Julia Baird

They have all been smash hits: Finding Nemo, Madagascar, Ice Age, Toy Story. Fish, penguins, rats, stuffed animals, talking toys. All good innocent family fun, right? Sure, except there are few female characters in those films.

We've spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in "Death of a Salesman." Willy is, perhaps, America's consummate loser, a failure to his family. But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949.

Vanity Fair's profile of the ex-governor reminds us that even when it seems we've accepted that a woman can have a job and still love her children, some people still think it's fair to judge a female public figure on the basis of what kind of parent—and wife—she is.

Blacks are still not as happy, overall, as whites, but in seminal new research, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found that the gap between black and white happiness has declined by about 40 percent. Wolfers said: "It is the largest and most important change in happiness for any population I have ever seen."

The fact that Sarah Palin wants to call herself a feminist is astonishing. It's not that she is conservative—there have been plenty of conservative, eccentric, and outlier feminists in history. It's that it has been such an unloved, if proud, term for so long that it is odd to watch it being fought over.

On TV, the seeds of a revolution.

It was hard to believe BP when it announced oil had stopped gushing into the Gulf of Mexico on Thursday, July 15. It had taken 87 days. There was relief but little jubilation: it will take many years to clean the shores and the birds, and for the sea to begin to repair itself from the onslaught of poisonous oil. Surely we can no longer call it a "spill"—it seems too light and trite a word.

Something pretty creepy has been happening to conservative women lately. There seems to be an insistent, increasingly excitable focus on the supposed hotness of Republican women in the public eye, like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Nikki Haley—not to mention veterans like Ann Coulter. The sexual references are pervasive: they come from left, right, and center, and range from gushing to highly offensive.

Australia has a mottled history of hyping, then savaging, women who are touted as potential leaders of national parties. With the Labor Party coup by Julia Gillard—who ousted a sitting prime minister and got her the job—the nation has finally moved on.

To my brand-new chum, Sarah Palin. I would be happy to meet with you during your upcoming trip to London. And I do have some questions for you.

When millions of Iranians flooded the streets in June 2009 to protest the disputed election, it was all recorded--on video cameras and cell phones. For the West, these grainy amateur images were the only witness to the uprising and the brutal crackdown.

The June 2009 election protests in Iran—where the Green Movement sprang to life—was the true birthplace of citizen journalism. NEWSWEEK compiles on-the-ground videos, shot by protesters themselves and smuggled out of the country.

A global movement for Internet freedom sprang from the Iranian protests. A BBC poll found four in five people around the globe think access to the Internet is a fundamental right. We should target the "dirty dozen" countries that have Internet-access restrictions in place.

'Sex and the City' once restored dignity to women. In the latest film, the characters are self-obsessed, tone-deaf and cliche. Worse, the smell of privilege has become a stench, and hints of racism emerge.

Why we should stop talking about Elena Kagan's sexuality.

When bad mothers give us hope.

Why the search for alien life matters.

Why historians salivate over Twitter.

A quiet revolution in male behavior.

And why nations with more progressive attitudes about homosexuality are happier and healthier.

Marines deserve to know the truth.

Why Wall Street hates Elizabeth Warren.

It's good that we are no longer talking about women's experiences in the abstract. But tweeting an abortion may backfire.

Do tell-all memoirs really help heal?

Will the recession change us?

Audio ecologist Gordon Hempton talks about America's vanishing quiet spaces, and how our lives can be helped by listening to the silence.

Victoria was both dutiful and angry.

Women, politics, and the media.

Dorothea Lange's politics of respect.

Silence isn't just golden—it's heavenly.