New America Foundation Naming Anne-Marie Slaughter as President

April 3 | Updated

Anne-Marie Slaughter is leaning in. A Princeton professor and former State Department official, Ms. Slaughter said Wednesday morning that she has decided to leave academia to become the next president of the New America Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy institute based in Washington.

Ms. Slaughter’s oracular warnings about the difficulty of women being able to  gracefully manage a fulfilling career and family life helped prompt a national conversation on the subject. Her argument that the American workplace has done little to support women set her up as a counterpoint to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, whose bestselling book “Lean In” chastises women for “pulling back when we should be leaning in.” With this new job, Ms. Slaughter is waging the battle on two fronts, just as she has urged Ms. Sandberg and others to do: “I am leaning in,” she said, “but I can only do it because the job is flexible.” That means she can be home forbreakfast and dinner with her two teenaged children, she said.

Ms. Slaughter, who will remain professor emerita at Princeton, will replace Steve Coll, who was named last month as the new dean of the Columbia Journalism School.  Ms. Slaughter said she is always “telling students to follow their passion and do what they love,” and so she decided to follow her own advice and get more involved in helping shape political and social policy.

The New America Foundation, which is based in Washington, characterizes itself on its Web site as interested in “work that is responsive to the changing conditions and problems of our 21st Century information-age economy.” Ms. Slaughter is already at the center of one of those issues: The debate about the dearth of women in top leadership roles in business and government became national news last summer after Ms. Slaughter wrote an influential article in The Atlantic magazine titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”

Ms. Slaughter, a professor of politics and international affairs at Prince­ton and the director of policy planning at the State Department from 2009 to 2011, detailed the problems of helping direct America’s foreign policy and her teenaged son’s homework. Her exhortations that women stop blaming themselves and focus on the society-wide failure to support working mothers set her up as the counterpoint to Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook who has urged women to “lean in” and seize opportunities to move up the ladder. In her bestselling book “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” she takes a psychological approach, telling women to overcome the “internal obstacles,” or unconscious ways they may hold themselves back.

A Weatherproof Case for the iPhone

Pelican Products makes protective cases favored by the military because they are practically bombproof.

Now the company is releasing a case for the iPhone 5 that sports some of that armed forces swagger, the CE1180 Pelican ProGear Vault Series iPhone case.

The case has a polymer back that is lined with a shock-absorbent elastomer. The front is an aluminum face plate with a clear membrane that protects the screen and screws down for a secure seal.

Pelican said tests had shown that the case would protect a phone when dropped from six feet. (I did not attempt to verify this.) For water resistance, the microphone and speaker ports are covered with Gore-Tex, and the camera ports are covered with Dragontrail optical glass, a competitor to Gorilla Glass.

Pelican said the case would protect against wind-driven snow, rain and dust, as well as the aforementioned drop. The case adds a bit of bulk to the phone, but not as much as most heavily protective cases.

The case, which is $80, goes on sale on Friday. It comes in a variety of colors â€" mostly blacks, grays and greens, but also purple and white.

The cases are guaranteed for life, but that doesn’t cover the phone within, so you may want to steer clear of explosives.

The Early Word: Pathway

Today’s Times

• While a bipartisan Senate group is preparing to introduce broad immigration legislation next week, another bipartisan group in the House is readying its own, Ashley Parker writes. The House plan would offer three distinct, if difficult, paths to legal status.

• One issue has emerged as the make-or-break provision in President Obama’s four-month campaign to overhaul gun laws: a proposal to expand federal background checks for gun purchases, Michael D. Shear reports.

• The National Rifle Association released a 225-page report on Tuesday ahead of next week’s gun control debate in the Senate, calling for armed police officers, security guards or staff members in every American school, Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports. One of the study’s central conclusions is that “the presence of armed security personnel adds a layer of security and diminishes response time” in a shooting.

• A report to be issued Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress says that some states with the highest levels of gun violence are among the ones with the weakest gun laws in the country, Erica Goode reports.

Around the Web

• President Obama will attend the dedication of The George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Tex., Time reports. He will join former presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, making it the first time all five of them will be together since shortly before Mr. Obama’s first inauguration.

 Happenings in Washington

• Five former White House chiefs of staff, representing four presidents, will be at the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives on Wednesday discussing their jobs and lessons learned from managing the White House. Donald Rumsfeld from the Gerald R. Ford administration, Kenneth M. Duberstein from the Ronald Reagan administration, Thomas F. McLarty III and John D. Podesta from the Bill Clinton administration, and Joshua B. Bolten from the George W. Bush administration will sit on the panel.