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Created
Tue, 23/04/2024 - 23:00

When COVID struck Rebecca Saltzman’s family, the virus unmasked a life-changing discovery: her husband and two of their kids had genetic heart disease. The kind where people drop dead. As their healthy wife and mother, Saltzman had a new role too—guiding her family through what Susan Sontag called the Kingdom of the Sick. In this column, she’ll explore the anthropological strangeness of this new place, the mysteries of the body, and how facing death distills life into its purest form: funny, terrifying, and sublime.

Created
Tue, 23/04/2024 - 22:00

1. Patience is key.

2. Remember to take breaks for self-care.

3. And don’t forget to go to the bathroom.

4. It’s better to make slow progress with the pieces than no progress on the puzzle at all.

5. Accept the pieces the way they are. A turtle piece can never be a camel puzzle. Stop trying to change them when they show you who they are.

6. Sometimes, you must realize it’s not you; it’s just a crappy puzzle. It’s not worth your time to guess whether it is off-white or eggshell white, and you’re better off on your own.

7. Your self-worth isn’t determined by how many puzzles you solve. It is determined by whether you can get the puzzle to marry you and have puzzle babies.

8. A complicated puzzle piece is not easy to love and is always alone on a Friday night, looking for that one missing edge piece.

9. Don’t get jealous of the puzzle pieces that found where they belonged first.

10. Even if it seems like they are happier, prettier, and having more fun than you.

11. Even if that puzzle piece is your parent’s favorite for finally giving them grand puzzles.

Created
Tue, 23/04/2024 - 09:30
Not bloody likely… Walter Shapiro in TNR runs down all the consequences we’ve seen so far from the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe vs Wade and the political problem it’s caused for Republicans: Even a huckster with Trump’s disdain for the truth cannot spin away the fact that Republicans are on the unpopular side of the abortion debate. Fifty-nine percent of voters in a Fox News poll in late March said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Wall Street Journal poll in mid-March found that a stunning 39 percent of suburban women in swing states consider abortion to be their most important voting issue in 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Republicans. In the spring and early summer of 2022, as the Alito draft became the official opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, the prevailing GOP view of the political aftereffects of the decision was, in effect, “It will all blow over.” No Republican predicted that abortion would still be a powerful weapon for the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.
Created
Tue, 23/04/2024 - 08:00
Axios on the GOP civil war: A growing number of House Republicans are accusing their conservative colleagues of enabling Democratic wins, especially after this weekend’s foreign aid votes. Multiple members believe they could have gotten concessions from Democrats on border policy in exchange for Ukraine funding, only to be blown up by backlash from conservatives.GOP leadership brought up border security provisions alongside their foreign aid package — but the package was blocked by Republicans from reaching the House floor under normal rules. It ultimately failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to pass the House under suspension of the rules.  “If you were a true conservative, you would actually advance border security, but what they want to do is they want to blow up border security,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) told Axios. “[T]he members who scream the loudest about border security were actively and knowingly preventing us from getting it done,” another member said. “They’re making us the most bipartisan Congress ever,” a third member told Axios.
Created
Tue, 23/04/2024 - 06:30
Following up on my earlier post today, I see that Philip Bump has some nice charts to illustrate the point that Biden has an advantage among likely voters: On Sunday, the network published the results of a national poll that asked respondents, among other things, to evaluate how interested they were in the election on a scale from 1 to 10. Fewer than 2 in 3 selected 9 or 10 — lower than any similar measurement by NBC’s pollsters this late in a presidential election year since at least 2008. Among Republicans, 70 percent indicated they were very interested in the election. Among Democrats, only 65 percent. Among independents? Fewer than half. This isn’t terribly surprising. It is consistently the case that independents — generally meaning independents who tend to vote for one party or the other and independents who don’t — are less politically engaged and less likely to vote. Comparisons of national polling conducted by the Pew Research Center with Census Bureau estimates of the electorate show how much of the nonvoter pool in each recent election has been made up of independents.