Having a Galactic Christmas

To the delight of art directors everywhere, Galaxy, arguably the best science fiction magazine of the postwar era, is in the public domain (sort of) and is available on the Internet archive. The copyright situation is a bit complicated because most of the stories are very much not in the public domain, but the commissioned parts including the columns, reviews, and best of all, art are.

From Wikipedia:

Notable artists who contributed regularly to Galaxy included Ed Emshwiller, who won several Hugo Awards for his work, Hugo nominee Wallace Wood, and Jack Gaughan, who won three Hugos in the late 1960s, partly for his work in Galaxy. Gaughan was commissioned by Pohl to provide the cover and interior art for Jack Vance's The Dragon Masters in 1962; the resulting illustrations made Gaughan immediately famous in the science fiction field.

Wally Wood was one of a number of EC artists who showed up in the pages of the magazine including the unexpected but unmistakable Don Martin.

Throughout the 50s, December issues of the magazine featured Emshwiller's four-armed but otherwise reassuringly familiar Santa Claus on the cover. I thought this would be a good way to kick off the month.

Happy holidays.

Trump did better with women against Harris than he did against Biden -- you'd think that would be the lede

I've seen remarkably little coverage of this. [From the AP. Emphasis added.]

Men were more likely than women to support President-elect Trump, the survey showed. That gap in voting preferences has largely remained the same, even as vote choice among men and women has moved modestly.

Harris had the advantage among women, winning 53% to Trump’s 46%, but that margin was somewhat narrower than President Joe Biden’s in 2020, according to the survey. In 2020, VoteCast showed Biden won 55% of women, while 43% went for Trump.

It's very possible I missed something. I haven't been following the postmortem discussion that closely, but I did multiple Google and NYT news searches and none of what I've found have focused on this one big and completely unexpected result. Many of the articles didn't even mention it.

The dominant narrative going into the election was that we would see the gender gap growing on both sides, men increasingly trending toward Trump, women increasingly trending toward Harris. I don't recall anyone predicting that in a time of Dobbs with a woman at the top of the ticket, we would see women moving toward the Republicans.

Assuming we can trust these numbers, this would seem to be one of the biggest stories of the election, in terms of magnitude, impact, and questions raised. The kind of thing that demands new hypotheses and deep dives into the data. 

It also raises questions about pre-election polling, I don't recall any large segment of the population where women were moving significantly toward Trump. How did the polls do with slightly over half the population? Could Harris underperforming Biden be explained by who turned out? How did women's votes break in 2016 compared to 2008 and 2020?

Before Obama, I remember lots of Democrats asking if the country was ready for a black president. I don't recall nearly so many before Hillary asking if the country was ready for a woman president. Is it possible we were getting things backwards? This is not to say that a woman can't be elected president -- the closeness of the popular vote in 2016 and 2024 show that Clinton and Harris were competitive -- nor should we exaggerate the effect this had on the outcome. It's true that if Democrats had improved on their performance with women rather than lost ground, they might have flipped the popular vote, but lots of factors such as the shortness of the campaign, widespread misconceptions about economy, a slow and timid justice system, and godawful press coverage all arguably played a bigger role. 

It is also important to remember that just as it is a bad idea to assume that conventional political logic applies to Trump, it can be just as much of a mistake to assume the lessons of Trump can be generalized.

That said, this is a big story that raises significant questions and it's joined the long list of important stories that the establishment press has shown a bizarre lack of interest in covering.