In the piece, Kahn compares psychopathy to autism, not because the two disorders are similar in their manifestation, but because psychologists believe they're both neurological disorders, i.e. based in the brain and really something that the sufferer can't help. This caused me to note on Twitter that even though the conditions are similar in this way, autism garners sympathy and psychopathy doesn't. In fact, most social discourse around psychopathy is still demonizing and utterly unsympathetic to the parents, who are often blamed for the condition. It struck me as an interesting logic hole in our cultural narrative around mental illness, since the usual assumption is that sympathy for mental illness is directly correlated with inability to control your problems. Psychopaths give lie to that narrative. Turns out that we sympathize more with austistic people than psychopaths because we feel empathy for the struggles of autism, but psychopaths just make us angry. There's no logic or rationality in play, just pure emotional reasoning, and the parents of psychopaths are the victims.

Assuming that psychopathy is a hardwired developmental disorder, we should feel great sympathy for the parents of psychopaths. If psychopathy is hardwired, it's not their fault their kids are unable to feel empathy.

Kahn's story makes it clear how horribly these parents suffer. Their children are manipulative, violent, and potentially dangerous. As long as they live, these parents will have to defend themselves against the predations of their offspring and worry that their kid is going to hurt other people. Kahn follows one couple whose psychopathic son keeps threatening his younger brother's life. They suspect their son has a horrible defect that will destroy their family, but they can't kick him out, because that's not what families do. To add to their burdens, society blames the parents for their son's condition.

Still, it doesn't make much sense to feel sorry for psychopaths themselves. They're not suffering. As Kahn explains, psychopaths are virtually immune to emotional pain and anxiety, and insensitive to punishment in general. Normal children feel anxious when they disappoint their parents, and therefore they have a built-in incentive to behave better. Psychopaths don't care:

In some children, [Callous-Unemotional] traits manifest in obvious ways. Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans who has studied risk factors for psychopathy in children for two decades, described one boy who used a knife to cut off the tail of the family cat bit by bit, over a period of weeks. The boy was proud of the serial amputations, which his parents initially failed to notice. “When we talked about it, he was very straightforward,” Frick recalls. “He said: ‘I want to be a scientist, and I was experimenting. I wanted to see how the cat would react.’” [NYT]

Many experts believe that psychopathy is a hardwired developmental disorder, like autism. Alike in hardwiredness, of course, not symptoms. People with autism have trouble reading other minds and sifting sensory information. Whereas, psychopaths can make very astute guesses about what other people are thinking and feeling, and they have no compunction about using these insights to prey on others because they lack empathy.

Psychologists have attempted to cure psychopaths before, only to realize that so-called anti-psychopathy training makes better psychopaths. Trying to teach adult psychopaths about empathy just makes them better manipulators.

Kahn writes about a new generation of psychologists who are focused on early intervention with budding psychopaths. One researcher runs a summer program for callous unemotional kids. The results sound decidedly discouraging:

The brilliant nutrition scientist Marion Nestle answers a reader's questions about red slime in her montly Q&A column:

Q: I had no idea that the tuna in my sushi roll was scraped off the bones in India, ground up, frozen, and shipped to California. Is this another "slime" product? Can I eat it raw?

A: No sooner did the furor over lean, finely textured beef (a.k.a. "pink slime") die down than we have another one over sushi tuna. On April 13, the Food and Drug Administration said Moon Marine USA, an importing company based in Cupertino, was voluntarily recalling 30 tons of frozen raw ground yellowfin tuna, packaged as Nakaochi scrape.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigations linked consumption of Nakaochi scrape sushi to about 250 diagnosed cases and an estimated 6,000 or so undiagnosed cases of illness caused by two rare strains of salmonella. Among the victims who were interviewed, more than 80 percent said they ate spicy tuna sushi rolls purchased in grocery stores or restaurants. [Emphasis added.]

Nestle doesn't call it red slime, but I've eaten enough sketchy sushi to recognize the stuff. My advice? Steer clear of chopped and "spicy" rolls, unless you watch the chef chop the fish.

I was reminded of this fable by Naomi Schaefer Riley's op/ed in the Wall Street Journal. Schaefer Riley was fired from her blogging gig at the Chronicle of Higher Education for singling out three African American studies dissertation titles for ridicule. She argued that these dissertation titles proved why the entire discipline of African American studies should be purged from the academy.

Schaefer Riley admits that she hadn't read these dissertations, but she had no compunctions about assailing the work of three grad students by name.

