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Month: September 2016

And now a word from a couple of bloodthirsty wingnuts

Published by digby on September 12, 2016

And now a word from a couple of bloodthirsty wingnuts

by digby

Dick and Liz:

We are no longer interrogating terrorists in part because we are no longer capturing terrorists. Since taking office, the president has recklessly pursued his objective of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo by releasing current detainees—regardless of the likelihood they will return to the field of battle against us. Until recently, the head of recruitment for ISIS in Afghanistan and Pakistan was a former Guantanamo detainee, as is one of al Qaeda’s most senior leaders in the Arabian Peninsula.

As he released terrorists to return to the field of battle, Mr. Obama was simultaneously withdrawing American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. He calls this policy “ending wars.” Most reasonable people recognize this approach as losing wars.

[…]

President Obama and Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry were so concerned with pleasing Iran’s ruling mullahs that they were willing to overlook the American blood on Iranian hands and decades of Iran’s activities as the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. In pursuit of the nuclear deal, they made concession after dangerous concession.

Every promise made to the American people about the Obama nuclear agreement has been broken. We were promised a “world-class” verification process. Instead, the Iranians are allowed in key instances to verify themselves.

We were promised the agreement would “block every pathway” to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, the Obama-Clinton agreement virtually guarantees an Iranian nuclear weapon, gives them access to the latest in centrifuge technology and will likely usher in a nuclear arms race across the Middle East.

Now ask yourselves who sounds most like Dick Cheney in this presidential election? The allegedly angry warhawk Clinton or the supposedly friendly isolationist Donald Trump?

According to a number of people lately, it’s the shrieking harpy not the the torture-loving, bomb the shit out of ’em, nuclear advocating Trump.

They simply cannot be hearing what the man is saying. He’s channeling Dick “waterbording is a no-brainer” Cheney and future GOP presidential nominee Liz Cheney. The only difference between them is that Trump wants to force American allies to pony up more in protection money.

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Is the NYT Public Editor Wrong or Completely Wrong? Views Differ by tristero

Published by digby on September 12, 2016

Is the NYT Public Editor Wrong or Completely Wrong? Views Differ 

by tristero

A textbook example of a straw man:

The problem with false balance doctrine is that it masquerades as rational thinking. What the critics really want is for journalists to apply their own moral and ideological judgments to the candidates. 

Nope. What we “really want” is for media not to report those arguments that are factually inaccurate as equivalent to arguments that are factually accurate. In addition, people objecting to the practice of false equivalence point out that merely reporting an unsubstantiated idea or a lie can provide status that it doesn’t deserve, making the idea appear equivalent to legitimate ideas.

We often see this in reporting on evolution and climate change, where, in the name of balanced coverage, sheer nonsense is given “equal balance” with actual science. And we see it in the reporting of Trump’s egregious lies as somehow equivalent to standard political spinning.

As Digby wrote me in a private email, Liz Spayd “simply doesn’t understand how their coverage creates narrative.” In practice, what Spayd advocates is a policy that will publish whatever nonsense a politician or businessman spouts regardless of its truth value,  provided they come from a large-enough political party or corporation.

And that is the problem.

QOTD: Giuliani time

Published by digby on September 11, 2016

QOTD: Giuliani time

by digby

He is well … he’s uninformed, to put it kindly:

I have never understood why he has been considered an authority on foreing policy because he was mayor on 9/11. But there you have it.

By the way, that’s called pillage and it’s a war crime:

Pillage (or plunder) is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as “the forcible taking of private property by an invading or conquering army from the enemy’s subjects”. The Elements of Crimes of the Statute of the International Criminal Court specifies that the appropriation must be done “for private or personal use”. 

As such, the prohibition of pillage is a specific application of the general principle of law prohibiting theft. This prohibition is to be found in national criminal legislation around the world. Pillage is generally punishable under military law or general penal law.

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Two representatives of New York

Published by digby on September 11, 2016

Two representatives of New York

by digby

Via The Guardian:

Having declared 9/11 to be an attack on all Americans, Clinton soon discovered that the national response was not entirely united or favorable to struggling New Yorkers. The head of the EPA at the time, Christine Todd Whitman, repeatedly insisted the air at Ground Zero was safe even as early as three days after the towers collapsed, as did Mayor Rudy Giuliani despite worries within City Hall that they were facing thousands of liability claims.

