“Watching her speech I was struck by how (New Zealand PM Jacinda) Ardern has had to navigate the complicated gendered expectations that often create barriers to women’s success. Women are often expected to be unfailingly kind and patient, and to nurture those around them. If women demonstrate the type of leadership typically praised in men — ambitious, swaggering, domineering — they are seen as unfeminine, unlikable, and even illegitimate leaders. To understand how that plays out in practice, take a look at the scholarship of Victoria L. Brescoll, a professor at Yale who studies how biased perceptions of women undermine their success on the individual level and reinforce gender gaps more broadly in society. Ardern, as I wrote in this 2020 column, built a public image that tied her leadership to traits that women are usually praised for. For instance, when Ardern addressed the nation after the country began its strict Covid lockdown in March 2020, she conducted an informal Facebook Live session on her phone while wearing a cozy sweatshirt, and made sure to let people know that she had just finished putting her toddler to bed. By portraying herself as maternal, friendly, and cooperative, she remained extremely popular even as she locked down the country.” (Amanda Taub/NYT)
“Day Three of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—the digital newsroom Semafor came out with the third installment of its ‘Davos Daily’ newsletter, a one-stop template for how the media covers the WEF and the global rich. There’s the cocktail-party scene-setting (‘plates of toothpicked olives and Gruyère cubes’), the hungry search for a narrative (‘the vibe is dour, and I’d expect that cement to harden by the end of the week’), and the obligatory swipe at the myopia of the entire enterprise. (‘A short list of things the Davos crowd missed: the 2008 crash, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, slowing global growth in 2018 and 2019, and the pandemic in 2020.’) And yet the journalists continue to come, in wave after wave, eager to make fun of the scene while making sure that they show up at the right parties.” (Kyle Pope/CJR)
“An even more obvious point is that, while any person or prince is likely welcome to do aid work, Africa is the Africans’ ‘thing.’ And yet this argument involves two young men whose family did once take part in divvying up the continent. When their father was born, in 1948, he was in line to inherit a realm whose colonies and territories still included what are now more than a dozen African countries, and more lands elsewhere. (Had he been born six months earlier, he would, briefly, have been in line for the title Emperor of India, too.) That inheritance is mostly, but not at all entirely, gone, which is one of many reasons that ‘Spare’ hovers so precariously between the meaningless and the momentous—qualities that, together, add up to the monarchical.” (Amy Davidson Sorkin/TNY)
“Experts say the sale, which also includes a small personalized Valentine by Andy Warhol, could earn over a million dollars for charity. Proceeds from the auction will go to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York and Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Durham, NC, both of which were close to Talley’s heart. The sale has been overseen by Alexis E. Thomas, executor of (Andre Leon) Talley’s estate, who was in charge of deciding what would go under the hammer from Talley’s homes in White Plains, NY. and Durham. Thomas met the editor while fundraising to build affordable housing at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in the early 2000s.” (P6)
“In the previous report, the Beast reported, (Marjorie) Taylor Greene asked Boebert, ‘You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?’ to which the Colorado Republican shot back, ‘Don't be ugly,’ and then reportedly fled from the bathroom.” (Salon)
“I tend to assume that gatherings of the uberwealthy and powerful could be at least a little entertaining. Maybe some cool celebrities, some good-looking people, some sick fashion, some stimulating conversations. Not so at Davos. Every sighting, every anecdote, and every quote from a global A-lister recorded in Semafor’s newsletters is more of a snoozer than the last. Does it sound like a good time to attend an 8:30 a.m. panel on ‘Quiet Quitting and the Meaning of Work’? How about a party titled ‘Whose Metaverse Will It Be?’ (According to Semafor, this nightmarish-sounding affair was somehow “the party people seem to actually want to get into,” which says everything that needs to be said about the caliber of party on offer.).” (Slate)
A Russian news video claiming to show Serbian volunteers training to fight alongside Russian troops in Ukraine has prompted outrage in Serbia, exposing its complex relationship with Moscow. Russia's Wagner mercenary group made the Serbian-language videos to encourage recruitment for the war. Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vucic, reacted angrily on national TV. 'Why do you, from Wagner, call anyone from Serbia when you know that it is against our rules?' he said ... It is illegal for Serbians to take part in conflicts abroad." (BBC)
“Located on an unpaved side street near the international airport of Goma in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC),the Hotel Mbiza usually caters to businesspeople or government delegations from the capital, Kinshasa. But since around Christmas of 2022, white military personnel from Eastern Europe have fully booked the hotel.