Note that academics read the Chronicle the way that New York media types read Gawker. Being called a disgrace to your discipline in the CHE is a crushing blow for a young scholar. I mean, consider the source, but still....

Chen, a blind self-taught lawyer, is famous for his fight to stop local officials from carrying out illegal forced abortions. He is a former prisoner of conscience whose story should inspire us all, regardless of stance on abortion. His struggle doesn't map neatly onto the U.S. abortion debate.

Like all his sessions, it was off the record — students are not supposed to talk about it outside class — because General McChrystal wanders into anecdotes about sensitive operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. [NYT]

If McChrystal's opinions are really that sensitive, he shouldn't be sharing them with a room full of university students. Academic freedom gives instructors broad leeway to discuss controversial issues. Yale should be inviting provocative instructors.

However, professors, and the institutions that employ them, should also be accountable for what they teach. The Yale community has a right to know, broadly speaking, what's being taught for Yale credit. No one would object to a policy of "Please no livetweeting lectures and don't give interviews without permission" but a blanket ban on discussing the course is an affront to the values of a university.

If you want to learn more about denialism in general, and Heartland in particular, check out these excellent books on global warming denialism.

• The Inquisition of Climate Science by James Lawrence Powell.
• Merchants of Doubt by Natalie Oreskes and Eric Conway.
• Climate Coverup by James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore

This book isn't about climate change, but it's a classic work on corporate denialism on issues ranging from tobacco, to lead paint, and asbestos:

• Doubt is Their Product by David Michaels.

Over the course of a few days, he revealed himself to be the most vicious, abusive, misogynistic, back-biting piece of shit I have ever met in my life. (and after 30 years in the restaurant business, that’s saying something). I’m hardly the nicest or most polite guy in the world. But even I was shocked. When not shouting profanities at the chefs, bursting into noisy and prolonged bouts of flatulence during the traditional tea ceremony, insulting and belligerently interfering with my crew by petulantly flashing his cell phone camera directly into their eyes while they were working (“I’m a journalist! I’m allowed!”), this guy was drinking himself stupid. It was only through their infinite mercy—and perhaps no small amount of pity for this elderly and shambolic creature, that my crew did not punch his face in. They were sorely tempted. Anyone who attended the event will surely recognize which particular steaming dribble of ordure I’m talking about.

Via Eater.

This kind of thing is the Platonic form of limousine liberal idiocy. Memo to Chief Judge Lippman: not having a lawyer is approximately item #714 on the list of what the average poor person in New York would spend money on if that person had extra money to spend. Here’s a thought experiment: Give 100 poor New York families $10,000 cash each. How much of that one million dollar bounty is going to get spent on legal services? Practically nothing, that’s how much.

You have to be pretty rich in this country before you start thinking of legal services as necessities rather than luxuries. Another thought experiment: how much money have you, dear reader, ever spent on legal services? If you are broadly speaking middle class the answer is more probably than not “nothing.” This is why lawyers who don’t work for rich people or corporations or the government are slowly or not so slowly going broke: because ordinary people, let alone poor ones, generally don’t employ professional legal services except in very limited circumstances (some but not most divorces, bankruptcies, arrests for  minor but not too minor crimes. principally DUI).

If the people who control entry into the New York bar are so concerned about helping poor people, it would be far better to simply require members of the bar to give poor people money, rather than offering them free legal services, which most poor people at most times will find, in comparison to various far more pressing needs — food, shelter, clothes, transportation, medical care etc. — about as useful as an annotated copy of Finnegans Wake. (This isn’t meant to deny that some poor people will sometimes be in desperate need of legal representation, but rather to emphasize that the problems of the poor are largely a function of not having money, rather than of not having access to the legal process. For example, people are usually evicted from their homes because they can’t pay the rent, not because their legal rights are being violated,  since in this country you have no legal right not to be forced to live on the street). [Emphases added.]

If Herzog can convince us that it's wrong for the State of Texas to kill Michael Perry, he will have produced a powerful argument against the death penalty. He doesn't make it easy for himself.

Michael Perry and Burkett, both aged 19, shot a 50-year-old woman, the mother of one of their friends, in order to steal her Camaro. After dumping her body in a nearby lake, Perry and Burkett lured their victim's son and his friend into the woods and shot them to get their hands on the clicker that would get them back into the gated community where they'd left the Camaro.  

Perry confessed and DNA evidence put him at the crime scene. Perry was sentenced to death and Burkett to life prison. As far as we know, they got fair trials.

