When the U.S. Senate confirmed President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court by a 96-3 vote on Aug. 3, 1993 — precisely 25 years ago Friday — that decision set Ginsburg on the path to legal (and viral) history. That process was also noteworthy for her decision to take “the unprecedented step of strongly endorsing abortion rights” in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing, as TIME reported back then.

“It is essential to woman’s equality with man that she be the decisionmaker, that her choice be controlling,” Ginsburg told Senators during her four days of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee. “If you impose restraints that impede her choice, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex.”

Today, the idea that a judge’s views on abortion rights might be determining factor for his or her suitability for a seat on the Supreme Court is unsurprising. In particular, the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade is frequently referred to as a “litmus test” for a justice. So it might come as a surprise that, though she made history by endorsing abortion rights during her confirmation hearing, Ginsburg had well-known reservations about Roe.

Her views on abortion came up during her confirmation hearings in part due to a lecture she’d given earlier that year at New York University School of Law, in which she discussed the topic. At one point during her talk, she critiqued the Court for the structure of its decision in Roe v. Wade:

Kate Michelman, then president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, called on the Senators to determine “whether Judge Ginsburg will protect a woman’s fundamental right to privacy, including the right to choose, under a strict scrutiny standard.” The questioning was strong enough that Ginsburg’s husband Marty Ginsburg, one of the fiercest advocates for her judicial career, got academics to call the White House and clarify that she was talking about the Court’s thinking in 1973, not the ultimate decision.

When Sen. Hank Brown (R-CO) asked about her remarks during her confirmation hearing, she clarified her stance: “Abortion prohibition by the State, however, controls women and denies them full autonomy and full equality with men. That was the idea I tried to express in the lecture to which you referred.”

Ginsburg said that she believed it would have been easier for the public to understand why the Constitution protected abortion rights if it the matter had been framed as one of equal protection rather than privacy. And in fact, there was a specific case she had in mind as one that should have driven the national conversation, instead of letting Roe carry that weight.

She told the Senators that she “first thought long and hard” about abortion rights when, as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she took on Struck v. Secretary of Defense, a case that was on the Supreme Court’s calendar during the same term that Roe was decided. Susan Struck was an Air Force Captain who got pregnant while serving in Vietnam and sued the Air Force after it said she would have to either get an abortion at the base hospital or leave if she wanted to have the child. She told the Air Force that she didn’t want to get an abortion; she wanted to use the vacation days that she had saved up to give birth and then put the baby up for adoption because abortion violated her Roman Catholic faith.

Here’s how Ginsburg explained her approach — that sex discrimination includes discrimination because of pregnancy — to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Struck lost in the lower courts, and the Supreme Court agreed on Oct. 24, 1972, that the case should be heard — but that never happened, because the Air Force waived Struck’s discharge and allowed her to remain in the service before that date rolled around. (As Ginsburg told law students in a summer program in July 2008, according to the 2016 edited collection of her remarks and writings My Own Words, Solicitor General Erwin Griswold had recommended that course of action for the Air Force because he thought the government could potentially lose the case.) The Roe decision came out three months later.

Ginsburg has described calling Capt. Struck in December of 1972 to see if she had been denied anything else because she was a woman, “hoping to keep the case alive.” Struck told her she would have liked to become a pilot but the Air Force didn’t let women become pilots.

“We laughed, agreeing it was hopeless to attack that occupational exclusion then,” Ginsburg recalled. “Today, it would be hopeless, I believe, to endeavor to reserve flight training exclusively for men. That is one measure of what the 1970s litigation/legislation/public education efforts in the United States helped to achieve.”

Despite her impassioned response on the matter of abortion, Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings are also known for setting the precedent of the so-called “Ginsburg rule,” which refers to her refusal to comment on some pending cases or cases that could come before the court. Ironically, as President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh faces the process Ginsburg endured 25 years ago, some experts predict that he will rely on the Ginsburg rule to get out of answering questions about his views on just the very subject on which she spoke so memorably.

President Donald Trump threatened Harley-Davidson with a “big tax” on Tuesday after the company revealed it was moving production overseas to avoid retaliatory tariffs from the European Union.

In a slew of tweets Tuesday morning, the President also claimed the move could “be the beginning of the end” for the famous motorcycle maker and accused the company of using the tariffs “as an excuse” to move their production operations to Thailand. “Their employees and customers are already very angry at them,” he said.

