michelleweber

The judge has no legal background. The lawyer gets a cut of any collections. And the people of Coffeyville end up buried in debt or in jail or both, just for trying to go to the doctor.

Organ procurement companies can harvest body parts before medical examiners have a chance to examine a dead body and rule on a cause of death. Does that seem problematic? Yes, yes it does.

Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant in Laredo, Texas, is a debutante ball featuring teenagers in multi-thousand-dollar Martha Washington cosplay. Mostly Mexican teenagers. But it wasn’t always that way — towns shift, and so do identities.

“In retrospect, it seems obvious that such a smallness of vision could never withstand the largeness of the right. But, for Obama, opposing largeness with smallness was the point.”

“[N]o matter how wildly inventive and unconventional I know the people involved to be, there’s always some degree of this absurd clichédness to the ceremony and the beginning of the party when they make all of the speeches, and dance like everyone’s watching (because they are), and throw bouquets and underthings. It’s about tradition, after […]

“Really, the digital creator class’s legitimacy is arising out of the passage of time. YouTube fame isn’t novel to Gen-Zers. It simply is.”

“Despite being illegal in Iraq, the BBC found that mutaa marriages were widely available in Kadhimiya. Out of 10 clerics approached by a BBC undercover reporter, eight said they performed them. Of those eight, we had further conversations with two who agreed to approve them for girls as young as nine.”

He’s a so-so MMA fighter with political views that are moderate at best. But since he’s outspoken on the internet — most recently, about Hong Kong — he’s become one of China’s best-known dissidents.

“I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling.” It’s all uphill (or downhill?) from this perfect lede.

“A flimsy raft, more than 100 souls, and three teenage heroes—or are they pirates?”