Alex Washoe, a writer I follow on Facebook, posted this quote the other day:
Your style is a function of your limitations, more so than a function of your skills.
– Johnny Cash
It got me to thinking, which was her purpose in posting. It’s certainly something that applies to all kinds of artists.
There are many different kinds of limitations. I recently finished the book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World by Sara Hendren, who teaches design for disability at Olin College of Engineering. The book is much more than an explanation of cool methods developed to address various disabilities (created both individually and as systems); it also gets into discussions of social and philosophical complexities.
For example, she discusses the experience of Audre Lorde, who had a mastectomy and declined to use a prosthetic, only to discover the expectation that she should wear one to make other people comfortable even if it was not comfortable for her. Hendren observes:
Her post-op prescription for prosthetics was never solely about functionality; it carried a social meaning.
And a discussion of humans as tool users – one of the most basic things we do – leads her to muse “your everyday life offers non-stop evidence that the body-plus may actually be the human’s truest state.”
Because I’d recently read the book, my first reaction to the word limitations was to think of those that come with every human body. Even if you aren’t disabled, there are things your body won’t do that someone else’s does easily.
Some people are very physically flexible; others will never be no matter how much stretching they may do. Certain activities require certain body types – ballet dancers are a good example, one made most stark by the fact that so many of them are retired by the time they are forty because even with the perfect body they are doing things that cannot be sustained into old age.
However, a lot of people who have a passion for dance have found ways around that, ways that incorporate their limitations. There are dancers who perform in wheelchairs, dancers that have curvy bodies and big hips, dancers who are not remotely young. Their limitations are part of their style.
A singer might have a voice others find pleasing, but still have a limited range, which affects the songs they sing and the way they sing them. That is style. In fact, there are some singers whose voice is not necessarily pleasing to all – Bob Dylan comes to mind – who make a virtue of that necessity. Continue reading “Limitation as a Virtue”…
That may well be the question being asked by “No Kings” protesters, who marched, rallied and danced all over the nation on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2025.
Pro-democracy groups had aimed to encourage large numbers of Americans to demonstrate that “together we are choosing democracy.” They were successful, with crowds turning out for demonstrations in thousands of cities and towns from Anchorage to Miami.
And while multiple GOP leaders had attacked the planned demonstrations, describing them as “hate America” rallies, political science scholars and national security experts agree that the current U.S. administration’s actions are indeed placing the world’s oldest continuous constitutional republic in jeopardy.
Once a democracy starts to erode, it can be difficult to reverse the trend. Only 42% of democracies affected by autocratization – a transformation in governance that erodes democratic safeguards – since 1994 have rebounded after a democratic breakdown, according to Swedish research institute V-Dem.
Often termed “democratic backsliding,” such periods involve government-led changes to rules and norms to weaken individual freedoms and undermine or eliminate checks on power exercised by independent institutions, both governmental and non-governmental.
Even so, practices used globally to fight democratic backsliding or topple autocracies can be instructive.
In a nutshell: Nonviolent resistance is based on noncooperation with autocratic actions. It has proven more effective in toppling autocracies than violent, armed struggle.
But it requires more than street demonstrations.
One pro-democracy organization helps train people to use video to document abuses by government.
That momentum can be challenging to generate. Would-be autocrats create environments of fear and powerlessness, using intimidation, overwhelming force or political and legal attacks, and other coercive tactics to force acquiescence and chill democratic pushback.
Autocrats can’t succeed alone. They rely on what scholars call “pillars of support” – a range of government institutions, security forces, business and other sectors in society to obey their will and even bolster their power grabs.
However, everyone in society has power to erode autocratic support in various ways. While individual efforts are important, collective action increases impact and mitigates the risks of reprisals for standing up to individuals or organizations.
Here are some of the tactics used by those movements across the world:
1. Refuse unlawful, corrupt demands
When enough individuals in critical roles and institutions – the military, civil servants, corporate leaders, state government and judges – refuse to implement autocratic orders, it can slow or even stop an autocratic takeover. In South Korea, parts of the civil service, legislature and military declined to support President Yoon Suk Yeol’s imposition of martial law in 2024, foiling his autocratic move.
