When my mother was an astronaut (oh, man, this is so good.)
US abortion doctors speak:
Recruited as part of the first batch of legal abortion counsellors in Texas, Glenna joined Curtis at his first clinic, the Fairmount Center in Dallas, in 1974. Since then, she says, things have changed for the worse. “Women express more shame. I can’t think of a time when it was worse than it is now. I used to ask women how they first heard the word abortion, how they learned about it. There were always very personal stories about someone they knew, or found out had had one. Now, the first time they saw it was on some ugly billboard. It has been legal throughout their lifespan, not to mention their reproductive lifespan. But it has been completely politicised. ”
Curtis, 76, agrees: “Patients never came in talking about all this shame. They felt it was an OK thing to do, if they could just find somebody to do it for them.”
Buzzfeed charts the sequence of events that slowlyyyyyyyy led to Bill Cosby’s downfall (I mean, he’s rich, he has plenty of fans, he’s not going to go to jail, people are just angry at him, let’s be clear about that.) And the Washington Post does a good job putting it all together.
Marion Barry has died. I actually really recommend social media to get a sense for how someone who’s been largely seen in pop culture as a punchline is being missed by so many.
I have been obsessed with this movie for YEARS.
On being the only brown person at a Dallas wedding, and also THIS NONSENSE (it gets better):
During our senior year, Texas released its own version of the Common Application for colleges. Unlike the one I used to apply to out-of-state schools, Texas’s version had three essay choices. One of these, Essay B, asked applicants to imagine living a roommate who was different from them in every way possible, and describe how they’d react. Most of my friends chose this essay option — and most of them wrote about a hypothetical roommate with my features, my name. Ultimately, these essays intoned, they’d realized we were all human; hypothetical Mariya’s winning personality showed them how to embrace her differences. For weeks I struggled to explain to myself why exactly this had hurt so much. All that effort I’d put into being just like them, and they’d still seen me as different — not just different, but the apotheosis of differentness, the first person they pictured when asked to imagine someone who was not like them.
Jenna’s essay had delivered the most devastating blow. In it, she wrote how transformative it was to learn that my DNA was only 0.2 percent different from hers, the same amount that varied between two white people. I couldn’t understand why science had to tell her we were the same. We enjoyed the same music, had the same friends, and could complete each other’s sentences: a random factoid in a textbook shouldn’t have been the detail that convinced her.
On the confusing state of our statute of limitations laws for rape:
On January 23, 2014, Bart Bareither walked into the Marion County Sheriff’s Department in Indianapolis. The 39-year-old computer engineer confessed to having raped a nursing student nine years earlier, while he was a teaching assistant at Indiana University. “He had a sincere demeanor. His head was bowed. It was clearly eating at him; he was apologizing,” recalls university detective Kimberly Minor, who was brought in to take his statement. Minor then contacted Jenny Wendt, who had been 26 at the time of the assault. She had not originally reported the crime because she thought it would be difficult to prove since she’d been on dates with Bareither. But even now, she soon learned, Bareither would not face any charges.
Indiana law classifies sexual assaults into two categories: Class A felony rape, in which an assailant causes serious bodily injury, uses deadly force, or drugs the victim; and Class B felony rape, which includes other types of sexual assault. There is no statute of limitations for Class A offenses, so charges may be filed anytime after a crime is committed. The statute of limitations for Class B offenses—like what happened to Wendt—is five years. Minor says she and the Marion County prosecutor searched for a way to bring Bareither to trial, but it was soon clear that the opportunity had passed. “I think he knew about the statute,” Minor says. (Bareither did not respond to emails and calls from Mother Jones.)
Cats. Welcoming. Soldiers. Home.
i am laughing too hard right now to function, thank God, because there’s been a lot of real bullshit in this roundup today, here’s Linda Rondstadt CRUSHINGGGGG “Desperado” for you:
