There is a position that over a billion women have given birth in. A position so normalized, so standard, so embedded in the hospital experience that most people assume it must be the most natural, medically optimal way to bring a child into the world.

It isn’t. And the history of how it became the default involves a voyeuristic king, the rise of male-dominated obstetrics, a new surgical instrument, and the slow disappearance of the midwife.

Louis XIV is often cited as the villain of this story. The reality is messier — and in some ways more troubling — than that.

The caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland asks the question with perfect indifference. He is sitting on a mushroom smoking a hookah and he could not be less impressed. Who are you?

It sounds simple. It is not.

Most people, if pressed, will eventually answer with their history. Their failures. Their worst moments. The things they have done that they cannot undo. In Christian circles this sometimes hardens into a kind of theological identity statement: I am a sinner. Which is true, as far as it goes. But it does not go nearly far enough, and when it is treated as a complete answer it produces a theology badly deformed at the root.

You’ve probably seen it on social media — a coworker’s Instagram post, a university’s flyer, a nonprofit’s tweet. “Wear denim today for Denim Day.” Maybe you’ve participated without knowing the full story. Maybe you’ve scrolled past it entirely.

Either way, the history behind Denim Day is one worth knowing. It begins in a courtroom in Italy, travels to the steps of a parliament building, crosses an ocean, and eventually becomes what Peace Over Violence describes as the longest-running sexual violence prevention and education campaign in history. It’s a story about injustice, outrage, and what happens when people refuse to stay silent.

In 1992, an 18-year-old Italian woman was sexually assaulted by her driving instructor during what should have been a routine lesson. He was convicted of rape. For years, it seemed like justice had been served.

We have confused performance with knowledge. This is not a new problem, but the internet has industrialized it.

A man called @professor_mike_ recently posted a gym mirror selfie wearing a t-shirt that reads Democrats Can’t Debate. He challenged Democrats to prove him wrong. Comedian Steve Hofstetter accepted, picked voting rights as the topic, and announced he would do no additional research — he’d go in on what he already knows.

June 9th. Tickets available. Live digital audience.

This is not an article about who to marry, or how to know when you’ve found the right person. Those are different questions — important ones — but they’re not this one.

This is about what happens before the question is even asked. The years of preparation, the quiet accumulation of effort and intention that precedes the ring, the dress, and the day itself. It’s about what those rituals were always supposed to represent — and what we lose when we stop taking the journey seriously.

It’s worth starting with a fact that surprises most people: the diamond engagement ring as a cultural institution is not ancient tradition. It’s a marketing campaign.

“Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice, or take the cloak of the widow as a pledge.” — Deuteronomy 24:17

“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” — Isaiah 1:17

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people.” — Isaiah 10:1–2

There is a particular kind of sermon that lands like a fist. You know the one. The preacher’s voice drops to gravel, the music swells ominously beneath him, and the message is clear: shape up, give, obey, submit — or burn.

It has been preached from ten thousand pulpits. It has driven people to their knees in terror and kept them there. It has filled offering plates and emptied the self-respect of generations of believers.

And if you take the Bible seriously — really seriously — it may be one of the most wicked things happening in American Christianity today.

There’s a meme going around — cynical, a little tired, but with a sharp edge that doesn’t dull no matter how many times you see it. It goes something like: food, clothing, and shelter aren’t free. Someone has to pay for it.

The implication being that this is simply the nature of things. Scarcity. Reality. The cold logic of the world.

But here’s the thing. In the right climate, with access to water, a fig tree can provide all three — and has, for thousands of years. This isn’t a universal solution. It’s a proof of possibility. And that proof is enough to ask the uncomfortable question: if survival without the market is possible even in principle, why is it systematically restricted, legally precarious, and in practice available only to those who can already afford to opt out?

Last week, a 77-year-old retired pastor named Clive Johnston stood outside a hospital in Northern Ireland, strummed a ukulele, preached John 3:16, and waited — patiently, politely — for the police to arrive.

They did. He was warned. He refused to leave. He accepted his summons with good cheer, thanked the officers for their courtesy, and went home.

He got more than a court date. He got Fox News. He got a U.S. State Department statement. He got a legal team, a PR apparatus, bodycam footage packaged for maximum virality, and a narrative that will outlast the verdict by years.

This piece is not a policy proposal.

It’s a physics argument.

