It's RBG's Birthday! Still Surprising After All These Years

March 15: Ruth Bader Ginsburg's 84th birthday. To mark the occasion, I give you--you, dear reader, not RBG, who does not read my blog!--an audio file that I think will make you smile.

Let me set up the clip: It's from last month, February 6, in Palo Alto, California. Justice Ginsburg had just given Stanford University's "Rathbun Lecture on a Meaningful Life" and sat for an interview with the event's host, The Rev. Professor Jane Shaw. (See photo below.) Now she was into a question-and-answer session with students in the audience.

Previously, Justice Ginsburg had shared advice she had received years before from her mother-in-law about how to have a happy marriage: "It pays, sometimes, to be a little deaf." This has long been a staple of RBG's talks and interviews--when someone says something unkind, whether in marriage or at the Supreme Court or in life, don't respond in anger. Act as if the unkind words weren't said. Now a Stanford freshman named Sasha had a question about this advice: How do you balance this choice to be deaf to unkindness with the need to speak out against things that seem wrong?

I've heard and read RBG repeat this it-pays-to-be-a-little-deaf chestnut many times. But I'd never heard the answer she gave at Stanford. Justice Ginsburg tells a fine, funny, surprising  story, and if you stop listening before you hear the words "sexist pig" come out of her mouth--you have stopped too soon. Take a minute and 20 seconds and enjoy.

Happy birthday, Ruth Bader Ginsburg!