This smells disgusting.

Hello lovelies. I hope your weekend was awesome. Mine was pretty rad. I got to see Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse Live! And much of Season 3 of Big Mouth. It was so warm one night we had a drink at Jones, which is not usually my scene but was outside and beautiful and absolutely perfect for the moment. My date and I discussed our worst political opinions and I never ran out of things to say.

Anyhoodle, to all my writer readers: My former boss and current friend and all-around amazing dude JP is running a blog about libertarian art/fiction/music/movies and is looking for guest bloggers. He’s an incredible editor and marketer so this is a great opportunity.

Despite being crazy busy at work I read a lot of great stuff last week.

This from the New Yorker one on small Georgia town’s murderous abusive boyfriend who’s also the grandson of the Sheriff (or someone important, some of the plot was a little hard-to-follow) and whose complete autonomy to do whatever he wants to women without consequence is actually a microcosm of small-town patriarchal authoritarianism throughout the country is really good.

This is a little good news. Apparently something called the Gun Trace Task Force scandal resulted in a trial where it was revealed that Baltimore cops were “planting guns and drugs, stealing drugs and money, selling drugs, making illegal arrests, and bringing false charges,” in the words of Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. And now she’s throwing out 790 the officers’ criminal cases. Who knows how many more should be thrown out. I’m sure they weren’t the only ones doing this. But it’s a step in the right direction.

But we have a LONG way to go. The guy who testified in the case where the Dallas Police officer shot her neighbor because she was drunk and entered the wrong apartment and thought he was a burglar and shot him to death is dead. He was shot in the back. The cop, Amber Guyger, was just convicted. This smells disgusting.

I have so many thoughts about this. Like, yes. This is just math. Fewer men are graduating from college than women and the gap is growing over time. Wages correlate strongly with education. Men’s wages in the bottom half are stagnant. Low-education men love Trump. I think this is most of why you’re seeing a decline in marriage among native-born Americans. It would be nice if the right would stop blaming liberals or gay culture or abortion or trans kids or pornography or any of their dumb boogeymen and realize that creating an economy that has very little use for a large percentage of the part of the population that’s supposed to earn enough money to support a family and then not offering any real safety net for them when they can’t is kind of cruel and insane. I’m not sure that sentence makes sense but trust believe it was written with a lot of emotion.

I have more to say on that but I’m exhausted. Thanks for being awesome. Smooches.