“America is not a young land…”

Children should have the legal right to divorce their parents.

‘History and tradition can be respected, but they must only be partial guides’

I’ve never read an editorial at The Lancet this furious:

‘Strong ideas about morality and how to uphold it’

In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s fine novel Heat and Dust, her narrator reflects on the experience of her step-grandmother Olivia’s decision to end her pregnancy in 1920s India:

Gays in Kentucky high schools: ‘It’s like they’re being shadow-banned’

Until Ron DeSantis’ election, I thought respect for Miami-Dade and Broward’s tourist-generating income — hell, let me include Orange, Pinellas, and Hillsborough counties too — would keep Florida fascist legislators from yielding to their basest impulses.

I am more frightened than in November 2016

Cruelty and caprice are bedfellows, hence the ravenous appetite for random targets. Reluctant to attack gay and lesbian relatives until Obergefell becomes the Sinister Six’s next disemboweling, conservatives have turned to trans men and women.

Conservatism’s long war against democracy

Families are unhappily alike in many ways, one of which is boasting a relative who will corner you at a dinner to lecture, eyes gleaming with the knowledge he screenshot on Wikipedia, about the United States being a republic, not a democracy. The relative will place the last word in scare quotes or emphasize it

‘History as doctrine is always dangerous’

At times disagree with Jill Lepore because she makes conclusions with the finality of a file snapping shut. This tendency is of course ideal for a writer working on a textbook.

The expanding attack on queer Americans

The situation in Florida (the state with the prettiest name!) continues to wither if citizens don’t belong to a governing majority that despises public education but would support shipping their teething child to Siberia at six months if men could get pregnant. HB 1557, which wants to ensure elementary schools ignore the pleas of gay,

Florida gets serious about hating women

Last night Florida (the state with the prettiest name!) inched closer to a rightist colony that punishes women for lacking the insurance to visit the gynecologist and for being born with systems unable to register a pregnancy before the new deadline. On an almost party-line vote, the state senate approved House Bill 5, aka the

What white minority rule looks like

I love reading biographical horrors like this about Ginni Thomas because I couldn’t make up the density of detail on my own without readers accusing me of luridness:

The ‘nihilism’ and ‘armchair epidemiology’ of the Supreme Court majority

I’m not a lawyer, but I play one on HTV. It’s my understanding that federal agencies have broad enough mandates to anticipate public health crises and situations requiring swift action because Congress, rightly, cannot predict their occurrences. Seeing an opportunity to undue an administrative state with roots in the Great Society and New Deal, Chief

Conservatism: concentrating minority power, picking the pockets of the rabble

I am not the only person who has observed that Donald Trump is American conservatism’s culmination. From Goldwater and Reagan and Gingrich to the Koch brothers and Sarah Palin, conservatism has thrived on grievance. But like so many things about this pathology-not-a-philosophy the grievance is itself a distraction.