I said what I have to say about the end of Roe when the Dobbs decision leaked last month. My dominant feeling is still anger, but lately the rage comes in flashes that punctuate an overall mood that I can only describe as "shrug."

It's settled over me like a thick blanket. I'm just letting the algorithm autoplay. I am skimming the headlines but not clicking the articles. I'm sending some expletive-laden texts, but mostly I'm annoyed, I'm tired, I'm resentful of having a body that's capable of getting pregnant. Whatever.

How can I feel both of these things simultaneously? Such hot rage and such deep resignation? Screaming, but also shrugging?

Pop-culturally, this has been called a hot regression summer ("an attempt to reach for the past in order to escape the cursed present"). And it's tempting to call the Roe reversal a regression, too. But, as Dahlia Lithwick writes, America could be "not so much be reverting to its pre-Roe past but slipping sideways into something that could be—believe it or not—much worse."

Maybe that's what my "shrug" is about. I've been preparing for things to be so much worse for my entire reproductive life. And many, many people in this country have long been living the so much worse future that some of us have the luxury of dreading. Despite the demanding emails and blaring alarms of this moment, it's not a departure or a regression. It's a continuation.

The other trending moniker for this season is side character summer: "I will not undergo any character development nor will I grow as a person." This appeals to both my screams and my shrugs. I don't need to grow! I'm already great at making my own decisions and trusting other people to do the same with their own bodies!! 

You can find me in stasis mode. Raging.

Two stunning, intense essays that touch on the many gray areas of the supposedly black-and-white abortion issue: Agnes Callard on miscarrying a pregnancy she would never know whether she wanted, and provider Christine Henneberg on the right to regret. Plus, a dispatch from abortion-banned America.

What if we cared for the Earth as if we were its aunties? "Aunt care centers those who are not your own," writes Catherine Bush. "Aunts reach out interstitially across gaps and generations." Meanwhile, the trauma of firefighters on the front lines of climate change. 

Brock Colyar has some complex questions about pronouns, specifically those of the they/them variety: "If this is a step toward some other utopic, gender-blurred society, when did it start to alienate me?"

How a London neighborhood stopped an immigration raid in progress, a detailed account by Illa Valenzuela-Oblitas.

An examination—which is to say a deep and challenging consideration, in quiz format—by Kaushika Suresh.

Lauren Groff on the horrors of the luxury beach vacation and Sarah Stodola’s new book, The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach.

And the 2022 writing fellows have been up to good things: Autumn Fourkiller interprets Fran Tirado's dream about spa water and Jewel Osco, and Celia Mattison on four moments that encapsulate the career of Tom Cruise. Plus, 2021 fellow Shanti Escalante-De Mattei on how living an internet-augmented life feels like a multiverse.

 

---

Big, heartfelt thanks to my paying members, who each chip in $15/year to keep this operation afloat. Click here to join them!

---

Fireflies—or, as I grew up calling them, lightning bugs.

"Ain't that America" plays in the background...

---

Donating to a practical support organization that helps people seeking abortions in your state.