“Companies are now coming back to America,” Trump tweeted. “Harley must know that they won’t be able to sell back into U.S.without paying a big tax!”

In a regulatory filing Monday, Harley-Davidson said the retaliatory tariffs from the European Union, imposed in response to Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, would increase costs by “$2,200 per average motorcycle exported from the U.S. to the E.U.,” totaling to as much as $100 million a year in costs. Harley-Davidson said it did not plan on raising retail or wholesale prices to cover the added costs.

The company said increasing production internationally “is not the company’s preference, but represents the only sustainable option to make its motorcycles accessible to customers in the EU and maintain a viable business in Europe.” Shifting more production abroad will take the company between 9 to 18 months, Harley-Davidson said. The company did not detail how many jobs would be lost or shifted to Thailand as a result. Harley-Davidson sold nearly 40,000 motorcycles in Europe in 2017, according to its annual report. The company did notimmediately respond to a request for comment.

The E.U. announced plans to place retaliatory tariffs on US. products like motorcycles, cranberry juice, peanut butter and whiskey in response to Trump’s hefty tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The president targeted Harley-Davidson on Monday as “the first to wave the White Flag” as a result of these retaliatory measures. A representative from the White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff and 10 percent tariff on steel and aluminum, respectively, in the interest of national security, he has said, and in an effort to promote domestic manufacturing. The E.U., Mexico and Canada were initially excluded from the tariffs when Trump announced them in March, but that expired on June 1.

(Bloomberg)—Elon Musk’s SpaceX won permission to deploy more than 7,000 satellites, far more than all operating spacecraft currently aloft, from U.S. regulators who also moved to reduce a growing risk from space debris as skies grow more crowded.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has two test satellites aloft, and it earlier won permission for a separate set of 4,425 satellites — which like the 7,518 satellites authorized Thursday are designed to provide broadband communications. It has said it plans to begin launches next year.

Space companies riding innovations that include smaller and cheaper satellites — with some just 4 inches long and weighing only 3 pounds — are planning fleets that will fly fast and low, offering communications now commonly handled by larger, more expensive satellites.

Right now there are fewer than 2,000 operating satellites, and the planned additional space traffic demands vigilance, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said before the agency voted Thursday on a variety of space-related matters including SpaceX’s application, debris rules, and other space matters.

“Even a centimeter-wide object can wreak devastating damage to satellites,” Pai said. He pointed to the 2013 film “Gravity” that portrayed devastating consequences including a spacecraft’s destruction from a debris strike.

The agency on a 4-0 vote advanced rules to require more calculations to demonstrate a planned spacecraft poses a minimal risk of collisions, and to minimize new orbiting debris — for instance, from devices that remain aloft after releasing a satellite.

Read more: Musk Dares to Go Where Others Failed With Space-Based Web

About 500,000 small pieces of debris were estimated to be in orbit in 2012, roughly five times the total in 2004, the FCC said in a notice.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth from all nations stood at 1,886 in August, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists policy group.

“Certain orbits are getting crowded,” Henry Hertzfeld, director of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an interview. “It is a problem that’s getting magnified in low Earth orbit by the proliferation” of small satellites.

The FCC gets involved with satellites as part of its role regulating the airwaves that spacecraft use to communicate.

The FCC also approved access to the U.S. market for satellites from Kepler Communications Inc., Telesat Canada and LeoSat MA.

Equal Pay Day — which in 2018 falls on Tuesday, April 10 — is an annual time to reflect on the persistence of the gender wage gap. The day, picked by the advocacy group the National Committee on Pay Equity, symbolizes the point at which, on average, American women will have earned as much in this year and the year before combined as American men earned in the previous year. It’s been marked each year since 1996, and shows no signs of being rendered moot soon.

In fact, the wage gap has been at a standstill of sorts for the past decade, in part because women’s wages haven’t grown. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org reports that “women on average are paid 20% less than men,” while the Institute for Women’s Policy Research finds that “women’s median weekly earnings for full-time work were $770 in 2017 compared with $941 for men.”

For as long as women have been in the workplace, they have faced questions about whether they are really up to the job. And the more women break into male-dominated fields, the more they discover such prejudices — and the ways those ideas affect how much money they make. Looking at some of the excuses for the gender wage gap in the last half a century, it’s clear that those questions tend to stick around.

