The NYT ran an article on Saturday about women going to the march, and now the men have to care for their children.
The women lined up by the hundreds early Saturday outside the local high school and then climbed into a half-dozen rally buses and headed off to Washington for the march. Many more left Montclair later that morning for the New York rally by car, bus and train.
In their wake, they left behind a progressive bedroom community with suddenly skewed demographics. Routines were radically altered, and many fathers tried to meet weekend demands alone for a change. By participating in the marches and highlighting the importance of women’s rights, the women also demonstrated, in towns like Montclair, their importance just by their absence.
If this had been a weekday, the absence of women would most visibly have affected the commuter trains, workplaces and schools. On a Saturday, however, there were other matters to navigate: children’s birthday parties, dance performances, swimming lessons, and lacrosse and indoor soccer practices. Growling stomachs required filling on a regular basis.
Usually, these chores and deliveries were shared by both parents, in a thoroughly modern way. On this day, many dads were left to juggle schedules on their own
The buses returned late Saturday night from Washington to a quiet, heartfelt welcome. By Sunday morning, most of the women were back to their routines in Montclair. The JaiPure Yoga Studio reported full attendance, and many fathers exhaled in relief.
After his dutiful Saturday, Mr. Coyle went off to play tennis on Sunday morning. It was part of the deal he had struck with his wife.
Now they're apologizing for the article.
The reporter and editor responsible for publishing a much-derided New York Times story about fathers are sorry for running the article, they told The Huffington Post Monday morning.
“It was a bad idea from the get-go,” said Wendell Jamieson, the editor who oversees the Times’ Metro section, where the story appeared on Sunday. “It was conceived with the best intentions, but it fell flat. And I regret it.”
“Routines were radically altered,” Bondy noted in the story, explaining that fathers had to bring kids to play dates and sports events. They also apparently had to feed the children: “Growling stomachs required filling on a regular basis.”
Breaking news: Fathers care for their kids!
The piece seemed to reinforce three old-fashioned tropes about gender and parenting: Men can’t handle parenting tasks; men who manage to handle the basics of parenting are exceptional and worthy of a news story; and parenting is fundamentally the work of women.
By treating “men perform parental duties” as headline news, the Times’ story came across as an artifact from some earlier era ― maybe 1983, when the Michael Keaton comedy “Mr. Mom” presented a dad taking care of his own children as a wacky, topsy-turvy scenario
Jamieson told HuffPost that the story was conceived by men at the Times who thought it would be a “fun look” at what happens in a town when all the women are away. Jamieson noted that female editors on the Metro desk did look at the piece.
Nevertheless, “we blew it,” he told HuffPost
Trump White House Distorts Wages Figure on First Day
Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as president on Friday, the White House said that eliminating power plant climate rules, a clean water rule and other environmental regulations would “greatly help American workers, increasing wages by more than $30 billion over the next 7 years.”
The statement, included on the White House’s website to justify Trump’s drive to eliminate environmental rules affecting the energy sector, was a distortion. And if it was true, it would represent wage gains equivalent to less than $20 per American every year
The figure was based on a paper produced by a Louisiana State University finance professor in 2015 on behalf of a fossil fuel industry nonprofit. The paper, which was not peer reviewed, investigated potential economic impacts if all protected federal lands were opened to unlimited oil, gas and coal mining.
The paper did not, however, analyze the potential impacts of other potential regulatory changes, such as eliminating Obama-era power plant climate rules, as the White House suggested.
This tweet from December is so so true.
I seem to recall Criminal Justice Reform was an important issue for some folks.
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