"After Ms. Holmes was convicted, Rupert Murdoch, who invested $125 million in Theranos..."

"... emailed The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper he owns, calling himself 'one of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.' I am not a smarter or more astute observer of human behavior than Mr. Murdoch or George Shultz, the former secretary of state who helped end the Cold War, or James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary, both of whom were Theranos board members and investors. So, how could I be sure that 'Liz' wasn’t another character that Ms. Holmes had created?"

Writes by Amy Chozick, in "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth/The black turtlenecks are gone. So is the voice. As the convicted Theranos founder awaits prison, she has adopted a new persona: devoted mother" (NYT).

"I was admittedly swept up in Liz as an authentic and sympathetic person. She’s gentle and charismatic, in a quiet way. My editor laughed at me when I shared these impressions, telling me (and I quote), 'Amy Chozick, you got rolled!' I vigorously disagreed! You don’t know her like I do! But... something... had been gnawing on me since I first met Ms. Holmes. How do you have an honest conversation with a person whose fraud trial has played out so publicly? I tried to ask Ms. Holmes this directly. How do I believe you when you’ve been convicted of (basically) lying? But how could I ask someone who was nursing her 11-day-old baby on a white sofa two feet away if she was actually conning me?"

Go to the link to read the long article and try to figure out how much of what Holmes wanted Holmes got from the NYT. 

"In the weeks I spent listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, I learned that lobsters have serotonin, that Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis and that Mr. Gladwell adheres to a firm life rule that he drink only five liquids: water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk."

That's a fine first sentence. The article is "With ‘Talking to Strangers,’ Malcolm Gladwell Goes Dark/Read by millions — but savaged by critics — the author has a new book on police violence, campus rape and other bleak terrain" by Amy Chozick (in the NYT).

Excerpt:

At 55, in clear-framed spectacles and a head of curls, Mr. Gladwell still has the spindly, featherweight look of someone who can break a five-minute mile on a casual weekend run. He lives in a two-story townhouse apartment in the West Village, brimming with books, vintage furniture and a set of eclectic paintings of the Ethiopian Army. We sat at a heavy wooden table as 90-degree August soup poured through the open windows....

Books take years to complete, but thanks to [podcasting], Mr. Gladwell’s typical reader — whom he has described as “a 45-year-old guy with three kids who’s an engineer at some company outside of Atlanta” — can partake in a virtuous cycle of Gladwell programming. The podcast teases interest in a souped-up “Talking to Strangers” audiobook, which builds an audience for more speeches, which stokes advertisers for the podcasts....

August souped-up?

It was a simple writing error to re-use the word "soup" there, and it amuses me, especially since neither use is about actual soup. "Soup" is conventionally used to refer to air that seems thick, mostly for fog, where the traditional expression is "pea soup fog." The OED traces that metaphor back to 1849, to an entry in a journal by Herman Melville: "Upon sallying out this morning encountered the oldfashioned pea soup London fog." That makes it sound as though people had been saying "pea soup fog" for a long time.

And what about the soup in "souped up"? The OED doesn't go into any detail here, but I think it's just an analogy to feeding human beings with the hearty, humble food provided to hungry poor people. The oldest uses are not about adding fuel, but tinkering with the mechanical works, readjusting the engines — of airplanes and cars... and jitneys:

Here come a flat-top, he was moving up with me
Then come waving goodbye in a little old souped-up jitney
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll
Moaning siren, 'twas a state patrol
So I let out my wings and then I blew my horn
Bye-bye New Jersey, I've become airborne

No, that one wasn't in the OED. That's just what plays in my head. Chuck Berry. Wonder if he had parapraxis... or if I do... What is parapraxis?!

Parapraxis, the clinical terminology for “Freudian slips,” as the episode explains, means abnormal acts in speech, memory, or physicality....

Gladwell focuses on the parapraxis that seemed to occur during performances in the late 60s and early 70s of Elvis’s song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” which contains a minute-long spoken-word section aimed at a long-lost lover. Though Elvis performed the song many times, he consistently tripped over the interlude. His final sweat-soaked performance of the song is iconic for all the wrong reasons: the words are almost all gone . . . replaced instead by maniacal, uncontrollable laughter.

