Erosions of Roe v. Wade can all be tracked back to the idea of “undue burden,” introduced in 1992 when the Court ruled on Planned Parenthood v. Casey, argues Meaghan Winter. “Many headlines have declared that if the court upholds Texas’ restrictions in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, it will presage the end of Roe,” writes Winter. “But the question of whether Roe will be overturned hasn’t been the salient one for 24 years—not since Casey threw out Roe’s clear-cut trimester framework and adopted the cloudy and subjective concept of ‘undue burden.’ ”
Soon, writes Daniel Engber, the labeling of foods according to whether they’re made with genetically modified ingredients will be widespread. Though “study after study shows that GM foods are safe,” Engber writes, it’s not worth trying to argue the question on a scientific basis. The recent push for labeling “builds from intuitions rather than observations, from apprehensions rather than data, and from theology rather than epidemiology.”
In the wake of the suicide bombing on Sunday in a park in Lahore, Pakistan, which targeted Christians and killed at least 69 people, Isaac Chotiner called Umair Javed, a columnist for the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, to ask about treatment of minorities in the country.
“The police have had some success in limiting sporadic incidents of violence or limiting some elements of hate speech, especially around the sectarian divide,” Javed told Chotiner. “By and large, I think, because the problem is so deeply embedded within the political and social processes in Pakistan, it becomes very difficult for a state that has very limited capacity in the first place to actually police what we would call cultural dominance or social discrimination that happens at more of an everyday level.”
How should libraries handle borrowers who take out books, CDs, and DVDs and never return them? This question has plagued public libraries for a century and change, writes Helaine Olen.
Over the years, libraries have fined patrons for not bringing back books and offered no-questions-asked return periods. They’ve published the names of book scofflaws in local newspapers. They’ve paid personal calls on people who hold onto books past their due dates, and even sicced the police on particularly recalcitrant readers. And they still don’t really know how to get their books back.
For fun: The New Republic sent poet Patricia Lockwood to a Trump rally, and the resulting piece is both funny and bizarrely moving.
A surface with no handle, a wall without a door,
Rebecca
