Who, elsewhere, will confront the rising tide of right-wing authoritarian politics?
The government’s primary focus was not on relieving suffering but on punishing dissent.
The Catastrophe in Turkey

Three Times
The pregnancy was the crisis, not the abortion
One was OK: a mistake. But two was a pattern. I knew at an early age that I never wanted to have kids but I didn’t think I was the type of girl who would have an abortion, certainly not more than one. Not because of adherence to a religious or natalist ideology but because I was too educated, too responsible—which is an ideology, too.

Learning and Not Learning Abortion
Most doctors don’t know how to do abortions. Why not?
The fact that most doctors like me—my colleagues in obstetrics and gynecology very much included—don’t know how to perform abortions is one of the greatest scandals of contemporary medicine in the US.
“Those boys were just cannon fodder. And for what?”
In Kherson

Fighting from Inside
Prison litigation as a conduit for resistance
On paper, legislators passed the Prison Litigation Reform Act to halt what congresspeople erroneously called an epidemic of “meritless” prisoner-initiated lawsuits clogging court dockets. But the law’s effect — crushing imprisoned people’s access to the courts and limiting the federal courts’ power to remedy heinous prison conditions, especially via population control orders — was to severely narrow a key terrain of struggle for imprisoned people fighting not only for relief from abusive treatment and inhumane conditions, but also against the expansion of an intensifying regime of racialized mass imprisonment.
Everyone on TV was just going through the motions. It felt like watching the death spiral of civilization.
National Nightmare

Lab-Leak Theory and the “Asiatic” Form
What is missing is a motive
I could not direct you to the key evidence that exonerates the Wuhan Institute, and it might not exist. But this is also the crucial point. There are too many lacunae in the lab-leak explanation for the theory to stand on its own: proponents must fill the gaps with their own projections and beliefs.
Wasn’t the real lesson of this case that strip searches are so violent that they are unjustifiable?
The State vs. Ms. X
The American military effort in Afghanistan has been a waste from start to finish.
Notes on Losing
Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison.
Why Did You Throw Stones?
Black struggle struck the match.