Julia Baird has an article in Newsweek dated March 11th called “Voice of the Middle Class: Why Wall Street Hates Elizabeth Warren.” It is the puffiest of puff pieces. If you took out the friendly adjectives– “Warren has been transformed from mild-mannered Harvard professor to the sharp-shooting, feisty head of the Congressional Oversight Committee”; “Warren is concise, logical, and angry”—there would be nothing left.

Baird reports that Warren, “in a landmark study, found that more than half of all people who declare bankruptcy cite medical reasons.” That this finding has been fiercely contested—that the balance of evidence suggests that her study is dead wrong—is not mentioned anywhere. The critics are represented entirely by Warren herself, in this passage:

Over a lunch of eggplant pasta and iced tea, Warren explains why she has been called an “evil, power-hungry, ignorant lady” who is out of her depth and hated by Wall Street. She has engaged in heated exchanges with radio hosts who insist she has “an agenda” and is out of step with “all the serious thinkers” because she believes that to fix the economy you need to focus on the middle class first. “I don’t have the right background,” she says with a shrug (having come from Oklahoma). “I don’t have the right sex. And I can’t keep my mouth shut. It is like a physical pain for me.”

Megan McArdle, Aparna Mathur, and Kerry Howley have all raised serious questions about Warren’s work. Mathur observes that in the most definitive survey we have, only 9 percent of bankrupts identified medical debt as the primary reason for their insolvency, with 7 percent listing it as a secondary reason.

All three of the critics listed above, it will be noted, are women. Whether they like eggplant pasta and iced tea is unknown.