Jess Wells

I get raised eyebrows and harumphs of disagreement when I mention this book, but Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and author, makes compelling arguments that violence is declining worldwide, and he backs them up with a trove of statistics and analysis in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Granted, his timeframe starts in the Paleolithic, and the book was published in 2011 before the hate-filled debacle of the Trump years, but he has a point: "for most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life."

Pinker not only proves that these conditions are declining but explains why and when.

Why: Pinke identifies several historical forces.

1.     The changing role of government: "Instead of thinking of government as the local franchise of God's rule over his kingdom, people began to think of a government as a gadget invented by humans for the purpose of enhancing their collective welfare." This reduced tolerance for governmental violence against its citizens. The state and judiciary having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force" reduces intrastate violence, he says. And finally, he says, "Democracy… would turn out to be one of the greatest violence-reduction technologies since the appearance of government itself."  Read More 

The Firebrand and the First Lady highlights a decades-long friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and African American civil rights advocate, lesbian, author and brilliant attorney, Pauli Murray.

Pauli Murray was a driving force in the burgeoning civil rights movements, launching National Sharecroppers Week in 1940, organizing boycotts of whites-only restaurants, founding an advocacy campaign for Odell Waller's fight on death row and orchestrating protests over discrimination in the military, all the while writing newspaper and magazine articles as well as personal notes and missives to Eleanor Roosevelt (ER).

While the book is an engrossing (and enraging) tale of personal hardship in the midst of Jim Crow America, it is also a description of a tender intellectual, political and personal friendship between Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt, who answered her letters and celebrated her achievements. One reads of Murray's excitement  Read More 

 To do battle against rumrunners and then ferret out Nazis, Elizebeth Friedman and her husband William invented the modern science of cryptology, described in a lively and highly readable saga, The Woman Who Smashed Codes by Jason Fagone.

It Started with Rum

Elizebeth Friedman started using her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition by solving 12,000 rum messages "which covered activities up the Pacific coast …along the Gulf Coast to Tampa; from Key West to Savannah, including Havana, and the Bahamas; and from New Jersey to Maine. Until 1930, she did almost all code breaking for the US government's planetary war against smuggling."[i]

Extracting Intelligence From the New Technology: Radio

"As good as she was at solving the individual messages, Elizebeth's ambition didn't stop there.  Read More 

Two books on women's lives in the distant past reveal fascinating differences and similarities to our own time. Here are highlights from She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia and Women at the Dawn of History.

• The first woman in history known by name was KA-GIR-gal. They discovered her name on a land sale peg, which would have been inserted into the wall of a building to denote ownership, ca 3000-2750 BCE.[i]

• Prosperous and autonomous: "During the old Babylonian period there existed a class of so-called cloistered women (Naditus/Naditum)  Read More 

In one of those "blow your mind" discoveries of unsung women in history comes the story of the daughters of Genghis Khan. I've never heard that he had daughters, let alone daughters who "ruled the largest empire the world has ever known."

Jack Weatherford, the former DeWitt Wallace Professor of anthropology at Macalester College in Minnesota, is best known for his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. After its publication, he researched and wrote The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire.

He says "Genghis Khan sired four self-indulgent sons who proved good at drinking, mediocre at fighting, and poor at everything else; yet their names live on despite the damage they did to their father's empire. Although Genghis Khan recognized the superior leadership abilities of his daughters and left them strategically important parts of his empire, today we cannot even be certain how many daughters he had…[but] without Genghis Khan's daughters, there would have been no Mongol empire."

  Read More 

To understand the achievements of this pioneer, it's necessary to go back and describe the world as it was, and it was pretty surprising.

As late as the early 1960s, it was believed that the ocean floor was a flat, unchanging surface, as smooth as a sandy beach; that the edge of the continent sloped down to an abyssal plane, until the sea floor gradually sloped up at another continent. Scientists called the sea floor a "place of perfect repose." Belief in continental drift would cast you as a nut-job, though it had been suggested in 1922. There was very little understanding of earthquakes, no discovery of the Ring of Fire; no respect given to ideas of tectonic plates. The idea of a supercontinent of Pangaea (and the others that proceeded it) was scientific heresy. "There was still no definitive theory that explained how the earth's crust formed. Mountains, oceans, continents, islands, valleys -- even the earth's simplest features were still a source of contention."[i] Read More 

There are a few things more core to the American way of life than the safety net instituted by The New Deal, and it turns out that a woman who is hardly known today was "the moving force" behind it all.

In a lively, engaging, and detailed book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Kirstin Downey, it was Frances Perkins who laid out the reforms that President Roosevelt would have to back before she would accept the post as America's first female Secretary of Labor.

"She ticked off the items: a 40-hour workweek, a minimum wage, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, a federal law banning child labor, direct federal aid for unemployment relief, Social Security, a revitalized public employment service, and health insurance.... The scope of her list was breathtaking. She was proposing a fundamental and radical restructuring of American Society, with enactment of historic social welfare and labor laws."

Robert B. Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, says that "Francis Perkins was the moving force behind much of [The New Deal]. Her legacy included … initiatives that have improved the lives of generations of Americans."

And her daughter nagged her into championing the WPA's inclusion of artists, which is responsible for some of the excellent murals in public buildings by Diego Rivera and others.

According to influential authors studying the period, "Francis Perkins (was) a fierce advocate who put people first, a public servant who was actually worthy of the name, and a bracing reminder of what inspired government can do."

 Read More 

The renowned 7th century Zen master Seng-tsan taught that true freedom is being "without anxiety about imperfection."

And there are few anxieties that plague women more than body image.

In Beautiful You by Rosie Molinary, she counsels that "when we are caught in the trance of unworthiness, we do not clearly recognize what is happening inside us, nor do we feel kind. Our view of who we are is  Read More 

On International Women's Day, we're honoring our pioneers to whom we owe a great debt, and Christine de Pizan is one of our earliest and most eloquent pioneers.

She defended the moral character of women during the viciously sexist Romance of the Rose debates. She penned more than 20 volumes of work at a time when no lay woman wrote at all. She wrote the only poem championing Joan of Arc during her lifetime. Her writing is still taught in universities as one of the great voices of the Middle Ages.

Ambition as a Drug

Genuine people, however, are multi-dimensional and the faceted sides of the human psyche give us an opportunity to examine the truth behind each side of the story of Christine de Pizan, in this case the addictive and conflicted nature of ambition.

For example, all pioneers waffle between the inculcated lessons of the status quo (giving rise to self-loathing) and their determined, brilliant will to move forward. Pioneers know their position as an out-cast, as Christine does when she acknowledges that she is a raptor (ferocious and potentially deadly) amid a court of decorative and powerless blue-bird women. She sometimes feels reptilian in her alienation.
 Read More 

My car just ranked my driving ability, and I sigh with a familiar anxiety. 65/100 going to the grocery store but it was 45/100 on the freeway. Sub-par. I'm failing.

My point is that we're being measured every day in new and surprising ways. Spending time and money striving for likes, friends, followers and approval. Striving for more money as a measurement of success and value. Book sales. Stars. Less weight, more collagen, a measure of correct living and moderation. A hipper kitchen that reflects our cool factor. The latest car. The correct political understanding. Even our humor is too often the judgmental and "subtle cruelties that pass for wit," as Dorothy Parker said.

  Read More