1. Several interesting pieces have recently appeared about women who were first or early path-breakers in some field.
- This one talks about a book about Cuban flora created by Anne Wollstonecraft, and lost from our attention for 190 years. The drawings of the plants are beautiful.
- The recent Kentucky Derby makes an article about early female jockeys particularly timely.
I have never understood why jockeys should be so overwhelmingly male. Young girls like riding a lot (so there's no pipeline problem) and women are, on average, smaller than men, which would be a useful characteristic in a jockey. The reasons that have been proposed for the scarcity of women in the profession range from an argument that being a jockey is more dangerous for women for physical reasons to the impact of a widespread misogynistic culture in the field.
- An interview with Dorothy Butler Gilliam, the first black woman who worked as a reporter at Washington Post, makes for interesting reading. Gilliam has written a book about her career as a journalist.
- Finally, this piece is about an early French woman in cinema, Alice Guy Blaché:
Until recently, Guy Blaché was mostly relegated to the footnotes: credited regularly as the first female filmmaker (when credited at all), but overlooked in terms of her impact as an artist and an innovator. And yet starting in 1896, she made around 1,000 films, constantly pushing visual and thematic boundaries. She experimented with early synchronized sound, color and special effects. She explored gender, race and class. And she inspired future giants like Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Agnès Varda.
2. Why would a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy join the Alt Right? A long piece gives one family's story about the trip there and back. It describes the specific events and mental states which caused a young boy to seek solace online, and it also describes the powerful effect of online hate sites. Ignoring those sites will happen at our own peril.
3. Speaking of online hate, two Guardian articles have recently addressed online misogyny and how its effects are beginning to leak into the meatspace. Mary Beard is, of course, correct about the ultimate reason for the ways misogyny is expressed in the social media: It is intended to silence women in public spaces.
4. This is a fun quiz to take about evolutionary psychology of the weird kind, the kind I call Evolutionary Psychology (EP) to differentiate it from the more neutral general kind (ep). And this is a fun take on the invisibility of women running for the Democratic nomination in the presidential primaries.