The Sorensen Monologues

The Obstetrician Inquisition

Lost in the impeachment shuffle of recent weeks are some eyebrow-raising stories of extremism at the state level. Voter purges in Wisconsin and Georgia should be headline news everywhere. Then there’s the insane Ohio bill banning all abortion outright, and threatening doctors with charges of “abortion murder” if they do not somehow magically re-implant an ectopic pregnancy. (Rewire has a deeper dive into the “science fiction” behind this idea from earlier this year.)

Once upon a time, we could laugh this sort of thing off, assured that it would never pass muster in the courts. But the judiciary is now stacked with Trump appointees, many of them far-right activists like the anti-choice Sarah Pitlyk, who has beefs with surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (and who is considered “not qualified” by the American Bar Association).

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The Collapse of Retro Trends

I needed a break from politics this week. I’ve been toying with this idea for a while — that the 2010s will be difficult to define aesthetically, since they’ve pretty much been a postmodern hodgepodge of previous decades. I’ve been particularly struck by the resurgence of large-ish, round wire-rimmed glasses that resemble my very first pair that I wore in the ’90s. Between this and the tackier excesses of the mid-to-late ’80s, it seems like some of the very worst style statements are now ironically in vogue. And yet, I am a fan of the high fade and Sabbathy stoner metal. And as I listened to some Steely Dan to get in the spirit of the yacht rock panel, I found myself wishing I was sipping champagne on a sailboat in Southern California in the late ’70s, forty years removed from this ghastly political moment. (You know things are bad when the ’70s malaise looks like paradise!)

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