Charlie LeDuff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former correspondent for the New York Times and author, most recently, of the swaggery book "US Guys." At its best, his writing has the blunt rugged-individualist machismo of a Hemingway or a Mailer. At its worst, his writing has the blunt rugged-individualist machismo of a Hemingway or a Mailer. The testosterone oozes from every other word as his prose swings from insightful and lovely to self-parody, often on the same page. As one review of "US Guys" in the Times put it: "He is like Borat without the laughs."

In a new essay for Men's Vogue he writes about being a stay-at-home dad. And in true LeDuff fashion, he careens from interesting and thoughtful to completely obnoxious and hackneyed—often on the same page! (Also hang on a sec, Men's Vogue? Was there no room in Esquire, Details, GQ, Playboy or, uh, Radar this month?) Anyway, here's his latest missive from the front. Let's take a look shall we?:

 

Anyway, this document introduces us to Dr. A. Brothers, who appears to be the first modern antecedent to Drs. Spock, Spears and Brazelton. An article called HOW TO CARE FOR BABIES (be warned, that's a pdf file) appeared on July 3, 1894. It describes Brothers's first lecture, held among the tenements of the Lower East Side, "to give the mothers of that neighborhood a general course of instruction upon the care and feeding of children during the warm weather, and particularly on the uses of sterilized milk and barley water, as introduced by Nathan Straus":