TIME spoke to Ariane Hegewisch, the Program Director Employment & Earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, about some of the most long-standing myths about the wage gap, and why experts say society ought to know better by now.

Myth: Women don’t need to make as much because they just work to make “pin money”

Usage: Historically, the term “pin money” has referred to money that’s either set aside by married men for their wives or money that women earned from small, part-time work to buy “hairpins” or other typically female luxuries or leisure activities. The LIFE magazine archives feature stories about several examples of jobs that women took just for fun money — from a 1953 photo of two women doing flower arrangements for weddings for “pin money” to a 1970 feature on students taking a sewing course so that they can “plan on making pin money sewing for friends” to a 1944 feature on twins who “make pin money, help relieve shopgirl shortage by working in a local store.”

Reality: Even if that term accurately represented some women’s choices at the time, the idea it captures is rare these days. The volume of women who are either their family’s main or co-breadwinner has dramatically increased, now that most women work. “Close to half of all households with kids under 18 — 49.4% — had a breadwinner mother, [meaning someone] who contributes at least 40% of her households earnings,” says Hegewisch. “Just limited to married couples, that proportion is still 36.3%.”

Myth: Women are willing to be paid less because they trade salary for flexibility

Usage: TIME’s Dec. 8, 1989, cover story was devoted to women who were “burned out from ‘having it all’” and addressed the idea that women would rather work less, even if that meant less money. The story was partly sparked by the uproar over Felice Schwartz’s ”Management Women and the New Facts of Life,” which appeared in that year’s January-February issue of the Harvard Business Review. The article became known as the the “Mommy Track” essay, for proposing that “professional women who prefer not to sacrifice family to ambition be relegated to a slower career path that would top out at middle management,” as TIME summed it up. “They would get by with shorter hours and schedules flexible enough to permit the occasional trip to the pediatrician or school play.”

Reality: Women are paid less, but they don’t actually get more flexibility. “Men (particularly men in the highest paid jobs) are more likely [than women] to have flexible working hours [and] control over when and where they work,” says Hegewisch. In addition, law professor Joan C. Williams argues some subconscious bias can be at play, too, as her research suggest that people tend to assume single women or men who are not at their desk must be meeting with a client and that mothers who aren’t at their desk are dealing with childcare.

Myth: Women have lower salaries because they don’t negotiate

Usage: Variations of the idiom “the squeaky wheel gets the grease” date back to 1910, and that idea has been used to justify the wage gap, by arguing that women just aren’t asking for raises. “If [a woman] will work for $8 and a guy will hold out for $9, is that discrimination, or is it market reality?” one defense lawyer told Fortune magazine about a decade ago for its 2005 special report on “How Corporate America Is Betraying Women.”

Reality: In reality, women can be penalized if they stick their necks out in that way to ask for a raise. “There is research showing that when women negotiate for themselves, they still may not get the same outcomes as men,” says Hegewisch. “They are treated differently than men, and there can be social censorship,” meaning their colleagues may treat them differently after they ask for a raise. Hegewisch cites a 2006 study by researchers at Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University who found “male evaluators penalized female candidates more than male candidates for initiating negotiations; female evaluators penalized all candidates for initiating negotiations.” And, even if that research is relatively new, TIME’s archives show that women in the workplace have intuited the danger for decades. For example, in a 1982 cover story about the subject, one woman told the magazine that, although she knew men made more for doing the work she was doing, “You learn not to make too many waves in the workplace” if you want to keep your job.

Myth: Women choose lower-paying jobs

Usage: “Women have tended to take the kind of jobs that men seldom strive for,” summed up TIME’s March 20, 1964, article on why equal pay won’t work. The magazine argued that the Equal Pay Act of 1963 simply wouldn’t work because “many women prove reluctant to take on heavy responsibility or to boss men on the job.”

Reality: Yes, women do often end up in lower-paying jobs — but not, on average, because their preferences for the work are so strong that the salary doesn’t matter, Hegewish says. “The issue isn’t choice, it’s constraints on choice,” she says. “There are a lot of constraints on women entering higher-paying professions, from discouragement in schools and not having any role models, to broad social effects, like hostile work environments through harassment and discrimination.” In addition, when men move into what had been considered predominantly female work, women tend to get squeezed out just as the prestige and pay goes up. For example, computer programming used to be considered “women’s work,” until the professionalization of the discipline in the ’60s and ’70s, as Nathan Ensmenger, author of The Computer Boys Take Over, told TIME last year when a memo about gender differences in that industry caused an uproar.

