The discussion prompts I prepared were politically neutral, meant to promote deeper thinking about all perspectives of the debate, but when I put it together I knew what side I was on. I’ve been pro-choice since before I even understood what was at stake. And yet, when I chose to have a baby while still in my allegedly fertile late-20s, all I could produce were the kind of clots sucked out during a D&C. I chose baby. Where was my baby?

I still don’t know. I mean, I know where my babies are. The end results of pregnancies No. 4 and No. 5 are now bounding preschoolers with scraped knees and very firm opinions about tomatoes (one for and one against). I am lucky among people who choose to reproduce in that I eventually got to. I would like to say that my son and daughter are the children always intended for me by some force that I don’t understand and probably don’t believe in; that those other pregnancies were just my real kids making RSVPs they couldn’t keep, but that’s just not how I feel. It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.

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The locusts became real to me one evening as a friend and I walked my dog Tova, our boots treading on the hard-frosted ground. She asks me how I’ll keep Tova from eating them.

“They’re canine delicacies,” she says with a laugh, driving her heel into the grass to make the crunch-crunch-crunch of snapped shells, teeth clicking shut. She describes a Biblical plague: Cicadas clustering on light poles and canopies; flying dumbly into car windshields, into people’s open mouths. They are prehistoric monsters muscling their way through the earth: fat-bellied locusts with hot coals for eyes.

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Case in point: Its hilarious “D.C. turns on Obama” piece last week, which marked the crest of Scandalmania and also helped explain polls that show Americans trust President Obama’s version of events when it comes to the Benghazi and IRS controversies. I expected polls to show people believe the president on these issues, but I’ll admit I was surprised to see his approval rating actually ticked up a bit despite the constant drumbeat of scandal. But it did -- and that should force the media to look in the mirror, though it probably won’t.

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How does a black president deliver 2013 Morehouse graduates realistic advice and a pep talk at the same time? How can he optimistically send them forth — with straight talk, or a straight face?

The average white family has about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families. The overall unemployment rate for whites is 6.7 percent, versus 13 percent for blacks, generally. The unemployment rate for black young adults ages 16 to 24 -- those outside the commencement halls -- is 25 percent, on par with Spanish- or Greek-level joblessness.

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Yeezy wouldn't have graced the set if he wasn't hawking a soon-to-be released LP. But his incendiary performance was peppered with damning truths: Angry and pointed condemnations of institutional racism and the prison industrial complex, which disproportionately jails young men of color to fill state budget holes and enrich private corporations.

In the final verse of "New Slaves," a track released Friday with the coordinated projection of a video on 66 buildings worldwide, and the second performance in his "SNL" set, West raps:

Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryn'a lock niggas up
They tryn'a make new slaves
See that's that private owned prison
Get your piece today

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We've been aware of Jackson for some years and while it's difficult to pick so few, here are 10 quotes from the conservative bishop to give you a sense of how he views the world.

1. On gay people: "Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex."

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The dog whistle quote came via NBC's “Meet the Press” Sunday from Peggy Noonan, who can no longer be taken seriously as a writer or pundit. When host David Gregory pressed her on the lack of evidence for her claims that the IRS scandal was worse than Watergate, Noonan insisted that the president “was giving a dog whistle to people who could launch this thing." The former Reagan-Bush speechwriter vividly summed up, in her thousand points of crazy style, where the IRS “scandal” went over the last few days: Obama didn’t need to order the tax agency to harass Tea Party groups (and his critics don’t need proof that he did so): his criticizing the group during the 2012 campaign, as well as blasting the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, represented an implicit order to do so.

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One night, while sipping wine in my apartment, we started adding items to the list of lascivious things we wanted to do together:

A shopping spree at a sex shop.
A threesome with another woman.
Sex clubs.
Light S&M.
Role playing.
Orgasm control.

I didn’t even know what “orgasm control” was. It sounded frightening.

“Anything else?” I asked.

There was one other thing Sophia wanted on our compendium of carnal delights: an open relationship. Sophia, who was openly bisexual, was convinced monogamy wasn’t for her, even though she’d never tried polyamory herself.

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Packer's inspiration, as he explains in the book's afternotes, was the "U.S.A." trilogy by John Dos Passos, three novels that use a third-person choral method to portray American life in the early 20th century. "The Unwinding," while nonfiction, is narrative rather than polemical or analytic. Each chapter is a story, or an installment in a story, about a person or place. Some of the subjects are famous (Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, Alice Waters) because such people, Packer writes, now "occupy the personal place of household gods, and they offer themselves as answers to the riddle of how to live a good or better life." But the key figures, the ones whose trajectories arc through the entire book like ribs or rafters, are unknowns: an African-American factory worker turned organizer in Ohio, a disillusioned lawyer who drifts from public service to finance and back again, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist with extreme libertarian beliefs and a scion of North Carolina tobacco farmers trying to make it as an entrepreneur. In the book's most bravura chapters, the city of Tampa, Fla. serves as yet another character.

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Of the 50 some new shows, a few of the most promising don’t even have trailers out for public consumption yet. (I’m talking to you, NBC’s “About a Boy” and “Crisis.”) Among those that do, there are many dude-centric sitcoms, many new re-imaginings of famous tales (Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, and even Ichabod Crane) and even one show that stars John Malkovich as a pirate. Watching all the trailers, I kept reminding myself that pilots are difficult to make and not necessarily indicative of the series to come. First episodes are sometimes better than what follows, but usually, thankfully, they are much worse, especially for comedies, which need to need time to clarify tone and character. I kept reminding myself of this because I had to: the new shows don't look very good. But in the spirit of optimism, here are the five series that I’m most excited about, and, in a slightly less generous spirit, the five shows that I’m most intrigued by, not necessarily for good reasons.

