When Less Is More...

 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 82.  Gloria Steinem, 81.  

Both women created careers to advance women's causes, and there's an excellent features piece to be written about their lives.

I would have assigned a woman reporter, and would have axed this lede as much much too elite, focusing on the staff, the chocolates set out from Zurich, and the fanciness of the private chambers...

It's off putting.

We know these women are elites, but don't rub it in our faces.  Why would a working woman want to read past these lines?  It reeks of being out.of.touch.

The room went still when the women hugged. All of the staff, bustling in preparation just moments before, paused when Ruth Bader Ginsburg emerged quietly from her private chambers at the Supreme Court last month and embraced her old friend Gloria Steinem.

And just as quickly, life resumed. 

Justice Ginsburg, 82, led Ms. Steinem, 81, into her wood-paneled chambers, with its stately traditional furniture and blue-chip modern art by Mark Rothko and Josef Albers (on loan from the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden). 

“What a magical place, Ruth,” Ms. Steinem said.

Justice Ginsburg gestured to an immaculately set table in the corner, tucked beside shelves of mementos and personal photographs including one of the two women together. She offered tea, cookies and chocolates she had brought back from a recent trip to Zurich.

 It doesn't get any better:

Philip Galanes*: Let’s start with a glaring inequity. Only one of you has a rap name.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: I like the way mine began. A second-year law student at N.Y.U. was outraged by the court’s decision in the voting rights case. But instead of just venting her anger, she took up my dissent.

PG: Happily, there are rap-name generators online.

Gloria Steinem: They have those?

PG: Yours, if you want it, is GlowStick.

GS: We may need to work on that.

*  What?  They couldn't book Adam Sandler to sit down with the ladies and write up their chat?  We settled for Phil?