Not Laughing

Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. 

-- attributed to Margaret Atwood

In this week's sift:

• Rich People Don't Have Jobs. I don't care how hard you work or how productive you are; if you don't need the money you're making, you don't have a job, you have a hobby.
• The Sifted Bookshelf: "Delirium" by Nancy Cohen. A feminist historian reviews the last half century and determines that all the conventional wisdom about the culture wars is wrong.
• Girls Heart Republicans and other short notes. Herman Cain is just the guy to explain the gender gap. Mitch McConnell puts words in the mouth of his female senators. How "low-effort thought" leads to conservative views. Free Republic revolts against Romney. Four crazy legislators. Orrin Hatch "despises" the Tea Party. Abstinence-only sex education still doesn't work. And a grandmother recalls her abortion, while hoping that her granddaughters will have the same rights she did.
• Last week's most popular post.Seven Issues the Election Should Be About got 611 views. The most-clicked link went to Nicholas Kristof's "Learning to Respect Religion".
• Follow-ups on past articles. Now that ALEC is drawing public attention, more and more corporations are dropping out. I love whoever noticed the resemblance between John Derbyshire's racist rant and this clip from Twelve Angry Men. And Derbyshire causes Slate's William Saletan to make the roughly the same observation about racial profiling that George Zimmerman evoked in me: "drawing inferences about anyone based on race, sex, religion, or any other crude category is a lousy substitute for inspecting or interacting with that individual.  If you tell people to protect themselves by avoiding interaction with the person they’re judging, you’re not just rationalizing racism. You’re perpetuating it."
• This week's challenge. I know it seems pointless to contribute money to political campaigns when you read about Super-PACs raising hundreds of millions, but it's important that ordinary people throw the stubborn ounces of their weight onto the scale. Decide how much you can contribute this year and start looking for candidates who deserve more than just your vote.