Wheel of Fortune?

Liverpool, Spring 2010

Quote of the Day

”The text box of Twitter still prompts every user with “What’s happening?” What’s happening, invariably, is that they are looking at Twitter. This simple fact accounts for perhaps 99 percent of the acrimony on there, which is rarely about events in the outside world and frequently about the content of other tweets.”

• Willy Staley in the New York Times

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Three numbers from Jimmy Yancey’s final recording session | Mournful Blues | How Long Blues | 35th and Dearborn

Link

Recorded just eight weeks before his death from diabetes on July 18 1951.

Long Read of the Day

 Love is Space: Notes on Marriage and Creativity

Lovely essay by Andrea Bajani on Writing, Solitude, and Forgiveness

On the US Supreme Court leak

From Heather Cox Richardson…

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan’s team made a conscious effort to bring evangelicals and social conservatives into the voting base of the Republican Party. The Republicans’ tax cuts and deregulation had not created the prosperity party leaders had promised, and they were keenly aware that their policies might well not survive the upcoming 1986 midterm elections. To find new voters, they turned to religious groups that had previously shunned politics.

“Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,” political operative Grover Norquist explained, “but these groups can provide the votes.” To keep that base riled up, the Republican Party swung behind efforts to take away women’s constitutional right to abortion, which the Supreme Court had recognized by a vote of 7–2 in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and then reaffirmed in 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Although even as recently as last week, only about 28% of Americans wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, Republicans continued to promise their base that they would see that decision destroyed. Indeed, the recognition that evangelical voters would turn out to win a Supreme Court seat might have been one of the reasons then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings for then-president Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland. Leaving that seat empty was a tangible prize to turn those voters out behind Donald Trump, whose personal history of divorces and sexual assault was not necessarily attractive to evangelicals, in 2016…

Yep.

We’re the Supreme Court, and We Should Have Used Protection

Lovely spoof by Joanna Castle Miller on the draft judgment that somehow ‘leaked’ out.

We wanted to address the controversy about our recently leaked majority opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade.

A lot of folks have been taking to social media and talk shows to discuss how this leak will cause dissent in the court, inspire riots in the public square, and threaten the future of our institution.

In their own unique and unforgettable way, each storyteller examines our crisis of access to care in ways that are at turns haunting, heartbreaking, and outright funny.

Well, that may be so, but if we didn’t want a decision to come into the world at this moment, we should have abstained from writing it in the first place.

Abstinence is the only true way to stop a majority opinion from being leaked to the press. But did we let that stop us? No, we gave in to our base desires and wrote as if there would be no consequences…

Do read on.

My commonplace booklet

• Astra Taylor (Whom God Preserve) has invented a new term: technocratutopian It describes a lot of the nonsense we seen in neoliberal democracies. Nice Twitter thread here.

• Molly White’s Blockchain collection She is the best critic of the crypto craziness writing today. And she has now corralled her best essays on it into one place.

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