An Alabama police department still pays an officer who was convicted of murder

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Crunching the numbers

  • From this series on how the ultrawealthy dodge taxes: A ProPublica investigation found that professional sports team owners often obtain deductions by reporting their teams received millions less than their actual earnings. The tactic frequently allows billionaire owners to pay lower tax rates than their players or stadium workers.
  • California will become the third state to provide reparations to people who the state forced to be sterilized during the eugenics movement. Victims, including women sterilized while in prison, could receive up to $25,000 in compensation. California’s forced sterilization program, which lasted from 1909 to 1979, was the largest in the United States. The state also sterilized 144 female inmates from 2005 to 2013, according to an audit.

In local news

I strongly recommend

  • This oral history of “Legally Blonde,” a feminist classic starring Reese Witherspoon as law student Elle Woods, as the movie reaches its 20th anniversary. Screenwriter Kirsten Smith said of the film: “It wears its desires on its sleeve: the contradiction [that] you can be a woman who’s fighting to be heard with a very clear point of view, who’s very strong and smart and also funny, fun and interested in different things, fashion and the law.”
  • This essay on Elle Woods, the bimbo archetype in film and how 2021 became the unlikely “Year of the Bimbo.” Marlowe Granados writes: “Just like Hollywood, men want women who fit into their lives neatly, without too much adjustment on their part. The bimbo, in all her glory, is a walking reminder that femininity is a process of making oneself. High maintenance and high effort. The more time a bimbo puts into her looks, the less time she spends on anyone but herself.”

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– Mollie Bryant
Founder and editor, BigIfTrue.org