The tension and banter on the Fox News morning show always seemed to be weirdly authentic—until now.
Dissension in the ranks has always been a secret recipe of Fox News, a key to the network’s watchability: Beneath the “Fair and Balanced” sheen and the conservative point of view, the network has been surprisingly tolerant of infighting on the air. You don’t generally hear the anchors on MSNBC calling each other out. Yet on Fox, this happens with some regularity.
.. These episodes are not mistakes or accidents; Ailes has always understood, perhaps better than most, that conflict is entertainment.
.. Ailes called her a “man hater” who needed to learn “to get along with the boys.”
.. It was 2012, and Kilmeade had made a low-grade sexist crack about the introduction of women into a military band: “Women are everywhere. We’re letting them play golf and tennis now, it’s out of control.”
Carlson, ever smiling, rose from the couch and walked off the set. “You know what?” she said. “You know what? You read the headlines, since men are so great.” The camera followed her for a few feet, capturing Kilmeade smiling, the crew laughing, and Carlson continuing to wear a painted grin.
Nettie Stevens discovered XY sex chromosomes. She didn’t get credit because she had two X’s.
Wilson still believed environmental factors played a role in determining sex. Stevens said it was purely the chromosomes. Neither view could be confirmed absolutely at the time of the discovery.
.. It’s a classic case of the “Matilda effect,” a term named after the abolitionist Matilda Gage. The effect is the phenomenon that women’s accomplishments tend to be co-opted, outright stolen, or overshadowed by those of male peers. Stevens is far from the only woman scientist to have this happen to her: Rosalind Franklin, whose work was crucial to the discovery of DNA, got similarly sidelined later in the 20th century.
How Falling Behind the Joneses Fueled the Rise of Trump
The median new house in the U.S. is now 50 percent larger than it was in 1980, even though the median income has grown only slightly in real terms. Houses are growing faster than incomes because of a process I call “expenditure cascades.”
.. A family at the median income level would reasonably aspire to send its children to schools of at least average quality. But to do that, it would have to buy or rent a house near the median of its city’s housing price distribution. And that’s become significantly harder to do.
.. “the inflation-adjusted cost of the average wedding in the U.S. was $31,000 in 2015, up from about $10,000 in 1980.”
.. Growing income inequality in the U.S. has meant that as those at the top are able bid up the price of valued goods like housing and access to good schools, those in lower groups have struggled to maintain their positions.
.. A September 2014 Demos study found that median white family wealth is $134,000. Among whites in the working class, however — the bottom 32.1 percent — the average net worth is $0.
.. For some of these men, there is a less talked-about sense of status displacement that stems from the surge of women, including wives, girlfriends and daughters, into the work force. This has served to focus attention on the erosion of the traditional male self-image as provider and protector.
.. Trump’s supporters — more than any other candidate’s — believe that society would benefit if “women adhere to traditional gender roles.”
.. For working class whites, Vandello wrote, the loss of their privileged status and loss of manufacturing jobs go to the
core of what it means to be a man in our culture — being the protector and provider.
.. the practice among liberal interest groups of
highlighting group differences, cultures, etc. has contributed to Trump’s appeal, especially given that white men are often blamed for being oppressive or the source of many of the issues being protested.
.. Of course respect for women and racial minorities isnot political correctness — it is just decency. But well-known excesses in the policing of speech have handed Trump a gift: he can rationalize despicable attitudes as honest reactions to political correctness. In this way he multiplies the effectiveness of his taboo-shattering campaign. Supporters don’t perceive him as merely publicizing their ugly private beliefs; they perceive him as speaking truth to power.
Books as Bombs: Why the women’s movement needed “The Feminine Mystique.”
She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. She was white and well educated; she had a financially dependable husband and a big house in a crime-free neighborhood; and she enjoyed the leisure to write, or do anything else she liked. The only expectations were that she manage the care of her healthy and well-adjusted children and be responsible for the domestic needs of her husband. By any material measure, and relative to the aspirations of most people, she was one of the most privileged human beings on the planet.
.. The Feminine Mystique” was a book that helped to change the world, or at least the way a lot of people saw the world, and it almost certainly could not have done so if Friedan had been completely open about her political background and motivations. She may have exaggerated her originality as well, but she succeeded where no other feminist writer had.
.. The number of women enrolled in college nearly doubled in that decade, for example, and the employment rate for women rose four times as fast as it did for men.
.. Friedan quoted the president of Mills College citing with approval the remark “Women should be educated so that they can argue with their husbands.”
.. Male-only institutions, from Harvard and Yale to the National Press Club, where invited female reporters had to sit in the balcony and were not allowed to ask questions during speeches, were prevalent.
.. The popular understanding was that the only reason for a marriageable woman to take a job was to find a husband.
.. If that was why women worked, it made perfect economic sense: because of the disparity in pay and career opportunity between men and women, virtually the only way a woman could improve her economic situation was to marry.
.. When sixteen million veterans, ninety-eight per cent of whom were men, came home, in 1945, two predictable things happened: the proportion of men in the workforce increased, as men returned to (or were given) jobs that had been done by women during the war; and there was a big spike in the birth rate. But what should have been a correction became a trend.
.. “The Second Sex” does not seem to have spoken to American women in the personal way that Friedan’s book did.
.. The fundamental argument of “The Feminine Mystique,” and of the second-wave feminism to which it gave rise, is that there is no such thing as women’s essential nature.
.. Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” was published in 1961. It has been credited with, in the long run, changing urban-renewal policies in the United States; in the short run, it helped bring an end to the career of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses.
.. In all these cases, it can be said (and in most of them it has been said) that the changes the books are associated with would have happened anyway. As Coontz puts it, about Friedan, “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of their time.” But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind