Quick thoughts, cheap shots, bon mots…
In Darin Strauss’s review of Taylor Antrim’s The Headmaster Ritual, he compliments Antrim’s descriptiveness and excerpts these great phrases:
To students, "teachers’ first names sounded so strange, like passwords to a club"; a boy’s room is sloppy enough that DVDs glint "through strewn laundry like mica." When a wife dumps her academic husband, she leaves behind "bookshelves with their teeth knocked out."
The Economist reports on the uproar over Heathrow Airport, with these amusing quotes:
Heathrow-bashing has long been an English pastime, but it has gained a new shrillness of late. The Daily Telegraph preposterously claimed that using Heathrow was more stressful than being mugged at knifepoint. Ken Livingstone, London’s mayor, accused the airport of keeping people "as prisoner" in its "ghastly shopping mall".
John Andrew Holmes on honoring other people (via Tim O’Reilly‘s favorite quotes):
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.
The National Organization for Men on why the men/women pay gap is not about discrimination but about the division of labor once children arrive:
The road to high pay is a toll road. On average, men are more willing to pay the tolls of the more hazardous jobs (accounting for 94% of workplace deaths), to work on commissions, relocate overseas, travel overnight and travel weekends (approximately 90% of the most frequent flyers are men), work late nights and night shifts, work weekends, intensify their work commitment during child-raising years, work in engineering, computer sciences, technology and the hard sciences where the supply doesn’t match the demand, and do all of the twenty-five most important trade-offs that on average lead to men earning more.
Yes, but what causes this peculiar division of labour amongst men and women? Discrimination and outmoded gender stereotypes that inhibit women succeeding at work and men succeeding at being parents.
And that’s to say nothing of situations where women are simply paid less than men for doing a similar job, or where female-dominated industries like teaching, nursing and hospitality are undervalued (and underpaid).
Here’s a counterpoint to the cite from the National Organization for Men: the latest research about the asymmetry in women negotiating with men v. with women, reported in the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072900827_pf.html.
Bottom line, “men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice”.”
So not the complete answer, but a very interesting twist on why …
Speaking as one of those “less nice” women, I can attest to the fact that asking more can sometimes rub people the wrong way.
But I also think that a lot of women spend too much time worrying about whether other people are going to like them.
Gals, stop worrying. Do what you’re going to do and GET ON with your lives. And that includes asking for more.
Beautiful – I’ve got to join the NOM!