Rebekah Kuschmider

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to get stuck at work. Last minute conference calls. Emergency orders coming in that need fulfillment.

“Sometimes a lady has to be told when she’s being nasty.”

This is no small thing. The institutional barriers to achievement faced by Black women are staggering: African American women earn only 64% of what white men earn, and they earn only 91% of what Black men earn. African American women held 8.58% of the bachelor’s degrees held by women in 2012, though they constituted 12.7% of the female population. The poverty rate for African American women is 28.6%. In comparison, the poverty rate of white, non-Hispanic women is 10.8%.

Apparently, the trend of very sheer tops that allow the nipple to make its presence known is the inspiration for this new twist on cosmetic surgery. Celebs have been photographed with nips in evidence, and people are bringing the photos to doctors' offices to say: “Give me these nipples, pretty please.”

Sexual orientation is not a lifestyle and gay people are not a monolith. Much as women are all individuals with different wants, needs, and preferences, so are gay people, bi people, asexual people, polyamorous people, and pansexual people (also people who present gender differently that the usual male/female binary but gender identity is a different thing than sexual orientation and will likely be the subject of a whole different essay).

Musician Kid Rock has announced that he intends to run for the Senate as a Republican in Michigan. Athlete and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner has teased about a run as a Republican in California. Neither would-be candidate has filed the official candidacy paperwork as of this time. I hope they don’t. At least not until they learn something about governance.

The governor of Florida just signed a package of tax cuts into law, and one of the changes to the state tax code is eliminating sales taxes on tampons, pads, menstrual cups and other menstrual supplies.

This weekend, she took to CNN and fielded a question about Trump’s recent statements about abortion, wherein he suggested that the official Republican platform should include room for exceptions to an all-out abortion ban in the cases of rape, incest, or risk to the life and health of the mother.

The special counsel is former FBI director Robert Mueller. The same FBI director who, under President George W. Bush, threatened to quit rather than unconstitutionally wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant. This is a by-the-book, law and order kind of guy. And his chief ally within the Department of Justice at that moment? James Comey.

I have ventured into the world of Harry Potter over and over again, and every time I finish the series, I feel like I’ve learned another life lesson. So I just want to say thank you to J.K. Rowling for the gift she gave us.