Yvonne Brill: Rocket Scientist or Homemaker?
The recent NYT obituary for Yvonne Brill opened with “She made a mean beef stroganoff.” Are you f*#!?g kidding? No offense to any woman who chooses to stay at home with her children. Keep in mind that Mrs. Brill (as she liked to be called) did in fact take leave of her full-time work for eight years in order to raise three kids. But this woman was a rocket scientist!! Who cares what she cooked for dinner. I want to know about her invention of a propulsion system (still in use today!) that allows satellites to remain in orbit.
Under pressure from the public, and maybe a little in-house ire, the Times did end up revising the obit. What you see here are the edits from when the piece was first published on Saturday at 2:21 p.m to the revision later that night at 9:56 p.m. Courtesy of NewsDiffs.
And really, if you are going to reference her stroganoff, at least include the recipe.
Thursday 04.04.13 at 4:57 pm
Thanks for bringing this bit of *editing* to light. Shame.
Men cook dinner too, but we don’t know about it and collectively don’t care. And that’s the way it should be across the board. Focus NYT.
Saturday 01.25.14 at 11:27 pm
I love that you put this up. Brilliant.
I have a piece brewing about the way magazines/newspapers treat the wording when people indelicately leave their partners: “once they untangled themselves from their current live-ins”
WHAT?!
Nice one.