If we can’t trust ordinary people to be jurors, then we’ve already given up on Democracy. The central mission of a rising authoritarian movement is to destroy public trust in any institution that can stand in its way, and in particular, in any source of truth that is independent of the movement and its Leader. And so over the last few years the MAGA movement has told us that: We can’t trust our public health institutions to guide us through a pandemic. We can’t trust what climate scientists tell us about global warming. We can’t trust the FDA’s opinion on the safety of abortion drugs. We can ..read more

This week, a Trump criminal trial actually started, and a jury is already in place. Opening arguments should begin this morning. During jury selection, we saw right-wing media mount an all-out offensive against the fairness of the jury system. Trump, they claimed, could never get a fair trial in New York, or in any venue where most people didn’t vote for him. In the Manichean world of MAGA, there are Trump lovers and Trump haters, and no Trump haters could possibly put aside their hatred to listen objectively to the evidence of the case. In this week’s featured post, I push back on that. I thi ..read more

The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease. – Monica Hesse “Tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends and the dream of feminine leisure” This week’s featured posts are “A Different Take on Retro Conservative Fantasy“, “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“, and “Republicans Scramble to Contain their Abortion Disaster“. This week everybody was talking about abortion My thoughts about the week’s developments are parceled out between two f ..read more

Trump’s let-the-states-decide statement looked clever until Arizona actually decided. All across the country, the abortion issue has been helping Democrats and hurting Republicans. For decades it worked the other way: Pro-choice women were confident the Supreme Court would protect their rights, so they mostly ignored the extreme positions Republican politicians took and based their votes on other issues. But since the Dobbs decision reversed Roe v Wade last year, the intentions of elected officials matter again. After taking their lumps in the 2022 elections, Republican politicians have been ..read more

The result is horrible, but it’s a correct reading of the the legislature’s mess. Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have admonished an idealistic lawyer: “This is not a court of justice, young man. It is a court of law.” In other words, courts exist to apply the laws, not to fix them. I was holding that idea in mind when I read the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling reinstating an 1864 abortion law. Undoubtedly, this result — that all abortions are banned excepting only those that protect a woman’s life, and not excepting cases of rape or inc ..read more

This is tragic but it is not an anomaly. The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic. – Scott Paul of Oxfam, commenting on the death of seven World Central Kitchen workers This week’s featured post is “Will the World Central Kitchen attack change anything?“ This week everybody was talking about signs and wonders This morning, all eyes are on the narrow corridor of the total eclipse, which stretches from Texas in the South to Maine in the North, and goes through Dallas, Cleveland, and Buffalo along the way. I’ve never experienced a total eclipse myself (and won’t see this one either ..read more

The Biden administration has finally begun to distance itself from the Netanyahu government. How much difference will that make? Israel’s attack Monday night on a three-car convoy of the food-aid group World Central Kitchen brought to a head something that had been building slowly for a long time: American discontent with the war in Gaza. Israel immediately said the attack, which left seven aid workers dead, was a mistake. But WCK Founder José Andrés wasn’t buying it: This was not just a bad luck situation where, “Oops, we dropped a bomb in the wrong place.” … The airstrikes on our convoy I ..read more

Thanks to everybody who wished me good health this week. Your wishes have kinda-sorta been granted. Every symptom of this illness — fever, congestion, coughing, etc. — has gotten significantly better, with one exception: My voice still isn’t coming back. Some people pay significant sums of money to go on silent retreats, where they aren’t supposed to talk to anyone. Well, this week I’ve had a silent retreat in the comfort of my own home. So far, though, the spiritual benefits of this practice seem to be escaping me. I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who loves the sound of hi ..read more

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