She’s a blond bombshell with an attitude, and as Elaine so aptly put it, “We hate her, don’t we?” Nothing unifies forces like an unwelcome predator — and with flawless skin and hair, no less.

Speaking of predators, Ally gets her claws into an 18-year-old hunk this episode. One court appearance, two elevator encounters and one innocent kiss later, he joins the list of Ally’s could-have-beens.

The mature, insightful, eerily Ally-like guy seems to be destiny’s match for her (I mean, come on, they had the same dream, for God’s sake). But alas, Ally does not go the way of so many presidents before her, and resists the urge to surrender to a May-December roll in the hay. Good girl.

What do you think of the supercom bative, tough-as-nails Nel Porter? Do you think Ally lost an opportunity to be with her true match, or was it just a silly one-night fling? Share your thoughts on the season premiere in our message board.

Monday is marked by a harmonious trine aspect between Saturn in Gemini and Neptune in Aquarius. Saturn’s natural action is to structure while Neptune’s natural action is to dissolve; Saturn keeps a stiff upper lip while Neptune enjoys a good cry; Saturn does while Neptune dreams. However, these two planets can interact well with each other, particularly under a trine or sextile, because the two zodiacal signs which are ruled by these planets can be friends with each other: Capricorn (ruled by Saturn) and Pisces (ruled by Neptune.)

Both Earthy Capricorn and Watery Pisces are considered yin (feminine) in nature; both signs are “deep” and tend toward introversion and mood swings, and the song “Come to Me My Melancholy Baby” could have been written with either of these signs in mind. At best, action- oriented Saturn/Capricorn can benefit from the unabashed sensitivity and imagination which is the domain of communication-oriented Neptune/Pisces, while Neptune/Pisces can lean on the purposeful, unrelenting strength which belongs to Saturn/Capricorn. Saturn/Capricorn can (gently!) push Neptune/Pisces to turn their dreams into reality, while Neptune/Pisces has the ability to turn Saturn/Capricorn’s stone-cold reality into something resembling Wonderland or Oz.

On Monday, with the beneficial trine aspect exact between Saturn and Neptune, Neptune will don a sturdy pair of hiking boots in order to climb Saturn’s mountain, while Saturn will invest in good scuba equipment in order to fathom Neptune’s oceanic depths. A balance could be struck between the humdrum and the hallucinatory. Concentration should be strong and will especially favor those individuals who meditate or engage in behind-the-scene investigations.

The First Quarter Moon is exact on Wednesday, 11:20 p.m. EDT. At this phase of the lunar cycle, energy levels should be strong and rising, with new projects well underway. With the combination of Sun in Cancer and Moon, ruler of Cancer, in Libra, emotional detachment is emphasized; Cancer doesn’t know the meaning of detachment so there may well be some conflict.

On Thursday Mercury turns Direct in its ruling sign of Gemini. Various delays, second thoughts and communication difficulties experienced over the past three weeks will begin to resolve themselves, but be patient; Mercury does not pass over the degree at which it turned Retrograde (the final degree of Gemini) until July 12. Individuals with Sun, Moon, or Ascendant in Gemini will especially feel a breath of fresh air, followed by those individuals with prominent Virgo (also ruled by the planet Mercury) in their charts.

June should go out with a bang due to the final planetary aspect of the month: the challenging square between Venus in Taurus and Uranus in Aquarius, exact on Saturday. The nature of these two planets, both placed in their ruling signs, are at odds with each other anyway; the square aspect will only increase the natural conflict. Venus (and Taurus) is highly sensual and by dint of its possessiveness, thrives on conventional, one-on-one love relationships;

Uranus (and Aquarius) is highly intellectual and by dint of its free spiritedness, thrives on unconventional relationships which may or may not include sex. Neither Venus/Taurus or Uranus/Aquarius are known to compromise, especially as far as relating is concerned; both are quite capable of laying down the law to others, with Taurus demanding fealty and Aquarius demanding freedom.

Especially since the Moon will be transiting through intense Scorpio during the Venus/Uranus square, plenty of thunder and lightening will occur in relationships, manifesting in dramatic sudden attractions and equally dramatic sudden break-ups. It will be difficult if not impossible to love or even like with a clear head while this unstable aspect is in effect; you may not know what you really want, but you will find it difficult if not impossible to admit that you are confused. If you are a Fixed sign (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio or Aquarius), you will be doubly challenged under this aspect, but no sign will be entirely off the hook.

While increased production and lower food prices are not a major concern for many people in industrial countries, Mitra pointed out that a different situation exists in India. Since average families spend about 50 percent of their income on food, even marginal increases in food prices have enormous effects on consumers’ abilities to spend money on other important items such as education, health care and better housing.

“Assuming that farmers in developing countries cannot make the decisions whether to adopt bio tech crops or not is a patronizing position,” Mitra concluded. “And it is important that decision makers in countries in Europe and the U.S. consider the impact that their choices concerning biotechnology have on developing countries.”

The final speaker, Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, addressed possible alternatives to the precautionary principle. Smith emphasized the importance of having an unbiased risk assessment process. While it is important to consider the potential risk of introducing a new technology or product that turns out to be dangerous (a type 1 error), the precautionary principle might cause type 2 errors, when a rejected technology or product turns out to be safe.

In his presentation Smith cautioned that the precautionary principle could overemphasize the risk of the new while rejecting potentially important new technologies. He stressed the critical need for balancing risk assessment, especially in government agencies where the mission is often focused on only one side of the risk equation. “Science is not a perfect tool, but it is the best one we have to evaluate risk,” said Smith, who pointed out that collecting and monitoring new data is essential to developing better knowledge. The danger of moving away from a science-based to a politically based risk assessment could lead to arbitrary restriction of new technologies.

International Consumers for Civil Society, an international umbrella organization of 22 nonprofit groups from 10 countries, held a briefing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 27 with speakers from India, the United Kingdom and the United States. International moves to restrict agricultural biotechnology was the focus as speakers noted that the current debate about the risk of new technologies and innovations has to be balanced against the risk of stagnation and stifling new technology.

Keynote speaker pointed to the potential benefits of agricultural biotechnology. Smith, as chairman of the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Basic Research, published the report “Seeds of Opportunity,” based on the findings of several hearings his committee held last year.

He emphasized his support for a science-based evaluation of this new technology and warned against fear-mongering campaigns against biotechnology in the United States and Europe. He said these campaigns could deprive consumers in industrial and developing countries of this new technology’s existing and potential benefits.

Julian Morris from the Institute of Economic Affairs in London presented the historic development of risk assessment and the precautionary principle. He pointed out that people are constantly faced with decision-making under uncertainty in their daily lives. In Morris’s view the incorporation of the precautionary principle would mean a move away from an earlier “trial-and-error” approach to a concept of “no-trials” by rejecting new developments when possible risks cannot be excluded.

Barun Mitra from the Liberty Institute in New Delhi, India, addressed how the use of the precautionary principle affected developing countries. He noted that for poor countries, balancing the potential risk from new technologies, such as modern agricultural biotechnology, with the real risks of stagnation and poverty is often a life-or-death situation. Mitra pointed to biotechnology opponents’ criticisms of food aid to cyclone victims in India, because it contained foods produced through modern biotechnology.

Ideally, you should divide laundry detail according to each person’s area of expertise. The person who realizes first that the laundry needs to be done is responsible for putting it in the washer. She who doesn’t want her spandex bras shrunk to Smurf-size proportions should carefully transfer clothes from washer to dryer. And he whose shirts must be folded with hospital corners had better be there the minute that dryer buzzes or it’ll be wrinkle city at work the next day.There are two reasons men end up doing laundry.

One is the sinister clothing imbalance of the sexes, which is illustrated by Jim, 33, and Sharon Beecher, 34, of Stamford, Conn. Like many people, Jim and Sharon determine that it’s time to do laundry when one of them is out of clean underwear. The catch? Sharon owns more underwear, so Jim always ends up doing the laundry. Confesses Sharon, “I don’t think he’s realized that I just buy a new pair whenever I run out.”

