When Molly Shannon auditioned for Saturday Night Live in the mid-’90s, she received some appallingly bad advice. A scout warned her against doing the character Mary Katherine Gallagher—a geeky teenager who stuck her hands in her armpits and smelled them when she got nervous—because the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, wouldn’t like it. “He’ll think it’s weird, that dirty little character,” Shannon recalled being told.

The chaos unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was underscored on Friday when federal judges released dueling opinions on mifepristone, a pill used in more than half of abortions in the United States. In a suit by 17 progressive states and the District of Columbia, Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone. In a competing ruling from Texas, Judge Matthew J.

You know something strange is afoot when Elon Musk comes out in favor of tech regulation. Or when Kevin McCarthy and a left-wing Joe Biden appointee agree that one particular issue is a priority. These are not people who tend to agree on, well, anything. But such are the nascent, topsy-turvy politics of artificial intelligence.AI is not really a single issue you can be for or against the way you can with, say, guns or abortion.

When the poet Mark Strand was a child, his family was constantly in motion; he lived in Cleveland, Halifax, Montreal, New York, and Philadelphia, then Colombia, Mexico, Peru. “I moved around so much, and went to so many different schools,” he once said, “that I never found my own place.

“For all this talk of chaos, I just didn’t see it, not from my perch,” John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, said on Thursday at the White House, following the publication of the Biden administration’s report on the Afghanistan withdrawal. That statement made me angry. My perch was a lot lower than his, and I certainly saw chaos.I had a modest part in the evacuation that was precipitated by the U.S.

Pro-life activists across the country are celebrating the decision by a federal district-court judge in Texas to force mifepristone, a drug used in self-induced abortions, off the market. This response makes sense: If, as pro-lifers like myself believe, the embryo developing in a mother’s womb is a human life, it is therefore worthy of both legal protection and social support. Steps that make it harder for women to have an abortion are welcome.

The first time I saw Amy, Ali Wong’s character in Beef, I found myself sitting up a little straighter and leaning a little closer toward my TV. I knew Wong had a starring role, but Amy caught me off guard.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.When my colleague Amanda Mull’s mom wouldn’t let her buy high heels in high school, she got an after-school job and bought them herself.

Barry Benson tightened his grip on his steering wheel. The federal wildlife-damage-abatement officer had handled bears, coyotes, and wolves. But now he was on a bigger hunt. And he was not alone. At an utterly unassuming, otherwise-bucolic intersection just outside the 280-acre Schmeeckle Reserve in rural Wisconsin, dozens of cars—Benson’s among them—idled in the predawn darkness of 5 a.m., all tuned into the same local radio station, 90 FM, waiting for instructions.