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Special announcement! I have returned to producing a blog. It is aptly named The Sundry Letter, over at sundryletter.com. This newsletter will be a relay of what I post on the blog. Thank you for reading!

White House women want to be in the room where it happens It’s hard to be a woman in politics, especially at the White House. Two-thirds of Obama’s aides are men. Often, women were ignored. But they found a way around this. And it’s brilliant.

Juliet Eilperin for The Washington Post:

So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called ‘amplification’: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.

‘We just started doing it, and made a purpose of doing it. It was an everyday thing,’ said one former Obama aide who requested anonymity to speak frankly. Obama noticed, she and others said, and began calling more often on women and junior aides.

James Gleick on our anxiety about Time, the origin of the term “type A,” and the curious psychology of elevator impatience Maria Popova back at it again with a great review of a book written in 2000 when smartphones, Facebook and the like did not yet exist. Here’s a quote from the book:

We have a word for free time: leisure.

Leisure is time off the books, off the job, off the clock. If we save time, we commonly believe we are saving it for our leisure. We know that leisure is really a state of mind, but no dictionary can define it without reference to passing time. It is unrestricted time, unemployed time, unoccupied time. Or is it? Unoccupied time is vanishing. The leisure industries (an oxymoron maybe, but no contradiction) fill time, as groundwater fills a sinkhole. The very variety of experience attacks our leisure as it attempts to satiate us. We work for our amusement.”

Elementary school homework is useless Heather Shumaker, writing for Salon: 

Homework has benefits, but its benefits are age dependent.

For elementary-aged children, research suggests that studying in class gets superior learning results, while extra schoolwork at home is just . . . extra work. Even in middle school, the relationship between homework and academic success is minimal at best. By the time kids reach high school, homework provides academic benefit, but only in moderation. More than two hours per night is the limit. After that amount, the benefits taper off. ‘The research is very clear,’ agrees Etta Kralovec, education professor at the University of Arizona. ‘There’s no benefit at the elementary school level.’

Let the kids play, be free and break the cycle: 

Then there’s the damage to personal relationships. In thousands of homes across the country, families battle over homework nightly. Parents nag and cajole. Overtired children protest and cry. Instead of connecting and supporting each other at the end of the day, too many families find themselves locked in the “did you do your homework?” cycle.

The 24-year-old Coca-Cola virgin Jamie Lauren Keiles never drank Coca-Cola in her entire life. She said she did other things though.

She wrote an insightful and funny — all together interesting — piece for Eater about her experience testing coke (pro tip: Mexican Coke is better because it uses real sugar and not high-fructose corn syrup):

Where to begin? Search: how to try Coke, revise to how to try Coca-Cola, and then finally drink my first Coke. A whole lot of info on how to quit drinking Coke, but nothing for beginners who are just starting out. There are WikiHow tutorials on how to breathe, how to pee, how to love, and how to cry, but drinking Coke apparently demands less instruction than functions which are naturally regulated by the brain.

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*