"We always said we would only return to Girls if there was a specific story we were burning to tell."

"I’ve missed these characters, but for a long time I couldn’t quite picture them in the present day. Then, right around my 40th birthday, they started talking to me in the shower.”

Said Lena Dunham, quoted in "Girls is coming back — bring on Hannah, the uber-competitive Brooklyn mum/Lena Dunham has announced a five-episode coda for her hit show, a decade after it ended. The absence of Adam Driver’s character aside, it may just work" (London Times).

 

ADDED: At the London Times, I clicked on a link to "We love Lena Dunham and Tracey Emin — but, once, we loved to hate them/The violent derision that first greeted the American writer and the YBA from Margate shows us that they got it right." That referred to "Tracey Emin’s big, flashy retrospective at Tate Modern," and I'm telling you this because it took me to one of the most absurd headlines I've ever seen:

"For a long time, the chief justice’s life here was a story of potluck dinners and easy friendships, according to a summer of interviews with more than two dozen residents."

"Neighbors reveled in his position but kept exchanges with him about it brief or light. At a long-ago annual summer party, he used to participate in touch football, then call dinner to order by proclaiming: 'Oyez, oyez, oyez, the lobsters are ready.' But in recent years...."

I'm reading "John Roberts and His Island/After decades of potlucks and paddle-boarding on Maine’s midcoast, rising anger and protests have left the Supreme Court’s chief justice more isolated than ever" (NYT).

"Neighbors have taken to the water to protest him. Calling themselves 'kayak-tivists,' they form flotillas facing his island home, holding waterproof signs conveying their disappointment. A local newspaper columnist recommended that people in town give him the finger.... 'Maine is not here as your happy place, your wind-down from all of your hard work destroying my civil liberties and democracy,' wrote Becca Shaw Glaser in her column...."

"The case drew national attention when a surrogate from Alaska refused to have an abortion after the fetus she was carrying was diagnosed with a serious heart problem."

"She eventually traveled to Texas and gave birth to the child over the initial objections of the parents, a couple from California.... On Tuesday, Justice Kagan, who oversees emergency filings from California, denied the surrogate’s request to block the lower-court ruling in the couple’s favor. She acted on her own without referring the matter to her Supreme Court colleagues. The justice’s order did not include an explanation, as is often the case when the court responds to such filings...."

From "Supreme Court Order Gives Parents Custody of Baby in Surrogacy Fight/A surrogate refused to have an abortion after the fetus was diagnosed with a serious heart problem. She asked the justices to block a court order giving custody to the biological parents" (NYT gift link).

Here's the emergency filing. The proceedings below are all in state courts, and much of the argument is about jurisdiction, but that's interwoven with the merits of the case — who gets the baby:

"My office will use every tool available to protect innocent lives."

Said the Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton (who is running hard for a U.S. Senate seat), quoted in "A Fight Over Abortion and Surrogacy Ends With a Baby Born in Texas/The baby, who was born Wednesday with a severe heart defect, drew the attention of anti-abortion activists and the Texas attorney general after the intended parents wanted the surrogate mother to have an abortion" (NYT gift link).

[The surrogate, McKenna] West, who did not respond to an interview request for this story, said in an interview this month with the former Fox News and current YouTube host Megyn Kelly that she did not support abortion and felt “trapped” by the surrogacy contract, which permitted the intended parents to end the pregnancy via abortion.... 

[Lincoln] Wilson, the lawyer for Ms. West, said that the legal case was not over and that Ms. West would continue to fight for custody of the boy, who must undergo weeks of surgeries “before he’s really in the clear.”

Here's that Megyn Kelly presentation: 

"Maybe such freaks should come to power — those who aren’t afraid of anything, who just do things — at least there are visible changes."

Said Svetlana Popova-Znamenskaya, who "stayed in Vologda to establish an architecture practice where she restores wooden houses and builds furniture" and has "a showroom with a specialty coffee shop opposite the local Kremlin and the new monument to Ivan the Terrible."