The spectacle is hard to explain....

Or easy to explain:



And so, as you sally out this morning, souped up on espresso or tea or milk, have some laughs, have some lobsters, and good luck with your parapraxis.

"Several household employees also made allegations of neglect, including that Ms. [Peter] Max withheld food from her husband and sometimes put 'large Brazil nuts' in his smoothies, on which he might choke."

"Not everyone agreed with the portrayal of an abusive marriage. One court-appointed lawyer testified that Mr. Max 'stated several times, without prompting, how much he loved his wife' and that removing him from their home could be 'highly detrimental' to Mr. Max’s mental well-being... Mr. Max continued to travel to the studio... and sign works of art, even as his condition steadily worsened....  The artist’s dementia, [a gallery employee said], made Mr. Max even more creative and prolific... Luke Nikas, a top art lawyer in New York... did not dispute that Mr. Max suffered from dementia, and noted that the 20th-century Dutch-American artist Willem de Kooning also had the ailment and remained productive. He compared Mr. Max to Warhol and conceptual artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, who exert creative control but typically rely on others to paint or construct the art. 'Not a single work goes out the door without being hand signed by Peter Max,' Mr. Nikas said... One Wednesday evening in April, I showed up at Peter Max’s apartment.... I told Mr. Max that I was a Times reporter... He just shrugged, asked me several times what year it was and then told me that he had spent his childhood in Shanghai.... I wanted to ask him directly about his career and the drama of recent years, but now that I saw his confusion for myself, I didn’t attempt an interview. So I thanked him and turned to leave...."

From "Dementia Stopped a Major Artist From Painting. For Some, That Spelled a Lucrative Opportunity/Now Peter Max’s associates are trading lurid allegations of kidnapping, hired goons, attempted murder by Brazil nut and art fraud on the high seas" by Amy Chozick (NYT).

Did you know that paintings with the Peter Max signature are sold on all of the major cruise lines, including Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian, and Norwegian has a Peter Max-themed ship?

Didn't you love Peter Max 50 years ago? If you were around back then. If so, now you are old, and maybe you go on cruises and it would feel nice to go on a cruise on ship painted with Peter-Max-style art and to buy a painting that was signed "Max," and you'd hate to learn that not only was the painting done by someone else but that the signature was accomplished because the demented Mr. Max was "instructed to hold out his hand, and for hours, he would sign the art as if it were his own, grasping a brush and scrawling Max."

Oh, the happy cheerful bright colors! Peter Max was the picture of our youth. His art epitomized youthful optimism and energy. There's no going back, and now it seems he's the epitome of age. How old we all are! His decline reminds us. What year is it? We spent our childhood in Maxland.

ADDED: Here's CBS touting Max 4 years ago....



You do see him painting and hear him talking there. Do you detect dementia? There's something horribly phony about the "CBS This Morning" presentation. The pinchedly smiling face of Michelle Miller made me queasy.

What Clinton loyalist Philippe Reines said to NYT reporter Amy Chozick: "I didn’t know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you."

That line — which Chozick called "grossly gynecological" — is from the movie “Thank You for Smoking," and it came up in a discussion of whether a prior conversation was off the record. Chozick didn't reveal Reines's name in her new book — "Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling" — but the WaPo reviewer (Carlos Lozada) revealed it, and Reines confirms, as he gives his riposte to Jezebel:

Amy deserves credit for confessing. Because anyone who’s seen “Thank You for Smoking” knows the problem isn’t Aaron Eckhart’s language or behavior, it’s Katie Holmes’s ethics and tactics. I said it then, I’d say it again today. Oh, one more thing: she and [New York Times assistant managing editor Carolyn] Ryan should know this about my own book I’m currently writing: there are tapes. And unlike some, I don’t bluff.

I'm not someone who's seen "Thank You for Smoking," but I can understand Reines's defense and its limits. He used a line that, he wants us to see, expressed the idea: I thought we had a close relationship, and you're a bad person if you use our closeness in a way that hurts me.

The limits:

1. The movie reference would only work if he knew she was quite familiar with the movie. I don't know the answer to that. Maybe he did!

2. He's bringing up sexual intercourse metaphorically. That suggests a level of familiarity that might have existed. It might be used to intimidate a woman, but it might suggest that the woman was included in the group, more like a man, that she was in the "locker room" where sexual metaphor is freely used. It's possible that Chozick is repeating intimate talk to outsiders who don't understand the style of repartee, and her ew, gross is really quite unfair to Reines.

3. Why would the analogy work? She was a NYT reporter and he was a campaign aide. Even if Chozick achieved phenomenal access to the campaign, how could it possibly equate to his getting "inside" her? Does Reines mean to say that she tricked him into believing that she was a lover and not a real journalist and now it's wrong of her to reveal herself as someone who never really loved him?

4. How could Reines possibly have been so naive? Anyone halfway sophisticated knows what Janet Malcolm famously wrote in "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. ...

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

5. I'm just going to guess that Reines is bullshitting, playing the faux naif today, even though back at the time he meant to flummox Chozick. As for Chozick, I think she's making a power move too. She must know how devastating it is in these #MeToo times to accuse a man of sexual harassment in the workplace, which is more or less what she is doing. I think Reines is scared, but he's trying to act tough — There are tapes! I don’t bluff! She's unethical! Like Katie Holmes!

6. I love the utter tininess of this dispute. It's so Friday. Such a relief from all the Comeosity.

Because I think the NYT is terribly slanted toward helping the Clintons, I read everything with an eye toward getting to normal.

I think: How would the equivalent material be presented in an article about Trump? And then I try to average it out, back to the middle. It's annoying, but it's possibly a good mental exercise, not unlike what I do when I read what I have to read for my job: judicial opinions. I don't have to read The New York Times, but where else am I going to get the news? Everything else is also bad in its own way, and I'm accustomed to the bad that is The New York Times.

This morning what I'm reading is "Chelsea Clinton’s Frustrations and Devotion Shown in Hacked Emails," by Amy Chozick. I assume the damaging material — which would be right up front in a Trump article — begins to appear many paragraphs down. I'm not going to tarry at the mushy beginning. (The first paragraph reads like a children's book: "Chelsea Clinton was alarmed.")

So let's skip ahead:

Though her housecleaning role had Hillary Clinton’s tacit approval (“My mother strongly agreed,” Ms. Clinton said in one email laying out proposed changes at the foundation)....

Ugh! Not far enough! (But let me just say that language-oriented feminists would chide Chozick for that "housecleaning" metaphor.)

Ms. Clinton, 31 at the time, had held various jobs, including positions at McKinsey & Company and Avenue Capital, a hedge fund owned by a major Clinton donor. She had degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Columbia but had not quite found a way to harness all of her academic wherewithal...

Translation: Chelsea was at loose ends, drifting, unable or unwilling to make anything out of her long and very elite education. The word "wherewithal" is particularly silly, especially with the mixed-metaphor verb "harness." "Wherewithal," the noun, is usually a polysyllabic way to say money. The unnecessary reaching for polysyllabic words is an old-fashioned form of humor. H.W. Fowler cautioned against it all the way back in 1908. What is this urge, suddenly, to write like George Eliot or Charles Dickens? They were not bullshitting us. Are you?

And the funny thing is, Chozick sees that Chelsea Clinton is dipping into inane polysyllababble*:

Ms. Clinton often gravitated to weighty policy discussions and interspersed statistics and SAT words into casual conversations.

Hours after the 2012 attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, she mused about the unrest in Egypt and Libya in a late-night email to her mother. “Such anathema to us as Americans — and a painful reminder of how long it took modernism to take root in the U.S., after the Enlightenment, the 14th, 15th, 16th, 19th amendments,” she wrote. “Much to discuss when we talk, hopefully tomorrow?”

In another email addressed to “Dad, Mom,” Ms. Clinton seemed apologetic, writing, “I hope this mini-behemoth is not rife with grammatical errors or inadvertent gaps; I am sorry if either true.”

"SAT words" is putting it kindly. Why would a 31-year-old woman who went to Stanford, Oxford,** and Columbia use words like "anathema" and "behemoth"*** so badly, and why would the only offspring of Bill and Hillary Clinton even feel the need to try to impress her parents in the first place? What did they do to deserve it? Does it have anything to do with why Chelsea was at loose ends so late in her privileged life and why they installed her in their charitable operation?

Now, the meat of the Chozick piece is the "cascade of grievances, gossip and infighting" that the installation of Chelsea unleashed at the foundation:

Ms. Clinton had already started to fret about the intermingling of foundation business with Teneo, the corporate consulting firm co-founded by Douglas J. Band, one of her father’s closest aides. She suggested an audit of the charity and wrote that she was concerned that Teneo’s principals had been “hustling” business at foundation gatherings....

Band fought back with a 13-page memo about all the millions he'd raised for the foundation and Bill Clinton:

“We have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the president and his family — for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,” Mr. Band wrote.

The subtext was clear: Where Ms. Clinton saw a messy overlapping of business and charity that could haunt both of her parents, Mr. Band saw an ungrateful daughter who was naïve about how what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.” made its money, and how her own expensive lifestyle was funded.

“I just don’t think any of this is right and that we should be treated this way when no one else is, only because CVC has nothing better to do and need justify her existence,” he wrote in one email, using the initials for Chelsea Victoria Clinton. Mr. Band, who had already planned to leave the foundation to focus on Teneo, often expressed frustration at the global charity’s nepotism, pointing to Ms. Clinton’s installing her friends in central roles....

That is buried in the center of Chozick's piece, which proceeds into some fluff about a note "from the Bon Jovis" and Bill Clinton "buying clorox wipes" and Chelsea's feeling "profoundly disturbed" about the Haitian earthquake. Remember the headline: The idea is to leave you with an amorphous, generalized empathy for Chelsea with her frustrations and daughterly devotion.

But the story from the leaked emails is about the inner workings of the Clinton foundation — how the Clintons got rich finagling in a way that Band justified and Chelsea seems to have been able to see was quite wrong.
_____________________________

* I just coined that word, polysyllababble. But Google tells me it has been used twice before in the history of mankind as revealed by the internet, so let's just say I discovered it independently and I'm surprised I'm in a group as small as 3.

** Note that I, unlike Chozick, use the Oxford comma after "Oxford."

*** The Oxford English Dictionary defines "behemoth" as "An animal mentioned in the book of Job; probably the hippopotamus; but also used in modern literature as a general expression for one of the largest and strongest animals."

NYT election buzzword: "subtle."

From an op-ed, "Hillary Clinton Will Not Be Manterrupted," by Jessica Bennett:

Women are less likely to speak up, and less likely to be heard, in groups that are mostly men... women are less likely to have their own ideas attributed to them....

This is subtle sexism.... Subtle sexism is everywhere in this election, and not just from Mr. Trump. It’s in the way we question whether Mrs. Clinton is trustworthy, even though she’s been rated by PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checkers, as much more honest than her opponent....

You just have to be more honest than Trump and it's not fair to view you as dishonest? That's just nutty. We should always question whether a politician is trustworthy. At what point is "the way" we question honesty sexist? 

Subtle sexism is the fact that — while, indeed, Hillary Clinton has made mistakes — we judge mistakes more harshly in women, and remember those mistakes longer. It’s that she must strike a near-impossible balance between niceness and authority — a glimmer of weakness, and she doesn’t have the “stamina”; but too much harshness and she’s “cold,” “aloof,” “robotic,” scolded by a man who is all but frothing at the mouth for not having the right “temperament.”...

From a news analysis piece, "The Subtle Phrases Hillary Clinton Uses to Sway Black Voters," by Farah Stockman:

When Hillary Clinton talked about race during her debate Monday night against Donald J. Trump, she delivered a subtle and powerful message to black voters, speaking to them not only in the substance of what she said, but in her carefully chosen language....

The "subtle phrases" are, we're told, "systemic racism" — she said "We’ve got to address the systemic racism in our criminal justice system" — and "implicit bias" — she said "I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police." What makes these stock phrases subtle? I think they're only subtle if they are subliminal — if they bypass your defenses. But these phrases are dropped in conspicuously, precisely to bonk people who like those terms over the head with the fact that she said them. Why wouldn't you be suspicious? Why wouldn't you think: Great, you said the words. I get it. You need my vote. But what will you actually do for me?

Some analysis by Amy Chozick, "Hillary Clinton, at Ease Onstage, Seems Utterly Herself":

When Mr. Trump interrupted her, she showed flashes of the steely calm she displayed during more than eight hours of testimony to a Republican-led House panel. As Mr. Trump spoke, she perched a leg in a subtle curtsy and calmly looked on. When it was her turn, she needled Mr. Trump by calling him “Donald.”

Even her leg is subtle!

Hillary Clinton is devising "attack lines" to "get under Trump's skin," while Donald Trump is studying video of HC debating to find her "vulnerabilities."

Is the debate prep the same or different? The NYT — in "Debate Prep? Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Differ on That, Too" — stresses the difference, but there's a sameness in relying on the weakness of the other person and hoping to reveal and amplify what's wrong with the opponent. The difference is that Hillary seems to be getting scripted zingers ready while Trump is learning how to read her. That is, Trump is going deeper as he preps and will be more spontaneous during the event.

But that's not how the NYT writers — Patrick Healy, Amy Chozick, and Maggie Haberman — put it. To them, Hillary is deep and Trump is shallow:

"Mr. Sanders... was in a bittersweet but resolute mood on Tuesday, according to his advisers, as he took the stage with Mrs. Clinton...."

"[H]e came around grudgingly to supporting her, the advisers said. But he was also determined to make a strong case against Mr. Trump and, in doing so, champion Mrs. Clinton as the only chance to defeat him.... One person close to Mr. Sanders said that the senator and his wife, Jane, were 'putting on a good face' on Tuesday, but that they were disappointed that his campaign had not been more successful after he gave it so much of his energy and rallied millions of people around his ideas.... Still, Mr. Sanders uttered the words that Mrs. Clinton needed him to say — 'I am endorsing Hillary Clinton.'"

From the NYT report "Bernie Sanders Endorses Hillary Clinton, Hoping to Unify Democrats," by Amy Chozick, Patrick Healy, and Yamiche Alcindor. They include Trump's cutting reaction: “Bernie is now officially a part of a rigged system" for "endorsing one of the most pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and pro-offshoring candidates in the history of the Democratic Party."

"Celebrity Hampers Clinton’s Effort to Connect With Iowans."

Front-page teaser in The New York Times for an article titled "Hillary Clinton Seeks to Connect With Iowans, but Celebrity Gets in Way."

I read the teaser out loud and Meade said "Celebrity and criminality...."

The article, by Amy Chozick, quotes former Senator Tom Harkin saying "She just needs to come out and meet Iowans, and the rest will fall into place" and then tries to show why that's so hard for Hillary to do. She's surrounded by "a dozen Secret Service agents, state troopers and staff members, as well as a horde of reporters, photographers and videographers." So "Iowans could hardly get close enough to take photographs of the former secretary of state, much less talk to her."

As Mrs. Clinton went along the route that had been mapped out for her at the fair, she posed for 42 pictures. She raved about being a grandmother (“It’s the best!”), examined a Monopoly-themed sculpture made of butter (“I love it!”), asked if Iowa had any zoning programs to help out small farms (it does) and gave an evasive “Sounds good!” to a fairgoer who asked if she would attend a tailgate party sponsored by the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

All the while, Mrs. Clinton’s celebrity had a way of encroaching on her efforts to show she can be just like everybody else. Only the reality TV star-turned-Republican candidate Donald J. Trump attracted more attention.

Well, does Trump's celebrity keep him from connecting to Iowans?

