Joan, your post is carefully worded enough that there's nothing to disagree with. I agree the sexism is pretty awful, especially the 'take her behind the barn' part. Unfortunately, for a lot of older feminists this seems to mean that they have to automatically support her candidacy as a defense. I wish people would reconsider this kind of thinking - would you vote for Larry Craig if he was running and being attacked for being gay?

No offense, but your being at such an utter loss suggests to me that you're being kind of haphazard about this and expecting something to fall in your lap without having done the necessary homework on how this whole thing works. But I suppose writing this letter was a good start.

I don't know what area you live in. If you live in one of the big cities, my advice may not apply. But if you are in any suburban area, chances are that you have a local town paper, and perhaps a larger county/state/regional paper. And most of the time they will have a position called editorial assistant that has a pretty high turnover rate and that is pretty easy to land.

I'll just directly tell you my experience and you can take whatever you need out of it. Like you, worked on my college newspaper. When I took a year off from school, I worked a bunch of temp office jobs before landing an editorial assistant gig at the second largest newspaper in NJ. I just saw an ad in the same paper and applied. I didn't need any clips, and I didn't even need a college degree, just know your way around a computer and have decent enough writing skills to pass the exam they gave me. It started off being mainly grunt office work (answering phones, bringing editors their morning papers, preparing the news budget, etc.) But it was invaluable as a way of "getting your foot in the door" because I was interacting with the reporters and editors on a daily basis. Along the way, I got to know some of them, and they got to know that I had been editor of my college paper and what kinds of things I was interested in writing about. After a while, I got a couple of little filler articles thrown my way, and when they were pleased with my work, more substantial ones. So without having held any position higher than Editorial Assistant, I still managed to build up a portfolio. The other people in my position went on to become full reporters at some of the local affiliate papers (after a couple of years of which they could be considered for being one of the staff writers at the main paper). One girl had worked the morning shift and therefore was lucky enough to cover a lot of local breaking stories when there was no one else on hand - she's now a paid intern at the AP office in DC. Me, I went to grad school, but that had been my plan anyway, and I do still have my clips if I ever decide to go into writing again.

So yea, there's your advice. I should also repeat what the other posters have been saying, and that is that you should be aware of the difference of 'writing' and AP-style journalism. You sound like you want to do the more creative, magazine-style column writing (don't we all), which you almost certainly will not be able to start off with. But if you can get the hang of the AP style and get a couple of clips under your belt, it will open a lot of doors for you - for example, after I did a couple of boring local articles about Earth Day events, another editor asked if I'd be interested in video game reviews (which I certainly was). Good luck.

If someone exactly remembers how to calculate p values, that would be great, but I'm pretty sure 72% with a sample size of 153 is statistically significant, so your "only slightly better than half argument" is pretty weak. Of course, I didn't even have to watch the video to know your reaction, but once in a while you guys surprise me. It would be nice if you could entertain more ideas and provide more original analysis instead of snarky retorts that tell feminists what they want to hear. Until then, we'll have to do your job for you.

In this case, it's probably a mistake to say it was the eyes, since participants got to see the person's whole face, including make-up, facial expression, hairstyle, and so on. Imagining what I'd do if given such test, I'm guessing that the participants simply rated the attractive people as likely to want casual sex, which turned out to be true 72% of the time (this would also explain the low levels of confidence). This would make sense, since attractive people would be confident about their future prospects and thus not have less need to be concerned about a relationship at the moment, whereas the opposite would be the case with unattractive people, who may be worried about finding anyone at all. That's just a speculative theory, but I don't see you doing any better.

This is a good article, but it makes it seem like the only choices are between overproduced mall punk and faux-retro indie garage rock. There are plenty of bands that still play melodic and aggressive punk without falling into either of these. Rise Against is one that comes to mind. Anti-Flag is also still around, as are Bad Religion and Propagandhi. If you insist on your punk being grungy, The Explosion is decent. Basically I'm just trying to say that there's more out there than the radio on one hand and the narrow range of styles that the elitist Pitchfork deems worthy of consideration on the other.