Music
The Seekers.
Judy Collins.
Po' Ramblin' Boys.
Robert Earl Keen.
Avishai Cohen.
Obituary
Gloria Steinem...This is sort of ridiculous, but it needs to be out there.
Gloria Steinem was one of the greatest activists of all time. Leftist? Sure. Live with men she refused to marry, for the express purpose of rerouting their incomes into her campaigns? Absolutely. (After retirement age she did finally marry her current boyfriend.) In bitter disagreement with a majority of the women she claimed to represent? On many things, probably enough to be a majority of the time. But she was dang good at what she did...including the use of heyoka hijinks ("If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a saaacrament!") to distract attention from valid nonpartisan goals like getting banks to treat all their customers with, at least, equal venality.
Everyone should have her collection of short nonfiction, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, for (if nothing else) her guide for what activists should be doing in aid for whatever we're active in aid of.
Hypersensitive male readers may of course feel bashed in that book, even hypocritically bashed in view of the fact that Steinem did not, in fact, hate men. Most heterosexual women do in fact support social changes to benefit women, and most of us recruit men to support the same things we do, and after all most men don't want to be an oppressor class if women will help them not to be one, but it is doubtful whether any other feminist ever drew or ever will draw so much support from men. (Which goes some distance toward explaining why Steinem made all that noise about abortion rather than safe sex, even knowing that a solid majority of women favor safe sex as the only safe and effective means of birth control.)
So it seems only fair to those male readers to tell them what I remember best about Outrageous Acts: Toward the end of that book is reprinted an interview with a pornographist and his girlfriend, or star actress, or whatever. They were yanking her chain. They referred, fairly explicitly, to a practice that's not uncommon among women who feel liberated about enjoying sex. There is no hint that Steinem, who edited a magazine that loudly called for women to be liberated in this particular way, realized what they had in mind.
Politics
Unfortunately this article does not include evidence that Kamala Harris actually uttered the title phrase...
Privacy
Yay! Ron!
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