the hubris and heavy-handedness that helped get us into this mess in the first place
. ........... The sight of Afghan political and military leaders escaping in American planes is a betrayal, plentiful proof of whose bidding they had been doing all along. But not everyone caught a cargo plane out of town. The former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the longtime leader and chairman of Afghanistan’s National Reconciliation Council, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, have been sitting down with Taliban leaders in an attempt to form a new and more inclusive government............ In a news conference last week, the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid promised to protect the rights of women, minorities and the independent press — albeit in the context of Shariah. “There is a huge difference between us now and 20 years ago,” he pledged. ........In 2001 the Taliban’s leader and co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar attempted to surrender to Mr. Karzai’s forces and demobilize, in exchange for allowing the Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to live in dignity in Kandahar.
The U.S. defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, refused to accept that deal. At the insistence of Americans, the Taliban were bombed and locked up at Guantánamo Bay. It’s hard not to see today’s debacle as a repudiation of the hubris of that era. ............. The Biden administration has frozen the roughly $7 billion that belongs to Afghanistan that sits in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The International Monetary Fund has refused to deliver funds that Afghanistan was due to receive to help the country weather Covid. Without international assistance, the salaries of low-level Afghan government workers — teachers, doctors and sanitation crews — will almost certainly not be paid. If the government runs out of funds, the price of food could skyrocket. Unrest will spread. ...........The Taliban are listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. Treasury and as a “threat to international peace and security” by the United Nations Security Council.
...... This is the long game: to leverage money and international recognition to incentivize the Taliban to establish the most inclusive and moderate government possible. ......... For the past 20 years, the United States and its NATO allies have micromanaged the government in Kabul, engineering support for pro-Western policies and leaders. On the sidelines, Afghanistan’s neighbors have backed their own factions. Iran has armed and trained Hazaras, a Shiite minority, who fought in Syria. Pakistan has supported the Afghan Taliban, who have traditionally been Pashtun. ..............In Afghanistan, there are no good options.
........ The occupation of Afghanistan was based on a flawed logic that people were either with us or against us, that the Islamic world was a swamp that we had to drain and that we had the moral authority and the power to remake an entire region to prevent another terrorist attack on our soil. In the process of all that draining and remaking, we created a whole crop of other terrorists and upended the lives of tens of millions of innocent people.
Yes, Marketing Is Still Sexist Despite women’s progress in many parts of society, advertisements still consistently cast women as secondary........
mansplaining, a term that refers to a man explaining things to a woman, unsolicited, and whether he is an expert on the topic or not
. .......... Over and over again, “We noticed how female customers were perceived in ways that were at best inaccurate and at worst diminishing and dismissive,” they wrote.......... Male characters also outnumbered female characters two-to-one and had twice as much screen time and speaking time. ........ Age-defying has turned into “ageless” and dieting has coded itself as “wellness.” ........ “sneaky sexism.” ....... the perception that women’s aim and ambition in life starts and stops with achieving male approval and patronage. ......... So for kids, marketing to girls is all about being kind, being sweet, being affectionate, looking after things. For young women, it’s all about your appearance, making sure you’re always as perfect as you possibly can be in order to seek and achieve male approval, and then of course you become the perfect mom, delighted and endlessly happy to have this baby. .......... Butwhen you actually talk to women, their aspirations are not, in fact, to be beautiful through the male lens; it’s to feel comfortable in their own skin
. It isn’t to be dependent; it’s to maintain their independence, particularly their financial independence. .......... Brands need to stop telling women how to be, and start being in service to them. ........ Once you’ve seen Frida Mom, a lot of the stuff that comes out of traditional brands starts to look really strange, really twisted and untrue. ......... Historically there weren’t channels available to women to talk to each other about how objectionable they found this stuff. Women were sort of forced to consume it. They didn’t really know whether everybody else was thinking, “wait a minute, this seems pretty punishing.”But now social media, for all of its faults, has also been a brilliant way for women to discuss what they find really objectionable about brands, and it’s been galvanizing.