Confronted by this wall of denial, Clinton was one of the most powerful voices warning of an impending health crisis. Ben Chevat, chief of staff to congresswoman Carolyn Maloney of New York on 9/11, recalls the impact.

“The Bush administration was saying, ‘There’s no problem, move along’,” he said, “and so it was hard work getting any traction in the media. Yet we knew there was a problem because people were getting sick with respiratory diseases and cancers.”

Chevat, now executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, said: “It took Clinton to put a spotlight on the issue and change the frame.”

Clinton and her allies started small but over time succeeded in dramatically expanding the health program for those who became ill after
9/11. Within weeks of the attacks she had helped secure $12m for a pilot project at Mount Sinai hospital, screening some 9,000 workers with suspected Ground Zero illnesses.

By April 2004 the program had grown to a $90m fund offering three free medical exams a year to 50,000 first responders and residents of lower Manhattan. In 2010, Clinton having passed on the baton to her successor in the US senate, Kirsten Gillibrand, reluctant Republicans in Congress were cajoled into passing the $4bn Zadroga Act, covering the health costs of those impaired by the toxic fumes. Last year the program was extended for 75 years, and now serves 65,000 emergency responders and almost 10,000 9/11 resident survivors.

Philip Landrigan, who hosted the first World Trade Center medical program at Mount Sinai, puts this success story in no small part down to Clinton’s relentless pursuit of the subject coupled with her attention to detail.

“She was angry at the Washington political leaders who would come to Ground Zero, have photos taken and then go back to DC and do nothing,” he said.

“She became deeply knowledgable on the subject, not just fiscal and administrative details, but also about medical and mental health problems. She was a sponge for knowledge.”

It’s a good article about Clinton’s emotional reaction and her relationship with people who were affected. She apparently took her job as Senator for New York very seriously and worked hard in a number of ways in the aftermath. And she was righteously pissed about the Bush administration’s response to the health crisis from ground zero.

And there there was this:

Clinton’s powerful engagement in the 9/11 health cause makes for a strong contrast with how her presidential rival, Donald Trump, spent his time in the wake of the terrorist attacks. He used a loophole in federal funding to help small businesses hurt by the disaster to claim $150,000 in subsidies for a Wall Street real estate project.

He’s the most famous living New York businessman. He is synonymous with the city. Did anyone see him take up a cause, lobby congress, start a 9/11 charity, anything???

He did zilch for his city. In fact, he took thousands in subsidies that were not meant for him.

That’s your patriot, Republicans.

FWIW: here’s a piece recalling Clinton’s immediate reaction after the attacks by WNYC:

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NO WORDS by Dennis Hartley

Published by digby on September 11, 2016

NO WORDS

By Dennis Hartley

I don’t get out much. In 60 years, I’ve yet to travel anywhere more exotic than Canada. That’s me…born to be mild. Oddly enough, however, I was “out of the country” on September 11, 2001.

OK, it was Canada. I was enjoying a weekend getaway at Harrison Hot Springs, a beautiful Alpine setting in British Columbia. I was booked to check out of the hotel on Tuesday, September 11th.

I woke up around 9am that morning, figuring I had enough time to grab breakfast and one more refreshing soak in one of the resort’s natural springs-fed outdoor pools before hitting the road for the 3-hour drive back to Seattle. I was feeling relaxed and rejuvenated.

Then I switched on CNN.

Holy fuck. Was this really happening? I actually did not understand what I was watching for several minutes. It was surreal. It was especially discombobulating to be out-of-country at the very moment the United States of America appeared to be under attack.

My first impulse was just to get back to the U.S.A. I was overcome with a sense of urgency that I had to “do” something (realistically, of course…what could I do to help those poor souls in the towers?).

I went to the front desk to check out, and was advised by the clerk that there were reports that the U.S./Canada border checkpoints were closed (to this day, I’m not sure if that was just a rumor-I can’t track down any historical annotations). I was also hearing from fellow guests that lines of vehicles were miles long at the checkpoints. At any rate, they were offering American guests with a September 11 checkout a reduced rate if they wanted to try their luck on Wednesday.

With all the uncertainty and fear in the air, I decided to take them up on the offer and leave Wednesday morning instead (for all I knew, I could be returning to some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape anyway). I was less than 200 miles from home geographically, but spiritually I might as well have been Matt Damon’s character in The Martian.

