WOMAN WALK THE LINE: NEW BOOK ABOUT THE WOMEN OF COUNTRY

I'm excited to share this new book of Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives by veteran music critic, Holly Gleason, with you all.

In this collection of personal essays, a diverse group of women music writers pay tribute to the female country artists who have inspired them, including Taylor Swift on Brenda Lee, Ronni Lundy on Hazel Dickens, Rosanne Cash on June Carter Cash, and Grace Potter on Linda Ronstadt. Other musicians highlighted include Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Lucinda Williams, and Tanya Tucker.

Full-tilt, hardcore, down-home, and groundbreaking, the women of country music speak volumes with every song. From Maybelle Carter to Dolly Parton, k.d. lang to Taylor Swift—these artists provided pivot points, truths, and doses of courage for women writers at every stage of their lives. Whether it's Rosanne Cash eulogizing June Carter Cash or a seventeen-year-old Taylor Swift considering the golden glimmer of another precocious superstar, Brenda Lee, it's the humanity beneath the music that resonates.

Woman Walk the Line: How the Women in Country Music Changed Our Lives

Here are deeply personal essays from award-winning writers on femme fatales, feminists, groundbreakers, and truth tellers. Acclaimed historian Holly George Warren captures the spark of the rockabilly sensation Wanda Jackson; Entertainment Weekly's Madison Vain considers Loretta Lynn's girl-power anthem "The Pill"; and rocker Grace Potter embraces Linda Ronstadt's unabashed visual and musical influence. Patty Griffin acts like a balm on a post-9/11 survivor on the run; Emmylou Harris offers a gateway through paralyzing grief; and Lucinda Williams proves that greatness is where you find it.

Part history, part confessional, and part celebration of country, Americana, and bluegrass and the women who make them, Woman Walk the Line is a very personal collection of essays from some of America's most intriguing women writers. It speaks to the ways in which artists mark our lives at different ages and in various states of grace and imperfection—and ultimately how music transforms not just the person making it, but also the listener.

HIDDEN FIGURES: THE WOMEN BEHIND NASA 1953

The human computers group photo in 1953. (Credit: NASA/JPL/Caltech)

They were known as “human computers” long before desktop, laptops and multi-function calculators. Comprising an elite team of mathematicians, engineers and scientists, these women were tasked with turning numbers into meaningful data at what would later become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Langley Research Center. Their calculations would chart the course of many ground-breaking missions, carrying U.S. astronauts to the moon and beyond.

Photo above: Macie Roberts’ computing group circa 1955 (far right). Barbara Paulson is on the telephone (standing, back left). Helen Ling is at the second desk in the left row. (Credit: JPL)

Barbara “Barby” Canright was the first and joined California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1939. As the first female “human computer,” her job was to calculate anything from how many rockets were needed to make a plane airborne to what kind of rocket propellants were needed to propel a spacecraft.

Mary Jackson

These calculations were done by hand, with pencil and graph paper, often taking more than a week to complete and filling up six to eight notebooks with data and formulas.

It was the careful and precise hand-made calculations of these women that sent Voyager to explore the solar system, wrote the C and C++ programs that launched the first Mars rover and helped the U.S. put a man on the moon. Though rarely seen in the famous photos of NASA’s mission control, these early human computers contributed immeasurably to the success of the United States’ space program. Read More