Myth: Biological differences naturally keep women out of some higher-paying jobs

Usage: In a study published in Science in 1981, researchers posited that “sex differences in achievement in and attitude toward mathematics results from superior male mathematical ability.” This conclusion led to headlines, such as “Do Males Have a Math Gene?” The idea has stuck around — for example, in 2005 then-President of Harvard University Larry Summers caught flack for suggesting that men and women have different intrinsic abilities “in the special case of science and engineering” — and contributed to the concept that women might not be cut out for high-paying jobs that require math or science skills.

Reality: A major study on this question came out in 2011, and Janet Mertz, senior author of the study and a professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concluded, “This is not a matter of biology: None of our findings suggest that an innate biological difference between the sexes is the primary reason for a gender gap in math performance at any level.” Rather, the study linked observed difference in math ability between men and women to social and cultural factors. In the years since educators made a concerted effort to encourage women from sticking with science and math, their success has been the proof against any argument that women simply can’t hack it in those jobs. In 2014, for example, women earned about 40% of the BA degrees and Master’s degrees in mathematics and statistics, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. And besides, women have long made critical contributions to math and science, from Ada Lovelace, who has been called the first computer programmer for imagining personal computing in the mid-1800s, to Jean Sammet, one of the key inventors of the programming language COBOL.

A Georgia Congressman tweeted and deleted a D-Day blunder.

Rep. Drew Ferguson, who is running for reelection in Georgia’s Third District, marked the 74th anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy with an image of soldiers for Nazi Germany and a tank with the Iron Cross, a symbol of the German military.

The tweet also featured a quote from Harry Truman, who was not yet president on June 6, 1944.

“The heroism of our own troops.. Was matched by that of the armed forces of the nations that fought by our side.. They absorbed the blows.. And they shared to the full in the ultimate destruction of our enemy,” reads the Truman quote – which is engraved at the National World War Two Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The tweet, from Ferguson’s campaign Twitter page, was posted to his campaign twitter at 9:57 am and deleted within an hour, but not before users spotted it and mocked it online.

“The problem is that it is an amazingly stupid mistake to make, and should have been caught by any kid nearby who has played Call of Duty for more than five minutes,” one Twitter user said.

Ferguson’s district includes parts of Columbus, Georgia, which is next to Fort Benning, a major U.S. Army installation.

Neither Ferguson’s Congressional office nor his campaign immediately responded to requests for comment.

Climate change is a global challenge demanding global solutions. No one country can face it alone, no matter that nation’s political, economic or military might. From the richest to the poorest, we all share one planet, and we all have a stake in its survival.

This is why the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes for such alarming reading and demands immediate, concerted action from everyone — particularly our leaders.

The report sets out starkly that, without a rapid change of course, global temperatures will rise above the 1.5°C level that scientists view as the bare minimum to avert catastrophic climate change, including rising sea waters, desertification and droughts.

This change will not happen, however, unless leaders in politics and business put their money where their mouth is and finally deliver the billions of dollars needed to make the transition to a green economy.

Nearly a decade ago, leaders of developed countries committed at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference to mobilizing $100 billion per year of public and private finance by 2020 for climate action in developing countries.

The pledge was reiterated in Paris, but funds committed to date are nowhere near the target; according to global NGO Oxfam, climate finance in 2015-16 amounted to $48 billion per year, but only $9 billion went to least-developed countries.

According to NASA, global temperatures are already 0.9 degrees Celsius higher than at the end of the nineteenth century. The past few months alone have shown us what this means in terms of extreme weather events: wildfires from California to the Arctic Circle, hurricanes battering the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and unprecedented drought in Australia.

Three years ago, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, I was proud to have helped secure the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. All 193 U.N. member states signed up to this deal — a rare feat in international diplomacy — which acknowledges the existential threat climate change poses to us all.

Today, I continue to believe that the Paris Agreement offers the best hope of delivering a robust and just transition to a zero-carbon, climate-resilient economy that protects lives and livelihoods, especially for the most vulnerable of the world’s population.

