Yesterday, while we were incapacitated, a bunch of dudes in Washington and around the media started debating something called contraception, as if hearing about it for the very first time. While contraception is known to 99% of American women as healthcare, it’s known to one man as a “license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.” Reflections on today’s decision by the administration can be found here and here.

At The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik follows up on his recent piece about America’s prisons, delving deeper into the moral issues surrounding mass incarceration.

“The moral failings of advanced liberal societies, not least this one, tend to be slow-motion sins. We don’t stone the adulterer or hang the sodomite or massacre the restive inner-city residents. We allow the atmosphere to be filled with greenhouse gases; we allow the hypertrophic growth of inequality; we let the prison population grow to the size of a megalopolis. And the key is that there’s no particular moment when they happened, no single event to expose and decry. “

(Via The Daily Beast)

The Nation explains how the GOP is resegregating the South with its infuriating redistricting campaign.

“The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.”

(Via Feministing)

In this Mother Jones essay, Eleanor Cooney tells her story of getting an abortion before Roe v. Wade, shedding light on what it means to live in a society in which abortion is illegal.

“That year in the 1960s, several thousand American women were treated in emergency rooms for botched abortions, and there were at least 200 known deaths. Comparing my story with others from the pre-Roe era, what impresses me is how close I veered to mortal danger in spite of not living under most of the usual terrible strictures.”

If all the talk about SOPA/PIPA hasn’t reached you, then I can only assume you haven’t been sitting in front of your computer for close to 8 hours a day like the rest of us.

Personally, I believe those 8 hours will be significantly less endurable if this bill gets passed, but there’s an endless amount of opinions posted on the internet and maybe you just want some facts because when you clicked on Google this morning, the internet giant had blacked out its iconic logo.  This got your attention.  You probably already tried to correct your knowledge fail by doing what we all do when we find ourselves ignorant on a topic: we go to Wikipedia.  But guess what? (Actually, though, there is at least one link working on Wikipedia today.)

You don’t need to be a tech nerd to want to know what’s up with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its counterpart the Protect IP Act (PIPA), so here are some links to help you understand SOPA/PIPA and today’s blackout.  After those links you’ll find a few to help you take action, if you so choose. …more

Where can one turn for detailed, reliable coverage of the Arab Awakening? How about American politics? …more

A British thinktank, the New Economics Foundation, is advocating for a shorter work week as a cure for Britain’s economic, social, and environmental woes. The economists argue that the solution to fewer jobs due to technological advances involves work-sharing, and a government legislated maximum work week.

“Are we just living to work, and working to earn, and earning to consume? There’s no evidence that if you have shorter working hours as the norm, you have a less successful economy: quite the reverse.”

(Via The Millions)

At the BBC, writer Sarah Hall explores “the popular motif in science fiction of an all-women society surviving without men.” In the two-part program, Hall talks with authors, professors, and science fiction historians, looking at how science fiction “has been used to examine relationships between the sexes,” and how the genre “has examined the different ways of continuing the human race.”

(Via Bookslut)

“If a comic can serve as the mediating mask of tragedy, that might help explain why graphic novels are proving so successful in depicting not only torture and war but illness, domestic conflict, even teenage trauma—anything hard to face in the raw. Comics can morph directly from realism to expressionist fantasy—from a prison cell or hospital bed, to the turmoil inside someone’s head.”

The Daily Beast takes a closer look at the “explosion” of graphic novels, evolving critical opinions on the medium, and a growing acknowledgment of “comics’ twin potential for art and activism.”

This past Saturday, December 17th marked the 9^th year of the annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. SF Bay Guardian looks back at the history of the San Francisco born tradition.

“It’s become a high holy day of whores. The one day that we all remember the real victims, not these made up situations. A lot of them are not victims, but people like to think we are.”

Rumpus bud Josh Bearman tells the tale of the Baghdad Country Club. You can preview the story before scooping it up at The Atavist and check out an excerpt here.

