I don’t care what religious beliefs you hold. You can be a protestant or a Catholic, a Muslim or a Jew, Hindu or Buddhist, Sikh or Baháʼí, Taoist or Rastafari. Do the druidism thing or pray to Odin. Go old-school and get your Zoroastrianism on. Your beliefs are none of my business. And if your beliefs and mine don’t always align, that’s okay, too. We can debate if you want, or we can take our differences to the polling station and vote on how best to shape the future of society.

I can now tell you what I’ve been haunting Golgotha over: my wife is divorcing me.I wrote about it here, and included this statement, which she previewed and of which she approved: It pains me more than I can say to announce that my wife recently filed a petition of divor… ncG1vNJzZmiqn5mxs7HHnqlnq6WXwLWtwqRlnKedZL1wus5mpqedXZyytb%2BMqKytZZ%2Bbeqmx0Z5krqaSp7yssc0%3D

Something that has long puzzled me confounds me anew in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision against affirmative action. Immediately critics of the decision brought pressure against Harvard to end legacy admissions, on grounds that these preferences for children of alumni are no less anti-meritocratic than the racial preferences the court had just forbidden. The puzzle was and is that anyone ever would have thought otherwise. In particular, graduate schools and corporate recruiters of Harvard graduates must have realized that some who received a Harvard diploma wouldn’t have gotten into the university without that extra boost.

I turn 50 today. It feels like 30, but better. More landed. Less buzzy. I feel this milestone lends me a certain licence to write about aging. Some frame 50 as having passed a half-way peak. They position it somewhere on the decline down the other side. But that only sticks if you envisage existence as a linear bell curve. I don’t. I feel, as with so muc… ncG1vNJzZmirkaeuqcPIpaqopl6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6opWaspae7qrrGZp2inqSu

Two weeks ago, Slate published an essay from a woman I know about a paramilitary raid she went on with Operation Underground Railroad. OUR is an organization of self-proclaimed abolitionists fighting to save children from sex slavery. It was founded by Tim Ballard, an ex-DHS agent who’s been capitalizing on QAnon. It seems Mormon millionaire mediamongers stick together: Tim pitched OUR as a reality TV series to Glenn Beck. Tim’s upcoming biopic, an action movie called Sound of Freedom, stars Jim Caviezel.