In his interviews with Herzog, Perry seems intelligent enough and no crazier than you'd expect a person to be eight days before his execution. He is eerily childlike in appearance and demeanor, giggling as the guards take him into the glass box to talk to Herzog. He's now 28 but he still looks 18. His pupils are improbably large. Perry jokes that Herzog had better get out of the state of Texas before they kill him too. He's joking, but for a second, you can feel the menace behind the joke. 

The Department of Labor reported Wednesday that 4,690 U.S. workers suffered fatal injuries in 2010, a 3 percent increase from 2009.

The higher number in part reflects a string of high-profile disasters in 2010: An explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia that killed 29; BP’s Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, which killed 11; and a blast at the Tesoro Corp.’s oil refinery in Washington State that killed seven.

Even discounting the 47 deaths from those three events, the toll rose in 2010. In 2009, 4,551 workers died, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There has been little progress in reducing the number of work fatalities over the past several years, according to an expert from the AFL-CIO.

Dr. Adam Ostrzenski's claim is suprisingly flimsy. He found the mysterious anatomical structure that looks like a cluster of grapes in a single cadaver. We don't know what kind of tissue the doctor, who normally practices "cosmetic gynecology," may have uncovered. It might not even have nerve endings, in which case, it would be an implausible candidate for a magical orgasm switch. Moreover, we don't know anything about the sex life of the deceased woman. For all we know, she never had a "g-spot" orgasm. Ostrzenski found something he didn't recognize during an autopsy and pronounced it the g-spot without doing further tests to establish what it is, or what it does.

Why is this lame case study making national news? Probably because it's news that some people really want to hear. The g-spot is supposed to be something in (or on) the front wall of the vagina that causes orgasms. Over the years, various organs and structures have been touted as the anatomical basis for the g-spot, but none have been conclusively linked to sexual pleasure. Orgasms are idiosyncratic. You can find people who get off on virtually any kind of stimulation. In order to establish something as the g-spot, it would have to be correlated with sexual function in a large population of women.

Here's what we do know: Some women enjoy having the front walls of their vaginas stimulated and some have orgasms this way.

That night Stewart and the sheriffs would attend an "ice-cream speakeasy" hosted by several Raw Milk Freedom Riders--mothers who practice civil disobedience by crossing state lines with raw milk--featuring product that had been criminally transpored from California.

Richard Mack, the man behind the Constitutional Sheriffs Convention, told Goodyear, without apparent irony: "To me, [raw milk] is the new civil rights. It's Rosa Parks."

Rather than enlist some dude to pretend he's an authority on What All Dudes Think, or put a professional writer/critic on the case, we've asked writer Foster Kamer to search far and wide for men in show's target demographic, who watch Girls, who do not hate it, and who have thoughts about it. This week's interviewee is a man who we'll call Hank. He's 27, in Brooklyn (of course), and is a line cook.

Foster Kamer interviews an anonymous 27-year-old line cook from Brooklyn. This may be the first time in the history of journalism that a publication has granted anonymity for TV criticism. Why? Because it's so shameful for a man to admit that he watches a show about women?

[KAMER] Jessa ends up going to a bar before her abortion appointment, and hooking up with a guy in the bathroom. He puts his hand in her pants, and asks, "Like this?" to which she responds, "Don't ever ask me that again." Sound familiar?



["MR. COOK"] Of course.



[KAMER] And asking can sometimes be a turnoff.

["MR. COOK"] 
It's not that you can't ask for things, it's just that you can't ask for all the things. Some implicit knowledge should be expected. That's not to say you can't find out by asking, but you have to have some moves. Nobody wants to be with someone with no moves. By the time you're our age, sex is one of those "if you ask how you're supposed to be doing it, you're doing it wrong" kind of situations, but sometimes, you can't help but ask. That doesn't mean you can't express to someone the things you like — or don't like — it's just not something that you want to hyperscrutinize.

The first hypothesis is that Americans have become more cynical across the board. Rosen notes that Americans' trust in the church, the banks, the public schools, and the presidency also plummeted during the same period.

Rosen sees a paradox: Americans learn about the failures of other instutitions through the media. So, you'd think that confidence in the press would go up as the media exposed more social rot.

I'm not sure there's a paradox. The biggest failure of the press in recent memory was the uncritical coverage of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The press credulously reported the Bush administration's version of events. Sure, the media eventually reported that no WMDs had been found, but that revelation didn't inspire confidence in the government or the media.

