GLFoster's artWorks

03/17/2026

mansplaining

I like this cartoon so much we paid the New Yorker the fee it requested to include it in my book.

We’ve not even had the vote 100 years. Let’s not let thing backslide.

Happy International Women’s Day, one and all.

03/17/2026

She thought she had won a golf tournament.
Just a pleasant competition on a sun-drenched course outside Paris on a October day in 1900 — something fun to do while living abroad, something to write home about to relatives back in America.
She had no idea she had just made history.
Margaret Ives Abbott was born in 1878 in Calcutta, India, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. After her father's death, her family moved first to Boston, then to Chicago, where her mother built a successful career as a novelist and literary editor. It was in Chicago that a teenage Margaret first picked up a golf club — introduced to the sport at the Chicago Golf Club, coached by two of the finest amateur players of the era.
She was good. Very good. She won local tournaments. People noticed.
In 1899, like many young women of her social world, Margaret moved to Paris to absorb its art and culture. She studied painting in the orbit of Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. She strolled the boulevards. She played golf.
And in the summer of 1900, Paris hosted the second modern Olympic Games.
There was only one problem — almost nobody knew it.
The Games ran not over two weeks, as they do today, but across five sprawling months, tangled up with the massive Paris Exposition happening simultaneously. Events were scattered across the city and its surroundings, poorly publicized, and often reported simply as Exposition competitions rather than Olympic ones. Even the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, had originally intended the Games to be for men only — women's participation in 1900 was informal, almost accidental, squeezed into a handful of events including golf, tennis, and sailing.
When Margaret heard about a golf competition at the Compiègne Golf Club, about 30 miles outside Paris, she signed up.
So did her mother, Mary.
They are still the only mother and daughter in history to have competed in the same Olympic event at the same time.
On the day of the competition, Margaret surveyed her French rivals — and noticed, with some amusement, that many of them had arrived in high heels and tight skirts. She played nine holes with focus, freedom of movement, and a steady hand. She shot a 47.
She won.
Her prize was not a gold medal — it was an antique porcelain bowl embellished with gold. Beautiful, unusual, and entirely without the words "Olympic champion" written anywhere on it.
She wrote a cheerful letter home about her win. The Chicago Tribune reported on the competition. But neither Margaret, nor her mother, nor the newspaper understood what had actually happened that day on that quiet golf course outside Paris.
Margaret Ives Abbott had just become the first American woman ever to win an Olympic event.
She didn't know.
She came home to America in 1902. She married. She had four children. She played golf at Shinnecock Hills in New York. She moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. She lived a full, happy, accomplished life.
And in 1955, she died — still not knowing.
Her son Philip had no idea either. Nobody did.
It wasn't until the 1990s that a professor at the University of Florida named Paula Welch — who had spent an entire decade chasing a name she'd spotted on a plaque at the US Olympic Committee's headquarters — pieced together the truth from newspaper archives, Paris Exposition records, and Abbott's own death certificate. When she finally reached Philip Dunne, Margaret's son, and told him what his mother had achieved, he was stunned into silence.
His mother had been an Olympic champion.
She had gone to a golf tournament.
She had won.
She had come home.
She had lived her whole life.
She had never known.
There is something both heartbreaking and quietly beautiful about that. Margaret Abbott didn't play that day to make history. She didn't play to break barriers or prove a point or claim a place in the record books. She played because she loved golf, because the day was fine, and because the course was close enough to make it worth the trip.
And in doing so — without fanfare, without intention, without ever receiving the recognition she deserved in her lifetime — she became a pioneer.
The first. The one who opened the door.
History doesn't always announce itself. Sometimes it happens on a sunny afternoon outside Paris, in high spirits and good shoes, while the woman making it thinks she's just playing a round of golf.
Margaret Ives Abbott won an Olympic gold on a Tuesday in 1900 and went home for dinner.
That might be the most quietly extraordinary thing any champion has ever done.