........... young women are consuming something like 10,000 messages a day from brands. Think about the collective impact that can have when the same things are being said over and over again, which are usually: Be thinner, be blonder, be more feminine, be hairless, be whiter. ................. Women have enough real problems that need to be solved by brands and products, you don’t need to make them up. ......... If they decide to target the male audience instead of doling out the usual slice-of-life formula that women get in marketing, out comes John Legend and hilarious jokes and brilliant high production values as if with men you have to be properly creative. ......... 20 percent of commercials depict a woman with her head thrown back laughing. .... and never being funny. Only 3 percent of ads are women being funny themselves. ............... the older woman completely disappears. Only one in 10 ads that feature a woman features a woman who’s over 50. ......... older women are fed up with looking at marketing that just features women under 30. ........... if you only watched ads, you’d think older women just have bladder issues.......... It’s not just older women who get overlooked. It’s women of color. Poor women. Massive swaths that just don’t get seen because of this narrow way that marketing has set its dials, which is around this good, white, slim, young, pleasing archetype. .......... The way that women can influence marketing is spending with the brands that are doing the right thing by women and refusing to buy from brands that are very evidently trying to keep women in their place, and/or the place they think women should be.
No Loans, No Credit, No Funding: Why More Women Aren’t Millionaires Rachel Rodgers, the author of “We Should All Be Millionaires,” blames systemic sexism and racism — and internalized beliefs — for holding women back. ....... Eighty-five percent of the world’s millionaires are men ....... One in seven white families in the U.S. have a net worth of $1 million or more, but only one in 50 Black families do. ........ between systemic racism and sexism and the internalized limiting beliefs many women of color have from operating within those systems ........ the workplace, where Black women make 62 cents for every dollar earned by a white man doing the same work ......... how
most financial advice excludes people of color
........... I started my business in 2010 with a $300 investment, which was everything in my savings account. Eleven years later, it is a $10 million business. I wasn’t broke by choice, I had to really figure it out. ........... The advice most get-rich books often share would not work for Black women or people of color. They say “invest in real estate.” ......... First, sexism and racism. Second, internalizing that sexism and racism. Part of why that happens is because it’s reinforced everywhere we look. It’s in marketing emails, Instagram feeds, commercials. It’s in movies. We’re told success and wealth are not for women of color. .......... The million dollar value is being crystal clear on answers to questions like: How am I adding value to this company? Be so clear about how you add value whether you’re in a corporate career or as an entrepreneur, so that you can charge accordingly. Then you’re back in your power instead of waiting for someone else to promote you. ........... Decades-old research finds that successful people are surrounded by other successful people. They have a powerful network. ......... I had to really create my network. ......... There’s this idea that women should cut out coupons and skip the lattes to build wealth. But I don’t believe in shaming people for wanting pleasure. Pleasure is something that we all deserve. I am about balance, I save and I invest. We need to change the narrative: Men invest, take risks and buy the suit, the watch, the yacht, the car to express their power. Women are called frivolous and are told to stop spending money on lipsticks and shoes. ............... I wanted a bigger house with a backyard for my kids. I also wanted to support my mother. I wanted to send my kids to extracurricular activities. Take vacations. Get a new car. I did the math on that, and I realized I needed to make three times what I was making. It took me two or three years from when I imagined that to when I had all of the things on that list.
A Triumphant Debut Novel on Black History and Coming of Age in the South W.E.B. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember. ........ the founding father of modern Black America ........ In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. .......... the double consciousness of Black Americans that Du Bois so famously wrote about ........ “Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground.” ........ how one navigates gender in a Black body ..... an urban place known only as “the City” and Chicasetta, a rural town where she is known and loved and free. ..........
Class and colorism
are constant tensions in the novel, and Jeffers expertly renders a world of elite African Americans. ........... Ailey comes to see how her grandmother cloaks cruelty behind her Edith Wharton-style manners and mannerisms: “On Christmas morning, Nana arrived at our house by taxi looking fresh and blameless, wearing the Chanel suit she’d bought in Paris on a family trip overseas, back when my father and uncle were teenagers. She handed me her purse and a platter of Creole cookies, then plucked at the tips of her gloves, like an actress in an old movie, and criticized my outfit.” ............ Even W.E.B. Du Bois himself makes an appearance. “Love Songs” reminded me, at times, of a line from Beyoncé’s song “Black Parade”: “Ancestors on the wall. Let the ghosts chitchat.” .......... How does a young Black woman craft a life that is joyful and whole against the backdrop of the American South, where the land is a minefield of treasures and tragedy? ....... “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.” “Love Songs” is so satisfying because it generously feeds a hunger that you might not have even realized you had....... in the very best novels, every important detail is so lovingly attended to that the novelist’s intention is as invisible and powerful as gravity. “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” is such a world. Long after you’ve read the last line, the universe of Ailey Pearl Garfield continues to spin.
