In this video, posted in November, New Yorker writer and author David Owen tells how Jane Jacobs’ classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, influenced him in the writing of his own Green Metropolis: What the City Can Teach the Country About True Sustainability.

This timeline, first posted in October, charts the remarkable transformation in the lives of American women from 1960 to the present — the subject of Gail Collins’s When Everything Changed.

1960
The birth control pill goes on sale, yet thirty states still have laws restricting the sale or advertising of virtually anything related to birth control.

1964
Representative Howard Smith of Virginia adds women to the minority groups to be protected from discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in order to obstruct the act, however in doing so the Civil Rights Act passes with the amendment intact and is signed into law due, in large part, to Rep. Martha Griffiths from Michigan and Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine—the only woman in the Senate f or most of her career. … (Read the full post.)

In this video, posted in November, legendary newspaper editor Sir Harold Evans describes how he came by his passion for crusading journalism. Evans’s recently published memoir is My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.