Violet at Reclusive Leftist starts
"pulling together some of our thoughts about the new feminism we’re building, what I think of as the Fourth Wave." Very interesting list -- and great comments/discussion.

This comment especially struck me: "Women need, desperately, cultural permission to be selfish, to put ourselves first without apology and without trying to spin it as good for other, more important people, too. Because even though I do believe feminism is good for the whole Human community, it really wouldn’t matter if it weren’t. Women have a right to demand what’s good for us."

Shades of His Dark Materials! (Not to mention Christopher Alexander)

The Times:

Four million of a newly discovered microbe — assuming the discovery, reported yesterday in the journal Science, is confirmed — could fit into the period at the end of this sentence.

Scientists found the microbes living in a remarkably inhospitable environment, drainage water as caustic as battery acid from a mine in Northern California. The microbes, members of an ancient family of organisms known as archaea, formed a pink scum on green pools of hot mine water laden with toxic metals, including arsenic.

Scientists say the discovery could bear on estimates of the pervasiveness of exotic microbial life, which some experts suspect forms a hidden biosphere extending down miles whose total mass may exceed that of all surface life.

Yikes! I certainly hope they're happy with what we're doing on the surface. But the interesting part of the article is speculation by the Times writer (which I can't find elsewhere in the news, although the Science article, which may contain it, is not yet available):