But I am alarmed and disappointed at the inadequate pace of progress, especially by the major polluting economies. The IPCC report makes it clear that the time for talking is over — this is literally a matter of life and death. To give just one example, Yale scientists predict that the difference between a 1.5 degree and 2 degree rise in global temperatures could cut corn yields in parts of Africa by half.

President Donald Trump’s decision in June 2017 to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement was politically short-sighted, and scientifically wrong. I am afraid he will be judged as standing on the wrong side of the history.

I have been heartened over the past year by the determination of countless Americans to reaffirm their commitment to the Paris Agreement and to keep taking climate change seriously, from state governors and city mayors to business leaders, labour unions, faith groups and ordinary citizens.

However, this groundswell of civic responsibility should not let President Trump off the hook — or indeed any other leader tempted to shirk or diminish their responsibilities. They need to be held to account in international fora, by national electorates and in the wider court of public opinion.

This means developing comprehensive national adaptation and implementation strategies, but also — especially for the rich, industrialized nations — providing the necessary climate finance to help least-developed countries.

The private sector also needs to step up and play its part. Industries and investors need to be bold and far-sighted, for example by cutting all links to fossil fuels and supporting a carbon price. If they act now, they can seize new opportunities from innovative technologies, rather than risk onerous costs as climate change makes previous business models unsustainable.

The International Labour Organisation predicts that the green economy will create 24 million jobs by 2030, and that those at the vanguard of climate action are best placed to benefit from this economic transformation.

Without responsible governance, it will not be possible to deliver a just transition to a new, sustainable and green economy. We need to invest in new technology and new training, and we need to ensure access to clean, reliable energy for all to lift even more people out of poverty.

Important steps are already being taken. On Oct. 16, Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and a dozen global leaders, including United Kingdom Prime Minister Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, will launch a Global Commission on Adaptation to lift even more people out of poverty.

I will be honored to chair this Commission together with Bill Gates and Kristalina Georgieva, CEO of the World Bank. This Commission will submit its flagship report to the Climate Change summit convened by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in September 2019, the fifth anniversary of the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

Our collective challenge is daunting. Equity, inclusivity and cooperation must underpin our response to meet the 1.5-degree targets. Climate change respects no borders; our actions must transcend all frontiers.

Google honored banjo-picking bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs with its Google Doodle on Friday.

Scruggs, who pioneered a musical style known as the “Scruggs style” which became integral to bluegrass, died in 2012 at age 88. The animated Doodle shows off Scruggs’ fingerpicking playing style.

Google’s Doodle was timed to celebrate the anniversary of the 2014 opening of the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby, N.C. The Scruggs Center is dedicated to celebrating Scuggs’ life and helping to educate people about the North Carolina musical traditions that gave rise to Scruggs’ talent.

Scruggs’ son, Gary, told Google: “Even though my father, Earl Scruggs, passed away before the Earl Scruggs Center opened, he was involved in its planning stages. It was important for him that the Earl Scruggs Center would serve as more than a museum displaying interesting artifacts and memorabilia, but as an educational facility as well.”

“I very much admired the fact that my Dad was not only a world-class musician, but was also willing and eager to teach his musical skills to anyone asking his advice.”

Scruggs was born in North Carolina in 1924, where he grew up playing the banjo. His musical career would span some six decades, winning him four Grammy awards and a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

When Babe Ruth was honored in 1947 with a special day for “fans, players and the management of the game … to unite in a salute and join in a prayer for his early recovery,” as MLB commissioner Happy Chandler put it, the baseball legend was dying of cancer and hadn’t played professionally since 1935.

Still, his grip on baseball was firm enough that nearly 60,000 people turned out for Babe Ruth Day at Yankee Stadium in New York City, and countless more around the country. The day was dedicated to appreciating the man whose name remains synonymous with his sport to this day. Addressing the crowd, Ruth spoke of what made baseball special — the fact that it took serious training to develop the necessary skills, for one — and expressed his gratitude for the event.

“There’s been so many lovely things said about me,” Ruth told the crowd. “I’m glad I had the opportunity to thank everybody.”

But Ruth couldn’t hide that he was sick. His voice sounded bad and it felt bad too, he admitted.

“He wasn’t the Babe Ruth everyone remembers,” photographer Ralph Morse would tell LIFE.com of that day. “He put a brave face on it, but he was ravaged.”