As I didn’t own a cell phone or a laptop (yes, I know they existed in 2001…but I was a latecomer to personal devices), CNN became my lifeline for the remainder of that horrible day. One thing I’ll never forget is Aaron Brown’s marathon reportage. As awful as the situation was, he maintained the perfect tone. This may sound corny, but he was not only a level-headed source of information, but he was my friend that day.

And apparently, I’m not alone in that assessment:

He feels conflicted about it, of course. He is grateful — “this is not a business where people say ‘thank you’ that often,” he notes — but he resists the attention. He seldom gives speeches or grants interviews about that day. 

“It was something that I was fortunate, professionally, to do and painful, as an American, to live through. It’s a weird contradiction that journalists live with — the ambivalence of, on the one hand, loving the big story, and, on the other hand, hating the fact that that story is happening,” Brown said in a rare interview on the eve of the fifteenth anniversary. 

I remember watching Brown anchor CNN’s coverage of the attacks, which he did from the roof of CNN’s old New York bureau at the corner of 34th Street and 8th Avenue. I remember his calm, steady demeanor while narrating chaos. 

“What was important is that we kept saying to people, ‘Here is what we know and here is what we don’t.’ That’s what mattered. And nothing else mattered,” Brown said. 

Re-watching the coverage so many years later, this remains a lesson for journalists. 

As the day progressed, Brown was joined by Judy Woodruff, Paula Zahn, Wolf Blitzer, Jeff Greenfield and many other CNN journalists.
At one point, from his rooftop position, he could hear fighter jets overhead. But he told me that during the marathon day of news coverage he was never personally afraid of a followup attack in Manhattan. 

“I was way too busy to be afraid of anything… I was too busy trying not to screw something up,” he said. 

Brown had New York and Atlanta control rooms in his earpieces simultaneously, feeding him information and guidance about what to say and where to go next. 

When the towers fell 

9/11 was Brown’s first day on the air at CNN. He had recently been hired from ABC, and he was preparing to start a new prime time newscast called “NewsNight.” 

He hurried to the roof after the World Trade Center towers were attacked and took over from CNN’s Atlanta-based anchors shortly after 9:30 a.m. Within minutes, word came of an attack at the Pentagon.
When the first tower fell at 9:59 a.m., Brown said he felt “profoundly stupid.” While he had been thinking a lot about the impacts of the jetliners hitting the buildings, “it just never occurred to me that they’d come down.” 

Brown, who trained under Peter Jennings at ABC, said “it’s the only time I thought, ‘Maybe you just don’t have what it takes to do a story like this.'” 

That insecurity did not come across on the air.

When the second tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m., Brown could hear it from his perch several miles north. “Good lord,” he said. “There are no words.” 

Some viewers, myself included, still remember his “good lord” reaction. 

“From the moment the first tower fell, there was a clock ticking,” he said. “It was ticking in my head. It was ticking in the heads of hundreds of millions of people in America and a billion people around the world who were watching it.” 

Brown left CNN in 2005. He now lives in New Mexico. He said “CNN was an amazing organization that day. And I was so proud to be a part of it.” 

When I asked him how journalism has changed since 9/11, he said he believes there’s more pressure “to react to the instant, to the moment,” with less time for big picture context. 

“My view of 9/11, if I can just this once take a step back and give you a longer view, is that it required that we not get caught up in the moment — that we, if anything, try and understand the implications of an attack on the United States of America. 

“When I got off the air that night, or early morning, I kept thinking, ‘Well, what was my daughter’s day like?’ Was it like my day, when Kennedy was assassinated and I was crying? And I thought, ‘Her life is never going to be the same.’ 

“And that’s a longer view of this. For my taste, too often, the lower third is dominated by some sort of instant thing or another that doesn’t really help people understand the broader implications of the story, of any story. And I think, honestly, Brian, that is particularly true of this election story. That it gets way too caught up in kind of an instant check and we’re not really focused enough on the broader implications of what’s going on.” 

Late into the evening on 9/11, Brown was still on the roof, and he could see the smoke coming from the World Trade Center site. 

“When we ended at 1 something in the morning and I sat down, in the corner of the roof, a lot of emotions happened,” he recalled. 

“This was the biggest moment in my lifetime in every sense — in the history of my country, in the history of my business, in my personal and professional life.” 

At one point in the day, then-president of CNN Walter Isaacson came up to the roof and commented to Brown, “This isn’t a story, this is history.” 

