Shawn Holley Will Free You Now

From Glamour authored by Mattie Kahn:

“Not even the most experienced journalists could resist a hint of scorn: “Trump Meets With Kim. Kim Kardashian West, That Is,” one headline read. Another: “Welcome to 2018: President Donald Trump Just Met With Kim Kardashian.”

Kardashian West had gone to the White House to plead the case of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who’d served more than two decades in prison on nonviolent drug charges. When Trump commuted her sentence a week later, the moment came and went like a season finale. Recapped, critiqued, forgotten.

The truth is the meeting between two celebrities (one, breaker of the Internet; the other, president of the United States) was planned over months, and behind it was a woman whose name and narrative—the public defender turned Kardashian “konfidante”—don’t fit in a headline.

Kardashian West was 16 the first time she tapped Shawn Holley for her legal expertise. The women had met two years earlier, when Johnnie Cochran assigned Holley to the “dream team” that would defend O.J. Simpson. Holley was one of the most junior in a group that included Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Kardashian. The case lasted 16 months.

By the time it was over and Simpson was acquitted, Kardashian West had come to see her father’s coworker as a cross between a role model and a relative. (“Oh my gosh,” she remembers thinking, “I just want to be like her.”) Holley became so close to the clan that she’d sometimes meet Kardashian West for lunch or to take her to Billy Blanks dance classes in Sherman Oaks. For their part, the Kardashians invited Holley to parties at their home. (The practice continues even now; the most recent photos on Holley’s phone include scenes from a barbecue on Kourtney Kardashian’s lawn).”

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Exclusive: This app helps divorced parents stop fighting over custody and save money

From Fast Company authored by Lydia Dishman:

“Parenting is challenging, even in the best of circumstances. Guiding the emotional and physical development of another human being is a massive responsibility. Throw a separation or divorce into the mix, and it’s easy to see how much more fraught the landscape can be.

Yet this is a common problem. Research from Penn State emeritus professor of family sociology and demography Paul Amato indicates that between 42% and 45% of marriages in the U.S. will end in divorce, resulting in approximately 50% of children experiencing divorce in their lifetimes. As this data doesn’t include parents who are separated or never married, the number of families impacted is likely much higher.

“In my 20 years on the bench, I witnessed countless families torn apart as they slogged through the family law system, battling over the simplest of co-parenting disagreements,” says Hon. Sherrill A. Ellsworth, former presiding judge of the Superior Court in Riverside County, California. “The reality is that most cases–up to 80%, in my experience–do not require legal intervention, yet that’s exactly where many families end up.”

So Ellsworth combined her legal expertise with the technical expertise of entrepreneurs Jonathan Verk and Eric Weiss to create coParenter, an app aimed at helping families collaborate on custody arrangements, child support payments, holiday scheduling, and other issues without conflict. The app just launched on iOS and Android and integrates texting and calendar tools with AI. Parents also have live, on-demand access to professional mediators who can help facilitate co-parenting decisions.”

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How parents talk about money differently to their sons and daughters

From Fast Company authored by Jared Lindzon:

“Our parents are often our first teacher and most lasting example of how to manage money.  A new study, however, suggests that parents are talking to boys and girls about personal finance in different ways, and it might be responsible for shaping habits and expectations that can last a lifetime.

According to a survey of 1,000 parents conducted by Giftcards.com, respondents were more likely to teach their daughters fiscal restraint, while their sons were more likely to be taught about building wealth. For example, 61% of boys received a lesson from their parents on credit scores by the time they reached high school, compared with 46% of girls. Boys were also 9% more likely to be taught how to pay taxes, 5% more likely to be taught about bank accounts, 3% more likely to be taught about credit cards, and 2% more likely to receive an education on investing.”

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How You Can Be The Answer To Gender Bias

From Forbes authored by Roger Dean Duncan:

“Gender bias is an equal opportunity phenomenon. It’s studied by sociologists and economists. It’s the subject of sermons in churches and synagogues. It’s a minefield for human resources practitioners.

And of course it’s a persistent topic for politicians all across the ideological spectrum. Just this week, as many people were observing Equal Pay Day, one prominent politician felt the sting of this hotly debated issue. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a progressive Democrat who has often railed against what she sees as unfair treatment of women, joined the ranks of the scolded. According to an analysis of publicly available Senate data, the gender pay gap in Sen. Warren’s office is even wider than the national average. In 2016, the analysis showed, women working for Sen. Warren were paid just $.71 for every dollar paid to men.”

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JASMIN PARIS ON HER RECORD-SETTING WIN OF BRITAIN’S MONTANE SPINE RACE

From REI CO.OP authored by Cassidy Randall:

“Her hood cinched tight against the unforgiving British winter, Jasmin Paris ran through the continual pool of light laid down by her headlamp. The horizontal rain blew into her eyes, obscuring the upcoming checkpoint where she would briefly rest, eat and pump breast milk for her 14-month-old daughter before racing on into the dark hills.

After 83 hours, 12 minutes and 23 seconds, Paris crossed the finish line Jan. 16 to become the first woman to win Britain’s Montane Spine Race. She smashed the previous record, held by Eoin Keith, by 12 hours.

The Spine Race, along the Pennine Way National Trail that traces the backbone of England, is widely known as one of the most grueling endurance races in existence: a one-week, nonstop ultramarathon that covers nearly 40,000 feet of climbing. Competitors carry their own kits with everything they need to be self-sufficient, including a sleeping bag, bivy or tent, cooking stove, at least 3,000 calories between checkpoints (of which there are five), and a GPS for navigation of the route between mountains, farmland and heather fields. The only thing Parris didn’t have to carry was her breast pump; it was in the drop bag that was ferried between checkpoints.”

