to make a radical adjustment in the coming decades. Perhaps oil prices will temporarily retreat from their current levels, but I think it's pretty clear we're facing a long-term upwards trend. The easy answer to your concerns is, "Well, let's start shifting over to alternative fuels now." But that's tough—we've built so much infrastructure to support an oil-dependent economy. That doesn't mean, however, that we should just give up. The time to start planning for a post-oil future is now; otherwise, the economic shocks you fear will be much more severe down the line.

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Anse (The Fray): I say it's "stupid" but I'm pretty sure most of us would like to know ... how do you measure atmospheric conditions in arctic ice? Is it simply precipitation in the arctic and the general water cycle that gets these compounds from our factories and cars to the arctic? Perhaps this would be a good Explainer column in the future.

Brendan Koerner: Thanks for the great question, Anse. I actually touched on this topic in this week's column. Scientists measure atmospheric conditions by analyzing air bubble trapped within the ice. This is how they've been able to calculate the increase in global CO2 and methane levels since 1750—they just bore down way deep down into the ice, where air bubble have been trapped since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Then they compare the contents of those bubbles to ones close to the top.

Believe it or not, I actually visited one of those research sites several years back, out on the Greenland ice. The scientists who man those camps are some of environmentalism's unsung heroes—I, for one, don't have what it takes to spend six months on the ice.

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Alexandria, Va.: I feel that even though small actions on everyone's part to live a greener life may not make an immediate visible change, it's more about the habit to live greener that is being developed. When I read articles about the environment, they often are belittling to those trying to make a difference, and I would like to point out that young children getting in the habit of living greener now will be the ones in the decision-making role in the future, and that these small actions really are huge.

Brendan Koerner: Agreed, and especially relevant to my own situation since I have my first kid en route. I think it's pretty obvious that the environmental situation is bound to get worse before it gets better—we're just barreling ahead so quickly, for better and for worse. But to bury our heads in the sand simply because results are hard to come by doesn't make sense. I'd like to think our species is in the game for the long haul, which means looking down the road instead of always focusing on the present. It's a tough thing for us to do, given that each human being has such a short time here. But it's critical.

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(Also, keep in mind that the current administration has been, uh, somewhat secretive about its energy policy.)

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Richmond, Va.: Out of curiosity, what kind of car do you drive daily? And do you have an energy-efficient home?

Brendan Koerner: Thanks for the question. I actually live in NYC, so don't currently own a car—I roll the train. I also live in a typically small apartment with steam heat and only one air conditioner. On the other hand, I'll confess that I made too few efforts to be "green" in my daily life—shortcomings that I've tried to be honest about in the column (e.g. confessing that I personally haven't been using canvas bags). I'm the farthest thing from an environmental angel—just another concerned bloke trying to make heads to tails of an avalanche of information.

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I read how skyline drive was constructed—a govenrment program for people who needed help in the depression, who went and worked and got paid and did great things. but the current administration and Rush Limbaugh never would allow it, and would call that socialism.

Brendan Koerner: Er, yeah, can't see any WPA-style proposals going too far nowadays.

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I share your concerns regarding the release of methane from melting permafrost. It's a nasty feedback loop, and it will doubtless contribute to the decline of the Arctic. Yet another reason not to delay in tackling our current—and woresening—environmental woes.

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Brendan Koerner: Thanks a million to everyone who sat in and asked great questions. Hope to catch y'all again soon. Be sure to check out "The Green Lantern" on Slate every Tuesday, and pay a visit to my website: www.youthrobber.com. Have a good one...

the dismal science
It Takes a Village
… to fail to thank its female leader, no matter how good she is.
By Ray Fisman
Tuesday, November 27, 2007, at 4:10 PM ET

The possibility that America will elect its first woman president next November has triggered the inevitable onslaught of one-liners, and also a more serious discussion about how America might change with a woman in the Oval Office. As luck would have it, there's new data out there about the shifts that take place when women run the world. Or at least a bunch of Indian villages.

Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

Why study the experiences of Indian villagers to understand the costs and benefits of female leadership? Countries that come closest to gender parity in government, like Sweden and Finland, are economically advanced democracies with universal health care, child care, and generous maternity and paternity leave policies. Contrast this with the list of nations with zero women in national legislatures—Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia, for example—and the pattern becomes clear: Women in government are associated with lots of good things (PDF). But the obvious problem with this sort of exercise is that Scandinavians are different from Saudis in lots of ways. Their progressive attitudes—not to mention all that free child care—may be what allows women to get elected, not the other way around.

To avoid this type of Swede-to-Saudi comparison, social scientists are always on the lookout for "natural experiments" in which we can look at before-after changes within a community rather than making comparisons across very different societies. In this sense, India's decision to put women in charge was an economist's manna from heaven, and the reason that Duflo and Topalova went there for insight on the effects of female leadership. In 1991, almost none of India's village councils were headed by women; the 1991 constitutional amendment passed to redress this imbalance mandated the election of women as pradhans, or council heads, in a third of villages that were chosen entirely at random. This means the villages reserved for female candidates were no different from other villages before the women-only elections.

By 2000, many village councils had been led by women for several years. This was also the year of a countrywide "Millennial Survey" (PDF), which collected information on drinking water, schools, public-health facilities, public transit, and other government services. The surveyors recorded the quantity of these services in each community, and also the quality (measured, for example, by drainage and leaks in water services, and the quality of playground and blackboard facilities in schools). They also ran opinion surveys of community members to poll their satisfaction with the services they received.

First, the encouraging news from India's social experiment with female leadership. Duflo and Topalova found that communities with women as pradhans had larger quantities of key public services overall. Nor was quality sacrificed for quantity—facilities in the women-led villages were of at least as high quality on average as in the communities with traditional male leadership. The greatest improvement was in drinking water, the public amenity found to be most valued by women in earlier research (PDF)—with 30 percent more taps and hand pumps in the women-pradhan villages. So while the female pradhans were working for the general good, they were working particularly hard to provide the services valued by their fellow women. They were also less corrupt—villagers with female-headed councils were 25 percent less likely to report having to pay bribes to access basic services like getting ration cards or receiving medical attention.

Now, the bad news. India's female pradhans were remarkably unappreciated for their efforts. Despite the objective upgrades in village amenities, both men and women living in villages headed by women expressed lower satisfaction with public services. This was true even for water—the level of dissatisfaction was 13 percent higher in women-led communities. In fact, there was even greater dissatisfaction about health facilities, a public service not even controlled by the local village council!

Why this disconnect between the performance and recognition of female leaders? Duflo and Topalova are engaged in further research to try to figure this out. They may wish to consult with Heidi Roizen, a hard-charging Silicon Valley venture capitalist and the subject of a Harvard Business School case study on business networking. How was Ms. Roizen perceived by students who read of her assertive style in the case? It depends whether she was presented as a man or as a woman. In an experiment on gender perceptions, psychologists Cameron Anderson and Francis Flynn gave one group of MBA students the original Heidi Roizen case for later in-class discussion, while the other half received a copy that was identical in every way, except that "Heidi" became "Howard."

In a study currently under review, Anderson and Flynn report that while both Howard and Heidi were rated as equally competent (they were the same person, after all), students described the female version of the character as overly aggressive, and were much less likely to want to work with or hire her. So the decisive, assertive traits that are often valued in leaders are received very differently when observed in women than when seen in men. Howard was a go-getter. Heidi was unlikably power-hungry.

In repeated polls, potential voters similarly find Hillary Clinton extremely competent yet not particularly likable. On Slate's "XX Factor," there's been lots of back and forth (scroll down and start with the entry "Bitches and Polls") about how these marks relate to Clinton's gender. If the experiences of India's female pradhans are any indication, even if Americans are better off after another Clinton administration, they won't line up to thank Hillary. And she may still find herself looking for a new job in 2012. When the women pradhans that came to power under the 1991 law had to compete with male candidates after their first terms in office, almost none were voted in for a second term. But there is some preliminary evidence (PDF) that the success of India's first wave of female pradhans is starting to change attitudes, perhaps bringing India one step closer to gender-neutral village politics. If Hillary wins the 2008 election but turns out to be a one-term president, she too could be consoled, perhaps, by the possibility that she's making a first landing for gender-neutral presidential politics so the women who come after her won't have to.