Let's consider what's not new in this election.There's a lot. The last five or six elections have been pushed along by trends that have been in place since the mid-1970s. Despite the extraordinary circumstances this year, the basic political contours of the country haven't changed (or haven't changed yet!).If anything, 2008 appears to be more an ...

While John McCain might have made the politically ill-advised move of voting against the equal pay bill, it’s nice to see he practices pay equality. Women in his office make $1.04 for ever $1 his male staffers make. And InstaPundit links to this blog post saying that Senate records show that women working on McCain’s Senate staff make more money ...

I haven’t posted yet on the Sarah Palin Show, mainly because it’s all just been too darn entertaining to stop snorting and say anything intelligent. Last week I persuaded a twentysomething family friend to tune into the Obama speech by telling her that political conventions were no different from reality TV. My young friend has been texting me ...

A guest post from Slate's and The Big Money's Jim Ledbetter: The Sarah Palin narrative is incomplete and will likely remain so even after her speech tonight. Nonetheless, I perceive a nagging gap between the way the media is so far discussing her candidacy and the way that polls indicate it is being received. Palin IS interesting to women ...

A guest post from Linda Hirshman, author of Get to Work: XX Factor is full of talk of how the Times just corrected its 2003 opt-out story about why women quit their jobs (it's the economy, stupid). Short version: Female factory workers' wages decline and they won't work for less. Then they cover their decision with talk of falling in love with ...

Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing ...

Rachael, All right, you caught me on my own overheated rhetoric (see what I get for posting at 6 p.m. on the Friday before a holiday weekend? I had a great time at Boston's beautiful fireworks, by the way—hope you had a fab weekend too!). No, I do not believe that being willing to perform abortions should be a requirement for getting and ...

As if Emily's article hadn't left me appalled enough about South Dakota's Orwellian new abortion ''disclosure'' law, I actually clicked over to read the 8th Circuit's appalling decision. Fortunately, no one else was in the office—everyone's sensibly headed out for the Fourth of July holiday—so they couldn't hear the astonished and foul language ...

In his ''Human Nature'' blog, Slate's Will Saletan rejoices over the recession's toll on the cosmetic surgery business and expresses horror at the idea that some suckers (social parasites?) still refinance their homes to get cosmetic surgery during economic downturns. Then these vain people justify their ill-gotten boobs and rhinoplasties on the ...

Melinda, I'm sorry your friend's son got tagged as a racist for supporting Hillary. But please: Let's not get it twisted.  My kids' school is almost a 50-50 split between black students (African-American, Haitians, Jamaicans, etc.) and white, with a smattering of Asians and Latinos, a good cultural diversity program and all the required ...