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Fake Porn Videos Are Terrorizing Women. Do We Need a Law to Stop Them?

From Fortune authored by Jeff John Roberts:

“In the darker corners of the Internet, you can now find celebrities like Emma Watson and Selma Hayek performing in pornographic videos. The clips are fake, of course—but it’s distressingly hard to tell. Recent improvements in artificial intelligence software have made it surprisingly easy to graft the heads of stars, and ordinary women, to the bodies of X-rated actresses to create realistic videos.

These explicit movies are just one strain of so-called “deepfakes,” which are clips that have been doctored so well they look real. Their arrival poses a threat to democracy; mischief makers can, and already have, used them to spread fake news. But another great danger of deepfakes is their use as a tool to harass and humiliate women.”

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Why Getting Into Trouble is Necessary to Make Change

From TIME authored by John Lewis:

“I’ve seen unbelievable changes during the past 50 or 60 years. When people say, “Nothing has changed,” I feel like saying, “Come and walk in my shoes.” I truly believe that if there is faith and hope and determination, we can continue to lay progress and create an American community at peace with ourselves. The next generation will help us get there.

When I was growing up as a child in Alabama, I saw signs all around me–I saw crosses that the Klan had put up, an announcement about a Klan meeting. I saw signs that said White, colored, white men, colored men, white women, colored women. There were places where we couldn’t go. But we brought those signs down. The only place you will see those signs today will be in a book, in a museum or on a video. When I was growing up, the great majority of African Americans could not participate in a democratic process in the South. They could not register to vote. But we changed that. When I first came to Washington to go on the freedom rides in 1961, black people and white people couldn’t be seated together on a Greyhound bus leaving this city. They travel to the South without being beaten, arrested and jailed.

Now all across the South and all across America there are elected officials who are people of color. In the recent elections in Virginia and some other places around the country, you saw more people of color and more women getting elected to positions of power. They are African American, they’re Latino, Asian American, Native American. Our country is a much better place–a much different place–in spite of all the setbacks and interruptions of progress.”

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What Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Hoop Earrings Mean to Latina Women Like Me

From Glamour authored by Frances Sola-Santiago:

“Like many Latina women, I got my ears pierced when I was a baby—my mother took me to the pediatrician to have it done less than a month after I was born. (According to her, there were many other new moms and infants in line at the doctor’s office to do the same.) She says I cried through the night afterward, but she kept the earrings in because, as Puerto Ricans say, Antes muerta que sencilla. Better dead than plain.

I’ve worn earrings ever since—mostly hoops, the cheapest pair my mom could find at the mall still made from real gold. And I had to be careful with them: One time, after I lost mine, my mom tightened a butterfly back so hard on my new earrings that we needed tweezers to take them off. But I loved these hoops. They were a rite of passage, one that Latina mothers offered their daughters as a symbol of their womanhood. I was raised to always be accessorized, no matter the occasion.

To me, my hoops were an heirloom, until I learned I’d have to set them aside to be taken seriously in certain circles. When I decided to take my ballet dancing seriously, I ditched the hoops for a pair of stud earrings (or dormilonas, as we call them back home)—the former represented a heritage of salsa and more rowdy dancing, which had no place in professional ballet. I stopped dancing when I was 17, but I kept the feeling that, if I wanted to be perceived as polished, my accessories needed to be more delicate.”

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The Japanese art principle that teaches how to work with failure

From Quartz authored by Ephrat Livni:

“Like a favorite cup or plate, people sometimes crack. We may even break.

Obviously, we cannot and ought not throw ourselves away when this happens. Instead, we can relish the blemishes and learn to turn these scars into art—like kintsugi (金継ぎ), an ancient Japanese practice that beautifies broken pottery.

Kintsugi, or gold splicing, is a physical manifestation of resilience. Instead of discarding marred vessels, practitioners of the art repair broken items with a golden adhesive that enhances the break lines, making the piece unique. They call attention to the lines made by time and rough use; these aren’t a source of shame. This practice—also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い ), which literally means gold mending—emphasizes the beauty and utility of breaks and imperfections. It turns a problem into a plus.”

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How weight discrimination affects women

From Biz Woman authored by Catlin Mullen:

“Weight-based discrimination affects more women than men and can influence both hiring and pay decisions.

Rebecca Pearl, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, writes that weight-based discrimination is experienced by 20 percent to 45 percent of women, compared to 6 percent to 28 percent of men.

A 2016 study found that weight discrimination had increased 66 percent over the previous decade and that the bias “appears to be socially acceptable and is reinforced by the media.”

Actress Melissa McCarthy, for example, told InStyle magazine about a journalist asking, “Are you shocked that you actually work in this business at your tremendous size?”

“I just remember all the blood drained out of me,” she said, calling it “fascinating” that male actors don’t face similar questions.

Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at the University of Connecticut, told Huffington Post.  that the stigma is “very pervasive,” and that “we need to think of broader-scale solutions to really try and address these inequities people are facing,”

Weight bias at work might take a greater toll on women’s careers than men’s partly because weight discrimination can occur at lower body weights for women than for men, the Perelman School of Medicine’s Pearl notes.

Weight bias often stereotypes people as sloppy, lazy, unintelligent and lacking willpower, according to Pearl, who writes that they also may be assumed to be more emotional, less outgoing and less conscientious. ”

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