03/16/2026

03/16/2026

She was the kind of child who filled jars with fish.
Sylvia Earle grew up on a small farm in New Jersey, spending hours beside the pond in her backyard — catching tadpoles, collecting specimens, filling notebook after notebook with careful observations about the natural world. Neither of her parents had gone to college. But they gave her something more lasting than a degree: they gave her permission to be endlessly, fearlessly curious about the living world around her.
Her family moved to Florida when she was thirteen. The farm pond became the Gulf of Mexico, and Sylvia's curiosity scaled up accordingly.
She graduated high school at sixteen. Earned a scholarship to Florida State University, studied botany, graduated at nineteen, certified herself as a SCUBA diver so she could study ocean plant life in person rather than in a laboratory. By twenty, she had a master's degree from Duke. By thirty-one, she had a doctorate — earned while raising children, going on expeditions to the Galápagos Islands and the Indian Ocean and the Panama Canal Zone, and serving as resident director of a marine laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.
All at the same time.
Her doctoral dissertation alone was a landmark — she personally collected more than 20,000 samples of algae to catalog aquatic plants in the Gulf of Mexico, making her one of the first scientists in history to use SCUBA to document marine life directly rather than from the surface. The study remained a reference point for decades.
But she was just getting started.
In February 1968, she descended 100 feet below the surface of the Bahamas in a submersible vehicle and entered an experimental underwater habitat as part of the Smithsonian Institution's Man-in-Sea project — the first woman scientist ever to do so. She was four months pregnant at the time.
In 1970, when government officials decided they didn't want men and women sharing an underwater habitat for the Tektite II Project — despite the fact that no one on earth had more diving experience than Sylvia Earle — she didn't argue. She simply assembled an all-female team of scientists, led them fifty feet underwater, and spent two weeks conducting research. When they surfaced, they were received at the White House and given a parade in Chicago.
In 1979, she did something no human being had ever done before — and no one has done since.
Carried in a submersible to a depth of 1,250 feet, she detached from the vehicle in a specially pressurized suit, stepped off onto the ocean floor, and walked there alone — in complete darkness, under crushing pressure, in one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth — for two and a half hours.
The record for the deepest untethered walk on the sea floor still belongs to Sylvia Earle.
In 1990, she became the first woman appointed as Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — the agency responsible for the health of America's oceans and atmosphere. She has since authored more than 200 scientific publications, lectured in more than 80 countries, and led more than 100 marine expeditions — logging over 7,000 hours underwater across a career spanning six decades.
Time magazine named her their first Hero for the Planet in 1998. The United Nations named her Champion of the Earth in 2014. She has received 27 honorary degrees and more than 100 international honors.
She is now in her eighties. She is still working.
Her current mission — through the Mission Blue alliance she leads — is to build a global network of "Hope Spots": protected ocean sanctuaries designed to preserve the biodiversity on which all life on Earth ultimately depends. Because after 7,000 hours beneath the surface, Sylvia Earle knows something most of us are only beginning to understand: the ocean is not a backdrop to human civilization.
It is the reason human civilization is possible at all.
A little girl who filled jars with fish.
A scientist who walked where no human had ever walked.
A voice still calling us back — before it is too late — to protect the deepest, most essential world we have.
Her name is Dr. Sylvia Earle. And the ocean she loves is still down there, waiting.

03/14/2026

I've posted before about the Matilda Effect, but this is about Margaret Rossiter, the woman who named it. "She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

"Yale University, 1969. Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program. Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

"The faculty answered firmly: No. Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit. Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them. So she started looking. She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont. There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.

"But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing. Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams. But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased. It wasn't random. It was systematic.

"Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries. Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

"She needed a name for what she was documenting. In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870. In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect. The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

"Her dissertation became a lifelong mission. For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

"Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. [Don't I know it.] Others insisted she was exaggerating. Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

"Eventually, the evidence became undeniable. Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
•Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the •Nobel Prize.
•Nettie Stevens, who discovered s*x chromosomes—received little credit.
•Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

"Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out." Systematically.

https://x.com/MrPitbull07/status/2031825148744253780

03/14/2026

Ricky Gervais calling out all the new kids on the block.

03/14/2026

Surprise, Surprise... there are American shoe makers.

