Reading

Cobble Hill, Brooklyn

I win the lottery and can afford to buy the brownstone where I once lived in a dungeon—er, “garden apartment.” Because the neighborhood’s changed so much, the building costs a fortune, but this time, no one mugs me at gunpoint or breaks into my home like they did when I first lived there. I also buy a fully restored vintage truck, always find a parking spot on my block, and can parallel park perfectly on the first try.

Red Hook, Brooklyn

I discover an investment account I had forgotten about, which has become wildly profitable. I can buy a building and don’t need to worry about the lack of subway service since I don’t need to commute to a job. I often ride my bike to that pier where the views of the Statue of Liberty are unbelievably good, and eat lots of key lime pie made by a longtime neighborhood resident. I become a regular at a bar with a great vibe and plenty of places to sit. The bartender knows me by name and pours me my usual as soon as I walk in. Eventually, he names a cocktail after me. I never get hangovers.

Celebrate Earth Day with Nautilus’ first-ever member-exclusive product.

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Gross domestic product is the most popular economic health indicator, but some organizations and agencies also look to measures that weigh factors like residents’ health and education.

Elizabeth Metzger writes a taut, searing line. Compression isn’t the right word, because these are capacious poems, phrases that hold and open up worlds—of feeling, of experience, of memory mixed with a living moment. Efficient might be a more accurate description—or impeccable. Part of the intensity of the poetry is the stripping away of anything that might moderate or mediate the punch. The result is a kind of a sharp but philosophical rhetoric, lyrical as a knife, breaking from image to statement with breathtaking—and devastating—deftness. Metzger also has a gift for the oddity of simile: “Be honest,” she writes, “as water.” Water is a fitting figure for this poet’s work, both for its persistence and liquid beauty, but also its unremitting force. Water, also, because Metzger is a poet of grieving: Her first book, The Spirit Papers, became, at least in part, a powerful elegy for her friend the late poet Max Ritvo—“life-yoked,” is her description for their shared bond. They were “joined at the Daemon.” I say became because some of the poems predate her encounter with Ritvo, and all of them were written before he died, many as he was slipping away.

Representative Stacey Plaskett, who called Michael Shellenberger and me "direct threats to people who oppose them," is now threatening me with prison - over Mehdi Hasan's uncorrected error

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I’m just a typical British man having a pint in a traditional cockney pub on my way to work in the morning. A London Taxi is having a fight with a red phone box at one end of the bar. Through the window, I can see Big Ben, St Pauls, Nelson’s Column, Stonehenge, the White Cliffs of Dover, and Gordon Ramsey.

The pub was constructed in 1066 by Robin Hood and his merry men and has remained unchanged ever since, save for the introduction of a jar of pickled pigeons on the end of the bar that costs 50p and makes for a delightful light accompaniment to a pint. As was the tradition of the day, one of the merry men was encased alive in a glass compartment in the wall so his merriness would infuse the pub forever.

It is exceptionally crowded today with men in bowler hats eating a hearty breakfast of mince and onions who are too repressed to speak to someone else other than to apologise occasionally for looking like they might be about to speak to someone else.

From AIDS to Covid, the history of regulation shows that we need facts — but also direct action.

The post Politics, Not Science, Will Win the Battle for Mifepristone appeared first on The Intercept.