The other reason men become the specialists of the spin cycle is that we are the only ones qualified to do the job right. In other words, only a man can master the technique of extracting the last milliliter of detergent from the jug, vacuuming the lint trap, and high-tension folding using vice grips.

A profound shift in the basis of competition is occurring. Today, competitive advantage in many businesses lies in the ability to capture unique information about customers-information that is not accessible to other vendors. For example, airlines develop frequent-flyer profiles that are not accessible to other airlines. Banks use information about balances and individual funds flow to market various financial products to their customers. Even grocers create loyalty card programs in order to build and act on proprietary profiles of their customers.

In infomediated markets, infomediaries hold these customer profiles on behalf of the customer and, subject to the customer’s privacy preferences, make them available to appropriate vendors willing to pay to access them.

By helping consumers capture and leverage their own information profiles, infomediaries will upend conventional markets. Through the mechanism of their profiling and agency services, infomediaries will “announce” their clients’ purchase intent (like brokers issuing a “buy” order on behalf of a client) and then organize the bidding environments to ensure that appropriate vendors compete for the client’s business.

In contrast to today’s vendor-centric conventional markets, infomediated markets will shift advantage to consumers by:

* reducing consumers’ search costs;
* connecting consumers with the most relevant vendors in a timely fashion;
* extracting as much value for consumers as possible from vendors.

About the Authors

John Hagel III is a principal in McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office and leader of the firm’s Interactive Media Practice. Marc Singer is a principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, where he co-leads the firm’s Continuous Relationship Marketing Practice.

Markets in which power shifts to the consumer might be called “reverse markets”-these are markets in which customers seek out and extract value from vendors, rather than the other way around. In reverse markets, consumers can easily switch vendors-the new vendor can readily download the necessary information about the customer’s needs and preferences from the infomediary, without the customer’s providing it again. Consumers will also have much more information to evaluate the performance of specific vendors, data that will help overcome the moral hazard and information asymmetries that plague so many consumer markets today. The perceived risk of switching vendors will therefore decline.

Infomediaries will create mechanisms for consumers to aggregate purchases of replenishment products and solicit vendor bids for this business. What if, for example, the infomediary bundled the bulk of a family’s grocery purchases for a one-year purchase contract to be awarded to the lowest bidder? What if the infomediary bundled a family’s grocery purchases with those of 50 other families in the same town?

Today, vendors dedicate the vast bulk of consumer marketing expenditures (about 70 percent) to preemptively capturing the attention of the consumer in advance of the purchase. In reverse markets, customers will shun this kind of intrusive marketing. Successful marketers will learn how to list themselves effectively in search environments, how to engage the consumer at the time of purchase, and how to tailor products and services in ways that reduce incentives for switching to other vendors.

In the process of redefining marketing, reverse markets will also force vendors to rethink the role of brands and to redeploy marketing spending. This redeployment will have profound effects on a broad range of businesses that depend on advertising and promotion expenditures from product and service vendors, including television, radio, newspapers, and magazines, as well as sports franchises, retailers, and agents who represent celebrity talent.

Thalidomide may boost immunity to HIV in children. Researchers from the United States and South Africa recently completed a study of thalidomide treatment in HIV-infected infants and children. The drug was safe and did not affect virus levels, but did increase the frequency of specific anti-HIV killer T cells in 3 of 4 children tested. This is the first report of an oral drug that may enhance HIV-specific killer T cell function in infected children.

Weakened viruses generated for potential dengue fever vaccine. Dengue virus is an emerging pathogen in many regions of the world, including a current outbreak in Hawaii. In pursuit of a vaccine against dengue infection, NIAID researchers have produced several weakened strains of the virus. The so-called temperature-sensitive mutants cannot replicate effectively, and therefore may be useful as vaccines.

