ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES

1.  In Poland the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party (PiS) proposed an almost complete abortion ban , with the only exception being t...

The lonely plight of the educated woman is a very old trope in opinion writing about men and women and heterosexual marriage, and I'm ...

What a scrumptious day for news about the US presidential campaign of 2016 for someone who holds the magnifying glass to the events in ord...

This picture is a fun gender-reversal: Very few other male politicians could get away with what Trump has been allowed to get away...

1.  This is the Hillary shimmy song.   Mind you, that shimmying could always be an early sign of leprosy or hoof-and-mouth disease or s...

I love Donald Trump's presidential language: The United States is a mess, the Middle East is a mess, NATO is a mess, and the America...

Paul Krugman writes about the false equivalence phenomenon in how the media has handled the two presidential candidates: If Donald Trum...

My apologies for the quiet on this here blog.  Life and its troubles intervened. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor ( who therefore should k...

This year was the 120th anniversary of the birth of Maiju Gebhard .  I bet you don't know who she was.  She was the Finnish inventor ...

A new Times-CBS poll suggests that the presidential race is tightening, though it's worth remembering that the questions were asked wh...

1.  Digby writes about one of the undecided voters profiled in a GQ story .   That particular voter is not given a name in the story, onl...

I'm back in the US.  But not completely up-to-date on the presidential elections or  the most incredible, the most frightening,  and th...

On Female Modesty, the Burkini and Its Ban in France The burkini is a form of religious modesty swimwear, intended for those  who believ...

You may have read this story about a group of young men deciding to knock over a rock formation.  They were caught on video. There is a ...

Originally from here . A  New York Times article looks at the  findings of several recent studies on this puzzle: A new study fro...

I came across this link in my archives.  The site is well worth visiting, for a reality correction.  Our views of what female breasts ar...

That title is much more ambitious than what this post can offer, which is a minimal introduction to  certain pitfalls in interpreting po...

Originally from here . Prologue This post has no mothers, but it has multiple fathers, the wounded young men of arts and literature who...

From here , and just because I think it's funny.  (Also this .) David Brooks has written an ode to the hard-boiled Sam Spade charac...