The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist. The elevation of Greg Epstein, author of “Good Without God,” reflects a broader trend of young people who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated. ........ The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman. ......... “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Mr. Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God. ....... To Mr. Epstein’s fellow campus chaplains, at least, the notion of being led by an atheist is not as counterintuitive as it might sound; his election was unanimous. ......... Greg is known for wanting to keep lines of communication open between different faiths.” ........ a Harvard Crimson survey of the class of 2019 found that those students were two times more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic than 18-year-olds in the general population. .......... “We don’t look to a god for answers,” Mr. Epstein said. “We are each other’s answers.” ........... Mr. Epstein’s work includes hosting dinners for undergraduates where conversation goes deep: Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? ......... Mr. Epstein frequently meets individually with students who are struggling with issues both personal and theological, counseling them on managing anxiety about summer jobs, family feuds, the pressures of social media and the turbulence endemic to college life.......... Some of the students drawn to Mr. Epstein’s secular community are religious refugees, people raised in observant households who arrive at college seeking spiritual meaning in a less rigid form. ......... When she turned 19, she applied to Harvard in secret and fled the community............ she still yearned to find people wrestling with issues deeper than academic achievement ........ a secular rabbi ........ you can have the value-add religion has provided for centuries, which is that it’s there when things seem chaotic.” ..........
Nonreligiosity is on the rise far beyond the confines of Harvard; it is the fastest growing religious preference in the country
........... More than 20 percent of the country identifies as atheist, agnostic or nonreligious — called the “nones” — including four in 10 millennials. ....... “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic, that’s a powerful thing,” said A.J. Kumar ......... “Greg was the first choice of a committee that was made up of a Lutheran, a Christian Scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Bahá’í,” said the Rev. Kathleen Reed, a Lutheran chaplain who chaired the nominating committee. “We’re presenting to the university a vision of how the world could work when diverse traditions focus on how to be good humans and neighbors.” ........... Ms. Nickerson grew up in a working-class Catholic household where she struggled to connect with rituals like Mass. But during her freshman year at Harvard, she found herself capable of long, lively conversations with her devout grandmother. Ms. Nickerson realized that her involvement with Harvard humanism had given her the language to understand her grandmother’s theology. ............ “We understood the idea of surrender in a similar way even though one of those explanations came with God and the other didn’t,” Ms. Nickerson said. “I find I’m more fluid in my spiritual conversations now.”Conservative Reforms Worked Wonders in Blue Wisconsin Walker was the governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019. ......... Before Act 10, most school district employees in the state paid little or nothing for their health insurance and retirement. Now they pay something, although still far less than the average citizen in Wisconsin. Previously, most school districts were required to provide health insurance from a plan affiliated with the teachers’ union. Now they can bid out, and districts have saved millions of dollars — money that can go into the classroom. ........ Wisconsin continues to have one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation, and our ACT scores continue to be some of the highest among states where every student takes the exam. ....... the effects of our reforms that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay. The paper shows that “the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort) and improved student achievement.” ............ If Chicago were in Wisconsin, school officials would determine whether their school system was open and under what circumstances — not the union bosses.
In William Maxwell’s Fiction, a Vivid, Varied Tableau of Midwestern Life Though his novels and short stories — published over six decades, beginning in 1934 — are set in an older, more decorous America, he grapples with themes that feel shockingly contemporary. .......... a sober understanding of the consequences of gossip. The members of the bridge club, cataloging sins and casting stones, practice a local, predigital version of cancel culture. They deal in shame, singeing the reputations of people who, while perhaps not entirely blameless, are nowhere near as bad or as brazen as the scuttlebutt might suggest. .......... Starting his career under the influence of Virginia Woolf, he was a resolutely modern writer, attuned to the fine vibrations of individual and interpersonal psychology against the backdrop of everyday life. ......... “If you were to draw a diagonal line down the state of Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis,” Maxwell wrote, “the halfway point would be somewhere in Logan County. The county seat is Lincoln, which prides itself on being the only place named for the Great Emancipator before he became president.” ........ The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. They can tell you nothing.” ........ that lost civilization, when houseguests measured their visits in weeks, not days, when the Civil War was still a living memory for many adults, when Chatauqua Season was a fixture of the calendar and when the towns threaded along the railroad lines of America’s farming regions were prosperous and dynamic places. ........ The fiction grew more factual. Draperville dropped its pseudonym. Maxwell’s father, brother, mother and younger self appeared as themselves. .........