T cells fight HIV in many ways. Helper T cells that recognize a specific HIV protein known as Gag appear to fight HIV infection. But how they do so is largely unknown. Recently, scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School led a study of Gag-specific helper T cells taken from HIV-infected individuals. The researchers discovered that these T cells could recognize multiple regions of the Gag protein. The cells also appear to attack infected cells by releasing proteins that drill holes in their membranes. The research suggests HIV vaccines should include components that stimulate helper T cells and identifies a short protein fragment that might be used to accomplish this goal.

Bacterial vector induces HIV-specific antiviral immunity in mice. Researchers from the Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore have used a weakened form of an intestinal bacterium as part of a novel AIDS vaccine. The scientists added a gene for gp120, a major HIV surface protein, to weakened Shigella bacteria. When injected into mice, the modified bacteria effectively delivered the HIV gene to immune cells, inducing strong anti-HIV killer T cell responses. The research suggests that weakened bacteria can be used as safe and effective shuttles for DNA vaccines.

Tuberculosis helps HIV thrive. Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the most common opportunistic infections in people with HIV. Scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Case Western Reserve University recently studied how TB affects HIV replication in infected cells. Their research showed that viral production was higher in two types of immune cells, T cells and macrophages, when those cells were exposed to the inflammatory fluid from lungs infected with TB bacteria. The results explain how TB might accelerate HIV disease progression.

Finding the immune system’s “on” switch. Little is known about how specific immune cells are switched on when an infectious microbe invades the body. Many believe the innate immune defenses, which recognize general features of many microbes, play a key role. Scientists from Yale University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Osaka University in Japan recently studied molecules called toll-like receptors (TLR) of the innate immune system. The researchers found that these receptors play a critical role in activating certain T cells. Their studies suggest that different pathways of innate immunity can switch on different arms of the body’s specific immune responses.

Blood vessel walls help HIV survive in other cells. Endothelial cells, which line the inner walls of blood vessels and lymph nodes, can help other cells harbor HIV. Researchers from Pennsylvania State University recently identified a molecule, C/EBP?, that assists in the process. Endothelial cells interact with macrophages, specific immune cells that are early targets of HIV and long-term reservoirs of the virus. Those interactions activate C/EBP? in the macrophages, enhancing HIV replication. The study offers new insight into the complex interplay of multiple cells and factors involved in HIV infection.

Years later, after Anne has secured a hard-bought sense not of happiness but of contentment with her place in life and the fulfillment of her duties to friends and family, she continues to believe she would have been happier married to her young naval officer, but not at the expense of violating the forcefully expressed views of her godmother. How much more conventional can you get? How less free to follow your star?

It is preposterous to conclude that because Anne’s godmother gave her bad advice, Austen meant to call into question the entire traditional family and social structure, any more than we are to believe that because Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet is silly and superficial, her children should feel free to mock and disobey her.

No, there is another reason (besides, of course, Austen’s sharp eye and sense of fun) why Jane Austen’s heroines are presented with so many silly authority figures. In their quest for an adult romantic destiny, issuing in a fruitful, stable, and, sustaining married life, her heroines are confronted with the female, bourgeois, early nineteenth century equivalent of hardships to undergo and dragons to slay to grow in wisdom and virtue and prove their worthiness. When Jane Austen temporarily deprives her heroines of the men they love, she is not only engaging in a suspense-building device, but demonstrating her heroines’ worth, as they repent of bad choices and ill-chosen words, if need be, and commit themselves to better ones.

If this sounds almost as solemn and humorless as a feminist tract, we all know that Austen’s novels easily avoid the comparison. They are acutely witty, since Austen delights in the manifold foibles and interactions of human creatures. Yet she is not afraid to judge her characters in very clearly defined moral terms, even as she skewers them as comic objects of derision.

One of the most striking examples of Austen’s willingness to judge occurs during the excursion to Box Hill in Emma, where Emma becomes intoxicated by her own wit and the playful attentions of Frank Churchill, and directs a cuttingly funny remark at the garrulous and simpleminded but good-natured impoverished gentlewoman Miss Bates. Emma’s own properly formed conscience convicts her of insensitivity and impiety toward an elder, but she also suffers the privately expressed condemnation of a shocked and offended suitor, Mr. Knightley.