2. Visibly bolster the rule of law
Where would-be autocrats disregard legal restraints and install their supporters in the highest courts, individual challenges to overreach, even if successful, can be insufficient. In Poland, legal challenges in courts combined with public education by the judiciary, lawyers’ associations initiatives and street protests like the “March of a Thousand Robes” in 2020 to signal widespread repudiation of the autocratic government’s attacks on the rule of law.
3. Unite in opposition
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela, is an example of how political parties and leaders who cooperate across differences can offer an alternative vision.
Voting autocrats out of office remains the best way to restore democracy, demonstrated recently by the u-turn in Brazil, where a pro-democracy candidate defeated the hard-right incumbent. But this requires strategic action to keep elections truly free and fair well in advance of election day.
6. Organize your community
As in campaigns in India starting in 2020 and Chile in 2019, participating in community or private conversation forums, local town halls or councils, and nonpartisan student, veterans, farmers, women’s and religious groups provides the space to share concerns, exchange ideas and create avenues to take action. Often starting with trusted networks, local initiatives can tap into broader statewide or national efforts to defend democracy.
Bringing together people across ideological and other divides can increase understanding and counter political polarization, particularly when religious leaders are involved. Even in autocratic countries like Turkey or during wartime as in Ukraine, deepening democratic practices at state and local levels, like citizen assemblies and the use of technologies that improve the quality of public decision-making, can demonstrate ways to govern differently.
The end of American democracy is not a foregone conclusion, despite the unprecedented rate of its decline. It will depend, in part, on the choices made by every American.
It probably doesn’t surprise anyone that I was reading science fiction and fantasy books for this project, which includes books from just about every genre you can think of, including poetry as well as prose. I noticed in going through the list that it includes several horror books as well as literary fiction and a lot of creative nonfiction.
Each reviewer was only able to provide capsule reviews of two or three books, which made the task very difficult. I read many other books that I really liked. Small presses are really publishing great things these days.
While you read this, I will be Medievalisting in Melbourne. Monday is my recovery day, so I’m seeing friends and family Tuesday I have in-service training which basically means really good behind the scenes tours at a major library and a major art gallery. Wednesday to Friday is the conference proper. My paper is written, my slides are almost there* and I don’t feel at all ready for any of it.
I’ll report back next week! There may be pictures, or there may not. It depends…
It’s rare that I can visit any campus these days, because I’m Jewish, but a friend has given me her phone number and the security number and, hopefully, all will be well.
My cutest slide is of the word ‘ritter’ scratched on a slate in Hebrew characters. I am so dreaming of writing a story where a Medieval Jewish school boy dreams of becoming a knight. If you want to see this picture, let me know, and I’ll share it when I’m at my own desk.
My neighborhood has a wealth of record stores. There’s one around the corner on 40th, and a half dozen more within walking distance.
They’re not just stores that happen to carry vinyl records in addition to some other music-related items like CDs or instruments. They specialize in records, mostly the LP albums that were the in-thing when I was coming of age. (The previous generation did more with the 45s that had one song on each side.)
I used to have a lot of records, but I got rid of them when I was moving cross country back in early 2008. I’d ditched my record player years earlier. I was fond of them, but they were heavy and took up space and I no longer listened to them.
I probably should have held onto them a little bit longer, though since I wasn’t a purist or a collector, I didn’t take extra care of them. I doubt any of them were especially valuable. And I probably wouldn’t want to set up an old-fashioned Hi-Fi system to listen to them anyway.
But people are back into records these days, enough of them to support a lot of indie record shops.
Typewriters are also making a comeback. The New York Times had a lovely piece a week or so ago on a man who took over a typewriter repair business from a man who started it in Bremerton, Washington, in 1947. The middle-aged guy who took it over – after spending a lot of time with the previous owner learning how to work on typewriters – did it more or less on a gut feeling that it was a good choice for his life.
But there’s a lot of work for people who know how to fix typewriters, both the manual and electric kind. Some people are into typewriters in the digital age.
I learned to type in high school back when there was a course called “typing” that was mostly aimed at people who wanted to do secretarial work. We learned on electric ones with no letters on the keyboard – memorizing the keyboard layout was part of the skill.
My parents had manual typewriters at home, and once I learned to type I wrote all my papers for school on them. I took one with me to college, but they took it back when they started a newspaper.
In those pre-computer days I lusted for an IBM correcting Selectric, but I never could come up with enough money. By the time I was making enough money to pay for something like that, the personal computer was a thing and I got that instead.
