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Charles M. Blow at The New York Times on misogyny and #YesAllMen. “As I drove my son back to college last week, he said something that struck me: ‘I believe it’s very important for everyone to be a feminist.’ Fighting female objectification and discrimination and violence against women isn’t simply the job of women; it must also be the pursuit of men,” Blow writes. “Not all men are part of the problem, but, yes, all men must be part of the solution. The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women has reported that in Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa and the United States, violence by intimate partners accounts for between 40 percent and 70 percent of all murders of women. Empathy is not particularly elusive. It only requires an earnest quest to understand and act on that understanding. The problems women face in this world require the engagement of all the world’s people. ‘It’s very important for everyone to be a feminist.’ #YesAllMen.”
Robert J. Samuelson at The Washington Post compares inequality today and a century ago. “It’s not the 1920s. One common line in the debate over economic inequality is that the income gaps between the rich and everyone else have reverted to levels not seen since the ’20s or earlier. The conclusion is damning. It implies that we’ve lost nearly a century of social progress. But as economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution shows, it’s ‘flatly untrue’: Inequality isn’t as great now as in the ’20s. Although the debate over inequality is legitimate and important, we shouldn’t distort it with misleading and overwrought rhetoric,” Samuelson writes. “The figures that have invited comparisons between now and then come from economists Thomas Piketty, author of the controversial book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century,’ and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley. But in thrashing out what’s happened and why — and what, if anything, to do — we should stick to the facts and avoid careless historical comparisons.”