Homegrown

On Slate's new full-site version of its Double-X blog, Stanford academic Terry Castle yesterday described the Times' Nicholas Kristof as "the greatest feminist journalist in this country today and perhaps the most passionate and effective media advocate for women's and girls' rights the U.S. has ever had." The more I think about it the statement, the less controversial it seems... I can't think of another American writer of any cultural background or either gender who writes as movingly about, and who maximizes their influence as effectively for, disenfranchised women and girls.

Although he usually does so in the context of Kandahar or Guinea Bissau. So his recent column on girlhood prostitution in Atlanta is particularly sobering. No additional editorializing here, really, just that it's awfully skillful of Kristof to point out that:

"The business model of pimping is remarkably similar whether in Atlanta or Calcutta: take vulnerable, disposable girls whom nobody cares about, use a mix of “friendship,” humiliation, beatings, narcotics and threats to break the girls and induce 100 percent compliance, and then rent out their body parts."

while resisting to the urge to hit us over the head with the shame we ought to feel as Americans. It packs enough of a wallop on its own.