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Kieran’s father, 57-year-old Brian, had worked as a security guard in Lanarkshire, near Glasgow. The day after Christmas 2011, Brian had a stroke, which left him paralyzed on his left side, blind in one eye, and unable to speak. He could no longer continue working to support his family, so he signed up for disability income from the British government.

That government, in the hands of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron since the 2010 elections, would prove no friend to the McArdles. Cameron claimed that hundreds of thousands of Britons were cheating the government’s disability system. The Department for Work and Pensions begged to differ. It estimated that less than 1 percent of disability benefit funds went to people who were not genuinely disabled.

Still, Cameron proceeded to cut billions of pounds from welfare benefits including support for the disabled. To try to meet Cameron’s targets, the Department for Work and Pensions hired Atos, a private French “systems integration” firm. Atos billed the government £400 million to carry out medical evaluations of people receiving disability benefits.

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Karl didn’t appear on CNN, but he gave Kurtz a statement which is brazen and baffling.

Clearly, I regret the email was quoted incorrectly and I regret that it’s become a distraction from the story, which still entirely stands.  I should have been clearer about the attribution.  We updated our story immediately.

-Jonathan Karl, ABC News Chief White House Correspondent

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But on April 22, in the tiny village of Dongshigu in the eastern Shandong province, something happened that would eclipse the visit. Chen Guangcheng, a blind dissident lawyer-activist, managed to scale a high wall to escape the building where he had been under house arrest for two years. Chen broke his foot in the process, yet over the next several days, with the help of other activists, he managed to make his way four hundred miles to Beijing, where he was taken into the U.S. embassy. On April 27, when he was inside the embassy, a YouTube video was posted in which Chen informed Premier Wen Jiabao that he had escaped and demanding punishment for the local officials who had detained him.

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This is the question that state governments and federal agencies are faced with, ever since a surge of people who consider themselves "sovereign citizens" began acting on their belief that all aspects of law and government are illegitimate. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that in 2011 there were approximately 100,000 "hard-core" believers in sovereign citizen ideology, though it's a tough number to nail down because the movement is so disparate. For the same reason -- and because, by their nature, members of the movement don't believe in laws -- it's also tough to draft legislation to specifically target those crimes favored by sovereign citizens.

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"It looks like you're proposing," she joked.

"Would you like me to?" he asked.

She laughed. "Yeah."

"Do you want a ring?"

"Yeah."

He went into the other room and came back with a diamond. He slid the family heirloom onto her finger before she even got up from the toilet. They're now happily married and it's a cherished story that they share "more frequently than is appropriate," she says.

After I wrote about my own non-traditional proposal last week, people started sharing their own stories, like the toilet engagement above, with me. I couldn't get enough, so I started asking around for more. I was delighted to find that my feminism -- and basic critical thinking skills -- hadn't entirely inured me to romance. These stories of pragmatism, awkwardness and foiled plans were more enchanting than any viral YouTube proposal -- at least according to my warped sensibility. The traditional male proposal may still hold strong, as I wrote last week, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going against the ring-in-the-champagne grain -- or at least embracing the sweetness of imperfection.

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My high school class and I moved like a school of fish: we graduates were capable of going off on our own, in whatever direction we chose, but something demanded we all swim as one, curving, cutting, sashaying together, wiggling our way to college. Except for a few miscreants, we all ended up in college.

In high school, if someone asked me what my “plans” were, I’d click into brainwashed robot mode: my body would become rigid, my pupils would dilate, and in a monotone, I’d recite, “I-will-go-to-the-best-college-I-can-get-into. No-matter-the-cost.” At some point, I’d convinced myself that going to college was what I really wanted to do. So I went to Alfred University, a pricey private college in southern New York. My first year at Alfred would cost me $18,450. Later, I would transfer to a cheaper state school, and my total price tag for higher education: $32,000.

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Semantic infiltration means one undermines one’s own position in negotiations by adopting unknowingly the terms which the adversary “infiltrates.”

As a conservative, Ikle drew most of his examples of semantic infiltration from liberal usages that became mainstream, like “affirmative action” for race- or gender-based preference policies. But in recent years, it is arguably the center-left that has suffered the most from the successful semantic infiltration of public discourse by loaded conservative terminology.

Witness the two terms “the welfare state” and “entitlements.” The right has managed to turn “welfare state,” once a neutral description for a modern system of economic security for individuals, into a pejorative phrase.

An even greater triumph of semantic infiltration by the right has been the universal use of the term “entitlements.” As used by conservatives and liberals alike, “entitlements” usually refers to three social insurance programs — two of them universal (Social Security and Medicare) and one means-tested (Medicaid).

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The reason is simple. Any increase in the supply or job mobility of willing workers will tend to benefit Capital at the expense of Labor, stifling any growth in working-class wages, especially given our high unemployment rates. The last 40 years have seen a huge increase in immigration, and it is hardly coincidental that median American wages have been stagnant or declining throughout most of this same period. A large boost in the minimum wage, perhaps to $12 an hour or more, would be the best means of reversing our current economic race to the bottom.

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What was so special about Jack?

Nothing, it turns out. What was so special, instead, was me — me and my autism. The connection between my autism and my poor athletic performance is pretty obvious in retrospect. At the time, though, I didn’t see it. Not until I was in my forties and I had the brain scan showing that my cerebellum — the part of the brain that helps control motor coordination — is 20 percent smaller than normal did I put two and two together. Now it all made sense! I couldn’t keep my skis together without falling because —

Because what? Because I’m autistic? Or because I have a small cerebellum?

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