#christopher gray

The American Woman's Association Clubhouse between West 57th and West 58th Streets, December 29, 1931. It was established as a place where professional women could network their way to success in the business world. At that time the group estimated that 700,000 women held salaried jobs in the city, with 50,000 of those in managerial or executive positions. Their architect was Benjamin Wistar Morris, who had close ties to the Morgan family. 

Most of the credit for the clubhouse goes to Anne Morgan, daughter of J.P. Morgan, who used her huge inheritance to advance causes of social justice. In 1903 she had been among the founders of the Colony Club, the pre-eminent women's club in New York, and in 1909 she brought striking women garment workers to be heard by the membership.

Morgan called the AWA ''a training school for leadership, a mental exchange'' where women ''can hear what other women are doing.'' The organization had 61 doctors, 16 lawyers, 939 teachers, a bacteriologist, a tug dispatcher and workers in many other fields. But Miss Morgan said that not everyone was eligible, only the woman ''with ambition, pluck and energy, which will push her up and up in her profession.''

The clubhouse had 1,250 rooms, along with a swimming pool, gym, meeting rooms, a restaurant, music rooms and wide terraces on the upper setbacks. Although the sleeping rooms had 128 color combinations, the exterior was bare and boxy, rising up among the aging brownstones of West 57th Street like a grain elevator in the Nebraska prairie grasses.

The club lasted until 1941, when bankruptcy proceedings forced the AWA to sell it, and it became the Henry Hudson Hotel.

(Note: Christopher Gray replaced Gregory Smith as Mega Man after the first episode)

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Alex Samuels at Daily Kos:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose tenure at the Pentagon has been anything but smooth, recently threatened his staffers with polygraph tests in a frantic bid to stop leaks from inside his department. According to The Wall Street Journal, Hegseth lost it last month after The New York Times correctly reported that Elon Musk had been scheduled to attend a top-secret military briefing on U.S. plans for China. President Donald Trump ultimately barred Musk from the meeting, but the leak infuriated both Hegseth and Trump, setting off alarm bells across the Pentagon.  Hegseth reportedly erupted, screaming at then-acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Christopher Gray: “I’ll hook you up to a fucking polygraph!”  It wasn’t an isolated outburst. The Journal also reported Hegseth accused Joint Staff Director Doug Sims of leaking the Musk meeting and threatened to strap him into a lie detector, too. Neither man ended up taking one, but the threats alone speak volumes. The Times of London summed it up, writing Hegseth has created “an atmosphere of intimidation.” A Defense official told the paper, “The extraordinary thing is that lie detector tests are being threatened not to uncover potential anti-President Trump civil servants but to catch political appointees suspected of leaking classified or sensitive information.” There’s an irony here. Hegseth is obsessed with keeping tabs on his staff while openly screwing up his own job. 

[...] It gets worse. On Thursday, it was reported that Hegseth set up an unsecured internet connection—known as a “dirty” line—in his office to bypass Pentagon security protocols and use Signal on his personal computer. Signal, of course, isn’t approved for classified communication, let alone military operations. “What I’ve seen with Hegseth—never in my life have I ever seen this,” one former Pentagon official told CNN.