Weekend Reads 8/19/17

Female engineers explain why James Damore was really fired from Google

One engineer, writing under the name Edith, said it wasn't just the content of the memo that was objectionable. It was the intent and framing too, and that's why she said Google was right to fire Damore.

"Social skills are part of a professional skillset," she wrote. "It is important to learn how to handle difficult subjects in a workplace — we all have to do it. There are consequences for doing it in a way that causes problems for your employer, and I think in this case the consequences were appropriate."

How Eclipses Drove 2,000 Years of Math

When he tried to work out the theories of moon, he just couldn't do it, because the math is basically too hard. Newton had a very clunky way of doing calculus. He'd invented calculus, but he was still using these geometrical methods which were very inefficient … His theory, when correctly worked out, gets it right, but his actual calculation was not able to get it right.

The Real Story Behind All Those Confederate Statues

This illustrates something that even a lot of liberals don’t always get. Most of these monuments were not erected after the Civil War. In fact, all the way to 1890 there were very few statues or monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders. Most of them were built much later.

Republicans, This Is Your President

It is easy to denounce Nazis. Republican lawmakers, if you truly repudiate this march and this violence, then repudiate voter-ID laws. Repudiate gerrymandering. Repudiate police brutality. Repudiate mass incarceration and private prisons. Repudiate the war on drugs. Repudiate the fact that black Americans have still not been compensated for the unpaid forced labor that was foundational to white financial stability. Repudiate gun control obstructionism. Repudiate the Muslim ban. Repudiate the wall.