This week in the magazine, Jeffrey Toobin writes a Profile of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who even before her time on the Supreme Court played an important role in shaping the legal framework for women’s rights and gender discrimination. Here Toobin and Margaret Talbot talk with Amy Davidson about Ginsburg’s legacy and some of the current issues the Court is addressing. Also, fiction from a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.  Click-through to listen now: http://nyr.kr/15sjBe5

Ann Friedman on the quest to create a dating app that women will actually use: http://nyr.kr/ZJ4YU9

(Source: newyorker.com)

Watching the Oscars last night meant sitting through a series of crudely sexist antics led by a scrubby, self-pleased Seth MacFarlane. That would be tedious enough. But the evening’s misogyny involved a specific hostility to women in the workplace, which raises broader questions than whether the Academy can possibly get Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to host next year. It was unattractive, and sour, and started with a number called, “We Saw Your Boobs.”

Continue reading Amy Davidson on the 2013 Academy Awards: http://nyr.kr/V1roxn

Photograph by Mark Davis/WireImage/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)

In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, last December, there has been much public discussion about the necessity of greater vigilance regarding mental-health issues—about our ability to recognize red flags early and get potentially dangerous individuals into treatment. It’s a reassuring notion, and less divisive, certainly, than calls for greater gun control or for censoring video games. But, as the [Amy] Bishop story [which I recount in a piece the current issue of the magazine (“A Loaded Gun”)] makes clear, this kind of early-warning system is often difficult to institute in practice. Amy Bishop shot her own brother, after all. She punched a woman at a pancake restaurant. She stood accused of mailing a bomb to one of her supervisors at Harvard. Red flags don’t get much brighter than that. Yet nobody stepped in. Why not?

Continue reading Patrick Radden Keefe on gender-bias in the criminal-justice system: http://nyr.kr/YhD78p

When I was embedded at Google for a good part of more than two years reporting a book, I sat in quite a few meetings conducted by Marissa Mayer, the prominent executive who’s just announced that she’s leaving to become the C.E.O. of Yahoo. I was struck that she possessed a quality that’s been in short supply at Yahoo in recent years: clarity.

Ken Auletta on Marissa Mayer’s move to Yahoo, and why Silicon Valley still needs more female C.E.O.s: http://nyr.kr/MBA44T

Margaret Talbot with the case against single-sex classrooms: http://nyr.kr/Oa4TwA

What has changed since the nineties is the notion of who single-sex education is supposed to help most. In the nineties, it was girls. … But that did not turn out to be the long-term problem.

The modern house has been replaced by the contemporary social network, and the media coverage of Pinterest shows the persistence of the gendered domestic roles that [author Esther] McCoy satirized back in the nineteen-forties. After that opening conversation, she offers us a quick tour of the Blakeleys’ living room, a catalogue of what now read as pleasant modern clichés: ash plywood, a built-in settee, sliding glass doors, and a poured-concrete slab with radiant-floor heating. If the Tumblr Fuck Your Noguchi Coffee Table had existed in 1948, it would have taken the Blakeleys to task for their integrated media cabinet and their lab glass.

Pinterest: Fear of the “Female Ghetto”: http://nyr.kr/LiLpaY

Daily Comment

Earlier this month, Mitt Romney started wooing women voters with talk of jobs, not birth control and abortion. He’s onto something. The “war on women” rhetoric was starting to strain credulity a little. While the Republican-led attacks on contraception funding and access to abortion certainly amount to a rollback in reproductive rights, “war on women” is overheated: what we’ve been seeing is more than the “kerfuffle” Republican strategists want to demote it to, but less than what some Democrats have made it out to be.

Besides, it’s true that women do not vote like “some monolithic bloc,” as President Obama said at a recent press event, and that they don’t necessarily like to be told that they should. Opinion on social issues doesn’t shake out neatly along gender lines. Indeed, on abortion, there is virtually no gender divide: fifty-two per cent of women and fifty per cent of men think it should be legal in all or most circumstances; forty-two per cent of women and forty-four per cent of men think it should be illegal. (Gay marriage is another matter: fifty-three per cent of women support it, compared to forty per cent of men.) As a commenter on a conservative Christian blog noted recently, complaining about a map of the best states for women that used access to abortion as one of the criteria, “No thought was given to the fact that many women are not for and would not want easy access to abortion.” Education level turns out to be a more reliable predictor of attitude on abortion than gender, with college-educated Americans the most likely to say it should be legal in most cases.