Too often, we expect women in positions of power to suffer from imposter syndrome, writes Christina Cauterucci. Hillary Clinton doesn’t, and that throws our gender expectations for a loop: “Seeing a woman like Clinton buck those expectations and buoy enough self-confidence to consider herself right for the presidency is an affront to the status quo. It’s a threatening prospect for those accustomed to watching women credit others for their accomplishments and cede power to men.”
Bernie Sanders supporter Susan Sarandon recently told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes that she might not vote for Clinton over Trump, saying that a Trump presidency might “bring the revolution immediately.” Michelle Goldberg can’t believe her ears: “The cost of electing a Republican provocateur is human misery on an inconceivable scale, inflicted on people who lack Sarandon’s many resources.”
China has an uneasy relationship with e-sports (competitive video gaming), writes Marcella Szablewicz. While the e-sports industry has rapidly professionalized in the country, and Chinese gamers find success in international competitions, “China has not only led the charge against ‘Internet-addicted’ youth … but also heavily censors game content” the government considers undesirable. (World of Warcraft’s skeleton imagery, for example, is a problem.)
Evelyn Lamb read Andrew Hacker’s book calling for substantial changes in mathematics education and found it confounding. “I am a mathematician, thinking about math brings me great joy, and I want more people to have joyful experiences with mathematics. Of course I think many of Hacker’s conclusions are incorrect,” Lamb concedes. But her larger argument is familiar to any defender of the liberal arts: “Most troubling to me is the idea that mathematics is important only insofar as we use it in our careers, and therefore anyone whose job path doesn’t involve math shouldn’t have to take math classes beyond basic numeracy. Education isn’t valuable simply because we use it in our jobs.”
On the Atlantic’s website, historian Matt Delmont reassesses the history of busing in Boston, interviewing a longtime local school integration activist. Delmont asks why the received wisdom “busing failed in Boston in the seventies” has lodged in our historical memory.
“Agreeing that busing and school desegregation failed makes it possible to dismiss the educational goals that were a pillar of the civil-rights movement and to dismiss the constitutional promise of equality endorsed by Brown, though it was never fully realized,” Delmont writes. “This busing narrative is comforting because it authorizes people to accept the continuing racial and socioeconomic segregation of schools in the United States as inevitable and unchangeable.”
For fun: Put This On’s interview with L.L. Bean’s company archivist is pretty fun.
So many boots,
Rebecca
