Eve Tushnet
Does what it says on the tin. Read more
Does what it says on the tin. Read more
writes: Daily saving the life of an immobile kid with a fatal disease raises some fundamental questions. What is the point of such a life? Which raises the prior question: What is the purpose of any life? more Read more
yes, yes, yes: What I find so attractive, therefore, about Catholicism is the fact that many–though certainly not all–of the practices within the church are grounded in something beyond fad and the opinion of a single pastor or leader. Put another way, I think a huge part of me would actually like it if my pastor said, “For the next 40 days, you’re fasting.” I wouldn’t like it if he was just making a power-play, trying to bind my conscience... Read more
One cheap but useful definition of natural law is that it’s the belief that there is a universal human nature which is knowable by reason (and here we fight about what we mean by “reason,” but ignore that for now), and so our desires can be rightly ordered based on what would express and support this nature, even though we have never seen this nature instantiated anywhere in our lives or history, ever. You can see why this is both... Read more
feature: …Yet whether prisons are public or private, preserving jobs generally means locking away as many people as possible for as long as possible—contrary to the goal of reducing mass incarceration. California’s prison guards union, for example, was one of the primary sponsors of the proposition that brought about Three Strikes in the 1990s. In the aughts, the union opposed parole reform and vigorously campaigned to defeat politicians it regarded as soft on crime. It has also supported the death... Read more
The publican doesn’t pray, “oh God I thank Thee that I am not judgmental like this Pharisee here” —via Read more
Russian Army singing “Spongebob Squarepants.” In many many different settings! Via TKB. Read more
Johnny Weir skates to “Feeling Good.” Read more
this is great: These things are all sacrifices, and worthy ones. But then my kids got older, and started to reveal that they were actual people, and not blank slates for me to write on, or duplicates of myself. And I found myself face to face with a whole new kind of sacrifice: sacrificing your idea of what kind of mother I was — my idea of what it means to be a mother. This one is hard, hard, hard. ... Read more
in the NYT: …The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities. “Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families,... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In