That Anne-Marie Slaughter article sure kicked up a lot of discussion, didn’t it? I heard about it in advance and knew it would be big, but I had no idea how big. Below, a little roundup of some relevant discussion—and a reason to have hope that your work may not always crush the rest of your life.

First, a personal report. Atlantic editor Scott Stossel tweeted in reply to the title of my piece here yesterday, "Why Does The Atlantic Hate Women?" His answer: We don't. He and I had a brief, if intellectually sophisticated (cough, cough) Twitter exchange. I reproduce it below, stripped of some of the twitty formatting, and with some serial tweets merged:

As you may have heard by now, last weekend the New York Times Magazine ran an in-depth article called "Prep School Predators: The Horace Mann School's Secret History of Sexual Abuse." In tremendous detail, author Amos Kamil, himself an alumnus of the school, details allegations that in the 1970s and 1980s, the administration of an elite New York prep school, Horace Mann, ignored teachers who sexually coerced, assaulted, and otherwise abused their students. Most of the stories Kamil was able to establish were of adult men exploiting boys, but he writes that there were just as many teachers exploiting girls:

Two days ago, I wrote that Slate’s editors should be ashamed of having published Mark Regnerus’s propagandistic tripe about his “study” comparing how children fare under intact families versus how they fare when their biological parents have a rocky time because one discovers or accepts that he or she is lesbian or gay.

Last week, I was a guest at the LGBT Connect day at Netroots Nation, meeting all kindsa people I've mostly encountered online. You know how these kinds of conferences go: glasses are hoisted, gossip is swapped, and you learn the story behind the story.

I’m married in Massachusetts. I’m not married in the United States. That paradox is untenable, the First Circuit Court of Appeals declared in May as it unanimously struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act—the portion of the 1996 law stating that, for federal purposes, marriage is between a man and a woman. Most legal observers believe the Supreme Court will agree, and the feds will have to recognize my marriage. That would leave me almost fully married, but not quite: Thirty-eight states still ban recognition of same-sex marriages. So what’s the path to marriage equality nationwide? 

Lily Ledbetter—complete with sensible blond bob and an Alabama drawl—is the kind of lady who would tell a you to stop wearing peek-a-boo blouses to work and making cookies for the office because both make you look unserious. The poster girl for the 77 cents to a dollar that American women make in the workplace compared to their male counterparts, Ledbetter's not one to be trifled with. The personification of the Obama campaign’s somber economic appeal to female voters, she’s also the kind of lady who calls Mitt Romney out for not taking a stand on equal pay issues.

How boring are marriage equality wins now? So boring that yesterday's DOMA defeat isn't even on The New York Times home page this morning, as I write this.