"I'm not sure about these cookies," Romney said at one point, eyeing a plate of cookies on the table as if they were covered in human excrement. "They don't — they don't look like you made them." He turned to the woman next to him. "You didn't, did you?" [NYMag]

Everyone knows the most delicious cookies are made with the unpaid labor of a high-status woman:

Missing from the equation is skepticism about the self-interested role of political insiders and campaign consultants in ballyhooing the merits of unlimited campaign spending. Good reporters would not be swayed if prominent Realtors trumpeted the benefits of home ownership over renting, but there is a long tradition of glossing over the built-in bias of campaign ad-makers and strategists when they prophesize doom if candidates fail to raise more money to pay for their services.

[...]

As admirable as all the efforts by the political press corps and foundation-backed groups to chart the sources of campaign donations may be, that is only half of the double-entry bookkeeping side of the ledger. What is missing is an equal curiosity about where campaign funds are going and who is profiting from all the spending. The fall presidential election campaigns will be a $2 billion business—and that alone should invite some long overdue press scrutiny of the inner workings of Politics Inc.

The Republican presidential candidate is sporting a small bandage on his finger after getting nipped by a small penguin during his tour of the zoo on Friday. Gingrich was in St. Louis to speak during the National Rifle Association's annual meeting.

During his visit to the popular zoo in Forest Park, he was treated to a behind-the-scenes visit with two Magellanic penguins. One of them nipped Gingrich on the finger. [HuffPo]

She leads with the observation that 50 Shades of Grey, a BDSM-inflected fanfic series that retells the love story of Edward and Bella from Twilight, is selling really well these days. That's true, but a skeptical reader might ask why these books represent a departure from your standard "bodice ripper" romance novels, which have been popular since the dawn of the publishing industry, and which have always been big on female submission and male dominance. Roiphe doesn't appear to have done any research in trends in the romance genre.

On to point Roiphe's second point. We know women are getting more submissive as they become more powerful beause of...HBO's new series "Girls":

The current vogue for domination is not confined to surreptitious iPad reading: in Lena Dunham’s acclaimed new series, Girls, about 20-somethings adrift in New York City, a similar desire for sexual submission has already emerged as a theme. The heroine’s pale hipsterish ersatz boyfriend jokes, “You modern career women, I know what you like ...” and his idea, however awkwardly enacted, is that they like to be dominated. He says things like “You should never be anyone’s ... slave, except mine,” and calls down from a window: “If you come up I’m going to tie you up and keep you here for three days. I’m just in that kind of mood.” She comes back from seeing him with bruises and sheepishly tells her gay college boyfriend at a bar, “I am seeing this guy and sometimes I let him hit me on the side of my body.”

This doesn't prove that today's women have a newly insatiable appetite for being dominated. The sex in the pilot episode isn't supposed to be titilating for the audience at all. The show's director, Lena Dunham, has said in numerous interviews that she's making fun of inexperienced guys who fall back on porn patter because it's all they know.

Fans of HBO's The Wire will enjoy Erlend Lavik's in-depth visual essay, "Style in The Wire." Lavik argues that critics have unfairly dismissed the beloved urban crime drama as visually artless.

Lavik argues that, unlike a lot of prestige TV shows, The Wire is admirably restrained in its visual storytelling and therefore more effective.

Documentary filmmaking is a major influence on the look of The Wire, particularly the work of Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman is famous for his films exploring public institutions like welfare offices, high schools, and a hospital for the criminally insane.

Farmers and ranchers will for the first time be required to get a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and other animals, federal food regulators announced on Wednesday. Officials hope the move will slow the indiscriminate use of the drugs, which has made them increasingly ineffective in humans.

The Food and Drug Administration has been taking small steps to try to curb the use of antibiotics on farms, but federal officials said that requiring prescriptions would lead to meaningful reductions in the agricultural use of antibiotics, which are given to promote animal growth. The drug resistance that has developed from that practice has been a growing problem for years and has rendered a number of antibiotics used in humans less and less effective, with deadly consequences. [NYT]

It defied logic that any farmer should be allowed to buy antibiotics in bulk that people need prescriptions to obtain. Antibiotic resistant bacteria don't know if they're being grown in a pig or a person.

The new rule is are an important step towards combatting antibiotic resistance.

We’re surrounded by fantasies and phantasms of press power, blinded by the liberal dream of the fourth estate and its evil doppelganger, the specter of media control. The impact of the media turns out to be much less and much more than these visions allow.

Shaya argues that the press is actually much less influential than most people assume. His main point seems to be that the press isn't influential enough to qualify as one of the great Estates of society, on par with a branch of government.

