New York Times reporters and editors are highlighting great stories from around the web. You can receive What We’re Reading by email, and let us know how you like it at wwr@nytimes.com.
The Alabama Vote
From The New York Times: Ahead of today’s special election in Alabama, I rounded up columns from the right, left and center on the contentious race. An anti-abortion advocate explains why even the staunchest of abortion foes shouldn’t vote for Roy Moore. The editorial board of AL.com asks readers to follow the lead of the senior Republican senator from the state, Richard Shelby, and write in a more deserving candidate. — Anna Dubenko, senior digital strategist
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Misogyny, not Sex
From New York Magazine: Oh, it’s complicated. It would be so much easier to look at the sexual harassment scandals purely in terms of sexual harm done. But that would mean ignoring the remaining 99.9% of the iceberg. Rebecca Traister, in this riveting essay, sees the deeper problem of gender discrimination: “It explains why women are vulnerable to harassment before they are even harassed ... why it’s difficult for them to come forward with stories after they have been harassed, why they are often ignored when they do.” (Adding to that perspective, Sally Kohn proposes a new terminology: “misogynistic harassment and misogynistic assault, not sexual assault. These are hate crimes.”) — Francesca Donner, director of the gender initiative
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Bad Sex
From Ella Dawson’s blog: The recent New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” about a consensual sexual encounter the woman deeply regrets, touched off a huge debate on social media and elsewhere. This piece points out that young women all too frequently consent to sex “because in the moment it seems easier to get it over with than it would be to extricate yourself.” Young women are told, the author argues: “Don’t be difficult, don’t be selfish, don’t be inconvenient, don’t be rude. Your discomfort is less important than his comfort.” — Sarah Lyall, writer at large
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Pathfinder
From The Boston Globe: Since we’re talking about women making their way in male-dominated professions, it’s a good time to read this tribute to Gloria Negri, my former colleague at The Boston Globe, who died Sunday at 91. She was a one-of-a-kind journalist, and character, whose voice boomed across the newsroom. Her assignments included joining Joe Frazier on a training run, traveling to South Africa and Vietnam, and sitting on a park bench in Boston’s South End as bait for a serial killer. And to the end, she was the beating heart of an old-school newsroom. — Anne Barnard, Beirut bureau chief
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Decoding Dress
From Racked: Once upon a time, a skirt made waves in America by transcending racial and class divisions and signaling a shift in women’s social roles. I’m referring not to the miniskirt, as you might imagine, but to the hoop skirt. And as this article explains, the 19th-century garment has managed to make waves well into the 21st century. — Gina Lamb, senior staff editor, special sections
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The Key to the Kingdom
From The Washington Post: “Once Amazon owned my door, I was the one locked into an all-Amazon world,” Geoffrey A. Fowler writes, in a measured but scathing review of Amazon Key. The Post continues to distinguish itself for its arm’s-length coverage of its owner’s other company. And I’m sticking with my Medeco. — David W. Dunlap, former reporter
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Price Check
From Bloomberg: Measuring hyperinflation can be an imprecise science, but this index offers a glimpse into surging prices in Venezuela. I lived in Caracas as bureau chief from 2006 to 2011, when authorities began calling their currency the “strong bolívar” even as black-market money dealers were thriving. It’s surreal to see how things have changed since then. — Simon Romero, national correspondent
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Bigger Thoughts
From Hollyhock Life: Rupert Sheldrake, a sort of renegade British scientist of the top order, talks of the limits of materialism, his thoughts on consciousness and God, and his personal journey. I listened recently on a long cross-country drive and found it a fascinating voyage, even when I did not entirely agree. — Michael Powell, Sports of the Times columnist
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Memory Serves
From the Nobel Prize website: After Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I read his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” which takes place mostly in Nagasaki, the city of his birth. It was revelatory the way he captured the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the Japanese language, in English. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I was starting to accept that ‘my’ Japan perhaps didn’t much correspond to any place I could go to on a plane; that the way of life of which my parents talked, that I remembered from my early childhood, had largely vanished during the 1960s and 1970s; that in any case, the Japan that existed in my head might always have been an emotional construct put together by a child out of memory, imagination and speculation.” Perhaps all places are both physical and emotional constructs. As a child of a Japanese immigrant, I find that my relationship with Japan is a blend of my own lived experience and the refraction of memories from both my own childhood years here and my mother’s, and her longing to return. — Motoko Rich, Tokyo bureau chief
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Time Travel
From The Times archives: It’s that time of year again on Wall Street: bonus season. Top bankers are spending weeks on end deciding how much to put in the stockings of their employees, something that in recent years has raised public ire over income inequality. But back in 1915, the bonuses meant something else. After a four-month closure of the New York Stock Exchange the previous year over fears of a crash during World War I — “the longest circuit breaker in history” — there was a burst of enthusiasm for the return of brokers’ fabulous bonuses as a sign of reassurance for all. — Andrew Ross Sorkin, DealBook founder, columnist and editor
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