Ta-Nehisi Coates

[T]he report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower. The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination. 

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors -- even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics. 

"I think we were all just a little bit surprised at how powerful the results were -- that not only do the faculty in biology, chemistry and physics express these biases quite clearly, but the significance and strength of the results was really quite striking," said Jo Handelsman, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale.

He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his "rights" -- I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.

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There's a lot of people in the league who'd like to break the union. There a lot of people who feel like the officiating is on-field personality. They feel like it's a commodity. But more importantly, everything about the NFL now is inelastic for demand. There's nothing they can do right now to hurt the demand for the game. The bottom line is they don't care. Player safety doesn't matter in this case. Bring in the Division III officials - it doesn't matter. In the end you're still going to watch the game, we're going to all complain and moan and gripe but ... it doesn't matter. Go ahead gripe all they want. I'm going to rest. Let them eat cake.

I don't know any football fan who thinks the current NFL "product" is superior to last year. But collectively, we're consuming more of it. If you want the real refs back, the best thing you can do isn't to root for more errors. It's simply not to root at all. The loudest and clearest way to ask for a change is simply to change the channel.

He looked at the priest and shouted, "Every night priest five against one!"

"I was 24 when my son was born. People always say that kids get in the way, right? But actually it had the opposite effect on me. I feel like I could have spent my twenties doing all sorts of self-destructive things - that was my natural inclination - but having a kid suddenly makes that not OK.... The stakes of everything just went up. I think I'm the type of person where, for any reason, I only respond to pressure. That kid just so raised the pressure, for everything. ... So I started writing for the Washington Monthly, and the Monthly pays shit, everybody knows that, right? They were paying ten cents a word at this point. But because they have these big-shots writing for them, nobody ever calls for the check! But I would say, 'no, I need you to send me that check. Yeah, I know it's only $150, but I actually need that check, you really need to send that check.'"

I've been obsessed with this notion of what constitutes progress. I think on the Left there this notion that this happens then this happens then this happens. And maybe that's a reflection of how history is taught in high school. But if you look ,my favorite era th Civil War. There's a strong argument for African-Americans in the South that their labor situation did not change. And I think some historians would probably go so far as to argue that it was for the worst. But the fact is that before 1865 you could take somebody's kid and put them on the auction block, and after 1865 you couldn't. That's an actual thing.

Conservative anti-voter fraud fervor first arose around the same time as two turning points in American politics. The first was John F. Kennedy's narrow presidential win in 1960, which many Republicans attributed to voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. The second was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which, by banning discriminatory voting practices, stoked fear in some quarters about the rising power of black voters. During the run-up to the 1964 presidential election, the Republican National Committee launched Operation Eagle Eye, the nation's first large-scale anti-voter fraud campaign. 

As part of the program, the RNC recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to show up at polling places, mostly in inner cites, and challenge voters' eligibility using a host of tools and tactics, including cameras, two-way radios, and calls to Republican-friendly sheriffs. After this, anti-fraud campaigns became commonplace, but they could backfire, as the RNC learned in 1981. That year, the party hired a swashbuckling 29-year-old named John Kelly to organize "ballot security" for New Jersey's gubernatorial election. Kelly, who turned up in the state wearing cowboy boots and a 10-gallon hat, arranged to have hundreds of thousands of sample ballots mailed to voters in black and Latino neighborhoods. His team then compiled a list of people whose ballots were returned as undeliverable, and allegedly tried to have them struck from the rolls. 

This technique, known as caging, is controversial because it can purge eligible voters. In this case, an outdated address roster was used -- meaning that an unusually large share of the people on Kelly's list may have been wrongly targeted. Kelly and his associates also recruited squadrons of men -- many of them off-duty police officers -- to descend on black and Latino precincts around New Jersey on Election Day. Wearing National Ballot Security Task Force armbands, walkie-talkies, and in some cases guns, the men posted signs warning in large red letters that the areas were being patrolled. They then stationed themselves around polling places and allegedly tried to stop those whose names appeared on the caging list from voting. 

According to a Republican Party lawyer who was on the scene that day, before the polls closed, Kelly hightailed it out of the state in a Chevy Impala, armbands and signs stuffed in the trunk. When the Essex County prosecutor's office launched a statewide criminal investigation the following week, he was nowhere to be found. In the end, prosecutors didn't bring charges -- no would-be voters stepped forward to say they had been blocked from casting ballots -- but the Democratic National Committee filed a federal lawsuit accusing Kelly and the RNC of violating the Voting Rights Act. 

To settle the case, in 1982 the RNC signed a consent decree, agreeing to end all "ballot security" programs targeting minority precincts. Four years later, the RNC was caught caging minority voters in Louisiana, an effort that was intended to "keep the black vote down," according to an internal RNC memo. The DNC filed suit again, and a chastened RNC agreed to a modified decree requiring it to submit all plans for anti-voter fraud campaigns to the court for approval.