Quoted in "He Shut Liquor Stores and Banned Abortion, All for the Glory of Russia/A firebrand governor aims to transform his region into a laboratory for the Kremlin’s reactionary ideals" (NYT)(gift like).

"He" = Georgy Y. Filimonov, "the governor of the northern region of Vologda," who has "vigorously embraced the sort of 'traditional Russian values' espoused by the Kremlin, asserting Vologda as an undistilled bastion of 'Russianness.'"

And here's a quote from Misha Priyemyshev, "a designer who worked on branding for the city before Mr. Filimonov’s arrival": "Everything is very slow here, like in a true swamp. That swamp has a lot of power — the more you move in it, the more it sucks you in."

"Applicants are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise."

"They cannot, in any legally relevant sense, be irreparably harmed by a court order that makes it more difficult for them to commit crimes."

Writes Justice Thomas, dissenting from the Supreme Court's grant of a stay in Danco Laboratories v. Louisiana, pending its disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari. The stay permits Danco to continue to ship its abortion drug mifepristone, undercutting Louisiana's law criminalizing abortion.

There's also an Alito dissent. Excerpt: "What is at stake is the perpetration of a scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U. S. 215 (2022), which restored the right of each State to decide how to regulate abortions within its borders. Some States responded to Dobbs by making it even easier to obtain an abortion than it was before, and that is their prerogative.... [M]ifepristone shipped to Louisiana... causes nearly 1,000 abortions per month...."

"This was a fecund period of first-person writing by women that had a transgressive and self-revealing quality, which also had the consequence of creating a kind of adrenalized form of commentary."

"Blogging was personal, but also a job, often a grind. It created cycles of argument that were rapid, intense and often punishing for the people at the center — both the subjects and the writers. As post quotas were filled, a slippage occurred between the artist and her public, the blogger and her commenters, the internet-famous and the real stars. 'Girls' permeated this media ecosystem...."

Writes Amanda Hess, in "We Need Lena Dunham Now More Than Ever/The era of 'Girls' is long gone. So why are we still so fascinated by its creator?" (NYT).

"An inveterate poster, [Lena] Dunham lived online and seemed determined to step on the rake of commentary as her influence scaled.... [Dunham said she] wished she could have had the experience of aborting a pregnancy.... She explained that her comment was made under the guise of 'a "delusional girl" persona I sometimes inhabit'.... Her name, and her auto-fictional project, had wandered beyond their creative boundaries, and the internecine debates of blogs had ballooned into a national concern. When Clinton lost the election, some blamed Dunham."

"I swear to God if I were a young woman today I would choose celibacy over having the government in charge of my body. Stripping woman of the right to bodily autonomy is in itself a form of rape."

So writes one commenter at the Washington Post article "Woman charged with murder after allegedly taking abortion pills, going to hospital/The 31-year-old Georgia woman went to the emergency room with severe pain after allegedly taking abortion pills at home, according to police and court records."

We're told "Alexia Moore delivered a 22- to 24-week-old fetus 'with cardiac activity' in December, according to an arrest warrant, which cited Moore’s medical records. The newborn, a girl, died within an hour."

Delivered a fetus? The child was born alive, then died. I think they mean that they detected cardiac activity while it was in utero, so they delivered what was, on delivery, a baby.

"By protecting the lives of preborn children with the same laws that protect people who are born, we are simply loving our neighbors in the womb as ourselves."

Said Southern Baptist Convention President Clint Pressley, quoted in "TN bill would allow death penalty for women who have an abortion/Tennessee has some of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. The Human Life Protection Act prohibits all abortions from fertilization, without exceptions for rape or incest" (The Tennesseean).

Two Tennessee Republicans are seeking to impose the death penalty on women who have abortions, requiring the same penalties for women “involved in the homicide of her own unborn child” as defendants charged with homicide.... The bill specifically removes legal protections for pregnant women currently in statute, and classifies harm done to an unborn child as equal to assault on a person "born alive."

It would not apply to “a spontaneous miscarriage,” or to “unintentional death of an unborn child” after “undertaking life-saving procedures” to save the life of the mother and “to save the life of the unborn child.” No other exceptions are specified in the amendment text....

