Those of you who follow this page haven’t seen much in a while: I’ve been busy writing a book, editing Public Seminar, and getting some cyborg tuning done. But I’m back. You’ll notice I’ve cleaned up the site: that urge I had to have everything available has dissipated. Also I am ditching pictures: too much work, and too damn busy looking.

It’s kind of bare-bones now, which I think is fine, and I am going to be using this space (yes, I’ve grabbed back my Tenured Radical moniker) for some old school bloggy stuff and, as I have been, to post links to the things that I write elsewhere.

It’s probably no accident that I got a hankering to blog — to go back to the beginning, I guess, when I cracked one of my own personal glass ceiling: a feature piece in the New York Times Sunday Review, published today. “Men Invented Likabilty. Guess Who Benefits” came out today online and is available in print tomorrow.

If the supposedly unlikable Hillary Clinton didn’t break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in 2016, she made enough cracks in it to encourage others to try again: Six women are competing for the Democratic nomination today. But guess what? We don’t seem to like them either.

As Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and others jumped into the race, each seemed to affirm the new power of women in 2019, a power that was born when President Trump was sworn into office, exploded during #MeToo and came into its own during the 2018 midterms.

But no female candidate has yet led the polls. The men keep joining — Michael Bennet this week, Joe Biden the last — and keep garnering glowing press coverage. Although Mr. Biden fumbled two previous presidential bids, we are told he has “crossover appeal”; Bernie Sanders has been admired by this newspaper as “immune to intimidation”; and Pete Buttigieg, who would be the first openly gay man nominated for president, is “very authentic.” By contrast Ms. Harris is “hard to define”; Ms. Klobuchar is “mean”; and Ms. Warren is a “wonky professor” who — you guessed it — is “not likable enough.” Seeing comments like this, Mrs. Clinton said wryly in January, “really takes me back.”

Likability: It is nebulous, arbitrary and meaningless, yet inescapable — and female politicians seem to be particularly burdened with it even when they win and especially when they run for president.

You can enjoy the rest of it here.