#remove interruptions

Republicans are obsessed with insuring that primary and secondary schools produce Republican voters—through a process of GOP political indoctrination drawing on Leninist methods. Jonathan Chait: Republicans have begun saying things about American schools that not long ago would have struck them as peculiar, even insane. 

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has called schools “a cesspool of Marxist indoctrination.” Former secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicts that “teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids,” will “take this republic down.” Against the backdrop of his party, Donald Trump, complaining about “pink-haired communists teaching our kids” and “Marxist maniacs and lunatics” running our universities, sounds practically calm.

More ominously, at every level of government, Republicans have begun to act on these beliefs. Over the past three years, legislators in 28 states have passed at least 71 bills controlling what teachers and students can say and do at school. A wave of library purges, subject-matter restrictions, and potential legal threats against educators has followed.

When writing about abortion, there’s a tendency to build a narrative around the most shocking scenarios — a patient who is denied the medication they need in the middle of a miscarriage or who discovers a fatal fetal anomaly late in pregnancy having no choice but to endure a stillbirth. Such stories illustrate the cruel fate that will befall some when the Supreme Court likely guts Roe v. Wade in June, but telling them doesn’t help an abortion seeker navigate getting the care they’ll need in a state set to legislate the procedure into oblivion. 

That’s why the Cut and New York have put together a directory allowing anyone in need to look up abortion services and practical support tailored to their needs as well as a guide explaining what to do if abortion is further restricted or banned in their state. As Irin Carmon writes in the introductory essay below, these resources are part of “a tradition of informal information sharing about how to end a pregnancy” that has “been kept alive by a network of grassroots organizers who not only were expecting Roe to fall but have already been working under barriers that belie this supposedly constitutional right.” The whisper network is now a shout: This magazine can help you get an abortion.

New York and Curbed recruited a team of designers and consultants, led by the architecture firm WXY, to approach the streets as a matrix of overlapping, interrelated networks. The allure of more humane cities has generated an entire library’s worth of plans and pilot projects, both top-down and grassroots, for areas like Downtown Brooklyn and Soho. A few years ago, a consortium of Harlem business and organizations collaborated on a plan to redesign East 125th Street. In 2019, the City Council passed a law requiring the Department of Transportation to develop a five-year citywide plan. But this torrent of good intentions and expertise has fragmented the issue further by producing more schemes to ignore, postpone, and gripe about. Most New Yorkers’ concerns are exquisitely parochial: The only time a Bronxite is likely to care about, say, the width of Soho’s sidewalks is if it makes parking there even worse.

Before: 1. The bus can’t move until the truck does, the truck can’t move until the crosstown car gets through the red light, and the car can’t move until pedestrians are done crossing. 2. Restaurant shed + tree + scaffolding = please step into oncoming traffic. 3. An intrepid cyclist is boxed in by construction, a double-parked van, and a bus pulling into traffic. 4. Streetery bumper cars. 5. You’d have to be suicidal to ride in the street here. 6. Hope nobody needs that hydrant. 7. The way to hail a cab is by standing where it can hit you. 8. Every trash can is different and in a different spot. 9. Disappearing curb. 10. No audible signals for people who are blind or have low vision. 11. Rough curb cuts suitable for high-clearance wheelchairs only. 12. The other side of the street is so far away. Photo-Illustration: nightnurse images

Let’s begin with an action scene: I was in midair, tumbling sideways, heading for the floor of the Columbus Circle subway station. Not a place I wanted to be. Where I wanted to be was on the downtown 1, five or ten yards away, doors standing open. I’d made this connection more than a thousand times, though usually getting off the 1, not on it. 

 This time, I was out of practice and I got it wrong. After stepping off the downtown B or C, I took the wrong stairway and had to double back to get over to the right side of the 1. When I climbed up the correct stairs, the stairs I used to fly down every morning, straight from the optimal train door on my precisely plotted commute, I saw the 1 arriving.