Cameras, too. Film cameras, not just digital ones, and not just fancy ones, but ones intended for the kind of snapshot at which the mobile phone camera has become king. At our coffee shop the baristas take Polaroids of patrons’ dogs and post them in the shop. Continue reading “Old School”…
I just posted about one of my novels, Borderlanders, on Facebook. Let me share that post, and let me add to it.
Memories…
This was the book wanted by readers on FB. I noted (on FB, obviously) that my academic stuff had given me a way of writing a novel with a chronically ill protagonist where the protagonist remains the hero, is not cured, is not killed, and is not replaced. I was going to teach this method to others, but first COVID intervened and then antisemitism. I don’t get to teach much, these days. I may have to write another novel, having said this, because I learned so much in writing the novel that I could now write a much better one.
What’s very strange is, during these 5 years, more people I know have the illness my character had, due to long COVID. I’ve had it since I was in my twenties, but I’m one of the fortunate ones for whom it goes into abeyance. Right now, I’m trying to coax it back to sleep. Not everyone has that luxury, which is another reason why I should write another novel. Not yet, though. While it’s awake, every moment of every day is not straightforward, and I am behind on all my fiction.
This mysterious illness was known as chronic fatigue in Australia in the late 1980s, but these days it’s called ME and the fatigue is just a symptom. We know a lot more about it. One thing we know is why walking up the street can be so impossible. For some of us it can set the illness back, and for others it can destroy life entirely. This is why I consider myself so fortunate. I may have to not do much for a few months, but after that time I can do a little more and then a little more. This is just as well, because it’s only one of several illnesses I have and I have this daft desire not to be bedridden or die young.
For me, the most annoying symptom is when my executive function is not working. I lose time (sometimes weeks) and can’t do simple things. Oddly, I can still write books.
I always tell folks, do not assume someone can or cannot do a thing when they are ill. Ask them. And ask them each and every day if you must, because the small everyday can change. Some days I can walk up the street and back and I can write 6,000 words. Other days I can hardly get out of bed.
The illness is not just part of our everyday, it becomes part of who we are, for better or for worse.
I would like to see a superhero who has ME. It would be such a wonderful thing, watching them change the world… on days they can do more than toddle. And seeing how other people respond to the wild level of change they see when a powerful person has to watch what they do every minute would provide a great sub-text to a movie. It’s quite a different set of options than those for someone who cannot walk without assistance, or someone completely confined to bed who uses their amazing telepathic abilities to run the world.
There are so many amazing stories in the lives of the people we mostly prefer not to see. I now want to see a whole sequence of superhero movies or a TV series that focuses on those lives. There is a different sort of heroicism when one is not visible and has to fight just to get through the everyday, especially when they do astonishing things. Most of those astonishing things are attributed to someone else, because, of course, the invisible and half-seen can’t possibly be the heroes we dream of. Except, of course, they are. I get through my illnesses because of those people. Some of them are role models and some of them help when others don’t even begin to see that I might not be able to ask for help when things are bad.
One thing about this non-extent show: costumes would be far too problematic for some of the hidden heroes. So would heroic stances and being randomly interviewed by reporters. It would be such a different and fascinating set of stories.
In real life, I’ve met these invisible people in essential services. From a desk or from home they make a lot of the everyday possible for so many other folk.
As someone who was all but born on a copy desk – my mother always said she wasn’t the first woman copy editor on the Houston Chronicle, but she was the first pregnant one – I grew up with the myths, the realities, and the ethics of journalism at the core of my being.
I may have picked up much of the same sort of beliefs about the legal profession in law school, but to be completely honest, I’ve always believed in journalism more than I believed in the law. I do know a lot of lawyers who really believe in the law and right now some of the finest of those are using it to fight the abusive regime that’s trying to destroy our democracy.
There are some journalists who believe in true journalism doing that as well.
But then there are the others.
I had never heard of Olivia Nuzzi until the scandal broke about her relationship with the Kennedy scion who is now dismantling our health resources, a relationship that went on while she was supposedly reporting on his presidential campaign. (I’m using the word “relationship” because I don’t know the details and really don’t want to find out what they are, but what went on between them was not a simple matter of reporter and subject of interest.)
She was “cancelled” – lost her job, was criticized heavily in many corners – but now she’s back. It’s been about a year. She’s written a book and The New York Times did an elaborate feature piece on her. Apparently she also has a new job at Vanity Fair.
