1. The White House Easter Egg Roll event is really complicated. Who knew it could be that complicated?
I disagree, however, on the person to be viewed as responsible for the success or failure of the event: the president's wife. The "job" of the First Lady is a sticky relic from the traditional unequal marriage where the wife is expected to be her husband's employee, without any formal payment scheme, but still full responsibility for stuff like organizing an Easter Egg Roll. Because it is for the children and children are the women's job?
It's Donald Trump's job. If he can't do it, he can hire someone else to do it for him.
2. An interesting take on the metamorphosis of one Donald Trump from a chubby pupa to something with wings. Presidential wings now that he has dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever! So presidential. Though I suspect he is a horsefly.
Anyway, Jonathan Chait argues that Trump has managed to shed everything that distinguished him from your usual Republican politician, except for his "ethnonationalist themes."* That's courtesy-speech for white male supremacy, my friends, but with the adjustments it's that only for the top white guys.
3. A few articles remind us of the relative dearth of women in literature and the cinema. Worth pointing out when the usual conservative argument about women and the STEM fields is that women's interests and talents lie elsewhere. In literature and the arts, for example.
The reasons for the under-representation of women are complicated and deserve a separate post**.
But the metaphor I think might apply here is that for some the trip to the top involves elevators all the way through the 200 floors, for others it means having to take the stairs between the fiftieth and the ninetieth floor, and yet for others it means having to use ladders on the outside of the building. People learn about those differences in the relevant industries, so whether some are just not interested in making the climb to begin with is a moot point, because the climb is not the same for all equally talented folks.
4. Our Dear Leader has privately signed
a bill on Thursday that allows states to withhold federal money from organizations that provide abortion services, including Planned Parenthood, a group frequently targeted by Republicans.
Why a private signing? President Trump adores public hullabaloo, after all. Perhaps making it possible for red states to deprive poor women of reproductive health care isn't something that he wants to be remembered for. But the Republicans-in-power love the idea of killing Planned Parenthood dead. Dead as a doornail, even though Planned Parenthood says that only three percent of its services are abortion-related. Still, who cares about poor women and their needs.
--------
* Rick Perlstein makes a somewhat different argument which is also worth reading.
** A very long post, actually, but I'd like to say a few words here about the second link in part 3 which asks why women so rarely seem to have written the "big books" of popular history.
Clears throat.
You cannot write a famous book if your book doesn't become famous. You cannot be a path-breaker if nobody follows your path. So the first problem here is the fact that audiences and reviewers do not regard women writing some gloriously simple and thought-provoking book about, say, wars as inherently equally credible as a man writing such a book.
Still, there are women who have succeeded in that task of making big books, and even more can be found if we acknowledge the fact that readers have certain pre-existing biases about which topics are important. Deaths? Very important, especially if violent. Births? Women's stuff, not terribly important.
I may have exaggerated a little there. But not much.
Then there's the expected reactions. Mary Beard found out about them when she joined the online conversations and when all the woman-hating trolls found her. Because sweeping and simplifying arguments are much easier to attack than detailed and carefully documented and nuanced arguments, women, who by now expect harsher criticism, are probably more likely to settle with the latter ones. But, alas, that's not what "big books" are all about.