Jill Lepore: evaluation

Transcript context

…Social media are more vicious. The cost of speaking in public is different because there are new ways and more immediate ways of being shot down. So you might have said, even 15 years ago before the rise of social media, you might have said things were quite a bit better than in the 1920s or 1930s. But my guess would be, if you were to look at it empirically, I would suppose — and I could be wrong, I would really want to investigate this in a quantitative way — that the costs are more significant. There would be people who are measuring that. Rutgers has this Center for American Women in Politics where they look at under what circumstances are women willing to run for office. Because it’s not that women don’t win when they run — they have a hard time raising money — but it has to do with a kind of reticence of the cost, often not only to one’s self but to one’s family, that women assess differently. And I wonder how chilling the discourse around social media has been for women who are considering. And from the book you haven’t written yet, Charles Dickens in His American Notes, why is he so grumpy about this country?…

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