I have not read her book. As far as I know, I’ve never read anything she’s written and from what I’ve read about her I can’t think of any reason why I would. I have, however, read a few pieces about her, which caused me to reflect on what journalism is and should be.
In the piece that brought her to my attention, Colby Hall (who I also never heard of before) compared her to Hunter S. Thompson. He was talking about the kind of political coverage Nuzzi did and he meant it as a huge compliment, an assessment that she broke the rules in the same effective way that Thompson did back in the day.
It’s possible she is equally outrageous. Maybe she’s an asshole in a manner similar to Thompson. (I read Thompson religiously during the Nixon and Reagan years, but while I loved his savage reporting, I never wanted to meet him.)
But here’s the thing that makes me question that comparison – and question the judgment of anyone who would make it – Thompson never had anything approaching a friendly relationship with the political people he covered. In fact, he mostly hated them and made no bones about it.
Yet, the U.S. is different in a meaningful way. Here, abortion has historically been framed as a personal right to privacy. In many other countries I’ve studied, abortion is viewed more as a collective right that is inextricably tied to broader social and economic issues.
Initially, for some of those autocratic leaders, limiting access to abortion and contraception was a strategy to gain the approval of the nation’s religious leaders. The Catholic Church held great power in Italy and Spain, as did the Orthodox Church in Romania. At the time, these faiths opposed artificial birth control and still believe life begins at conception.
Restrictions on reproductive rights also aimed to increasebirth rates following two world wars that had stamped out some of the population, particularly in the Soviet Union and Italy. Many political leaders saw procreation as a national duty. They designated women – white, heterosexual women, that is – specific roles, primarily as mothers, to produce babies as well as future soldiers and workers for their regimes.
In the past two decades, countries in Europe and the Americas have been following this recognizable pattern. Nicaragua and Poland have both banned abortion. Hungary, Turkey and Russia have all clamped down on access to it.
Restricting reproductive freedoms has helped Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan stoke lasting political divisions within society that help them consolidate their own power.
These politicians have also taken power away from a significant portion of the population by reinstating earlier, fascist-era restrictions on bodily autonomy. As feminist scholars have pointed out, strong reproductive rights are central to functioning democracies.
Restrictions on reproductive freedoms often necessitate other kinds of restrictions to enforce and maintain them. These might include free speech limits that prohibit providers from discussing people’s reproductive options. Criminalizing political dissent enables the arrest of people who protest restrictions on reproductive freedoms. Travel bans threaten prison time for individuals who help young people get abortion care out of state.
When these civil liberties weaken, it becomes harder to defend other rights. Without the right to speak, dissent or move freely, people cannot engage in conversations, organize or voice collective grievances.
Putting the US in a global context
In 2022, the U.S. joined the likes of Poland and Hungary when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending 50 years of federal abortion protections.
President Donald Trump was not in power when this happened. Yet the Supreme Court’s conservative majority was shaped during his first term.
Since then, both the second Trump administration and many states have enacted their own regulations or bans on abortion. This has created a divided country where in some states abortion is as restricted as it is under some of the world’s most autocratic regimes.
Yet, there’s a key difference.
In the U.S., abortion is viewed by the law and the public as a matter of individual rights. The debate often boils down to whether a person should be allowed to terminate their pregnancy.
In many other contexts, reproductive rights are understood as a collective good that benefits all society – or, conversely, harms all society when revoked.
This perspective can be a powerful driver of change. It’s how, for example, women’s and feminist groups in places such as Argentina, Colombia and Mexico have successfully pressured their governments to decriminalize abortion in recent years.
The Latin American feminist activists have also documented how restricting abortion intensifies authoritarianism and worsens both individual and collective rights.
In a region where many citizens remember life under military dictatorship, highlighting the relationship between abortion and authoritarianism may be particularly galvanizing.
This was basically what the mainstream pro-choice movement advocated for at the time. White feminists saw abortion rights as a personal liberty. This framing has real limitations.
As Black and brown reproductive justice advocates have long pointed out, Roe never served women of color or poor people particularly well because of underlying unequal access to health care. Their work has, for decades, illustrated the strong connection between racial, economic and reproductive justice, yet abortion is still largely regarded as solely an individual issue.
When debates about reproductive freedoms are framed as fights over individual rights, it can engender a legal quagmire. Other entities with rights emerge – the fetus, for example, or a potential grandparent – and are pitted against the pregnant person.
