ALL whites disproportionately supported Trump—some of the people I know who voted for him in 2016 were low-income rural people, but there were also plenty of comfy well-educated suburbanites who didn’t want their taxes to go up. And I think the inclination of urban liberals (my own demographic) to play us-and-them…

And I wish we would stop blaming the working class and impoverished rural people for Trump. We bask in that narrative because it fits our world view, and because it’s simpler than looking at the way huge swaths of votes are discounted by gerrymandering and the structure of the electoral college, or at the legitimate…

All I’m saying is that you’re making some mighty broad generalizations there, something to consider when you’re talking about bias. 

I just don’t get how that’s age-related. 

I’m with you right up to the “show white boomers a lead character of another race.” Not to speak for my entire generation or anything, but few of us I think are THAT oblivious. I did applaud the portrayal of an interracial romance where that element was no big deal.

Beautiful! 

I’m so sorry - for the loss of your dad, and for that loss being compounded by his need to have a final unanswerable smack at your politics.

Grammar doesn’t mean only the prescriptive rules for formal speaking and writing—descriptive grammar deals with language as native speakers use it every day. And on both levels, change is constant. For example, the rule about not splitting infinitives comes from an era when prescriptive grammarians thought it was…

A linguist’s take: Any distinction that has to be explained to adult native speakers, and that doesn’t interfere with meaning but serves only to make “grammar police” types wince, is a distinction that’s on its way out (see also: who/whom). It’s worth maintaining in formal or business-related writing or…

I know! And lowercase that stuff. It’s in sentences, for crying out loud.

As does my son! Not to mention 11-11. That piece of timing had nothing to do with me but I remain stubbornly proud. (Also he has about six copies of Slaughterhouse-5, which his dear but slightly absent-minded godmother kept giving him for his birthday during his teen years.)

When I was recovering from surgery during a heat wave, my sister sent me a box of chocolate-dipped strawberries. I froze them and ate them by first peeling off the chocolate and eating that, then putting the frozen strawberry into a glass of icy lemonade and eating it after the glass was empty. It was like a beautiful…

A huge yes to this. I can’t believe all the years I’d have to pull over for a 20-minute nap halfway through a three-hour car trip, or doze off at my desk every afternoon. CPAP is a pain but once you get used to it, it’s just there—and life is a million times better.

History and cultures exist even in states with an evil whackadoodle majority in their legislature, and the places with the worst history have also been home to some of the most meaningful resistance movements. You can love a state’s beauty and good side even when that state’s politics are all fucked up. Said the woman…

I am equally appalled at their product and their deviant spelling of totin’, with extra points deducted for the missing hyphen after gun. I’m a grammar hippie in everyday life, but I have a pretty solid rule not to buy from anyone who can’t spell the name of their product.

I think even people who aren’t particularly psychic get deeply attuned to family members they’re close to. I’ve heard too many stories like that not to believe it.

Does anybody else remember the late-90s Alternamoms website and its many spinoffs? Eerily similar in its insistence that the birth experience was sort of the point of the whole enterprise and if you’d had medical intervention (like the one that saved my son’s life after a placental abruption) you were either a failure…

Yeah, those are dog names. 

Anteaters. I must have seen something about them in school, and I was certain they were coming for me in the night. My poor parents got out the encyclopedia (because that’s how old I am) to show me that their range was nowhere near Tennessee, plus they ate, you know, ANTS, but nothing would dissuade me. At one point…

Yeah, I see that perspective too.