This scene marks the moral and educational turning point for Emma, as she faces the need to put aside childish things — her play-acting of the lady of the manor and regional matchmaker — and accept her real power to harm or help those around her. Only then, as a woman aware of responsibilities, consequences, and human limitations, can she qualify as a fit wife for Mr. Knightley. (Note, by the way, how many of Austen’s heroines grow up without a mother’s guidance, or hampered by a silly mother. They are left to look for role models among friends and relations who embody the best virtues of society. Only Anne Elliot, in Persuasion, seems to have no peer in judgment around her, though her godmother is, within the limitations of her worship of status, a good woman.)

The Box Hill episode is burned into my mind with special force because I first studied it in college when I and those around me were in much the same stage of development as Emma and Frank Churchill: vying for our places in a young, exuberant society, and intoxicated by the witty remarks that no sooner made their way to our brains than they were transmitted to our lips. Hurt feelings and misunderstandings were common, and so the real damage Emma did to Miss Bates — as real as the bullet that entered Prince Andre in War and Peace, though less fatal — was clear to me.

Unfortunately for the feminists, Jane Austen is neither a lightweight prisoner of her benighted times nor a deliciously devious mole bent on undermining her social system. She is a virtuoso novelist whose bedrock seriousness permits her to play entertainingly with the faults and foibles of those around her. The proof of her moral maturity is that she treats stupidity married with immorality (as in Lydia Bennet’s elopement with Whickam) very sharply, while stupidity married with generous good will receives the warm sunshine of good-humored ribbing from this worthy daughter of an Anglican clergyman.

This article orginally appeared in the Winter 2000 issue of The Women’s Quarterly.

So Woolf’s delight in Austen’s confident style and rancor-free mind is tempered by her feeling that, after all, there is something slight and unweighty about Austen’s work, so that her significance, though real, may owe much to her role as a Missing Link between Fanny Burney (a great early success story among female novelists in the generation before Austen’s, and still a good read) and, well, Woolf’s own more open, enlightened, liberated generation.

Alas, poor Jane gets it from both sides here, since the traditional manly man’s reaction to her novels also tends toward the “where’s the blood, where’s the action?” school. Even childbirth very definitely occurs off-stage in a Jane Austen novel. Recall also Elizabeth Bennet’s anxious nursing of her sister Jane’s common cold (though anxiety over fairly wimpy complaints can more easily be forgiven when we remember that there were no antibiotics to handle wimpy complaints that deteriorated into things like pneumonia). And then there is Louisa in Persuasion, whose entire personality is permanently altered by a fall she suffers while jumping down the steps at the seaside resort of Rye. She is stunned, perhaps by some sort of concussion, but by the time she fully recovers (after more anxious nursing by most of the females in the novel), she has become markedly more timid, easily startled by noise, and fond of quiet.

There is another more forgiving, more admiring strand of feminist reaction to Austen, which seizes on her sometimes cool, acerbic humor and ironic detachment from most of her characters as evidence that she was satirizing society and the social conventions of her day. To be sure, she was doing that, to some extent. But from what angle, and with what purpose, was she laughing at people like Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins, Sir William Elliot and his daughter Elizabeth, or the insufferable clerical couple in Emma?

Some revisionists would like to believe that Austen was in some sense “deconstructing” her society as busily as she was constructing her characters — that she allowed them to condemn not only themselves, but by extension the entire world to which even her heroes and heroines comfortably accommodate themselves. In this ingenious way feminists can snuggle up in an armchair with Emma or Pride and Prejudice while deploring almost every convention, value, or article of faith that Austen herself not only was reared in but also accepted as her own.

C. S. Lewis wrote an essay on Jane Austen in which he called her the daughter of Samuel Johnson, thinking of the clarity and sharp edges of the moral vision they both shared. The feminists have got some of the picture right — Jane is the antithesis of treacly nineteenth century sentimentalism and its romantic descendants. Yet this is not because she rejects the conventions of society.