Recently, for instance, a pregnant woman declared brain dead in Georgia was kept alive for several months until her fetus became viable, apparently to comply with the state’s strict anti-abortion law. As her mother told the press, her family had no say in the matter.
Narrowly focusing on abortion as an individual right can also obscure why banning it has societal impacts.
Research worldwide shows that restricting reproductive freedoms does not lead to fewer abortions. Abortion bans only make abortion dangerous as people turn to unregulated “back alley” procedures. Maternal and infant mortality rates rise, especially in marginalized communities.
Other kinds of suffering increase, too. Women and their families tend to become poorer when contraception and abortion are hard to get.
Abortion bans also lead to discriminatory practices in health care beyond reproductive health services, such as oncology, neurology and cardiology. Physicians who fear criminalization are forced to withhold or alter gold-standard treatments for pregnant patients, for example, or they may prescribe less effective drugs out of concern about legal consequences should patients later become pregnant.
As a result, abortion bans decrease the quality and effectiveness of medical care for many patients, not just those who are pregnant.
Defending reproductive freedoms for healthy democracies
These findings demonstrate why reproductive rights are really a collective good. When viewed this way, it illuminates why they are an essential element of democracy.
Already, the rollback of reproductive freedoms in the U.S. has been followed by efforts to limit other key areas of freedoms, including LGBTQ rights, freedom of speech and the right to travel.
Access to safe abortion for pregnant people, gender-affirming care for trans youth, and international travel for noncitizens are intertwined rights – not isolated issues.
When the government starts stripping away any of these rights, I believe it signals serious trouble for democracy.
This story is published in collaboration with Rewire News Group, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering reproductive and sexual health.
We’re in that time of year when things suddenly warm. We don’t know whether a given day will be spring or summer, normally. This year we don’t know if the negative temperatures of winter will also appear. It’s a bit too exciting and not good for those of us who handle chronic illnesses.
Each and every time this happens, there are cherries to ameliorate the pain. Another thing that ameliorates the pain is everyone’s children, at school, getting excited about the end of year activities and the count down to the long summer holidays.
This week, in the Australian Capital Territory, so many schools were closed down because of asbestos in sand. I do not know how the asbestos got through all the checks, but every parent I know is asking to work from home or taking early holiday, or rearranging shifts. A bit more warning may have made this straightforward, and friends like me could have taught random child-friends how to make spice mixes or bath bombs, but there wasn’t enough warning and all our days are being rearranged.
It’s a small excitement, compared with the rest-of-world, but it’s a lot of work for young families. We’ll be through it soon, and whoever ordered that sand will never, ever do something that stupid again. Then I can return to thinking about seasonal produce and what I need to do today myself. I have a very long list to work through, but there is no asbestos involved.
It’s going to be Thanksgiving in the United States in a couple of weeks, and that got me to thinking about the people who worked hard and made sacrifices to make sure “we the people” means everybody. Given the way the current regime is trying to destroy those rights, it seems important to remember how we got them and what we need to do to keep them.
I’m thinking about these things in the United States because that’s the history I know best and it’s also where rights are under attack right now. But you can find similar histories in many countries.
Me, I thank the suffragists who made it possible for me to vote and led to many more women in positions of authority. That happened 105 years ago now, which may seem like ancient history if you were born in this century, but doesn’t seem that long ago at all if you’re my age.
I mean, my grandmothers were born before women could vote in the United States. My mother was born just three years afterwards.
I also thank the predecessors of the suffragists, the women who organized for their rights back in the 1800s, often working alongside abolitionists. I looked up the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and discovered that Frederick Douglass – who was the only African American at the convention – argued strongly for the inclusion of women’s right to vote, which was why they included it in their statement.
Douglass’s efforts in this regard are just one reason I think the abolitionist and the later civil rights movement were critical to rights that I have, and that we all share these days.
It’s not really freedom if it’s not freedom for all. The activism that finally implemented some of the rights set out in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments not only expanded the freedom of Black people, but expanded the rights for everyone.
I also thank unions for my freedoms. I’m personally grateful to the News Guild, my union, which enabled me to retire in reasonable comfort, but I’m grateful in general to all those people who fought for workers’ rights over many years, and who are still hanging in the fight right now. Continue reading “Feeling Thankful”…