If Hillary wanted to get close to the common people, she would. I'm just not buying those headlines and that spin, and I don't think the NYT readers are buying it either. Here's the top-rated comment there now:

Celebrity gets in the way? I don't think that's the issue. Connection between people involves some level of trust. Mrs. Clinton trusts nobody, and a dwindling minority of voters trusts Mrs. Clinton. That mutual distrust prevents any hope of "connection," not her celebrity.

ADDED: Celebrity hampers are a good place to hide your dirty laundry, and Hillary has a lot of it.

"Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich."

A book — by Peter Schweizer — that's coming out in a couple weeks.

The NYT got hold of a copy, and Amy Chozick has this:

But “Clinton Cash” is potentially more unsettling [than some other recent anti-Hillary books], both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations including The Times, The Washington Post and Fox News have exclusive agreements with the author to pursue the story lines found in the book....

From 2001 to 2012, the Clintons’ income was at least $136.5 million, Mr. Schweizer writes, using a figure previously reported in The Post. “During Hillary’s years of public service, the Clintons have conducted or facilitated hundreds of large transactions” with foreign governments and individuals, he writes. “Some of these transactions have put millions in their own pockets.”...

[Schweizer] writes mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist and meticulously documents his sources....

Some excellent anti-Hillary street art.

Via Weekly Standard, which has 3 pictures. This is one:



The other 2 are the same but with "ambitious" and "entitled" in place of "secretive."

I believe this is a reference to the email received by NYT reporter Amy Chozick from a group called "Hillary Clinton Super Volunteers," which we discussed here a couple weeks ago.

2/2 Sexist words, they say, include "polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident..."
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015

At the time, I said:

Now, obviously, these are people pushing Hillary's candidacy, and they're trying to intimidate and manipulate the media. The media can't let this cow them. Mustn't criticize Hillary. We might get called sexist for any criticism we make. That would be incredibly lame, and in fact, I think that if a female President can command that kind of privilege over speech, we'd better not have a female President. I don't want a politician that we're not free to kick around. That's dangerous!

But that's no reason to abandon the project watching for coded sexism in language. That's the reason to look not only for sexism — and racism — but for political interest. We shouldn't take statements at face value. That would be naive. There's a lot going on in language, and we ought to take a closer look at everything... including what Hillary and her people say about other women... words like "narcissistic" and "loony toon."

"You are on notice that we will be watching, reading, listening and protesting coded sexism."

Said email received by NYT reporter Amy Chozick from a group called "Hillary Clinton Super Volunteers," reported at Reason, which says that the problem is that "many if not most" of the words the group says it's looking out for "have been used to describe non-Clinton candidates — some of them men — as well."

Well, of course! How else could it be code? You've got to have your deniability. You can't get off the hook that easily.

You know, I too am watching, reading, listening for the sexism in seemingly sex-neutral language, and I have been doing that for a lot longer than the 11 years of this blog. For example, women are called "strident." It's like calling black people "shiftless" or "uppity." Well, white people can be "shiftless" and "uppity" too. Yeah, but we at least know that saying "shiftless" or "uppity" about a black person is coded racism. It might get more sophisticated and questionable beyond that. Is it coded racism to call a black person "articulate" or "eloquent"? You might want to argue about that, but straight out denial is lame and shallow.

Similarly, in talking about women, there is language that those who care about the equality of women should notice. And the Hillary Clinton Super Volunteers have listed some words:

2/2 Sexist words, they say, include "polarizing, calculating, disingenuous, insincere, ambitious, inevitable, entitled, over confident..."
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) March 25, 2015

Now, obviously, these are people pushing Hillary's candidacy, and they're trying to intimidate and manipulate the media. The media can't let this cow them. Mustn't criticize Hillary. We might get called sexist for any criticism we make. That would be incredibly lame, and in fact, I think that if a female President can command that kind of privilege over speech, we'd better not have a female President. I don't want a politician that we're not free to kick around. That's dangerous!

But that's no reason to abandon the project watching for coded sexism in language. That's the reason to look not only for sexism — and racism — but for political interest. We shouldn't take statements at face value. That would be naive. There's a lot going on in language, and we ought to take a closer look at everything... including what Hillary and her people say about other women... words like "narcissistic" and "loony toon."