Originally a comment on Toby tell us again.

During my first degree in computer science (not at Oxford, at Teesside of all places) in the early 90s there were four women out of about 300 students. There were eight people who were not white. During later degrees at Newcastle and Leeds and having worked in those universities for decades, I didn’t see as much improvement as I’d hoped.

There were women and people of colour in top faculty positions, for sure. But there was also a very obvious funnel: women and people of colour didn’t seem to rise through the ranks as easily as white dudes did. Women of colour in particular seemed to find it difficult to find … Read the rest

Helen Lewis has some characteristically amusing observations on Kermit Peterson:

This is the Peterson brand: interweaving a story of dragons and witches, and masculine order and feminine chaos, around some crushingly banal life advice about trying to be a good person, wash behind your ears, and maybe a slick of deodorant once in a while wouldn’t go amiss, eh? If he was a woman, writing for women, we would see him for what he is: a mash-up of Cosmo tips and My First Book of Myths. But because he’s writing for sad young white men – and their problems are, you know, real problems, not like anorexia or rape or sexual harassment at work – he’s a public

I saw this.

Reporter: “Do you deserve the Nobel Prize, do you think?”

Trump: “Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it.”

That was May 9th.
Two weeks ago. pic.twitter.com/G5J3X1kmwH

— Victor Blackwell CNN (@VictorBlackwell) May 24, 2018

I thought “Really?? He said that?!” I looked it up. He said that.

Trump was asked by a reporter at the White House if he’s deserving of the prize after news broke Wednesday that three American men who had been imprisoned by North Korea were on their way home to the United States.

“Everyone thinks so, but I would never say it,” said Trump, who is preparing to meet face-to-face with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in coming weeks,

David Lammy MP:

630 Black British students get 3 A's and yet 1 in 4 Oxford colleges did not have a single Black British student in the entire cohort in at least one of the last three years. Not one Black British student offered a place for Computer Science or Psychology. Go and find the talent. https://t.co/dbJBnyXnY1

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018

Oxbridge gets £700 million a year from the taxpayer and the Oxbridge admissions system decides who gets to be the next Cabinet Ministers, newspaper editors, senior civil servants, FTSE CEOs etc. So it does matter to my constituents and to every person in this country, actually. https://t.co/C0tJJN7vTQ

— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) May 23, 2018

Toby … Read the rest

From the Beeb:

Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, received a secret payment of at least $400,000 (£300,000) to fix talks between the Ukrainian president and President Trump, according to sources in Kiev close to those involved.

The payment was arranged by intermediaries acting for Ukraine’s leader, Petro Poroshenko, the sources said, though Mr Cohen was not registered as a representative of Ukraine as required by US law.

The meeting at the White House was last June.

Shortly after the Ukrainian president returned home, his country’s anti-corruption agency stopped its investigation into Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

Cash and carry diplomacy; what could go wrong?

A high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence officer in Mr Poroshenko’s administration described what happened before

Glosswitch in the Staggers on bullshit about how to raise boys:

I suspect many of my fellow feminists have no idea just how truly awful the literature aimed at mothers raising sons has been. Think “misogynistic and essentialist” – Piers Morgan, perhaps – then times that by 1,000.

Of course, it doesn’t mean to be that way. Such literature is, we are told in that sad, regretful tone adopted by neurosexists and evolutionary misogynists everywhere, merely presenting the facts. No one wants to believe boys are naturally aggressive, girls naturally submissive, but you can’t argue with bullshit science. Just don’t blame the messenger, OK?

In 1997’s Raising Boys – a bestseller, still in print today – godfather of raising

This is part of what’s making me (and others) pessimistic:

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/999313938314477568

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/999315077239947269

I’m pessimistic because it seems it could easily happen that we get a long detailed account of crimes and corruption linked to Trump and/or the Trump campaign, and it won’t make any difference to anything.

Look, I have never understood why or how the Republicans got away with refusing to hold hearings on Merrick Garland, since even the majority party has to follow the rules (I had assumed), and the non-stop brute force violation of all norms has only gotten worse. Trump and Fox News are going to drag us all into the sewer and there we’ll stay until the rising seas devour the remnant.… Read the rest

John Cassidy at the New Yorker says it’s getting worse.

Since Donald Trump entered the White House, American democracy has sometimes been described as dangerously fragile, but that isn’t necessarily true. Having survived for two hundred and forty-two years, American democracy is more like a stoutly built ocean liner, with a maniac at the helm who seems intent on capsizing it. Every so often, he takes a violent tug at the tiller, causing the vessel to list alarmingly. So far, some members of the ship’s crew—judges, public servants, and the odd elected official—have managed to rush in, jag the tiller back, and keep the ship afloat. But, as the captain’s behavior grows more erratic, the danger facing the ship

Worse.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders said that the White House had brokered a meeting at which two key Republican chairmen would hear from the leaders of the Justice Department, FBI and the intelligence community following weeks’ worth of requests for the classified material.

No one from the White House is scheduled to be present, Sanders said — nor, at this point, are any senators or any Democrats, in defiance of a request from the Senate minority leader.

So it’s a Republican meeting to see secret documents from an ongoing investigation. Not a Congressional meeting but a Republican one.

“A lot of people are saying they had spies in my campaign,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “If so, that would

Scott Pruitt really doesn’t want us to know what he’s doing.

The Environmental Protection Agency is barring The Associated Press, CNN and the environmental-focused news organization E&E from a national summit on harmful water contaminants.

The EPA blocked the news organizations from attending Tuesday’s Washington meeting, convened by EPA chief Scott Pruitt.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox told the barred organizations they were not invited and there was no space for them, but gave no indication of why they specifically were barred.

Pruitt told about 200 people at the meeting that dealing with the contaminants is a “national priority.”

Guards barred an AP reporter from passing through a security checkpoint inside the building. When the reporter asked to speak to