I Was Raped by My Father. An Abortion Saved My Life. by Michele Goodwin

During this week’s Supreme Court arguments about draconian laws that were obviously constructed to allow a partisan judicial branch to overturn fifty-year-old settled law, there was a unsurprising, but still infuriating, dearth of consideration for the women who will most impacted by the revocation of a central piece of their reproductive rights. Michele Goodwin’s staggering piece, published by The New York Times, fills that gap.

A tale of two thefts by Judd Legum

Judd Legum’s article is about the drastic disparity in how different crimes are pursued. If someone is caught stealing items from a store’s shelves, they are likely to wind up in handcuffs. If that same store is caught stealing from its employees through methodical wage theft, those employees are only likely to get justice if they pursue it — arduously and at great cost — through the legal system. Perhaps even worse, Legum shows that the far more significant crime of wage theft, which more wide-ranging damage to the populace, is largely ignored by the media in favor of panicky news reports about smash-and-grab robberies of business’s wares. This article is published by Popular Information.

Matrix (2021) by Lauren Groff

A lean, artful epic about a twelfth-century nun and the little empire she builds after being dispatched to a rural English nunnery. Writing with characteristic crisp eloquence, Lauren Groff dashes along the decades, introducing dense psychology and just enough salacious details to make the story pop. Groff knowingly looks to the distant past — and avoids getting bogged down by stultifying archival factoids — to offer insightful commentary on enduring human nature.