Michelle Goldberg writes, "As secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has been the feminist hero of this administration."

She continues:

"Rhetorically, there’s not much new here—for years, politicians, economists, development experts, and national-security specialists have argued that women’s oppression leads to economic stagnation, and political instability. (As Lawrence Summers, no paragon of radical feminism, argued when he was chief economist of the World Bank, “Educating girls yields a higher rate of return than any other investment in the developing world.”) But Clinton has acted on this understanding in bold and unequivocal ways.

We saw this almost immediately with the firing of Bush’s global AIDS coordinator, Mark Dybul. Initially, Obama had asked Dybul to stay on, and it was easy to see why the president liked him: Dybul is a gay man with Democratic leanings who prided himself on his ability to work with religious conservatives. But women’s-rights activists believed he had consistently sold out women in order to appease his right-wing allies. He championed abstinence-only programs and fought against attempts to integrate AIDS prevention with other reproductive-health services like family planning.

Dybul’s critics pointed out that you can’t fight AIDS without taking women’s rights seriously—in parts of Africa, after all, young women are three times more likely to be infected than young men, and marriage can itself be a primary risk factor. Feminists in the field prevailed on Clinton to get rid of him. Shortly after inauguration, he got a phone call telling him to clear out his desk by the end of the day."

***

Pico Iyer writes, "I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

If you’re the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn’t where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I’m there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all."

***

What exactly would I need to do to play with this toy?