Saturday roundup (brought to you by Exhaustion)

Because if I were less exhausted, I would be cleaning.

I wouldn't know what to say to people who have lost so much.

As North Korea missile explainers go, this is a very good one. And here's a good one on "gay" wedding cakes.

Just another way a country's xenophobia ultimately just fucks it over. Conversely, as I noted earlier this week,

In 1 para, what Makes America Great...

...volunteer co-organizer & child of Vietnamese immigrants herself: “We learn about cultures through foods and I really want to help our new Syrian immigrants integrate into Phoenix and make it a stronger, richer city.” https://t.co/F8QnjPy5yT

— 🙀 (@rgbrb) November 26, 2017

The tax bill is, needless to say, horrendous.

Until now, your income that paid for public schools (via state &local taxes) wasn’t taxed by the federal government. GOP bill ends that. Instead, they’re now creating a tax break for *private* school tuition.

— Ben Wikler (@benwikler) December 2, 2017

The story of this Afghan filmmaker gives me life.

Rosa Brooks speaks for so many of us about why we let things go at the time.

They were so common they were forgettable. Inappropriate comments and the occasional drunken assault? They were only what every woman expects to encounter in the workplace.

You don’t get a special “survivor” merit badge when you’ve only gone through what every woman goes through, do you?

and

There’s a continuum of crappy male behavior, and it runs from the merely obnoxious and offensive all the way through to the clearly criminal... But none of it’s okay, and at every point along that spectrum from merely offensive to actually criminal, crappy male behavior is part of what pushes women out of the national security workplace.

This this this this:

“Women are taught to question our realities when we are young. ‘He was only trying to be nice. He's just awkward. You're too uptight.’ We take on that instruction so studiously that we learn to do the work of inflicting doubt on ourselves.” https://t.co/OnIS0bd9Yk

— Stacey E. Singleton (@staceyNYCDC) November 25, 2017

The solution to eliminating sexual harassment is not to lock up women, but to hire and elect them. And ffs, listen to them.

I covered the campaign last year. Over and over men insinuated that women's analysis of HRC's candidacy were "biased," or "subjective," or "opinion."

When women wrote about Hillary, it was a "feminist take." When men wrote about Hillary, it was "the truth."

— Charlotte Alter (@CharlotteAlter) November 29, 2017

And--this has been said but it cannot be said enough: this wave of accountability and reform must reach beyond white collar workspaces. All women in all workplaces must be free of harassment and assault.

This Veritas thing is amazing in its ineptitude. It's almost satire.

Also deserving of satire: the Times domesticated-nazi profile.

This is how you profile a questionable character (in this case, Jill Stein).

Well, that's creepy.

Getting more people to eat less meat is more effective (at mitigating climate change and saving animals) than getting fewer people to eat none.

Kids often have an intuitive sense that something's not quite right about meat. My stylist was just telling me that her young daughter is turning away from it and will say things like, 'poor chicken!' See also, this awesome kid.

Children are incredibly intuitive. We should listen to them more oftenpic.twitter.com/MkC9txcy2e

— Jona Weinhofen Ⓥ (@jonaweinhofen) November 25, 2017

Moving on to Large Adult children... it's amazing how absurd and silly the first children are.

This is a spring-2016 interview that I only recently came across; contrast what we see now with the graciousness here:

In some ways, when you struggle for a while, and you’ve had the ability of being an ordinary person and you’ve gone shopping, changed diapers and tried to figure out how to pay the bills and so forth, so that you’re not some overnight success. Then handling some of these issues ends up being easier because you have a better sense of perspective. You don’t sense somehow that this is because I’m just so special, or because I’m so much smarter than that other person. Because in fact you’ve known those other people who are talented and smart and capable. In some ways you got a break, you were lucky. And that, for me at least keeps me grounded because it reminds me that, you know, for all the blessings and privileges and responsibilities that I’ve gotten, I’m just representing a huge cross section of people who are talented and capable and supported me getting to where I came from.

Take Gail Collins' quiz.

Carolyn Hax rightly appraises this characterization as genius. I've been there.

I seem to be trapped in a producer role for an audience that doesn’t care but won’t leave the theater either.

Yep, this is how I feel about xmas music.