When he died on Aug. 16, 1948, just a little more than a year after that Babe Ruth Day and a few months after his farewell to Yankee Stadium, TIME’s obituary noted how surprising it was that Ruth was even able to make it to that celebration of his life, months after “sports editors everywhere prepared obituaries.” As the remembrance explained, that stamina shouldn’t have been surprising:

Maybe that feeling of intimacy was why so many people had trouble believing he was really gone. “Newspaper switchboards lit up within minutes after the radio bulletin, and were jammed for hours,” TIME reported the following week. “At Memorial Hospital five extra operators were put on, to repeat over & over that Ruth had died.”

A.N. Devers has always had a fondness for unwanted things. As a child, her family moved around the U.S. a lot, following her father’s postings in the Air Force. In each new town, they’d go to yard sales, where Devers would dig through other people’s cast-offs and come up with interesting items to take home.

A few decades later, that talent for spotting the overlooked is the driving force behind her unusual new bookstore, The Second Shelf.

Tucked away in a peaceful courtyard off the busy streets of London’s Soho, the store almost exclusively offers rare books by women authors – a group that has rarely enjoyed the attention, or the price tag, afforded to male writers. Devers, a writer and book dealer, became obsessed with the discrepancy when, at a book fair in 2015, she saw (mostly male) traders relegating titles by renowned female authors like Joan Didion to the lower shelves and, tellingly, selling them for a tiny fraction of the cost of books by their male counterparts. “We don’t value women’s work the same way we do men’s,” Devers says. “It’s depressing. But it’s also exciting, because I can do something about it.”

After Devers, 42, moved from New York to London – “a great town for people interested in rare books” – in 2016, she started meeting other women in the trade. The idea for The Second Shelf began to take shape. A prolific user of social media, Devers marshalled her thousands-strong following into powerful online attention for her project, which she initially intended as an online store. She raised over $40,000 on Kickstarter and garnered interest from high-profile figures in the book world.

The Second Shelf opened its reddish pink doors in November. Inside, the walls are papered with the kind of patterned end pages you find in beautiful old books, thousands of which are crammed into tall shelves and dark cabinets. Most are first editions, and many are signed and almost all are by women (a handful of male-authored books about women have made it in). The focus is modern fiction – Elizabeth Bowen novels, romances by Rosamunde Pilcher, poetry by Ntozake Shange. But there’s also travel writing, essays, guidebooks and more. Next year Devers’ first book, Train — a non-fiction exploration of trains in American culture published by Bloomsbury — will surely join them.

In collecting these works and promoting them in the Second Shelf’s biannual review, Devers is hoping to correct a historical imbalance in the book trade that has left women authors forgotten over the years. In the U.K., early bookmen (the term for rare book dealers) were “country gentleman who ran estates, and amassed libraries of books to show their wealth and intelligence,” Devers says. There have been some famous bookwomen, she adds, citing Belle da Costa Greene, who built the famous Morgan Library in New York. But for the most part, it has typically been men who decide which books are worth collecting, preserving and passing down to future generations. As in other male-led creative industries of television, film, and the news media, “they focus on themselves,” Devers says.

The effect is a stark absence of women’s work among what society considers to be the most valuable cultural artefacts. In January, the Second Shelf went viral on Twitter after Devers pointed out that only eight books by women appeared in a list, compiled by a trade website, of the 500 biggest sales at auction in the books and paper field in 2018. Even among more recently published works, a 2018 study found that books by women are sold for on average 45% less than books by men. “In a capitalist society, where we put our money shows where we see value. We’ve been taught to find value in something really narrow,” Devers says. “It’s time to explore something different.”

Devers’ brick-and-mortar shop – made possible by a good deal on the rent from local estate agents – is the physical site of a mostly online movement pushing back against the status quo. (The online store, which Devers promised on her Kickstarter, is on its way). The Second Shelf is named for a 2012 New York Times essay by Meg Wolitzer critiquing the sexist treatment of women’s fiction. Since then, many have promoted the idea of reading only books by women for a year, while student activists have increasingly called on universities to diversify their largely white and male reading lists.

