The Best and Worst of Abortion TV Since the 1970s
ABC Previously, on TV: the abortion-quandary plotline, featuring an uncertain pregnant woman agonizing over her decision. For years, this was how abortion was portrayed—a right-wing fantasy, essentially, present even in shows with broadly liberal politics. But as the medium flowered in the new century, so did abortion TV. Now abortions could be just another part…
Democrats Say They Want to End Mass Incarceration. There’s No Way They’ll Do What’s Needed to Get There.
LightFieldStudios/Getty In his criminal justice proposal, 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has said he would grant clemency to 17,000 federal inmates serving time for nonviolent drug-related offenses. He proposed this idea in June, as part of his plan to end mass incarceration in the United States. Shrinking the enormous US prison population has become a standard…
Has TV Ever Gotten Abortion Right?
Melinda Beck In 1981, eight years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion and just a year before her breakout role as pregnant Stacy in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Jennifer Jason Leigh played another apparently knocked-up high schooler, this time in a CBS after-school special called I Think I’m Having a Baby. Leigh is Laurie,…
GOP Congressman Says DC Statehood Would Make It Harder for His Staff to Park
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty When Congress held a hearing Thursday on the possibility of statehood for Washington, DC, Republicans came prepared with all the usual arguments for why district residents shouldn’t be represented in the US House and Senate. DC statehood might violate the Constitution, they claimed. DC wouldn’t be able to support itself financially, they worried.…
Exclusive: The Climate Crisis Will Hit Hard in Mayor Pete’s Lifetime. Here’s His Plan to Fight It.
Michael Brochstein/Zuma Pete Buttigieg wants Americans to understand that the climate crisis isn’t only about encroaching seas and shrinking glaciers—it affects everything and everyone in between. “Too often, I think our imagination around climate change is confined to the North and the South Pole, but I see it happening right in the middle of America.”“Too…
Trump Blasts People “Dumb Enough to Believe” He’d Act Inappropriately With a Foreign Leader
John Gibbins/ZUMA What did President Donald Trump promise a foreign leader? That’s the question rattling Washington this morning after an explosive report late Wednesday in the Washington Post detailed a whistleblower’s claim that the president made an alarming offer to a yet-unknown foreign leader that prompted a US intelligence official to file a formal complaint with the…