Imagine an oral argument in our current Supreme Court on the question whether the death penalty for abortion is cruel and unusual punishment. I suspect you'll want to say it will never come to that. 

"China today is a country where many young people have no siblings. Because the one-child policy lasted so long, their parents also have no siblings..."

"... so they have no aunts, uncles, or cousins, either. That is complicating China’s war-planning efforts because the massive casualties required to invade Taiwan would mean many families lose their only child, who they’re counting on to take care of them in old age. Decades of sex-selective abortions have resulted in severe gender imbalances. Because there are tens of millions more men than women, dating or marriage — let alone procreation — is impossible for many. Intense pressure on the children who are born, plus child-raising costs that are among the highest in the world when adjusted for income, make the prospect of family life unattractive, even as loneliness eternally grates on the soul...."

From "China embraced population control. The damage may be irreversible. Despite the communist government’s efforts, women won’t have more children" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

1. Taiwan has an even lower birth rate than China.

2. "loneliness eternally grates on the soul" — That was not a phrase I expected from the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

3. I've seen so much social media touting the joy of a single life for women. There's a viral TikTok audio that begins with an ominous sounding warning of women about what will happen if they don't marry and continuing with a list of good things like having a clean, well-decorated house, peace and quiet, and the company of music, books, friends, and pets. And here are the WaPo editors anguishing over the solitude of the Chinese. Hmm.

4. I'm also surprised WaPo editors didn't try harder to align their language with the belief in the right to have abortions. These 2 sentences (not quoted above) jumped out at me: "Forced abortions and sterilizations, combined with fines and propaganda, snuffed out many millions of lives. Unborn girls were particularly victimized because of sex-selective abortions." 

"Still, the justices’ consideration of Ms. Davis’s petition had set off alarms among gay Americans, who were already reeling from the Trump administration’s targeting of programs and funding that benefit L.G.B.T.Q. individuals."

"Gay Americans and their allies had been on alert since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority eliminated the nationwide right to abortion after 50 years, showing a willingness to undo longstanding legal precedent. In that decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to urge reconsideration of the Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, which recognized gay marriage nationwide."

From "Supreme Court Denies Request to Revisit Same-Sex Marriage Decision/Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses, had asked the court to reconsider its landmark 2015 opinion" (NYT).

I'm glad to see this precedent left alone. There's so much reliance on it.

"In April 1965, the magazine published his extraordinary cover image of an 18-week-old fetus, luminous in its amniotic sac..."

"... seemingly floating through space, along with an extensive photo essay. Nilsson had worked closely with a Stockholm hospital, where he had a makeshift studio set up. He’d get a call when a woman had had a miscarriage or came in for an abortion, which had been legally permissible in Sweden since 1938 if the woman’s life was in danger. The photographer would then rush over with his Hasselblad camera. Only one image in the photo essay was of a live fetus in utero. All the others, including the groundbreaking cover, were of fetuses that had been surgically removed. In the 1980s, after learning that his pictures were being used at anti-abortion demonstrations, Nilsson refused to allow them to be republished...."

From "The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time/Four editors, a creative director and a visual artist met to debate and discuss the best of print media — and its enduring legacy" (NYT)(free-access link, so you can see all 25 covers and the story behind each of them).

I vividly remember that Life Magazine cover, "Drama of Life Before Birth," April 30, 1965. If I remember correctly — from 60 years ago when I was 14 — the article had nothing to do with abortion and readers were shielded from the notion that these unborn children were dead. We were invited to feast our eyes on the miracle of life, and we had never seen pictures like this before.

That Life cover ranks 6th on the list, well above the cover I would have put first, Saul Steinberg's "View of the World From 9th Avenue," which is only #14.

"Are you for real?"

I asked at the end of a post about an essay about social media, vacations, and self-knowledge, but it's the same question I want to ask about these videos Meade has been texting me this morning — this and this.

I texted back: "Is this real?" "Is this AI?"

