This blackballing in the legal community is a big thing. My aunt got a very prestigious job right out of law school. All was going well until she got pregnant with her first kid, whereupon they fired her and told her that if she sued them for it, no law firm would ever hire her again. 

Yeah, generally this is not the best-written Jez post. The last line about how Mila’s probably going to exhaust herself also seems kind of off.

There’s one giant black pickup in my ruralish area that has a huge confederate flag (we’re not even in the South! Nowhere close!) and a slew of the kinds of bumper stickers you mention. We call it Donald Truck.

I live in a neighborhood that’s pretty much 50/50 Democrat/Republican, and am sooo grateful that on my street all the neighbors seem to have an implicit deal only to put up lawn signs for local and state races, not president. It really helps keep the mood neighborly compared to other streets in the neighborhood that…

Yes, I’m very disconcerted by the it-only-counts-as-her-winning-if-she’s perfect-and-he’s-horrible framing the media is going for.

My thinking on this is the taboo on wanting to take away people’s guns is approaching a similar territory to what happened with the word socialism. For so many years the Right screamed “you can’t say that, that’s socialism!” to shoot down all sorts of sane, modest liberal proposals so much that eventually the word…

Agreed, duvet covers are so annoying to put on.

I love the European duvet-in-a-duvet-cover thing because the duvet cover acts like an envelope of top sheets around the duvet, so the top sheet can’t get smushed at the bottom of the bed. If, however, the duvet was used by the host family without a duvet cover, then ew and I’d agree with your girlfriend.

How many of your friends have had kids yet? I never did any sort of “diet” before I gave birth, nor did any other thin-ish people I knew, but when I was trying to lose baby weight, well, I didn’t use the word “diet” but I tracked my caloric intake and restricted my carbs, which is dieting even if it won’t call itself…

The “natural” diapers that do work and are actually absorbent, IMHO, are the Seventh Generation ones. However, they are expensive. Honest Company has always struck me as peddling this lie that products can be affordable AND effective AND “all natural.” The reality is no product’s ever going to do better than 2 out of…

I agree with you and also think this is another reason he would be a foreign policy disaster— this description of Hillary also applies to Angela Merkel, IMF head Christine Lagarde, and any of the women likely to succeed Ban Ki-Moon as UN Secretary-General. The world has a long way to go to achieve gender equity, but…

Yes! The idea that just by having intellectual interests a person (especially a woman!) has claimed to be better than other people is one of the worst parts of anti-intellectualism, and it’s so prevalent in American culture. My MIL very much has this attitude, and after dealing with her for decades I think her…

I sometimes fly EasyJet but never RyanAir, and here is why: a European friend of mine has a little brother who is a huge fuckup. The brother is super irresponsible, has terrible decision-making skills, etc. A few years ago this kid decided he wanted to be an airline pilot and went through a flight training program,…

Also, internal flights in the US are way more expensive than flights of a comparable distance within Europe or Asia.

Yes, US airports suck on the whole. Notable exception: the Burlington, Vermont airport has tons of character. There are old-timey New England rocking chairs, a yoga room, an outlet of a tasty local creperie, a green roof, and art exhibits.

Yes, for real. Isn’t that crazy??? Under previous German law saying no wasn’t enough (even if you were drugged)—you had to fight back physically and since she didn’t it wasn’t considered rape. Then on top of that, because she’s a reality star, she got all the slut-shaming and plastic-surgery-shaming and…

Totally agree — the “it isn’t rape if the victim is trashy-looking” attitude in the German public’s reaction to her has been super disturbing.

A really major, important part of this story is missing here, which is that this law is at least as much in response to the Gina-Lisa Lohfink rape case as the Cologne NYE assaults. The Lohfink case (her rapists made a video in which she clears tells them no and stop, then not only were they acquitted but she was fined…

Ugh, this dredges up painful memories— I was also a scholarship kid at a fancy private school and there was this one other kid who would complain about the scholarship kids getting a “free ride” when he’d “earned” his place at the school. This made me feel ashamed on a certain level but at the same time, even as an…

I love when Abigail Fisher says, “There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT....” Um, maybe those were academically talented kids who weren’t in “all the activities” because they were poorer than you and had to do things like work after…