Global Comment

Where the world thinks out loud

Must reads: Pay transparency, women, goats, garlic

A cardinal landing on a log

Before we delve into the posts we’re reading and loving elsewhere on the internet, don’t miss our most popular post last week…Natalia Antonova’s impassioned defense of the alpha male!

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I Know the Salaries of Thousands of Tech Employees (Jackie Luo for Medium)

Salary transparency is a hot topic in Silicon Valley. You’ll understand why when you see the huge pay, and disparities, at stake.

I’m a software engineer with three years of experience, working at Square, a public tech company in San Francisco. I make $130,000, plus $47,500 in stock, for a total of $177,500 a year.

Why Suppress the ‘Experience’ of Half the World? (Carina Chocano for the New York Times)

We’ve been talking about how to suppress women’s writing for a very long time.

Woolf had solved, she said, the problem of the Angel. But that second question, “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful.”

Goats Are All the Rage Right Now (C. Brian Smith for Mel)

Goat yoga is just the beginning.

I find Spanky, the now famous, fully grown Nigerian Dwarf featured on “Weekend Update,” and his brother Pippin, at their home in the equestrian hamlet of La Tuna Canyon 30 miles north of downtown L.A. Their goat mom, 36-year-old Scout Raskin, owns and operates Party Goats LA, booking Spanky and Pippin for private engagements — parties, hiking, yoga, “goat grams” — at $70 to $99 an hour.

The Strongest Woman in the Room (Kitty Sheehan for Longreads)

This searing personal essay on a family tragedy will take some time, and it’s worth it.

His little sister Kitty’s room was down the hall. Kitty had a fluffy, white looped cotton rug on the floor next to her bed. One Saturday morning, Kitty and Dan took the bottle of Chocks vitamins from the kitchen, dumped it onto that rug and ate every one of the different colored vitamins, like they were candy.

The giant of Santa Clara County (Jennifer Swann for Curbed)

What happened to Gilroy?

Much of the land where garlic used to grow has been paved over for strip malls, outlet stores, and tract homes. As the garlic capital of the world undergoes a major transition, from a former farming town to a Silicon Valley commuter city, it risks losing the product that made it so famous.

Photo: Andy Morffew