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Under Donald Trump, the federal government is like a bad parent: never there when you need him but eager to stick his nose in your business when you don’t want him to.
The relationship between Trump and California has always been bad, but the past few days represent a new low.

A few Sundays ago, I was in a car ride home with my wife when the light caught her face in a lovely way. I snapped a photo, and shortly afterward posted it to Instagram with several iterations of an emoji that felt appropriate: a man smiling, with hearts in place of his eyes. I did this because I love her. My love for my wife does not exist solely online; I often express it directly to her, or talk about her in glowing terms to friends and co-workers.

To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience.
In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate.

After years of trying to improve his hospital in Riverton, Wyoming—first as a doctor, then as a board member and volunteer activist—­Roger Gose was ready to give up.
Gose, a Texas native, had been in Wyoming since 1978, when he saw an ad in a medical journal looking for a small-town internist. Ever since he was a kid, he had wanted to be a community doctor, the kind who made house calls and treated his neighbors from birth into adulthood.

Last year, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign notoriously made transgender issues a centerpiece of its charge that Democrats were out of touch with Middle America. The Trump team focused on matters where liberal activists and politicians had taken deeply unpopular stances: They would allow biological males in women’s sports; Trump wouldn’t. They supported medical transition for minors; he didn’t.