It all depends on what you mean by power. Shaya notes that it is difficult to measure the impact of media coverage on public opinion. True. But then again, virtually everything we know about the workings of our government comes from media reports. When was the last time you checked the Federal Register?

It's not clear how much the tone of media coverage affects public opinion about, say, the Affordable Care Act. Yet, virtually everything we know about the ACA comes from media reports. Scrutiny itself is a check on power. Politicians and public officials are constantly thinking about how their decisions will play in the press. That's not the kind of power that a news outlet can wield to make people vote a certain way, but scrutiny, or the possiblity of scrutiny, is an important structural check on all kinds of power.

Shaya cites Watergate as an example of the myth of the Fourth Estate. Woodward and Bernstein didn't single-handedly bring down Richard Nixon:

The piece leads with the revelation that Wallace's childhood nickname was "Chinky," which pretty much sets the tone for what follows.

Here's what the uncredited author has to say about Wallace's depression:

But Wallace had long suffered from depression, perhaps thanks in part to his overbearing and chronically depressed mother. He kept it a secret, but things worsened in 1984 when Gen. William Westmoreland filed a $120 million libel suit against CBS. Wallace alleged in a story that Westmoreland had altered intelligence reports and understated the strength of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War. After years of seeming infallibility at the top, there was growing opinion that maybe Wallace’s “Gotcha!” journalism was going too far, and he was simply reading a predetermined script. Wallace started to doubt himself, and sank into a deep depression. [Emphases added.]

The Westmoreland case generated a backlash against Wallace, but what the story doesn't tell you is that CBS demolished Westmoreland's case at trial. When Westmoreland realized that he was about to lose, he reached a last-minute settlement with CBS to dismiss the case without payment, retraction or apology from the network.

The paragraph about Wallace's suicide attempt is unsourced speculation about how he may have just wanted attention when he put himself in that coma:

As hellholes go, there are few worse places in America than the Orleans Parish Prison.

New Orleans' teeming city jail first hit the radar of most Americans following Hurricane Katrina, when thousands of inmates were abandoned for days in flooded cells without food, water, ventilation, or electricity—some of them "standing in sewage-tainted water up to their chests," according to the ACLU. But OPP’s problems did not begin with Katrina, nor end in the storm's wake, when prisoners were shipped back to the jail's surviving buildings. [Mother Jones]

The lawsuit alleges that rapes, sexual assaults, and beatings are commonplace inside OPP:

"It's just complete lawlessness in there," Katie Schwartzmann, the SPLC attorney representing the prisoners, told us in an interview. "The place is full of knives. There are tons of assaults, beatings."

"Look at their hospital transport list," she continues. "For the month of February alone, they had 23 emergency room transports for lacerations, fractures—and that's just the stuff they had to send people to the hospital for. That doesn't even count the stuff they have to handle at their infirmary."

Prison rape is a major problem throughout the U.S. prison system. In 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that an estimated 88,500 inmates had been sexually victimized between 2008 and 2009.

Max is a self-described "fratirist" (fratboy humorist) whose trademark is over-the-top misogyny. Here are some quotes from his latest book, Hilarity Ensues. Lest you think I'm cherry picking, these are among the quotes he chose to showcase on his own website:

-“There is a girl lying next to me on the bed, shaking me, saying something. She is not happy. She is also not skinny. Or attractive. She may not even be human.”

-“I know this really sexy move you can do with your mouth. It’s called ‘shutting the fuck up.’”

Irin Carmon of Salon found some Tucker Max tweets about Planned Parenthood, which have since been deleted. The second one was from last month:

-“Planned Parenthood would be cooler if it was a giant flight of stairs, w/someone pushing girls down, like a water park slide #FF @PPact”

-“In South Florida. This place is awful. Shitty design, slutty whores & no culture, like a giant Planned Parenthood waiting room.”

As you might expect, Max is trying to blame Planned Parenthood for spurning him. Uptight feminist bitches too good to take his money, eh? Well, he'll show them!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Chris Hayes of MSNBC had a great segment on his Sunday show about the posthumous demonization of Trayvon Martin. Initially, it seemed like Martin's killing was remarkably non-polarizing. Pretty much everyone agreed that an unarmed 17-year-old boy had been gunned down by a vigilante, and that's all there was to say about it. It seemed odd to everyone that the cops let the shooter walk. Then, what Hayes calls the "Great American Polarization Machine" swung into action.

