Long Reads That Caught Our Eye This Week

Your weekly roundup of longreads that caught our eye. Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray [View this email in your browser]( We love to read. Here are a few longreads from around the web that caught the attention of our editors this week. The Mysterious Madame Giselle Manuel Roig-Franzia | The Washington Post She told people she advised Ivanka Trump. Talked about her marriages to world leaders. Promised riches. Why would anyone believe her? --------------------------------------------------------------- The irresistibly charming woman in Apartment 713 can hold forth for hours with tales of her luxe life among the intercontinental elite, neighbors say. Madame Giselle, as some call her, is forever boasting of being the secret wife of Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, even saying she facilitated the first phone call between the Middle Eastern leader and President Trump, according to two of her neighbors in an upscale high-rise building just beyond the D.C. border in Chevy Chase, Md. Over homemade Turkish coffee in her lavishly appointed apartment or across the table at pricey restaurants, the neighbors say, she has shared in a confiding tone that she occupies a prime White House office next to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump. “I’m kind of a mom figure to her,” Madame Giselle says, according to those who live in her building. [Read More]( Boys Are Not Defective Amanda Ripley | The Atlantic Girls in the Middle East do better than boys in school by a greater margin than almost anywhere else in the world: a case study in motivation, mixed messages, and the condition of boys everywhere. --------------------------------------------------------------- Jordan has never had a female minister of education, women make up less than a fifth of its workforce, and women hold just 4 percent of board seats at public companies there. But, in school, Jordanian girls are crushing their male peers. The nation’s girls outperform its boys in just about every subject and at every age level. At the University of Jordan, the country’s largest university, women outnumber men by a ratio of two to one—and earn higher grades in math, engineering, computer-information systems, and a range of other subjects. [Read More]( Bunny Love Matt Labash | The Weekly Standard Hugh Hefner's "Little Black Book" tells his own heroic epic and shows us the world he has wrought. --------------------------------------------------------------- NO MATTER WHAT KIND of life you lead, there is inevitably a guidebook to help you lead it. Right now, as we speak, on Amazon.com, one can find a Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World, or a Guide to Living in Sin Without Getting Burned, or a Fat Girl's Guide to Life. There are numerous guides to "simple living" and "better living" and even a Canine Guide to Living With Humans Without Going Mad, if your dog, unlike mine, happens to be a big reader. Most of these, of course, are applesauce. Who needs some jackleg generalist fuzzing over the idiosyncrasies of each of our lives, telling us Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, and It's All Small Stuff, until they come out with their tie-in follow-up, What About the Big Stuff? which, as luck would have it, we're not supposed to sweat either. As an American and an individualist, I'll sweat where I please. [Read More]( The Natural Law of Free Speech William J. Haun | Library of Law and Liberty With Progressives increasingly condoning censorship of conservative views as “hate speech,” conservatives are responding with an increasingly absolutist freedom of speech.Some recent essays written in reaction to the Antifa/neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville show the appeal that the absolutist view has to conservatives: If political communities were prohibited from drawing content-based restrictions on almost any expressive activity, dissent from the dominant political and cultural orthodoxies (read: conservative views) would be protected. To be sure, the absolutist view is rooted in the past half-century of Supreme Court jurisprudence. Even so, conservatives ought to pause before embracing it. Free speech absolutism is, to begin with, a position that lacks a basis in the Founders’ political philosophy, in the Free Speech Clause’s original public meaning, or in the reality that only a people capable of controlling their passions are capable of preserving self-government. It surrenders to moral nihilism the ability to see principled distinctions between the speech that can harm the civic virtue required for republican government and the speech critical to republican government. [Read More]( Mrs Myself Polina Aronson | Aeon Self-marriage promises love and fulfilment – but is it a radical act or a depressing concession to self-absorption? --------------------------------------------------------------- This summer I got married for the second time. Unlike my first wedding, in a town hall 11 years ago, this one was strictly informal. The ceremony took place at the Karaoke Pit in Berlin’s Mauerpark, a dilapidated concrete amphitheatre in the middle of the former no-man’s land between East and West Berlin. There were some 500 guests in attendance, most of whom I’d never met before and would never see again. My dress was black and I kept my sunglasses on. There were no bridesmaids, no public registrar, let alone a priest or rabbi, and no papers were issued at the end. Moreover, there was no bridegroom: I was, as it happened, getting married to my own self – with my husband and our two children watching from the front row.` [Read More]( Copyright © 2015 The Federalist, All rights reserved. You are receiving this e-mail because you opted in to receive e-mail updates from TheFederalist.com. 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