E.J. Graff

Attention Glenn Greenwald, Dahlia Lithwick, Chris Hayes, and others who’ve been banging this drum: Human Rights Watch (HRW) is asking Canada to bring criminal charges against Dick Cheney, who’s visiting there today, for “overwhelming evidence of torture by the Bush administration, including at least two cases involving Canadian citizens.” HRW cannot genuinely expect Canada to […]

Linda Greenhouse, formerly The New York Times‘ Supreme Court reporter and now teaching at Yale Law School, tapped on the Commonwealth of Virginia’s shoulder and reminds it that the civil war is over. Looking at the state laws and lawsuits launched in reaction to the new federal health-care statute, she writes: Although the courts that […]

Warning: This post includes two very bad jokes, one of which I’ll dispose of right up front. When my wife walked into my study to find me looking at scantily clad Playboy bunnies on the Internet, I did in fact tell her that I was going to watch NBC’s latest show, The Playboy Club for […]

I should’ve known better. Yesterday, I wrote that DADT would die not with a bang but a whimper. Wrong! There was, indeed, a media fanfare, with general agreement that this was a very good thing. Apparently, I’m an anachronism; but after spending my early adulthood in the Jim Crow era of LGBT issues, it still […]

After my post last week on whether “sexual liberation” leads to monogamy, Amanda Marcotte and I twittered briefly about the myth of progress in sexual mores. The progress myth goes like this: Once upon a time, all was repression, imposed by religion/patriarchy/the establishment/your-nominee-here. But that theory is wrong: As with all fashions, libertinism comes and […]

While we’re talking about how policy failures can help illnesses spread, let me pass on some news from organizer Ellen Bravo of Family Values @ Work. As flu season starts (file under: Contagion), Bravo’s group is stressing that real contagion can be prevented if more people had paid sick days. Every year, 44 million low-wage […]

Earlier this week I posted an excerpt from a funny diatribe by Jeffrey T. Kuhner of the Edmund Burke Institute, published in the Washington Times, that linked contraception with abortion. Kuhner ranted that almost every major religion and civilizations have always opposed contraception, homosexuality, adultery — oh, pretty much anything having to do with sex […]

At the Prospect on Monday, Chris Geidner took a principled stand on the procedural question of who should be able to defend Proposition 8 in the courts: Do only California state officials, who have declined to support this antagonism toward marriage equality? Or do Prop. 8’s authors and backers. The LA Times essentially agreed that […]

In theory, your lunch is soon to be a little safer . In part as a response to Harvard Public Health Review editor Madeline Drexler’s devastating food-safety critique in the latest issue of Good Housekeeping, the USDA just announced it would designate all “Big Six” strains of E. coli as “adulterants” — previously, only one […]