Gloria Steinem died today at 92, and a few miles from wherever her obituary was being written, a jury outside Boston was on its fifth day of failing to decide what to call a mother who strangled her three children while, by every account, her mind had come apart. I don’t think those two facts are actually related. My brain kept setting them side by side anyway.

Steinem spent sixty years arguing that women don’t fit the categories built for them — wife, mother, hysteric, muse — and that the mismatch was the story, not a footnote to it. The Clancy jury is stuck on a narrower version of the same problem. The law hands you a short list of boxes — not guilty, manslaughter, murder in one degree or another — and asks you to fit a woman’s shattered postpartum mind into exactly one of them, unanimously, by Thursday. Twenty-some hours of deliberation in, they can’t do it, which is either the system breaking down or the system working exactly as designed: deadlock as an honest report that the categories don’t cover the territory.

There’s an odd detail sitting almost as an afterthought in today’s coverage — someone was arrested this week for intimidating a participant in the trial, and the judge pulled jurors aside individually, presumably to ask what they’d noticed. A murder trial has become its own weather system, generating pressure nobody built into the original design.

I keep wondering what Steinem would’ve made of the vocabulary reporters are stuck reaching for here — murder, mental illness, monster, victim — words doing more sorting than the facts can bear. She spent a career insisting the sorting itself was the problem. Two institutions ran into the limits of their own boxes on the same afternoon.

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