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Phil Carter is a longtime contributor to Slate and a personal friend to many of us at the magazine. He also served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, dealing chiefly with issues relating to the closure of Guantanamo Bay. It was reported last night that he has left that position for ''personal ...

America is caught up in a frenzy of Heene-Hatred. So angry are we at the perpetrator of last week’s balloon-boy hoax, we pour out our wrath on him, his wife, cable news, reality shows, and every aspect of our celebrity-worshipping culture that rewards parents for exploiting their kids. We pledge to clean up the reality-show kid frenzy. To ...

Emily, Justice Scalia made a lot of hay in yesterday’s campaign finance case out of the fact that when it came to regulating campaign contributions by corporations, “Congress has a self-interest,'' and would have necessarily crafted rules to favor incumbents. I was trying to figure out why that felt so very déjà-vu-ish to me until a reader ...

Hanna, I too have been fascinated by the dustup over recent news reports of Virginia’s gubernatorial hopeful, Bob McDonnell, but I am even more fascinated that it surprises us ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Here’s one other take on Katie Roiphe’s addiction to her newborn: In addition to the mistake of assuming that all or most “feminists” think X, I think Roiphe has fallen prey to the error of conflating what happens when a woman stops working with the magical experience of having a baby. Which is just to say that the professional experience she’s ...

I am wondering what you all thought of the miscarriage scene in Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ new film about pregnant slackers seeking a home. As Dana’s already pointed out, it’s not a perfect movie. Too many cartoon characters bouncing around cartoonishly (although Allison Janey, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Josh Hamilton are such brilliantly wrought ...

Hanna and Meghan, I guess that’s your answer to your debate about the pitfalls of the boring old “companionate marriage.” To hear Mark Sanford tell it, one day you’re home digging holes in the yard... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Hanna, I read the Sandra Tsing Loh piece not as a condemnation of modern marriage, and not even as a parable about the impossibility of modern motherhood, but as a cautionary tale about building your life around what Tsing Loh describes as a life spent “taking with me ... to my bed, a glass of merlot and a good book.” Because the only villains ...

Jessica, the most striking thing to me about Amanda’s great post on the widely-envied Obama marriage was that I read it immediately before reading Naomi Wolf’s quirky piece in Harper's Bazaar that Willa mentions about women who ostensibly covet Angelina Jolie’s entire life. I confess that while I have glanced longingly at the Obama’s marriage—the ...

Anyone notice that the New York Times story by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak about Sotomayor raising ''questions about her judicial temperament and willingness to listen'' was subject to a headline makeover this morning? (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)