Headlines: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth

I've always been a big fan of The Kansas City Star, which I think of as my hometown newspaper and read regularly whenever I'm in KC. Here's a round-up of my favorite headlines from the past few days.

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Sunday, Matt Campbell reported that Kansas City is turning a portion of its biosolids (read: human poo) into fertilizer for trees and biofuel crops. According to Campbell's article, the city is currently turning 8,000 pounds of dry biosolids into fertilizer each year and plans on expanding the program in the future. The system helps the city save money by reducing the amount of waste the Water Department has to burn, by providing cheaper saplings for planting in public parks, and by contributing income to the city budget in the form of biofuel sales.

Not only is this process amazing, but it's especially impressive in Kansas City, a place that has, until recently, never seemed particularly interested in going green. But then again, large-scale composting has come to KC, so maybe we're not as environmentally backwards as we Midwesterners sometimes seem to be.

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More bad news: Today, Emily Van Zandt and Chad Day (who, ironically, are recent college grads employed as summer interns at the Star) revealed that college grads may have diplomas, but they're still missing their paychecks. Van Zandt and Day profile four local college graduates who can't find work, despite their degrees in civil engineering, music education, communications, and Latin American studies.

It's a good article, but not a terribly surprising one since I'm also struggling to find my first post-graduation job. This piece did make me wonder, though, why such articles get published and read at all. Each new issue of every paper in the country is running articles about the state of the economy and how high the unemployment rate has soared, yet nothing visibly changes day to day; there's nothing new to make this "news" exigent. So why are newspapers giving this space, and why do I find myself reading these pieces again and again?

Well, to be honest, they help me feel a little better when I don't get called back for an interview. So there.

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Mary McNamara's piece on the shrewish business woman type in American comedies first appeared in The Los Angeles Times but was reprinted in today's Star. McNamara uses Katherine Heigl's role in The Ugly Truth as an example of how most comedic movies depict independent women: as high-strung, neurotic, cold, and bitchy, at least until the manly co-star proves the woman vulnerable and persuades her into leave her career for love. McNamara argues that actresses like Heigl (and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston) should avoid these Taming of the Shrew-style roles in movies and stick to the richer, more realistic, and less misogynistic roles found on television shows like In Treatment or The Closer.

While I don't watch enough TV to know whether or not I share McNamara's preference for women on the small screen, I do know that she's dead-on when it comes to romcoms like The Devil Wears Prada. Plots like these are why I want to hurl a copy of A Room of One's Own at my TV screen every time a Jennifer Aniston movie comes on late-night cable.