Saturday roundup

Shall we leave the red states to their own devices?

 

The traditional political process was imperfect but it worked.

 

The travel industry ought to be screaming.

 

Helene Cooper reports on a woman's presidential victory in Nigeria:

The men fell in line behind Mr. Weah and complained that the women supporting Mrs. Sirleaf were sexist. Given the choice between a soccer player with no credible college education and a Harvard-educated development expert, the top male presidential candidates who fell short of the runoff, with one exception, endorsed the soccer player.
In the meantime, Mr. Weah, honing a message explaining why he, and not Mrs. Sirleaf, should run Liberia, settled on an ''educated people failed'' theme.

But what the men who endorsed that strategy failed to realize was how much that very idea was angering the market women. Those women may not have been educated themselves, but they worked in the fields and the market stalls to send their children to school. Now the men were telling them that education wasn't important.

No woman is surprised that people are more difficult with women.

You can't fight against bodily autonomy and still claim feminism:

If you demand that every girl and woman who becomes pregnant bear a child no matter the consequences to herself, and if you call on the government to back that up through criminal law, there isn’t a lot left to the ideals of equality and self-determination that are fundamental to feminism. One sperm can derail a woman for life. The patriarchal religions that sustain the anti-abortion movement explicitly oppose those ideals and correctly recognize that reproductive rights are what make them possible.

The woman who frantically collected her intruding children out of the room during a Skype interview is not a nanny.

 

Sustainable seafood, to the extent there is such a thing, has to account for bycatch.

 

Unsurprisingly, restaurants are the enemy of weight loss. I'm not actively trying to lose weight, but I found myself overeating a lot when I was dating M. (I was also generally sick of going to restaurants).