May 21
Roger Angell, who has been writing for the New Yorker since 1944, died Friday aged 101. Angell "lived long enough to see Babe Ruth, of the Yankees, at one end of his life and Shohei Ohtani, of the Angels, at the other".
May 7
Some, uh, "New Yorkers" are dropping the "the" from place names like "the East Village" and "the Lower East Side". Like: "Want to meet for dinner in East Village?" What the hell??
Fascinating typographic analysis of the PDF of the leaked Supreme Court opinion by designer and lawyer Matthew Butterick. "It seems that the printed PDF was unstapled and then rescanned. Why?"
May 6
Intuit Will Refund $141 Million to Low-Income TurboTax Users. They misled millions of Americans into thinking their tax software was free only to hit them with hidden fees. (Ok, now ban tax season!)
Why hasn't Congress codified abortion rights? "The increasingly partisan nature of abortion politics represents a case of issue evolution driven by party elites and filtering down to the masses."
Stop talking about coat hangers and start talking about misoprostol. "[Don't] use the coat hanger as a rallying cry, because that is the symbol of my era, a time when a pregnancy could only be ended with a procedure. The symbol for this era is a pill."
GOP Handmaid's Tale. Short but sobering view into what living in a conservative, theocratic police state might look like.
The "Original Sin" of the Religious Right. "It was school segregation, not abortion, that brought Christians together in prayer and a quest for political power."
Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion. "Women are indeed missing from the Constitution, as Justice Samuel Alito's leaked draft opinion suggests. That's a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor."
May 5
Today in weird Kickstarter projects: the Tandem Shower. "Up to now, showering together has always sucked." (Has it???)
An epidemiological take on abortion: banning abortions will not stop abortions. "With increased desperateness, the rate of illegal and unsafe abortions will start increasing, or people will be forced to have an unwanted pregnancy."
Rebecca Solnit on how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rights. "They're building a broad constituency of opposition, and it is up to us to make that their fatal mistake."
The case against the Supreme Court of the United States. "The Court was the midwife of Jim Crow, the right hand of union busters, and the dead hand of the Confederacy, and is now one of the chief architects of America's democratic decline."
Good GQ profile of chef & philanthropist José Andrés. "If he could invent anything, what would it be? 'The pot that feeds the world.'"
Another fantastic interactive explainer from Bartosz Ciechanowski about how mechanical watches work.
May 4
Abortion is freedom. "There is nothing more holy in the world than choosing if, when, or how you create a family, which is why abortion is one of our most sacred rights."
A Fundraising Email from the Galactic Senate Majority Leader. "By now you've heard the news that Senator Palpatine is trying to disband the Senate..."
It's Time to Rage. "I do not know where this retraction of civil rights will end, but I do know it will go down as a milestone in a decades-long conservative campaign to force a country of 330 million people to abide by a bigoted set of ideologies."
Overturning Roe v Wade has been the fundamentalist Christian plan all along. "It's never been a secret. The plan has been shouted at rallies. Held up on signs. It's been plotted and spoken of and written about over and over."
As the US Supreme Court moves to end abortion, is America still a free country? "There is no condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person's control over her own body. We can't call ourselves a free country without it."
This is fantastic little story about a cache of cassette tapes found in Fire Island. "In tragedy, music provided solace during the AIDS epidemic, and newly discovered cassette tapes captured two decades of parties and pain."
May 3
The Real Origins of the Religious Right. "They'll tell you it was abortion. Sorry, the historical record's clear: It was segregation."
An extensive online up-to-the-minute life log from Felix Krause. Photos, location, diet, inbox status, sleep stats, steps, mood, heart rate, and many more things.
You Can Now Order Abortion Pills Before You're Pregnant in All 50 States. "Having pills in your medicine cabinet before you need them is one way to combat restrictive laws, though it won't fix the overall problem."
MIT researchers have developed a portable desalinization device that can be powered by a small solar panel. "It automatically generates drinking water that exceeds World Health Organization quality standards."
Reminder: safe and effective medication for having an abortion is available via the mail. "Even in states with the strictest abortion laws, pregnant people have a safe, inexpensive option to terminate their pregnancies."
According to an initial draft, the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe vs. Wade, which has guaranteed the right to abortion for almost 50 years. America in retrograde – they are coming for everything not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.
May 2
Richard Feynman on how play can provide the antidote for burnout. "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."