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How much is it OK for a human to love a dog? Is it really necessary to know how to cook? Why do women want to have children?

Meghan Daum's new collection of essays considers those questions, among others — and also grapples with what it means to be part of Generation X.

"I guess technically we're middle aged, if you're in your mid-forties," she tells NPR's Arun Rath. "But that just doesn't sound right."

"It's almost like, are we in the twilight of youth? That sounds almost worse. That sounds not good."

She tells Rath about how much she didn't learn from almost dying, and how her mixed feelings about sentimentality tie the book's essays together.

Click the audio link above to hear their full conversation, including Daum reading an excerpt from her book.

Interview Highlights

On Generation X

In my view, our sensibilities are more closely aligned with the boomers than the millennials, a lot having to do with technology. We remember a time pre-digital era. We were sentient beings during that time. We were not using the Internet in junior high school. And we had junior high school and not middle school!

On sentimentality as the central theme

I started off thinking that really what linked these essay was sentimentality. I wrote a couple inspired by experience that I had had personally over the last couple years and then I started to think about what was theme, and the theme had to do with the way our culture is really wedded to certain ideas about taking meaning from experiences that might not necessarily be there. The idea that you have to be redeemed after some traumatic event or you have to learn a lesson or you have to come out a better person from a crisis.

More On Meghan Daum

Books

Searching For A Perfect Life 'In That House'

Book Reviews

Lust After 'That House' (And That One And That One)

On societal expectations around death and dying

In about an 18-month period my mother got sick and died, and then I had a freak illness less than a year later and almost died myself. And I found in both of those situations that there was this expectation to have a kind of transformative experience. We expect things of the dying that are really unreasonable. ... When I started to get better friends were saying, "Oh, you know, we were praying or we were thinking about this in a certain way and we want to know what you think about it now. We want to know, is there some secret out there?"

And all I could really say was, "You know, not really." Like, I'll probably go back to my shallow, whiny ways. And that's actually recovery, though, right? That actually is a success, I think: staying the same person, rather than becoming a different person, which is what they wanted.

It was as if they couldn't believe that I had actually recovered unless I was transformed in some way.

Read an excerpt of The Unspeakable

Meghan Daum

How much power should corporations wield in Washington? It's an enduring question — and now the Sunlight Foundation has devised a new way to gauge that power

The foundation took the 200 corporations most active in Washington, analyzed the years 2007-2012 and applied several metrics: what the companies got in federal contracts and other federal support, what they spent on lobbying, how much their executives and political action committees gave in campaign contributions.

Bill Allison, the Sunlight Foundation's editorial director, says that there aren't permanent majorities governing in Congress and the executive branch — "but there really are permanent interests in Washington," he says.

With some companies, a policy of giving big to political campaigns might seem pretty obvious; at other companies, it's less obvious. "But federal spending is a big part of their business model," Allison says.

He says the top 200 corporations accounted for nearly $6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions. Those same corporations benefited from more than $4 trillion in federal contracts and assistance.

Take defense contracts. This year alone, the Pentagon is budgeted to spend $163 billion on procurement and research and development. Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.

Finance is the other dominant corporate sector. Some of the country's biggest financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others — are the top recipients of federal aid, largely because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash.

Thousands Petition SEC To Disclose Corporate Political Spending

4 min 6 sec

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Last week Congress came back for its lame duck session, and the fundraising business resumed — after a short hiatus.

"We're just through an election season and everybody is probably sick to death of thinking about elections," Allison says. Still, he says, some corporate PACs are gearing up for prime time:

"A lot of times with these interests, they are less interested in an election than they are in governance, and what's happening on Capitol Hill."

And that's another metric in the analysis: How much campaign money went to incumbents?

Some corporate strategists are risk-averse. Honeywell International, for example, gave 88 percent of their contributions to incumbents.

A statement from Honeywell says that its PAC " supports those who support the policies that are most important to our business."

Politics

The Life Of A Lobbyist In A Do-Nothing Congress

All of this might imply that donors are the driving force on Capitol Hill, but David Primo, a professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester, doubts that.

"The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns," he says. "But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses, that if they don't change their policy or if they're not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them."

That doesn't make the process any more sparkling clean — but it does point the accusing finger in a different direction.

"By and large the political science research hasn't found that money in politics drives policy outcomes," Primo adds. "The research is more mixed on exactly what it is that money's doing."

It's a situation about as murky as Washington itself.

lobbying

Sunlight Foundation

campaign finance

Washington

Americans grow up knowing their colors are red, white and blue. It's right there in the flag, right there in the World Series bunting and on those floats every fourth of July.

So when did we become a nation of red states and blue states? And what do they mean when they say a state is turning purple?

Painting whole states with a broad brush bothers a lot of people, and if you're one of them you may want to blame the media. We've been using these designations rather vigorously for the last half-dozen election cycles or so as a quick way to describe the vote in given state in a given election, or its partisan tendencies over a longer period.

