feminism – The News Desk

25Dec

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World

Musk Says ‘Make More Italians’

William McGurn is a member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board and writes the weekly "Main Street" column for the Journal each Tuesday. Previously he served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush.Mr. McGurn has served as chief editorial writer for The Wall Street Journal in New York. He spent more than a decade overseas -- in Brussels for The Wall Street Journal/Europe and in Hong Kong with both the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review. And in the mid-1990s, he was Washington Bureau Chief for National Review.Bill is author of a book on Hong Kong ("Perfidious Albion") and a monograph on terrorism ("Terrorist or Freedom Fighter"). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, holds a BA in philosophy from Notre Dame and an MS in Communicatio...

Jezebel and the Question of Women’s Anger

Earlier this year, Ben Smith, the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News and a onetime New York Times columnist, published a book, titled “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral.” It explores the creation of, and the competition between, well-funded news-and-culture Web sites—BuzzFeed News and the Huffington Post among them—that began in the early two-thousands, just as the professional blogosphere was getting going. One day after the book’s May 2nd release, the Times published a Smith-authored guest essay, titled “We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started with Jezebel.”Jezebel is an influential feminist Web site that I created in 2007. Smith had devoted an entire chapter of “Traffic” to the story of the site’s creation, stumbles...

Why Barbie Must Be Punished

My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure them, or else kidnapping them—jamming them into the deepest reaches of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special. Most girls I know liked to mess their Barbies up; and when it comes to child’s play, crisis is hardly unusual. It’s a way to make sense of the thrills and terrors of autonomy, the problem of other people’s desires, the brute force of parental disapproval. But there was something about Barbie that especially demanded crisis...