These days she tours rare book fairs in search of hidden gems that have received little attention. The works that fly off the shelves fastest are those by women of color. “If women’s work has been relegated, then that’s even more true for women who aren’t white, which makes it’s hard for my customers to find elsewhere,” she says. The store has twice sold out of works by Nigerian-born novelist Buchi Emecheta. Devers quickly sold 14 first editions of works by Miriam Tlali – the first black South African woman to get published in her country. Devers initially came across her in a charity shop and was shocked she had never heard of her – today she is out of print, even in South Africa. “I can’t keep up with the demand, which means there is a demand. That’s heartening.”

Less heartening is the reaction some people have to Devers’ mission online. While social media helped power the birth of her store and brings in most of her customers, it has also brought trolls who feel free to share their (often offensive) thoughts on a women’s-only bookstore. Devers says it doesn’t happen constantly, but when it does she will often engage to explain the importance of what she’s doing. “Sometimes it’s exhausting, but I disagree with that idea that you can should just ignore them until they go away,” she says. “People say you should, but if you ignore them, there’s no counterpoint.”

Some of the trolls are men taking issue with their perceived exclusion from the store. But much of the online abuse The Second Shelf gets comes from TERFs – an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, a group which refuses to include trans women in its definition of women and which many say is more prominent in the British feminist movement. On Twitter, TERFs have taken issue with Devers’ stocking of work by trans writers, such as Welsh historian and travel writer Jan Morris, and model April Ashley, who became one of Britain’s first trans public figures. “I’m aware that I’m operating in intellectually charged times around what gender is,” she says. “But I guess wasn’t prepared for how controversial some people would find it: I sell books by and about women, as they define themselves. I want everyone to be comfortable coming into my store.”

As in any good bookstore, customers stepping on to the pale pink-tiled floor of The Second Shelf are greeted by staff members excited to share their wealth of literary knowledge and recommendations for people at different stages of their book collecting career (there are Penguin Classics for $8, newer books by Alison Lurie and Rachel Cusk for $25–40, first edition Elizabeth Bowens for around $50, right up into the hundreds for work by legends like Virginia Woolf). Devers is no exception, constantly breaking into tangents on her favorite stock items and rattling off the life stories of their authors. “It’s frustrating that there are so many great books out there and no one is looking for them,” she says. Now, at least, we know where to start.

Correction, March 5

The original version of this story misstated the name of the librarian who built up the Morgan Library. It is Belle da Costa Greene, not Bella de la Costa Greene.

A massive “potentially hazardous” asteroid spanning more than the length of the world’s tallest building will fly by our planet on Feb. 4.

The roughly .7-mile long asteroid is considered longer than the Burj Khalifa, which at .5 miles high currently stands as the world’s tallest building, and will fly at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour just 2.6 million miles from Earth.

“This is a fairly routine close approach of an object that we have known about for many years,” said Paul Chodas who manages the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Asteroid 2002 AJ192 was discovered in 2002.

“We’ve been tracking it since then so we know its trajectory very accurately and predicted this close approach years ago,” Chodas added. “Close approaches of near-earth objects happen almost daily, and many of them are closer than this.”

Thanks to its reach and size, the asteroid is classified as “potentially hazardous” by NASA, but it’s one of over 1,000 asteroids and comets scientists currently know about that falls under this category.

Technically the asteroid’s current size remains unknown and it has been estimated based on typical reflectivity, said Chodas. That’s part of the reason why the asteroid’s upcoming flyby is gaining attention.

Under NASA’s classifications, any asteroid or comet predicted to travel anywhere within 0.05 Astronomical Units (or reaching under 5 million miles) of Earth’s orbit and that has a size of at least 30 meters or more is deemed “potentially hazardous.”

“We know that this particular object is not one of the ones that has any chance of hitting the Earth in the next 100 years; there are no asteroids that we know of that have any significant chance of hitting the Earth over the next 100 years, but you never know what we find out in our discoveries,” Chobas said.

Though 2002 AJ129 is far enough from Earth’s orbit to avoid any collisions, scientists plan to continue closely observing the rock and others like it using both the Goldstone Radio Telescope in California and the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico.

They also have even been looking into technology that would allow them to deflect asteroids from a distance. Last year scientists began working on the Double Asteroid Reflection Test (DART), which would allow them to strike the asteroid as its approaching Earth to shift its orbit through a technique known as kinetic impactor. The first test with DART is planned for October of 2022 and again in 2024.