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The Roundup Top Ten for July 29, 2022

Why "Life of the Mother" Exemptions Vanished From Abortion Restrictions

by Mary Ziegler

Exceptions to allow abortions to protect women's lives are popular. They are being eliminated from new abortion bans because the people pushing those bans distrust both women and doctors. 

"They Want Your Children!": Right-Wing School Panics Seek to Repeal Modernity

by Rick Perlstein

"Reactionary panics about what children learn in school are about as old as time. And they won’t ever go away."

Trump's Reelection Threatens a Politicized Civil Service

by Heather Cox Richardson

Since 1883, the federal civil service has been protected from the old spoils system by rules for merit-based hiring and promotion. Trump has threatened to revert to a system of rewards for loyalists and punishment for enemies, without regard for performing the public's business. 

Till's Accuser's Memoir Shows the Pandora's Box She Opened has Never Closed

by Peniel E. Joseph

"What does it say about America that we are still in search of justice for the victim of an almost 70-year-old crime that helped spark the modern civil rights movement?"

What Conservative Justices Get Wrong About the Founders

by Timothy C. Leech

It's preposterous to argue that the Founders, men of the Enlightenment generation, would have intended for the constitution they drafted to be immutable and unchanging. 

Can America Apply Lessons from HIV/AIDS Crisis to Deal with Monkeypox?

by Dan Royles

Public health debates on monkeypox need to look at the history of health messaging about HIV-AIDS to focus on communities of gay men currently at risk while avoiding triggering homophobic responses and stigma. 

The Irish Lesson: Abortion Bans Won't Stop Abortion

by Fintan O'Toole

The recently overturned Irish constitutional ban on abortion and the recent attack by conservative Americans on abortion rights have a common intellectual champion in Notre Dame's Charles E. Rice. The Irish learned the hard way what followed. 

Young Faculty Refusing the "Free Labor" Their Predecessors Performed Have Their Reasons

by John Warner

Faculty used to operate in a gift economy of unpaid labor supporting peer review, journal editing, and writing letters for tenure reviews. Now that institutions have withdrawn the possibility of that work being cashed in for job security, why should any faculty bother with it? 

What Does an Electric Makeover Mean for the Car of the Counterculture?

by Jill Lepore

The new electric VW bus seems to lack the charm of the vehicle of the counterculture, reflecting changes in technology and society. 

A Brief History of the Vatican and Western Canadian Missions

by Roberto Perin

"Residential schools and the papal bulls justifying the fallacious doctrine of discovery call out for concrete acts of atonement and reparation on the part of the church."