The Periodical Table

Meet Janie Fredell. From the ultra-conservative and ultra-religious community of Colorado Springs, she arrived at Harvard University wide-eyed. "From the start," the New York Times Sunday Magazine reports, "she was awed by the diversity of the place, by the intensity, by the constant buzz of ideas." Except for one: sex.

Like all Harvard freshmen, she was educated in safe-sex practices, including familiarizing herself with a pamphlet called "Empowering You" that taught newbies to"put the condom on before the penis touches the vagina, mouth, or anus . . . Use a new condom if you want to have sex again or if you want to have a different type of sex."

Janie was having none of it. She founded an abstinence group called True Love Revolution and landed on the cover of the Times magazine - because the media loves abstinence stories and celibacy pledges and extrapolating large themes from the actions of small number of sheltered 18-year-olds, and this one filled this year's quota nicely.

Is abstinence really something to be lauded, though? And does it, um, "work"? The facts are not so clear. "In a follow-up study to a 1995 national survey of close to 12,000 students in grades 7 through 12, two sociologists, Peter Bearman at Columbia University and Hannah Bruckner at Yale, found that while those who took virginity pledges preserved their technical virginity about 18 months longer than teenagers who didn't pledge, they were six times more likely to engage in oral sex than virgins who hadn't taken a pledge," the Times reports. "They were also much less likely to use condoms during their first sexual experience or to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Disease rates between those who pledged and those who didn't were actually similar."

The truth is that our little Janie seems more ignorant of sex - forgivable given her young age - than on the cutting edge of a new movement we've been hearing about for years. "Whenever sexual urges struck, she told me, she was able to manage them by going on a long run and assumed that everyone should be able to do the same. 'The biological drive can be overcome,' she said. 'It's not like it reaches a peak and you have to go out and have sex.'"

We beg to differ, Janie. You'll learn.

Subprime Suspect
Rev. Jeremiah Wright's jeremiads against White America's greed are certainly true, but Black America is getting there. The Wall Street executive who has walked away with the biggest payout for driving an investment house to the brink of disaster is Stanley O'Neal, who took home $162 million when he was forced out last fall, the New Yorker reports, thus capping off a remarkable story of the rise of the first African-American to head up a major Wall Street firm.

O'Neal's grandfather was born into slavery. O'Neal golfed - posting his scores on the Web - while Merrill Lynch was crumbling. Ain't that America.

Out Of The Litter Box
Who says there's no use for newspapers anymore? A local graffiti artist has moved on from building walls to "a new type of canvas: USA Today's weather maps, Wall Street Journal stock tables, and New York Times combat photographs," Editor & Publisher reports.

"With color pencils, markers, and ink, Rodriguez will draw his graffiti name, 'Tsel,' across a USA Today weather map, creating a piece that looks as if the landscape of the entire nation had been tagged - which can be seen as sly commentary on what the newspaper itself is doing with its rainbow of temperature shades."

Rodriguez was born in Mexico, raised in Uptown, and educated at the American Academy of Art Chicago (Fine Art & Graphic Design), the University of Illinois-Chicago (Art History), and Columbia College (Interactive Multimedia),

His portfolio includes a tagged RedEye cover of Saddam Hussein, as well as photographs from the Tribune. He tells E&P that he gets home delivery of the Sun-Times, and that newspapers are 'like a capsule for art,' with the date carefully recorded and photographers credited."

Too bad he doesn't work one; he's the kind of talent the business needs.

FukuBall
"Japan loves baseball - but increasingly the American sort," the Economist reports.

Maybe that's because we keep stealing their best players.

"Japan risks becoming a mere farm-team and fan base for America, frets Masaru Ikei, a professor at Keio University and author of Baseball and the Japanese People.

In fact, Major League Baseball is expanding its interest not just in Japan, but globally. "American clubs played two exhibition games in China for the first time this month, and MLB officials are eyeing India and South Africa as promising new markets," the Economist notes. "The MLB has foreign offices in Tokyo, Sydney and London, and last year it opened one in Beijing. It is a disappointment for Japan, explains Mr. Ikei. Japanese teams once harboured the ideal of turning the 'World Series' from an American affair into a truly international one. 'That is a long ways off,' he says."