Writing about a love of reading can feel like preaching to the choir. After all, most people who sit down to read such a thing (probably) like reading enough as a baseline to bother … Well, reading. But I still feel there is no solace quite like a book. It feels trite to say we’re in difficult times, but again, it feels true to say that books have been helping me keep a sense of stability and relief while so many of us are under so much stress.

This weekend, if you’re milling about the kitchen or backyard as America celebrates its Independence Day and you find yourself feeling, well, a little put off because the Supreme Court has decided you no longer have bodily autonomy, I offer you the following concoction to take the edge off. 

And if you don’t drink, congrats and I support you in your sobriety! This is for those of us who need this right now:

Disclaimer: Do not drink and drive.

Every election I attend, I leave the office with a nice sticker that says “I Voted!”, a reminder that I participated in the process. There were a few years when I didn’t get a sticker—instead I received a lollipop (not kidding), or a pen. The pens were nice, the lollipops were decent. All of them were meant as a reminder that participating in the American experiment truly meant something.

More than 100 organizations are urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to not deport survivors of the San Antonio tragedy that took the lives of 53 people, and allow them to apply for certain visas that are made available to victims of crime.

It’s going to be hard to go very far with a regular series featuring objects in deep space without mentioning Charles Messier. Because between 1771 and 1784, Messier did something that keeps his name almost constantly on the lips of both backyard and professional astronomers today.

Messier was born in northern France in 1730, where his father held the totally important job of being a “court usher.

It is Friday times. The week has been filled with highlights and lowlights, and all of those lights concern an attack on our centuries-old experiment in the concept of representative democracy. The Jan. 6 committee hearings this week saw former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ top aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, testify about how fully onboard everybody was with disrupting our country’s democratic processes.

Perched on high ground across the river from the larger city of Severodonetsk, the town of Lysychansk has played a critical role over the last two months of the battle in eastern Ukraine. When Russian forces pressed into Severodonetsk in May, they seemed to think taking the city would be a cakewalk.

Here’s just a sliver of what the Supreme Court did in the past two weeks of decisions. It doesn’t even count the atrocities it  rolled out earlier in the session, including all of the destructive shadow docket decisions that were made without hearings, without any transparency, and often even without the Court’s extremists signing their names.

In one term, the extremist Supreme Court: -overturns Roe v.

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was an arguable watershed moment for the Jan. 6 committee’s probe into the coup that investigators say former President Donald Trump nearly pulled off last year.

The Supreme Court, filled with truly mediocre-minded wannabe conservative Christian clerics, has spent this last session of the court taking away reproductive rights, everybody’s Miranda rights, the separation of church and state in the classroom, and the ability of our government to regulate greenhouse gases that have driven anthropogenic climate change.