What Gandhi's Wife Taught Him About Nonviolence | OZY's Weekend Highlights

From arty chocolates to a baseball shake-up, here’s the best of OZY this week.

It’s been a compelling and emotional week in the news, with two key events in the #MeToo movement: the sentencing of Bill Cosby for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about an alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In other news, the world came to New York City this week for the United Nations General Assembly, where we learned that North Korea is President Trump’s friend, but Canada is not. Trump also elicited laughter from global leaders when he boasted about his historical accomplishments in office.

Now that the weekend has arrived, it’s time to relax and settle in with some great reading. Here are 10 of our favorite stories on OZY this week.

The new memoir For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics reveals hard truths about the Democratic Party and tips on how to rise up.

Each Friday night, starting in the early-aughts, four African-American women — they called themselves “The Colored Girls” — gathered for dinner with others in Washington, D.C. What began as a respite from the political scene soon grew into a must-attend event for presidential hopefuls. Almost always White men, candidates such as Howard Dean and Tom Vilsack would suddenly find themselves being grilled by as many as a dozen female Black professionals and politicos.

The most fascinating of these dinners was with Barack Obama in 2008 in a private dining room at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse in Chinatown. When asked what his race strategy would be, Obama demurred. “Oh, race won’t be an issue. America is past that,” he said, according to an OZY exclusive excerpt from For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics, co-authored by Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Yolanda Caraway, and Leah Daughtry, all African-American women and trendsetting deans of Democratic politics. “His expectation was that he was walking into a room of adorers and supporters,” Daughtry says. “Some of it was, I think, Black male bravado.”

Time might minimize the sting of many of life’s miseries, but not one lawyer’s lingering pain from a high school rape.

In high school, a relationship can last only a few days or weeks, enough to get one through the social events of the season, which in this case were the Spring Formal and the Powder Puff Game. Today, I cannot recall which came first. I know this: I attended both the kegger that followed the game and the formal dance with a rapist. My rapist.

He was the captain of a sports team and was regarded as having a shot at a professional career, even if he also was clearly deficient in the brains department. I liked him simply because I was concerned at the time with being popular, and dating a sports captain was an automatic ticket to the in-crowd.