“Welcome to a place where even beer runs are a matter of life and death. As the Iraq War draws to an official close, Joshuah Bearman tells the funny and poignant story of the real-life Baghdad Country Club, a bar in the Green Zone during the conflict’s bloodiest years. Against all odds, its proprietors struggle to keep their raucous watering hole safe and well-stocked as the insurgency rages outside.”

Rumpus columnist Nicholas Rombes explores the “Occupy zeitgeist” in 2011 cinema over at Filmmaker. Rombes reveals how films such as Drive, Meek’s Cutoff, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Tree of Life, while seemingly “far removed” from the movement, “speak to Occupy anxieties of this past year.”

“…It’s possible that films like Tree of Life somehow capture — in their very structure — the decentralized fantasy of the movement. All four films… are defined by lack. In each one, it’s not clear precisely what the protagonists want, although they each clearly want something, and this generates a sort of outsized tension, a puzzle for the audience that somehow makes us complicit.”

Aimee Bender responds to Full Stop’s Situation in American Writing survey. Bender discusses literary criticism’s transition to the Internet, the political tendencies of American writing, and whether she imagines a specific audience for her work:

“No, not a definite audience. Whoever responds to the work! Whoever catches (more or less) the ball I threw. My hope is that the audience has grown but really, who knows. They say the Kindle is getting people to read more; they also say that people are reading more shallowly, or so says a very convincing Nicholas Carr in The Shallows.”

Here’s a video about the passing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill, which the President will not veto, includes a provision that allows the military to detain and imprison American citizens indefinitely without trial. WTF?

And now for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act:

The Atlantic asks, “Should copyright be allowed to override speech rights?” The answer: “no.”

OpenCongress breaks down the interest groups that support and oppose SOPA.

The Washington Post discusses the “nightmarish SOPA hearings.”

Get Your Censor On reminds us that “life will suck if they censor the internet” and “only sacrifices of taste and sense will satisfy our Web-lords.”

Oh, and today is the 220th birthday of the Bill of Rights. The irony has not gone unnoticed.

At Mother Jones, our friend Mac McClelland reports from Uganda, focusing on the defiance of the country’s gay community in the face of bigots (some of whom have American allies). McClelland calls attention to the fact that despite the media’s recent focus on Uganda, anti-gay violence and attacks on gay rights is occurring elsewhere, including here in the United States.

“The Anti-Homosexuality Bill dies without making it to a vote. Bahati has pledged he’ll get the legislation through, somehow, someday. And indeed, in October, Parliament votes to reopen debate on the bill. Meanwhile, Sappho Islands, Kasha’s bar, will close when the landlady evicts the business because of all the weirdos coming in and out. Kasha will vow to open another one, one that’s bigger and even better.”

“We don’t know why porn stars should not teach children, why it’s OK to watch porn but not be in it, why we should have to hide our involvement in pornography, or why we should be ashamed of it. These arguments apply, in differing degrees, to sex itself.”

At The Advocate, Conner Habib reflects on the “outing” of teacher Kevin Hogan as a former gay porn performer, articulates the cloudy nature of public conversations about porn in our society, and argues that Hogan’s potential firing should be a “shared responsibility.”

“They started taking detainees away every night, by groups of twenty. We didn’t know where they were going to, but we thought the US. One day, it was my group’s turn. The Pakistanis took away our chains and gave us handcuffs ‘made in the USA’. I told the other detainees: ‘Look, we’re going to the US!’ I thought the Americans would understand that the Pakistanis had cheated them, and send me back to Saudi.”

In their latest volume, The London Review of Books has published the story of Mohammed el Gorani, the youngest person held at Guantánamo Bay.

(Via Maud Newton)

Cassie J. Sneider sent us a lil’ piece she drew recently (based on this well-known photograph) that we just had to share.

Catch it in all its glory after the jump: …more

“We are not the leaders, but we did spark it.”

Guernica chats with Kalle Lasn, the editor in chief of Adbusters.