Reading for Thinking, on Saturday

This is an interesting article about a fundamentalist Christian man who decided to spend a year pretending to be gay and what he learned about it.   To what extent can similar experiments be done about the impact of gender on one's perceptions?  Or more importantly, about the impact of gender on the perceptions of others?

Remember those tax loopholes the Romney/Ryan plan vows to close, in some completely unspecified manner, preferably carried out by the Democrats in the Congress while Romney/Ryan would get the credit for the tax cuts?

Against that background this article in the Rolling Stone magazine is kinda fun:

Are Romney's tax dodges legal? It's impossible to say for sure, given how little he has disclosed. But tax experts note that there are plenty of red flags, including an investigation by New York prosecutors into tax abuses at Bain Capital that began on Romney's watch. "He aggressively exploits every loophole he can find," says Victor Fleischer, a professor of tax law at the University of Colorado. "He's pushing the limits of tax law beyond what many think is reasonable." Indeed, a look at Romney's finances reveals just how skilled he is at hiding his wealth – and paying a fraction of his fair share in taxes.

Finally, Huffington Post has a nasty piece about Goldie Hawn.   It's almost a concentrated shot of ageism and sexism mixed up and injected straight into the vein.  It's also a good basis for asking why actors are supposed to have no right to privacy, even when they are not working.