After an emotional 14-hour workday that included fist-fights between lobbyists and a walk-out by women Democrats, the Georgia House passed a Senate-approved bill Thursday night that criminalizes abortion after 20 weeks.

The bill, which does not contain rape or incest exemptions, is expected to receive a signature from Republican Gov. Nathan Deal.

Commonly referred to as the “fetal pain bill” by Georgian Republicans and as the “women as livestock bill” by everyone else, HB 954 garnered national attention this month when state Rep. Terry England (R-Auburn) compared pregnant women carrying stillborn fetuses to the cows and pigs on his farm. According to Rep. England and his warped thought process, if farmers have to “deliver calves, dead or alive,” then a woman carrying a dead fetus, or one not expected to survive, should have to carry it to term.

The bill as first proposed outlawed all abortions after 20 weeks under all circumstances. After negotiations with the Senate, the House passed a revised HB 954 that makes an exemption for “medically futile” pregnancies or those in which the woman’s life or health is threatened.

Roe guarantees a woman's constitutional right to an abortion up to 24 weeks, but Georgia legislators don't care. The constitution doesn't cover livestock. 

ABC News released exclusive video footage of George Zimmerman being led into the Sanford police station shortly after he shot Trayvon Martin. The police report claimed that Zimmerman had facial injuries, which he said Martin had inflicted on him during a struggle. Zimmerman's lawyer claimed his client's nose was bloodied and possibly broken.

Jesse Singal writes in the Daily Beast;

In the eyes of many, the story about how Zimmerman came to shoot Florida teen Trayvon Martin had taken a sharp turn into Zimmerman-friendly territory this week. “With a single punch,” the Orlando Sentinel reported Monday, “Trayvon Martin decked the Neighborhood Watch volunteer who eventually shot and killed the unarmed 17-year-old, then Trayvon climbed on top of George Zimmerman and slammed his head into the sidewalk, leaving him bloody and battered, law-enforcement authorities told” the paper.

No injuries to Zimmerman's face or to his shaved head are visible in the 1:27 clip. The video is shot from above and offers a clear view of the front and back of Zimmerman's head. The police report claimed that Zimmerman's back was wet, as if he had been lying on the ground, but his jacket doesn't look wet in the video.

The surveillance footage raises questions about whether the police participated in a coverup.

ABC News also obtained cell phone records that appear to corroborate Martin's girlfriend's claim that Trayvon was on the phone with her when he was shot.

Bravo to ABC for doing what the press is supposed to do in a democracy: Questioning the official versions of events.

He shared a story about one of the loudest abortion foes he ever encountered, a woman who stood year in and year out on a ladder, so that her head would be above other protesters’ as she shouted “murderer” at him and other doctors and “whore” at every woman who walked into the clinic.

One day she was missing. “I thought, ‘I hope she’s O.K.,’ ” he recalled. He walked into an examining room to find her there. She needed an abortion and had come to him because, she explained, he was a familiar face. After the procedure, she assured him she wasn’t like all those other women: loose, unprincipled.

She told him: “I don’t have the money for a baby right now. And my relationship isn’t where it should be.”

“Nothing like life,” he responded, “to teach you a little more.”

A week later, she was back on her ladder. [NTY]

For Cook, it's inconceivable that any self-respecting anti-choicer would go back to a clinic she picketed as a client: Why wouldn't she go to a different clinic? Why would she come back to protest?

Besides, Cook notes, there are lots of anecdotes online about abortion protesters who go back to get abortions at their old picketing haunts. So, his argument is that it can't be true because there are too many accounts of it happening? As a reproductive rights reporter, I've heard similar second-hand reports. They are indeed common.

I applaud Cook's dedication to critical thinking. We should maintain a high index of suspicion about dramatic stories that supposedly happened to a "friend of a friend" (or a friend of Frank Bruni's). But there's a big difference between a lightly sourced story and an anecdote that's self-evidently too good to be true.

One in four American women will have an abortion in her lifetime. Anti-choicers get unhappily pregnant, too. If Cook is shocked that rabid ideologues sometimes fail to practice what they preach, I'm here to revoke his Cynical Journalist Card.

Thanks to rabid anti-choicers, abortion access is starkly limited in many parts of the country. An anti-choice protester in New York could probably find a facility that she hadn't picketed. But an anti-choicer in Mississippi or North Dakota might not have the option.

If you need an abortion, and you've picketed the only clinic in your town, or your state, you may have to swallow your pride. When you do, the word will get out. It's the equivalent of showing up at the ER with a carrot in your urethra. Your personally identifiable information will remain private, but your case will become a legend.