Politics

The Supreme Court’s Power Grab

In a series of disturbing decisions this term, the Supreme Court drastically weakened the power of the executive agencies that govern financial markets, agriculture, health care, energy, the airwaves, the environment, the workplace, and so much else.

August 15, 2024 issue

The Supreme Court Picks Its Battles

June ended with far-reaching upsets for civil rights, but a closer look at the Supreme Court’s decisions across the 2022–2023 term suggests the justices are not immune to public scrutiny.

July 4, 2023

Egregiously Wrong

In several of the term’s most controversial cases, the Court’s new majority applied originalism to disastrous effect.

August 18, 2022 issue

The Court’s Declarations of Independence

In the end, the Supreme Court’s 2019–2020 term was much less conservative than anyone had expected.

August 20, 2020 issue

What the Little Woman Was Up To

An exhibition of books, ephemera, and realia made by women over the past five hundred years makes tangible the kind of contributions that typically go ignored.

March 26, 2020 issue

Old Wives’ Tales

“The oral contraceptives and abortifacients known to the Greeks and Romans were both effective and also safer than one might have expected.”

November 18, 1993 issue

Darn that Darning

“Despite our view of them as repressed and exploited, we know that nineteenth-century women had contraceptive practices, orgasms, used nursing bottles and abortifacients; in Michigan at one period, one-third of pregnancies were terminated by abortion.”

April 12, 1984 issue

An Abortion War Solution: The Celibacy Amendment

In the interest of equity, the anti-abortion zealots would honor their obsession by proposing a sort of balancing of the human budget: a Celibacy Before Marriage Amendment to the US Constitution. Let us see how that goes down.

June 17, 2019