“I just wanted to get it right,” he said. “I wanted to get it right for my audience; I wanted to get it right for the people who employed me; I wanted to get it right for the history.”

That, my friends, is what a good journalist does. Remember them?

(Video at the link…)

–dh

It’s always about him

Published by digby on September 11, 2016

It’s always about him

by digby

On the day after 9/11 Trump gave an interview about the attack:

“40 Wall Street,” he said, referring to his 71-story building blocks away from the now-collapsed twin towers, “actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest—and then, when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest. And now it’s the tallest.”

And this from the first week:

In an article from the New York Post dated  September 18th, 2001, Trump said of the towers: to be blunt, they were not “great’ buildings … They only became great upon their demise last Tuesday.

This story from last year: 

As the city and nation observed the 14th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a 2013 tweet regarding the terror strikes vanished from the Republican presidential front-runner’s feed. 

“I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th,” Trump said in a tweet that had disappeared by Friday, according to CBS News.

And he’s a New Yorker.

Update: This too

My 9/11 by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on September 11, 2016

My 9/11
by Tom Sullivan


By MarineCorps NewYork from New York City, USA Sgt. Randall A. Clinton/
Division of Public Affairs [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

On Monday, September 10, 2001, I flew into Boston on what was the oddest flight I’d ever been on.

I was working field support at a paper mill in northern New Hampshire. We were installing a gas turbine generator and co-generation boiler. The next morning, the ex-Navy boilerman working with me, an old Hoosier, got a call at the construction trailer from his wife. She said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she was the victim of an Internet hoax. She wasn’t. But it was impossible to get on the Internet to check. The Net was choked. Most work stopped on the site as pipefitters and carpenters huddled around radios. Other crew coming up from Atlanta got set down in Norfolk and had to rent a car to get to New England. The site boss was from Stockholm. Relatives called from Sweden to make sure he was all right. In Groveton, NH he couldn’t have been more all right. We couldn’t say the same for New Yorkers.

In my hotel that night, I heard the hijacked flights had originated from Boston. I watched the TV coverage and called my parents in Charlotte. I told my dad about my odd experience the day before.

I boarded early in Atlanta and was in the right window seat (27F) watching people come down the aisle, wondering who’s going to be sitting next to me for the next two-plus hours. This 20-something guy with a heavy five-o’clock shadow stood out as he made his way down the aisle. His clothes I later described as “European K-Mart.” What was odd was it was a bag-lunch flight. He had no lunch. And no carry on. Not a backpack. Not a laptop. Nothing. He looked like he was boarding a bus, not a flight. The man settled into the middle seat in the row behind me, only to get dislodged by another passenger when it turned out he was in the wrong row. He got up, moved forward, and sat down next to me. He looked stressed out. He immediately leaned back, put a pillow behind his head, and closed his eyes. He looked, I don’t know, Lebanese. He waved away the flight attendant when she offered drinks. Never looked at a magazine. Nothing. He never said a word.

It was the weirdest feeling (and unusual for me), but on my way to Boston on September 10, 2001 I thought if there’s a terrorist on this flight, this is the guy. Then the next morning happened.

On Wednesday or Thursday, the FBI called the construction trailer. My dad had phoned it in. The agent wanted a full description, flight number, seat number, etc. When did I see him last? Had anyone met him getting off the plane? (I’d seen him last walking alone through baggage claim.) Oddest thing was, somewhere over Cape Cod as we banked towards Logan, the man took the pillow from behind his head, placed it in his hands, chest high, palms up, and lowered his forehead onto it for a few minutes. O-kay. But that was it. We landed and he disappeared.

Some poor college student probably got a visit from the FBI because of that call. It was a crazy couple of weeks.

I was on a two-week rotation, so flights being cancelled was not an immediate problem. Ten days later, Logan International Airport looked like the airport of the living dead. The Hertz shuttle cruised by one darkened, deserted terminal after another before letting me off. The flight monitors at the top of the escalator well were all dark except for two. Only a handful of flights were moving. The terminal was crawling with guns. Machine guns. Boston PD. SWAT. National Guard. INS agents with sidearms.

Even weirder was getting on the plane and seeing how glad the flight crews were to have anybody flying. Only a handful boarded.

Hi. Welcome to Delta. Can I help you find your seat? Oh, sit anywhere you want. What are you drinking? I’ll bring you two. (She did, complimentary.)