In fact, she was reared in the last years of that eighteenth century Johnsonian society against which the Romantics rebelled. The Romantics were the great individualists of their day, the ones who argued against general laws from an egocentrically particular vantage point (“I must follow my star! I have a right to be happy!” — that kind of thing). Austen’s Anne Elliot, the most mature of all her heroines, did not believe she had a right to be happy either at someone else’s expense or at the expense of societal conventions, even though they doubtless seemed sturdier then than they do now. Anne wished very much to be happy — as who does not? — yet denied herself the right to do so even at the relatively small cost of her godmother’s disapproval of the dashing and impecunious yet respectable naval officer she loved.
…to be continued…

Jane Austen is one of those women from the past who has both been co-opted by feminists and patronized for her lack of geopolitical interest. Of course, her unmarried state is a hopeful sign to feminists, and the injection of at least a hint of lesbianism into an Austen movie was inevitable.

But the politicization of Jane Austen began much earlier, at the conclusion of the suffragette era and the beginning of modern feminism, with that pivotal figure in modern female thought, Virginia Woolf. Woolf faced the problem that feminist lovers of books always face with Jane Austen — she writes so well, and is so much fun to read, that some way must be found to “save” her for private reading and academic study even though her plot lines run to standard romantic boy-meets-girl, boy-leaves-girl, boy-gets-girl formulas. In other words, feminists must distinguish Jane Austen from her successors in the romantic fiction genre in order to justify the pleasant habit of reading her.

They face this same problem with the Bronte” sisters’ slightly later entries, notably Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These are much more broodingly “romantic” works, but all those smoldering passions and broken conventions — or conventions teetering on the brink of being broken, as in the almost successful attempt at a bigamous marriage by Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre — count as marks in the Bronte”s’ favor. This is because spontaneity and elemental passions and lack of self-control and epatering the bourgeoisie are modern virtues.

And one other thing counts in the Bronte”s’ favor: their selection of heroes or heroines precariously perched on the edges of middle-class respectability, and at times falling over the edge. Heathcliff, the foundling of obscure, possibly gypsy parentage, and the penniless orphan Jane Eyre (who tutors an illegitimate child of a French courtesan, no less, and fights off the mad mixed-blood Caribbean married to Mr. Rochester) are far removed from the more proper circles of Jane Austen’s Bennets, Woodhouses, and Elliots.

It is in her (let us admit it) delightfully written A Room of One’s Own that Woolf uses the Bronte”s and Jane Austen to develop a forthrightly feminist thesis: that historically, female social constraints and lack of financial independence and educational opportunities have prevented almost all gifted women throughout most of English history from competing on equal terms with men in literature. (Never mind that almost equally daunting drawbacks have prevented nearly all gifted males throughout most of history from making use of their talents as well. Misfortune is remarkably gender-blind.)

Virginia Woolf, like many non-religious authors of her day, valued the integrity of the written word with a religious fervor. She believed the novelist had a duty to subordinate his voice and concerns to the consistent development of his fictional characters. Woolf described Austen’s “miraculous” freedom from resentment and frustration in her sphere — “I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. … Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching.” Woolf concedes that this psychological balance permits Austen to approach a kind of creative perfection within the world of her novels.

But where Austen comes in for faint praise and even criticism is in that very acceptance of her limited experience. Not only did Austen have no opportunities to jaunt about Napoleonic Europe, sail the seven seas with her naval brother, or pursue parliamentary politics, she did not even betray a desire to do any of these things by covering any of these topics second-hand. Her heroines dispense baskets of food to the poor, but do not involve themselves in questions of land reform, the economic dislocations of the early Industrial Revolution, labor struggles or the extension of the suffrage.

Indeed, Austen’s lightness, good humor, and mental balance, her easy negotiation of the conventions of her social class, contribute to her technical success but also keep her from that creative dissatisfaction with her lot that might have moved her, in Woolf’s judgment, to reach out for a greater and larger world — pumping her brother, perhaps, for nautical recollections in sufficient detail to make them her own for literary purposes.
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