Lady Business: Odds and ends and July 4 in Mexico
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the seventy-third issue, published June 27, 2019.
Patriotic Borders
Greetings from Mexico City, where I landed 12 hours ago and have already spotted several scooters in the wild. (I haven’t tried falling off one yet, unlike another recent New York tourist. But I did almost trip over one in the middle of the sidewalk last night, if that counts!)
This will be a short, pre-July 4 Lady Business; I’m anticipating next week’s most patriotic of holidays with a long weekend of tacos, mezcal, ridiculously temperate weather, and Frida Kahlo. Though I can’t help but feel a bit weird about vacationing right now in a country that’s been the target of some extremely unpatriotic and despicable policies from my country of late, especially at our shared border:
A slew of other sympathetic people, advocacy groups and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have expressed a desire to lend a hand to the kids housed in the facilities. But after purchasing items like toys, soap, toothbrushes, diapers and medicine — especially as news reports circulate of facilities having drinking water that tastes like bleach and sick children without enough clothing — they’ve been met with a common message: No donations are being accepted. … Last week, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice argued in court that the government shouldn’t be required to give migrant children inside Border Patrol detention facilities toothbrushes, soap, towels or showers.
So ... happy Fourth of July, everyone?
Lady Bits
-- Related, some lists of organizations that are trying to help children and other migrants detained at the border.
--“Rapinoe had also made her stance clear in an interview with Sports Illustrated. … But it wasn’t until the sound bite reached the president’s favorite medium that the story blew up.” Also related to last week’s issue, “Here’s What Every Member of the USMNT Has to Say About U.S. Soccer’s Wage Inequality.” (Spoiler: It’s a very short read!)
--“‘Over the course of my time at GQ, I learned the people who were considered geniuses, all men, were filing their stuff on closing day’--i.e., very, very late--‘and that that almost added to their allure,’ she recalls.”
--“Bartleby teaches us to look for resistance in forms of ascetic refusal; Amelia Bedelia turns passive aggression into a kind of art.” The New Yorker on housework, children’s literature, Herman Melville, and the enduring power of “I would prefer not to.”
--Lady Business will be off next week for July 4. Happy summer!
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