Links For September 16, 2014
Smashing a Ceiling and a Lot of Egos
[Michele Roberts] said she was all too aware that if she was selected, she would represent several hundred male athletes in the N.B.A.; she would deal with league officials and agents who were nearly all men; she would negotiate with team owners who were almost all men; and she would stand before reporters who were predominantly men. She did not flinch. “My past,” she told the room, “is littered with the bones of men who were foolish enough to think I was someone they could sleep on.”
Puzzle Trouble: Women and Crosswords in the Age of Autofill
At this point in his speech, Steinberg suggested that the ever-widening gender gap in crosswords might be explained (or “boysplained,” as one puzzle blogger snarked) by the field’s shift to software-facilitated constructions. Like photography, film, and any number of once-analog trades, the process of puzzle-making has been digitized in the past twenty years. With few exceptions, and I count myself among them, constructors use programs like Crossword Compiler or Crossfire to assemble their grids.
Here's the One Simple Reason Why We Need More Openly Bisexual Characters on Television
Piper in Orange Is the New Black is only referred to as bisexual once in both seasons; her onscreen husband referred to her as a “lesbian” while her ex-girlfriend Alex refers to her as a straight girl. This split portrayal has prompted more than one critic to complain that show’s portrayal of its main character constitutes bi erasure.
The Black-White Thing: Racial Biases in NBA Scouting Comparisons
Racially-coded language has long been a problem in American professional sports, as Alex Diamond’s scarily-good-for-a-Bachelor’s-thesis “The Construction of Race in Professional Basketball” points out. The framing of white athletes as ‘skilled and fundamentally sound, despite a lack of physical tools’ and black athletes as ‘athletically superior, but lacking in intangibles and skills’ began as a coping mechanism for racist white sports fans to be able to reconcile the performance of black athletes in the early 1900s (p. 11-12).
Little League World Series - Philadelphia beats Nashville behind Mo’Ne Davis’ two-hitter
Pitcher Mo’ne Davis, one of two girls at the Little League World Series, threw a two-hitter to help Philadelphia beat Nashville 4-0 on Friday in the opener for both teams.... She became the first female pitcher to win a game in LLWS history.
How Mo'ne Davis, Taney captured national fame at Little League World Series