03/14/2026

A former Fox News host, who paid to settle a s*xual assault case, is Secretary of the Department of Defense.

The former head of World Wrestling Entertainment, who is accused of covering up the s*xual abuse of minors, is over the Department of Education.

A he**in addict accused of s*xual assault by the family babysitter, is over the Department of Health & Human Services.

A cattle rancher with a two year community college degree has been nominated as secretary of Homeland Security.

A convicted felon and adjudicated ra**st is president of the yet-to-be United States.

Y’all need to shut up about Black people being ‘DEI hires.’

Talbert Swan

03/11/2026

In 2014, Anthony Bourdain traveled to Iran for an episode of Parts Unknown. Filming focused on Tehran and Isfahan, where Bourdain explored local markets, sampled traditional cuisine, and engaged with residents about cultural and social life.

Journalists Jason Rezaian and Yeganeh Salehi played key roles in guiding him through modern urban experiences; both were later detained by Iranian authorities, a situation Bourdain openly condemned. The episode became widely discussed for highlighting Iranian hospitality and everyday life, offering a perspective that went beyond typical geopolitical narratives.

03/11/2026

This article is an excellent reality check and gave my day a much-needed good morning lift.
Axios AM, One Big Thing - America's Big Lie.
Watch TV, scroll social media or listen to politicians, and the verdict seems clear: Americans are hopelessly divided and increasingly hateful, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column.

It's a ubiquitous, emphatic, verifiable … lie.
Why it matters: Most Americans are too busy for social media, too normal for politics, too rational to tweet. They work, raise kids, coach Little League, go to a house of worship, mow their neighbor's lawn — and never post a word about any of it.

This isn't a small minority. It's a monstrous, if silent, majority. Most Americans are patriotic, hardworking, neighbor-helping, America-loving, money-giving people who don't pop off on social media or plot for power.

The hidden truth: Most people agree on most things, most of the time. And the data validates this, time and time again.
Oh, but you're so naive, so delusional and detached from reality. Everywhere I look, I see dispute and decline!

But it's the terminally online news junkies who are detached from the actual reality.

We've been manipulated by algorithms and politicians amplifying the worst of humanity. Our feeds and screens spread a twisted, inaccurate view of America.
It makes it seem like the nation is hopelessly broken … Political enemies are evil … Facts are no different than fiction … Morality, honesty and service don't matter … And salvation can only come from magical technologies or a powerful few.
What if we told you it's a big lie that makes you stop believing your own two eyes?

Every day, people battle over outrageous things said on X. Did you know that four out of five Americans don't use X, and therefore don't see what you see? Pew Research Center found last year that only 21% of U.S. adults use X, and just 10% visit it daily.
But what about the wacky claims made on cable TV? Did you know that during most hours of most prime-time nights, less than 1% of the country watches Fox News, CNN or MS NOW, combined?
Maybe, just maybe, it's the very people on these platforms who are the crazy ones.

Maybe, just maybe, most people are simply normal, sane, real.
A Gallup World Poll out last week found Americans are more anxious about their political system than citizens of almost any other country — yet the data consistently shows this anxiety is driven by the noise, not the neighbors. The system feels broken. The people are not.
💡 Here's a good test: In a given year, you see hundreds of people frequently enough to appraise their character. Are they good people? Would they help shovel after a snowstorm or lift groceries for an aging neighbor? Do they volunteer and give to others?

We bet the answer is a resounding yes. This is America's Super Majority.
📊 The numbers back this up. Americans gave $592.5 billion to charity in 2024 — a record, with individuals accounting for two-thirds of it.

Over 75 million Americans formally volunteer each year, and 130 million informally help their neighbors. Gallup research out last month found that 76% of U.S. adults gave money to a religious or other nonprofit organization in the past year, and 63% volunteered their time.
This isn't a broken nation. This is a generous one, where the vast majority quietly do the right thing every single day.
The bottom line: The next time your screen tells you America is broken, close it. Walk outside. Talk to your neighbor. Coach the team. Go to the town meeting. That's the real America — and it's a hell of a lot better than the one being manufactured for clicks, clout and cash." Mike Allen