I took my suspicious mind to Grok: "How can I detect AI video? I'm seeing things like [the above-linked videos]. I believe it is AI. It looks off, especially in the mouth. The person doesn't have a name and the person seems to be confidently spewing talking points. The person has attributes that seem chosen to boost credibility (often a nice-looking person of color saying something conservative)."

I know. If I hate AI, why am I using AI? Maybe AI is better at detecting AI than I am. A fight-fire-with-fire concept. It's different, at least. A second opinion.

Here's Grok's answer. It's not conclusive, but for both videos, it finds evidence that these are AI. I won't copy all that Grok had to offer. I'll just say watch the mouth. The lip shapes don't fully match the phonemes in the audio. And is the flow of language human? Catch yourself. You might like it because you think the person is articulate, but it's not human eloquence. Don't become the person who likes what is artificial.

I'm sounding the alarm. Please, we need to preserve our capacity to detect what is fake. But in the end, we are going to lose. I think we already know that, and I fear that many of us are already thinking that we prefer the fake, even if we can tell, maybe even especially when we can tell. 

"A Texas man whose girlfriend used abortion pills to end her pregnancy is suing a California doctor who allegedly mailed her the medication..."

"... in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind wrongful-death lawsuit — and a fresh test of federal and state abortion laws. The complaint, filed in a Texas federal court, accuses the doctor of violating state law that prohibits performing or facilitating an abortion, including by distributing pills. But California, where the physician is based, has a 'shield' law explicitly protecting providers who mail abortion pills, including to states where the procedure is banned. The case appears to be the first time an interstate wrongful-death claim over an abortion has been filed in federal court. It is also the latest legal challenge against a provider as antiabortion activists attempt to curb the flow of abortion pills, which are being mailed into all 50 states under shield laws passed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade...."

From "Man sues over girlfriend’s abortion in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit/he first-of-its-kind wrongful-death lawsuit tests the laws blue states passed to protect abortion access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade" (WaPo).

"The Wisconsin Supreme Court invalidated a state abortion ban that was enacted in 1849 and had been dormant for five decades...."

"The court ruled 4-3 to strike down the ban, and while the justices are officially nonpartisan, the decision split them along ideological lines. A new justice who had campaigned on her support for abortion rights, Janet Protasiewicz, joined the majority....Writing for the majority in the case, known as Kaul v. Urmanski, Justice Rebecca Dallet [wrote]... 'Comprehensive legislation enacted over the last 50 years regulating in detail the "who, what, where, when, and how" of abortion so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion'.... The opinion noted that the court had historically set a high bar for such 'implied repeal.' But in this case, the majority of the justices found that the Legislature had met that bar by entirely revising state law on abortion.... In a separate order Wednesday, the court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin that had asked the court to find that the right to equal protection in the state Constitution protects a right to receive an abortion and protects medical professionals who provide one. The court said its ruling in Kaul v. Urmanski effectively settled the issue...."

The NYT reports.

That is, the decision is based on statutory interpretation and not on a state constitutional right. It's up to the legislature to make new law restricting (or permitting) abortion. The 1849 law is gone, but some or all of it could be reenacted. If that were to happen, question about the state constitutional right would need to be answered.

"Supreme Court allows states to cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood."

WaPo reports.  Free-access link.

At issue for the justices was whether a provision of the federal Medicaid Act allows individual Medicaid patients to sue to obtain care from their provider of choice.... Several justices during oral argument seemed eager to provide clarity to help lower courts determine when a statute simply confers a benefit to an individual and when it goes further, empowering those individuals to sue to enforce that benefit or right. The Supreme Court has typically set a high bar for allowing lawsuits against the government, seeking to shield public officials from liability....

"The most extreme end of the promortalism movement is 'Efilism,'which takes its name from 'life' spelt backward..."

"... and argues that all sentient life should be extinguished to prevent suffering. Gary Mosher... one of its most prominent proponents... endorses violence towards women, even claiming he will murder any woman he gets pregnant who refuses an abortion. 'The end goal is for the truth [Efilism] to win, and once it does, we can finally begin the process of sterilising this planet of the disease of life,' he wrote in an online manifesto. But after the IVF clinic in Palm Springs was bombed, he distanced himself from the violence. 'The fact is that there’s people in the world who are lonely, and some that are crazy, and this, that and the other thing,' he said on [YouTube]. 'They have some reason to be despondent, and they have low investment in their existence, and those are dangerous people.'... [I]t is not hard to find members recommending various methods for killing oneself, or using the term 'CTB' — or catch the bus — for suicide...."

