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Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of The Codpiece in Art, by the English critic Michael Glover, has inspired this edition of the blog. Why devote any attention to it at all, you may well ask. Well, for one thing, it's pretty funny.

Cancel culture, sometimes termed call-out culture, is all the rage these days, particularly among young people — primarily young white people, who seem to have pickpocketed the phrase from (again) the Black community.

We're reeling at the news that the Supreme Court actually did it. They utterly erased Roe v. Wade. Not that we weren't expecting this, because we were. Not that we weren't ready for this, because we are. But we need to fortify ourselves--with will, political will.

New revelations coming out of the January 6 Congressional committee hearings this past week raised the hair straight up off my head in ways even I had not anticipated.

A few weeks ago, the state legislature of Oklahoma passed the most draconian anti reproductive rights law in this nation, in effect granting tissues of the fetus “personhood.” Never mind Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway musical; The state of Oklahoma has its own dramatic historical background.

A few weeks ago on this blog I hazarded the bizarre notion that soon, right wingers would be patting themselves on the back for making abortion illegal for an additional reason than those they usually give, the new one being that it would please other right wingers terrified of “replacement theory.”

I promised that we would not let this story drop, so we are following up on it here: Marina Ovsyannikova. The 43-year-old Russian TV editor had held up a poster for six seconds on “Vremya,” the main news program on Russian state television, while live and on air, and had become an icon for freedom of speech, women, and the press overnight. Those six seconds would change her life forever. Lilienström spoke with Ovsyannikova about what motivated her to take such a courageous move with concrete repercussions, the moments that followed, and how her family reacted....