Weekly Reader

  • One of my favorite pieces of Transformers fan fiction is A Chance In A Million.  Now that I think about it, it might have been the first one I ever read too when I got back into the fandom in 1997.

  • It seems that I link to a Marjane Satrapi interview almost every week.  This week’s interview is from Nerve:

I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums.  When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.

  • Incoming Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is interviewed over at Mother Jones:

Third, I want to take a look at some of the good things that are being done around the rest of the world that are almost never discussed in the United States. How often is it discussed that the American people work the longest hours of any industrialized country in the world? The two-week paid vacation is almost a thing of the past; meanwhile in Europe you get four to six weeks vacation, and maternity leave with pay. We don’t know about these things. I want to take a look around the world and see what workers are receiving, and compare that to the United States — from an educational point of view.

 

The Pro Life Movement Summed Up Perfectly

Steve Almond sums up the pro-life movement perfectly:

The problem is that unborn children eventually get born and must live in the actual world. In this sense, "pro-lifers" are like the baby daddies of the spiritual world: full of promised love for the abstraction, and nowhere to be found when the kid shows up. They don't want to deal with the fact that some children in this country grow up starved of love, and warped by poverty. . . .

In the weeks to come, the usual pro-choice suspects will dutifully argue on behalf of a woman's rights to choose. That's not going to be enough. The leadership of the left has to recognize that those who oppose choice are not simply benighted crusaders, but bullies who are exploiting the abortion issue to exalt their pathologies.