From "Inside the ‘strangest terrorist movement the US has ever seen’/Guy Bartkus tried to destroy an IVF clinic to save the embryos the pain of existence. Alarmingly for national security, his ‘promortalist’ philosophy does not die with him" (London Times).

"Perhaps the biggest shot in the arm for the fetal-personhood movement came in the form of an executive order ostensibly unrelated to abortion..."

"... one with an especially unwieldy and Orwellian name: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. The order proclaims, with unwarranted confidence, that '"Female" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. "Male" means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.'... At this year’s March for Life rally... Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House... brought up Trump’s executive order early in his speech: 'I don’t know if you saw his executive order on gender, but it defines life as beginning at conception, rather than birth.' Johnson put invisible air quotes around 'gender,' but he came down hard on the word 'conception,' jabbing one finger in the air as he said it. The crowd cheered. Ideas have consequences."

Writes Margaret Talbot, in "Does a Fetus Have Constitutional Rights? After Dobbs, fetal personhood has become the anti-abortion movement’s new objective" (The New Yorker).

Why were the anti-Trump protests yesterday called "Hands Off"?

That was my first question, and it led to a series of questions:

• Generally, I would think, it is the role of the President to take charge, to handle all problems, and to get things done. A "hands-on" President sounds like an effective, active President, so it sounds as though it is an objection to the elected President being President. That reads as anti-democratic to me.

• If these protesters were libertarian, the slogan "hands off" would make more sense. These would be people wanting government to do as little as possible. But even then, much of what Trump is doing is cutting back government, making it smaller, more like the libertarian ideas. The tariffs are an exception to that, but you get my point. His hands are ON many government programs for the purpose of ending them or cutting them back. The protesters want to preserve big government.

• I think the tariffs are a means to an end of eliminating the tariffs against us. If that's what's really going on then the tariffs are not an exception and could be characterized as getting government out of free trade.

• Trump has been making big moves that have won cooperation from his antagonists. I'm thinking of the universities and law firms that backed down when confronted with financial loss.

• He has good reason to think that huge moves are needed or people will just resist and drag it out and wait it out. He needs shock and awe. The response "hands off" seems weak. Who will "hands off" convince? How did that slogan emerge?

All of that is for the annals of Things I Asked Grok. If you want to see how Grok answered, here's the link. Those are all prompts, by the way, so don't assume I believe all those assertions. It's a bit like teaching law school: You frame ideas to engage your interlocutor. You don't profess belief. You open things up for a better look.

One thing I saw is that the "Hands Off" slogan came from the abortion-rights discourse. But Hands Off My Body is a libertarian concept. 

Pasting Susan Crawford posters on public property in Madison.

The fine print says "VOTE BY 04.O1/FOR SUSAN CRAWFORD."

Crawford is one of the candidates in the much-watched Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

I photographed the posters this morning, but yesterday evening, I saw the man pasting them up. I couldn't believe that he had the nerve, in daylight hours, to deface public property. How does it help your candidate to conspicuously trash the neighborhood of the people you hope to influence? Are you picturing desperate, anarchic citizens who don't care about anything but abortion?

If I were Susan Crawford, I would be distressed to have my name on something like this. I have no idea if she or her campaign has anything to do with it. The ultra-fine print might answer that question, but it's not legible in my photographs and most definitely not legible to those of driving through the underpass.

A pedestrian could stop and read the ultra-fine print. Of course, pedestrians walking through an underpass, especially if female, can feel physically vulnerable, and pasted-up posters can magnify fear. Vandalism speaks of chaos and a breakdown of vigilance. Maybe that's the idea. The woman worries about the problem of rape, and the posters offer the second-rate solution: abortion.

UPDATE: Here's the ultra-fine print: