January 6, 2017

“I asked white people a book they read that made them first learn about racism. And so many people said fiction or books of poetry.” The day after the election, someone asked Eve Ewing if she had anything to say about it. Just as she was about to say no, she realized that wasn’t true at all. / HTML Giant

A rejected manuscript on science and philosophy ran as a paid advertisement in the Times last week, raising questions both about the state of academic publishing but also science reporting. / undark.org

“I ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance for people,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it to sound bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch.” An economic term for why men don’t take more service-sector jobs: “retrospective wait unemployment,” where guys sit around looking for the job they used to have. / The Upshot

Meet Katherine Johnson, one of three African American women “computers” who helped send John Glenn into space. / Popular Mechanics

“All I could think about was how wrong and upsetting and sad it was. I just had to use it to fuel my drive to make sure I honored this woman [in a way] that hopefully will make her proud.” Janelle Monáe, of the newly released Hidden Figures, on the pain of depicting a woman who had to sue for the right to attend college. The woman she portrayed, Mary Jackson, went on to become NASA’s first African-American female engineer. / Entertainment Weekly