On arrival in Atlanta, nothing. One MARTA cop with a pistol.

Then the madness set in. I wrote in 2009:

A flood of post-September 11 articles asked how the attacks happened, what we would do next, and why terrorists hate us. One savvy pundit asked, Would America keep its head?

We invaded Iraq on trumped-up intelligence. We conducted illegal surveillance on our own citizens. We imprisoned people without charge, here and abroad. We rendered prisoners for torture and tortured others ourselves in violation of international law. All the while, millions of staunch, law-and-order conservatives supported and defended it, and still do. Vigorously.

Did America keep its head? Uh, no.

We have never recovered from the psychic hit we took fifteen years ago. A friend who lost her fiance in the towers still suffers post-traumatic stress this time each year. The whole country suffered post-traumatic stress. Republicans this year nominated Donald J. Trump for president.

Q.E.D.

Sunrise, sunset: “Mia Madre” *** By Dennis Hartley

Published by digby on September 11, 2016

Saturday night at the Movies

Sunrise, sunset: Mia Madre ***

By Dennis Hartley



God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

–from the “Serenity Prayer”, by Reinhold Niebuhr

In my lukewarm 2012 review of Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope, I did give props to the Italian writer-director for “…humanizing someone who holds a larger-than-life position of power and responsibility by depicting them to be just as neurotic as anybody else.” I observed that Moretti’s protagonist was a (would-be) pontiff who “…elects to leave a hermetic bubble of rituals and spiritual contemplation to revel in the simple joys of everyday life; to rediscover his humanity.”

Although Moretti’s latest effort is but the second film I have seen by this director, I’m sensing a theme. That’s because Mia Madre also centers on a protagonist who holds a larger-than-life position of power and responsibility (in this case, a film director), and is depicted to be just as neurotic as anybody else. One could even say that a film set is also a “hermetic bubble of rituals and spiritual contemplation” (of a sort). And indeed, over this cloistered, make-believe world, Margherita (Margherita Buy) holds sovereignty. But when it comes to her “real” life-not so much.

Every time she steps foot off her set, we sense Margherita’s power over her world diminishing. We see her literally gathering up the scant remnants of a failed relationship; dropping by her (soon to be) ex-lover’s apartment to collect some of her odds and ends. Her morose boyfriend (who, in a nice little directorial flourish, is sulking and listening to Leonard Cohen while she packs) gives her a desperate hug. “We know how things are,” she says a little unconvincingly, as she gently breaks away, “We’ve already decided.” To which he counters, “No…you’ve decided.”

Other aspects of her personal life are slipping through her fingers. She is stressed over the declining health of her hospitalized mother (Giulia Lazzarini), which in turn is exacerbating a gulf between Margherita and her teenage daughter (Beatrice Mancini). The only rock she can seem to cling to in her destabilizing spin is her Zen-like brother Giovanni (director Moretti), who urges her to get a grip (he’s the only person in her orbit who intuits that she is headed for a crash).

We know Margherita is losing it, because she is having Fellini-esque, metaphor-laden daydreams suggesting as such (echoes of 8 ½). In fact, chaos (internal and external) seems to be a central theme. The fictional director’s film within the film is a polemic concerning factory workers in the midst of a tumultuous labor dispute; Margherita’s set itself gets thrown into chaos upon the arrival of a mercurial American actor (played to the back row by the ever hammy John Turturro).

While Maretti’s meta-narrative of a harried director juggling creative and personal issues while slogging through a film shoot begs comparison to Truffaut’s Day for Night, he ultimately digs into more elemental themes, revealed incrementally. Maretti’s measured pacing may give you some pause, so be advised that it does require your attention (and patience) to fully appreciate the denouement: one word of dialog that not only packs an emotional wallop and beautifully ties the entire film together, but gives us all a reassuring moment of clarity amidst the chaos of adult life.

Previous posts with related themes:

Top 10 Movies about the Movies

More reviews at Den of Cinema

— Dennis Hartley

Go ahead and interrupt, she won’t mind

Published by digby on September 10, 2016

Go ahead and interrupt, she won’t mind

by digby

Well, actually she does. And Katy Tur would have none of it:

I know nobody wants to hear this but …

For an engaging primer on the realities of mansplaining, look no further than Rebecca Solnit’s new book Men Explain Things to Me, which collects seven essays on feminism, violence, and how when men often explain things to women “whether or not they know what they’re talking about.” In May, Soraya Chemaly also addressed the mansplaining phenomena with a great article “10 Simple Words Every Girl Should Learn.” In that piece, Chemaly advised parents who want to combat sexism to teach their daughters to practice saying “Stop interrupting me,” “I just said that,” and “No explanation needed.” As her article points out, women are taught to be overly polite and active listeners in conversations, but men are not taught to socialize this way.

For example, just last week, Fox News excellently showcased some mansplaining on a segment that instructed women to “not raise their voices” or “talk too much” in the workplace. Within that segment, host Steve Doocy interrupted the guest author as she spoke about her new book.

While individual women might feel like they’re the only ones frustrated at being ignored or interrupted, there are numbers that show it happens all the time: studies show that men interrupt women during meetings, while in groups with friends, and while speaking one-on-one. In the interest of showing how mansplaining is a proven phenomena, I’ve gathered seven studies that show how men often dominate conversations.

1. Women get interrupted more than men. Both men and women interrupt women more often than they interrupt men, according to a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology. In that study, two researchers at George Washington University reported on an experiment where they put 20 women and 20 men in pairs, then recorded and transcribed their conversations. The result: Over the course of each three-minute conversation, women interrupted men just once, on average, but interrupted other women 2.8 times. Men interrupted their male conversation partner twice, on average, and interrupted the woman 2.6 times.

2. Men interrupt women to assert power. Not all interruptions are the same, of course—sometimes we interrupt people to be encouraging about what they’re saying. But a 1998 meta-analysis of 43 studies by two researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz from 1998 found that men were more likely to interrupt women with the intent to assert dominance in the conversation, meaning men were interrupting to take over the conversation floor. In mixed groups rather than a one-on-one conversation, men interrupted even more frequently.

3. Men dominate conversations during professional meetings. A study by Brigham Young University and Princeton researchers in 2012 showed that women spoke only 25 percent of the time in professional meetings, meaning men took up 75 percent of an average meeting. The study also found that when women were left out of the conversation, it was harder for them to have an effect on decisions and discussions during majority votes on issues.

4. Men and boys dominate conversation in classrooms. A 2004 study of Harvard Law School classrooms found that men were 50 percent more likely than women to volunteer at least one comment during class, and 144 percent more likely to speak voluntarily at least three times. Another study of Harvard classrooms, back in 1985, found that in classes with a male instructor, men spoke two and a half times longer than their female classmates. However, when female instructors led classrooms, the study found they had “an inspiring effect on female students,” leading women to speak three times as much as they did with a male instructor. This problem occurs in elementary and middle school as well, according to research by Myra and David Sadker from 1994. In classroom discussions, boys called out answers eight more times than girls and were more likely to be listened to, while girls who shouted out answers were instructed to raise their hands. Boys also raised their hands in more disruptive ways by jumping out of their chair and making noise, pleading for the teacher to respond.

5. Patients are more likely to interrupt female doctors than male doctors. According to a 1998 study by Candace West, a sociology professor at University of California Santa Cruz, doctors who are women are more likely to be interrupted by their patients than male doctors. The study looked at the number of times patients and doctors interrupted each other and found that patients were more than twice as likely to interrupt a female doctor than a male doctor.

6. Men get more space in print and online journalism. Men don’t just talk more in face-to-face conversations, but in our media conversations. According to a 2012 study by the OpEd Project, women write 20 percent of traditional opinion pieces, 33 percent of online opinion pieces, and 38 percent of college newspaper opinion pieces. Bylines on literary reviews and creative nonfiction also skew male, according to the annual VIDA count. And when it comes to coverage of politics, a 4th Estate analysis of 2012 election coverage showed women were vastly underquoted.

7. On Twitter, men are retweeted more often than women. The tendency to give more conversational space to men is a reality on social media, too. A tool named Twee-Q creates a score based on the amount of men and women retweeted by twitter users. Women make up 62 percent of Twitter users, but according to Twee-Q’s statistics on retweets, men are retweeted almost twice as often as women, with close to 63 percent of all retweets belonging to male users.
When girls are reminded to be polite and boys’ behavior is brushed off, the phenomenon continues. To stop the interruptions and conversation domination remember Soraya Chemaly’s ten words that keep mansplainers in check—and boys should be taught to respect other people’s contributions to conversations.

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