It got started on TV, the original electronic visual, when NBC, the first all-color network, unveiled an illuminated map — snazzy for its time — in 1976. John Chancellor was the NBC election night anchor who explained how states were going to be blue if they voted for incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, red if they voted for Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter.

That arrangement was consistent with the habit of many texts and reference books, which tended to use blue for Republicans in part because blue was the color of the Union in the Civil War. Blue is also typically associated with the more conservative parties in Europe and elsewhere.

As the other TV operations went to full color, they too added vivid maps to their election night extravaganzas. But they didn't agree on a color scheme, so viewers switching between channels might see Ronald Reagan's landslide turning the landscape blue on NBC and CBS but red on ABC.

YouTube

The confusion persisted until 2000, when the coloring of states for one party of the other dragged on well past election night. As people were more interested in the red-blue maps than ever, the need for consistency across media outlets became paramount. And as the conversation about the disputed election continued, referring to states that voted for George W. Bush as "red states" rather than "Republican states" (and those voting for Democrat Al Gore as "blue states") seemed increasingly natural.

And it never went away. Instead, it became a staple of political discourse, not just in the media but in academic circles and popular conversation as well.

By the next presidential election, the red-blue language was so common as to be a metaphor for partisanship. That provided a convenient target for the most memorable speech of that election cycle, the 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, delivered by a young senatorial candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama.

"The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states," he said. "Red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too — we worship an awesome God in the blue states and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the red states."

Of course, that did not stop "the pundits" or anyone else from using these catchy labels. If anything, the practice has become more universal.

Not a few Americans see this as a symptom of a real disease in the body politic, an imbalance in favor of conflict that makes compromise more difficult.

Painting whole states with an ideologically broad brush is also offensive to many. No liberal in Idaho needs to be told that state leans conservative, just as conservatives in Minnesota are fully aware theirs was the only state not tinted for Ronald Reagan in 1984.

But being on the minor-fraction side of the party balance does not make these citizens less Idahoan or less Minnesotan. On the contrary, they may be among the fiercest loyalists of either state.

#ColorFacts: A Weird Little Lesson In Rainbow Order hide caption

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No one thinks the red or blue designation makes a state politically single-minded. But the message sent by such media-driven characterizations is not without consequence.

Bill Bishop, the Texas-based writer who co-authored the influential book The Big Sort in 2004, says political affiliation is a powerful part of the allure certain communities have for Americans seeking a compatible home.

"All of this is a shorthand, right? So a 'blue community' is a shorthand not only for politics but for a way of life ..." says Bishop.

And for many people, that way of life includes a sorting out by political affinity.

"We thought at first that this was all lifestyle, but the more I talked to people, the more I talked to people who said it was a conscious decision to go to a Democratic area or a Republican area."

Which may mean the red and blue labels will be even harder for the media to resist using in the years ahead.

How much power should corporations wield in Washington? It's an enduring question — and now the Sunlight Foundation has devised a new way to gauge that power

The foundation took the 200 corporations most active in Washington, analyzed the years 2007-2012 and applied several metrics: what the companies got in federal contracts and other federal support, what they spent on lobbying, how much their executives and political action committees gave in campaign contributions.

Bill Allison, the Sunlight Foundation's editorial director, says that there aren't permanent majorities governing in Congress and the executive branch — "but there really are permanent interests in Washington," he says.

With some companies, a policy of giving big to political campaigns might seem pretty obvious; at other companies, it's less obvious. "But federal spending is a big part of their business model," Allison says.

He says the top 200 corporations accounted for nearly $6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions. Those same corporations benefited from more than $4 trillion in federal contracts and assistance.

Take defense contracts. This year alone, the Pentagon is budgeted to spend $163 billion on procurement and research and development. Military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.

Finance is the other dominant corporate sector. Some of the country's biggest financial institutions — Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others — are the top recipients of federal aid, largely because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash.

Thousands Petition SEC To Disclose Corporate Political Spending

4 min 6 sec

Add to Playlist

Download

Last week Congress came back for its lame duck session, and the fundraising business resumed — after a short hiatus.

"We're just through an election season and everybody is probably sick to death of thinking about elections," Allison says. Still, he says, some corporate PACs are gearing up for prime time:

"A lot of times with these interests, they are less interested in an election than they are in governance, and what's happening on Capitol Hill."

And that's another metric in the analysis: How much campaign money went to incumbents?

Some corporate strategists are risk-averse. Honeywell International, for example, gave 88 percent of their contributions to incumbents.

A statement from Honeywell says that its PAC " supports those who support the policies that are most important to our business."

Politics

The Life Of A Lobbyist In A Do-Nothing Congress

All of this might imply that donors are the driving force on Capitol Hill, but David Primo, a professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester, doubts that.

"The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns," he says. "But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses, that if they don't change their policy or if they're not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them."

That doesn't make the process any more sparkling clean — but it does point the accusing finger in a different direction.

"By and large the political science research hasn't found that money in politics drives policy outcomes," Primo adds. "The research is more mixed on exactly what it is that money's doing."

It's a situation about as murky as Washington itself.

lobbying

Sunlight Foundation

campaign finance

Washington