Barack Obama -- master of the slow soundbite. It's like watching Kareem's sky-hook.

In May of 1970, when he was a young former journalist working for the White House, Pat Buchanan offered President Richard Nixon some tips that he'd never stop using. "I strongly endorse symbolic gestures toward groups," wrote Buchanan, "especially the blacks where symbols count for so much." In order to divide the country effectively, Nixon had to pretend that he wasn't dividing it at all. "The President is President of all the people and while they will never vote for us, we must never let them come to believe we don't give a damn about them -- or that they are outside our province of concern." 

Forty-two years and four months later, an older, more widow's-peaked Buchanan appeared on Fox News to explain the leaked video of Mitt Romney talking to donors. Had Romney stumbled when he wrote off the "47 percent" of voters too dependent to vote Republican? No, said Buchanan. "Barack Obama is a drug dealer of welfare. He wants permanent dependency, in my judgment, of all these folks."

With the help of James C. A. Smith and a sympathetic white storekeeper named Samuel Smith (no relation), Brown devised a plan to have himself shipped to a free state by Adams Express Co. Brown paid $86 (out of his savings of $166) to Smith, who contacted Philadelphia abolitionist James Miller McKim, who agreed to receive the box. Brown burned his hand with oil of vitriol (sulfuric acid) as an excuse for missing work.

During the trip, which began on March 23, 1849, Brown's box traveled by wagon, railroad, steamboat, wagon again, railroad, ferry, railroad, and finally delivery wagon. Several times during the 27-hour journey, carriers placed the box upside-down or handled it roughly, but Brown was able to remain still enough to avoid detection. 

The box containing Brown was received by McKim, William Still, and other members of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. When Brown was released, one of those present remembered his first words as "How do you do, gentlemen?" He then sang a psalm from the Bible he had previously selected for his moment of freedom.

The next day, I stationed myself by the side of the road, along which the slaves, amounting to three hundred and fifty, were to pass. The purchaser of my wife was a Methodist minister, who was about starting for North Carolina. Pretty soon five waggon-loads of little children passed, and looking at the foremost one, what should I see but a little child, pointing its tiny hand towards me, exclaiming, "There's my father; I knew he would come and bid me good-bye." 

It was my eldest child! Soon the gang approached in which my wife was chained. I looked, and beheld her familiar face; but O, reader, that glance of agony! may God spare me ever again enduring the excruciating horror of that moment! She passed, and came near to where I stood. I seized hold of her hand, intending to bid her farewell; but words failed me; the gift of utterance had fled, and I remained speechless. I followed her for some distance, with her hand grasped in mine, as if to save her from her fate, but I could not speak, and I was obliged to turn away in silence. 

This is not an imaginary scene, reader; it is not a fiction, but an every-day reality at the South; and all I can say more to you, in reference to it is, that if you will not, after being made acquainted with these facts, consecrate your all to the slaves' release from bondage, you are utterly unworthy the name of a man, and should go and hide yourself, in some impenetrable cave, where no eye can behold your demon form.

On the presidential level, where everyone running campaigns is very, very good at their jobs, campaign infighting and incoherence tend to be the result of a candidate being behind in the polls, not the cause of it. Romney is behind and has been there for quite some time. According to the Real Clear Politics average of head-to-head polls, Romney hasn't led the race since October 2011. The closest he came to a lead in the polls this year was during the Republican National Convention, when he managed to ... tie Obama...

This year, it was the Democrats who made the biggest gains from before to after the conventions. Obama is leading by 3 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of polls, about double his lead before the Republican convention. If that doesn't fade by the end of the week or so -- that is, if it proves to be a real lead rather than a post-convention bounce -- then there's simply no example in the past 15 elections of a candidate coming back from a post-convention deficit to win the popular vote.

This is about the point where I'm supposed to write: That said, the race remains close, and the debates are coming soon. It's still anyone's game. But the most surprising of Erikson and Wlezien's results, and the most dispiriting for the Romney campaign, is that unlike the conventions, the debates don't tend to matter. There's "a fairly strong degree of continuity from before to after the debates," they write. That's true even when the trailing candidate is judged to have "won" the debates. "Voters seem to have little difficulty proclaiming one candidate the 'winner' of a debate and then voting for the opponent," Erikson and Wlezien say.

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"If somebody's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they're gonna have to take what they get," the veteran actor told an Extra correspondent during a one-on-one interview about his upcoming film Trouble with the Curve...

Asked if Mitt Romney was that "somebody," Eastwood initially said "yeah," before adding, "actually, he had some of his people ask."

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."