Gossip is living history. History is petrified gossip.
........ Everyone in this world is to some degree a child, because everyone has to infer the rules in the middle of the game. And the rules are always changing. ....... The French are all inscrutable, but each one is baffling in a particular way, depending on gender, class, generation and temperament. They can be warm and confiding one moment, aloof and even hostile the next. Barbara and Harold are always trying to figure out what they might have done to provoke affection or give offense. ............. Motives may not be fully rational, and reasons may not be completely knowable, but even extreme or capricious varieties of human behavior have observable patterns and causes. ........ Everything happens for so many different reasons! ........ You don’t have to read between the lines to find inklings of sectional conflict, racial inequality, class stratification and cultural resentment in these pages. All of that is right there, in front of the narrator’s eye. What holds it all together isn’t his omniscience so much as his curiosity, his historian’s hunger to figure out why what happened happened. ............ Much as the setting may be an older, more decorous America, its people and the problems they face can feel almostshockingly contemporary
. .......... The hectic plot, laid out over the course of a single day, spins toward the arrival of Jefferson Carter, a Black writer and traveling lecturer. His presence brings out the worst in everyone, proceeding through a welter of microaggressions toward a climactic shouting match that is both hilarious and sad. “If they weren’t all mad,” Jefferson thinks as the evening unravels, “then their conduct was inexcusable.” ...........The racial neurosis of white people — not fragility so much as a defensive, anxious need to brush aside problems and talk about something else
— is something Maxwell returns to, notably in “The Chateau,” in which his alter ego, Harold Rhodes, challengesthe reflexive racism of some French acquaintances
. .............. “They are a wonderful people,” he says of Black Americans. “They have the virtues — the sensibility, the patience, the emotional richness — we lack. And if the distinction between the two races becomes blurred, as it has in Martinique, and they become one race, then America will be saved.” ........ a chronicle of Black upward mobility and white civic benevolence set at a time of discrimination, violence and segregation. ........ What goes on between the two young men is both obvious and mysterious, and Maxwell’s treatment of it shows a sophistication and sensitivity that 21st-century writers might envy and learn from. ......... The most timely of Maxwell’s books at the moment is surely “They Came Like Swallows,” one of a handful of enduring literary works about the influenza epidemic of 1918-20. Maxwell was 10 when his mother, Blossom, died of the flu, a trauma that he reconstructed 18 years later with devastating precision. The disease creeps into the story via newspaper headlines and local gossip, a tiny detail among the routines of Midwestern, middle-class family life. .......... And then she’s gone, leaving the world in a state of permanent imbalance. ............... The manly, capable, wounded older brother — sometimes missing an arm rather than a leg — is a recurring character, often contrasted with a more introverted, psychologically fragile younger sibling. The stoical widower, the satellite relatives, the shadowy ancestors passing silent judgment on the present — these are fixtures of Maxwell’s imagined world, plucked from the stream of his own experience. ............. He calls people mostly by their own names and presents their situations with what seems like minimal embellishment. “So Long, See You Tomorrow” tells the story of a homicide sparked by sexual jealousy, but its achievement is to render the crime in as unsensational a way as possible, to emphasize its profound ordinariness.......... His own gaze is characteristically backward, to the early days of the automobile, college life before the higher-ed boom, France before American travelers spoiled it. .......... Midwestern though he may have been by birth and temperament, Maxwell was by choice and professional commitment a New Yorker. A “New Yorker” New Yorker, employed at that magazine through much of its midcentury golden age. ....He’s the watchful, sensitive second child; the diffident husband; the attentive father; the awkward but devoted friend. The reliable narrator.
How to Stay Flexible While Traveling
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