"‘There are dozens, maybe even a hundred white men in uniform,’ a local journalist said. He asked for anonymity for security reasons. ‘They wear a variety of uniforms with no national flags, and pistols on belts,’ he said. The journalist added that soldiers of the Congolese presidential guard closely guarded the hotel entrance. They told him foreigners had booked all the rooms for an extended period. ‘It is now the headquarters of the whites,’ explained a soldier at the entrance, who refused to say more. Diplomatic circles have been speculating for weeks on the meaning of the presence of these armed Eastern European men in Goma amid a new round of fighting in eastern DRC.The war erupted last spring after Tutsi rebels of the M23 (March 23 Movement) seized a vast swath of land along the border with neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Congo's army has been incurring heavy losses in the fighting. The presence of white armed men at the Mbiza Hotel sparked rumors that the government had hired the notorious Russian mercenary Wagner Group to help fight the rebels.” (DW)
“The reporting suggests that the administration’s possible pivot to what the Times calls ‘one of its boldest moves yet’ is motivated in part by officials’ belief that the risk of Russia retaliating by deploying tactical nuclear weapons has diminished, though not disappeared. There is no clear evidence as to why this fear is reduced, and, as Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow at the Carnegie, argues on Twitter ‘the fact that Russia has not used nuclear weapons yet is poor evidence that it would not do so to protect Crimea.’ For its part, Moscow has continued its nuclear saber-rattling. In a post on the Telegram messaging app this week, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned, ‘The defeat of a nuclear power in a conventional war may trigger a nuclear war.’” (Responsible Statecraft)
“Their attempted coup, however, was destined to fail. Whether those invading Brasilia believed it or not, there was little interest among Brazil’s elites and armed forces in a violent overthrow. And the attacks on Sunday against the country’s democratic institutions may have made President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva even stronger. For two months, radical Bolsonaro supporters had been rallying in front of military barracks, calling for the Brazilian armed forces to oust President Lula, who won the October 30 presidential election and was inaugurated on January 1. They believed the military was on their side. And they believed this attack would spur the soldiers to action. Despite a lack of evidence, that is what they had been told for months in their echo chambers over social media and in WhatsApp and Telegram group chats: that the election was stolen, that Lula was going to sink the country into a communist dictatorship, that Bolsonaro was ready to return, that they were the patriots fighting for Brazilian freedom.” (The Nation)
“Pope Francis was elected in 2013, at a time when the church was battered by continuing sex abuse allegations and the recent Vatileaks scandal. The first non-European to be elected in over a millennium, Francis quickly broke with his more conservative predecessor by eschewing the ostentation of the position. He rejected the church’s narrow fixation on abortion and ‘sexual sins’ and instead emphasized compassion, hinting at leniency for divorced Catholics and making overtures to the LGBTQ community. He condemned greed and unbridled capitalism and made environmentalism a key issue of his papacy.” (Slate)
“Netflix announced 34 new Korean titles to hit the streaming platform in 2023, including a diverse array of series and movies. The upcoming titles, which Netflix calls their ‘biggest-ever lineup of Korean films and series,’ includes 21 scripted shows, five reality shows, six movies and two documentaries. Korean content on the platform has continued to grow, with over 60 percent of all Netflix users watching Korean titles last year, according to a release from the company on Monday. ‘Over the last year, Korean series and films have regularly featured in our Global Top 10 list in more than 90 countries, and three of Netflix’s most-watched shows ever are from Korea,’ Don Kang, the vice president of content for Netflix (Korea), said.” (NBC)
“We discuss why the Cold War bonded Republicans as a party, how the 1994 Republican congressional victory inaugurated a new era of intraparty fighting, how Rush Limbaugh’s rise created a new market for far-out ideas and new pressures on conservative politicians, why conservative media has had so much more sway than liberal media over grass-roots voters, how the business model of Fox News differs from that of MSNBC and what kinds of political ideas those businesses produce, how the G.O.P. is now caught between the pincers of the donor class and the grass roots, when the chief Republican enemy became the Democratic Party, why more moderate conservatives have become so weak and more.” (Ezra Klein)