Politics, once a kind of sport for we amateur observers, is just no fun anymore. We’re in the third year of a deadly pandemic, on the cusp of a recession, and we’ve lived through one of the strangest, least civil, most divisive election cycles in memory, culminating in the horrific disruption at the Capitol. We’ve … Continue reading Looking Forward, Watching Out

The Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, handed down yesterday, was as glumly predictable as the Court’s reversal today of Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. Each is a product of the Trump-appointed, Federalist Society-picked majority that applies, with a damn-the-consequences determination, an ideologically conservative … Continue reading The Activist “Originalism” of the Supreme Court

Words fail.  That's the first thing to acknowledge. There is simply no way to grasp in mere words the sheer moral outrage of what happened in Robb Elementary yesterday, much less to try to find in words some way to redeem it. Action is all that can redeem it, and that is precisely what we … Continue reading A Litany for Uvalde

The recent leak of the draft Supreme Court majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health has provided another instant x-ray of the deep fractures in our body politic. The opinion’s flat reversal of Roe v. Wade has been derided on the left as the cavalier usurpation of what had been, for fifty years, a … Continue reading The Patchwork Republic: Covid, Roe, and the Failure of Federalism

The recent release of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade seems an appropriate time to re-post the following essay, originally written in June, 2019. It’s also a time to remember how we got here, and the far-reaching consequences of the ruthless political partisanship that has characterized our recent past. Imagine if you … Continue reading The Last Days of Roe v. Wade – A Coda

The Supreme Court is one of the most thoroughly examined institutions in American life, and rightly so. Supreme Court Justices are appointed, not elected, and yet the Court can undo laws passed by any elected legislature in the land, and it often makes law that has more profound and lasting impact, for good or ill, … Continue reading Supreme Court Clerks and the Making of American Law

Do I, or do I not, have Covid? This is a question that occupies millions of us every day with varying degrees of urgency. The answer may determine whether we go to work, whether our children go to school, whether we get to see our friends or relatives for dinner this weekend or for a … Continue reading The Quantum Physics of Covid Testing

The other day I couldn’t remember the word “kayak.” I was making a list of things to do, and one of them was to pull our kayak out of the basement in case the grandkids wanted to take it out on the Gulf when they visited next week. And my pen hovered over the page … Continue reading The Word for the Thing in the Basement

We live in a world increasingly divided by diametrically opposing accounts of civic realities, paired narratives that don’t just conflict, but wholly contradict each other, each claiming credibility and often achieving it within its target faction. The examples are legion, but take just three: the “Trump Won” narrative versus the narrative of the “Big Lie”; … Continue reading The Lost Language of a Shared Reality

What we used to call shame is being shamed out of existence. We are not supposed to feel it, and we are certainly not supposed to inflict it. But what else do we lose when we dispense with a sense of shame? To define the word is to understand why the current culture reviles it. … Continue reading The Shame of It All