The numbers below describe what the laws of nature permit — what becomes possible when you stop asking “what will the regulatory environment allow” and start asking “what does thermodynamics allow.” The gap between those two answers is the whole point.

There is a specific argument that gets made at family dinners, in church lobbies, and across social media with enough regularity that it has become a kind of ambient theology: that anyone who does not identify as a Christian is, in some meaningful sense, a pagan — and that pagans, by virtue of not fearing God, are on the wrong side of eternity.

The argument usually comes packaged with Romans 1: God’s existence is evident from creation, everyone knows it, and failure to acknowledge it is willful suppression. Case closed.

What the argument almost never includes is Romans 2, which opens: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.”

There is a simple test for whether a war is worth fighting.

Look at who isn’t fighting it.

If the people who declared it — or their children, their donors, their class — have found a way to sit it out, they have already told you everything you need to know. Not in words. In behavior. Revealed preference doesn’t lie.

There is a rule so universal that it appears, in some form, in virtually every moral and religious tradition humanity has ever produced. You likely already know it:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Or in its negative form: Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.

There’s a quote that floats around the internet like it’s ancient wisdom:

“A man with dreams needs a woman with vision.”

It gets shared with wedding photos. Printed on mugs. Cited on Goodreads as though someone important said it once, in a room full of people who immediately wrote it down.

This document examines each claim in the catechism against the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the recorded words of Jesus. The catechism was a real genre of instruction used to teach enslaved people to accept their bondage as divinely ordained. Brown includes it in Clotel to expose its theological corruption.

The catechism reproduced in Clotel belongs to a tradition of “slave catechisms” produced in the antebellum American South. These documents selectively cited, distorted, and invented scripture to construct a theology of racial slavery. What follows examines each major claim against the full witness of the biblical text.

The catechism’s defining move is this: it imposes obligations downward and removes them upward. It quotes every passage that can be made to require submission from the enslaved, and suppresses every passage that imposes corresponding obligations on the enslaver. That asymmetry is not a reading of scripture — it is a system imposed on it.

There’s a debate happening in writing communities about AI-generated prose, and it keeps talking past itself. That’s because it’s actually two different conversations at once — and the people having them have fundamentally different relationships to language.

One group are writers. For them, the struggle to find the right word is the point. The craft is inseparable from the meaning. The sentence is the thing. That’s a legitimate and serious relationship to language — and it produces work that couldn’t exist any other way.

The other group are storytellers — people who have something to say and need language to carry it. For them, the sentence is a vehicle. Clarity is the destination.

There’s a TikTok video making the rounds. A woman is talking about her birthday. She wanted a birthday cake with candles — that was her prompt to her husband. Simple. Festive. Exactly the kind of low-stakes creative latitude that should be a gift to receive.

He got her an alligator cake. Because their daughter likes alligators.

The comment that cut through all the noise in the replies:

There’s a video making the rounds on TikTok that you’ve probably seen by now. A girl finds out her boyfriend booked her on Spirit Airlines — didn’t tell her, just sent a confirmation number — and she’s giving the camera a look that could curdle milk. Side-eyeing him into next Tuesday. And then, like clockwork, another creator stitches in with the hot take: “But he’s flying you out. That’s amazing.”

It is not amazing. We need to talk about this.

First, let’s acknowledge what the “be grateful” crowd is actually saying. They’re saying that the gesture — the act of booking travel, the logistical effort of producing a confirmation number — is what matters. The thought counts. He thought of her. He wanted her there. Isn’t that enough?

AI isn’t replacing people in the abstract. It’s replacing specific people, in specific industries, right now. And if you look at which industries those are — commercial illustration, editorial art, character design, book cover painting, fan art — you’ll notice something. They skew heavily female. This piece is about that.

If you’re waiting for the piece about men, it may be coming. But we’re talking about women right now, because the women are the ones losing the work right now, and most of the people replacing them with AI tools know it and are doing it anyway.

To be clear about what this piece is not: it’s not an argument against people making a living. It’s not an argument against cottage industries, against self-published authors, against small creators using every tool available to survive in an economy that has never been particularly interested in their survival. People making a living is never the problem. Hoarded wealth is the problem. Indifference is the problem. Those are the things worth getting angry about — and they’re what this piece is actually about.

There is a kind of parent who does not think of themselves as withholding.

They think of themselves as fair. Consistent. Clear about expectations. They have a system, and the system works, and the fact that their child is sometimes upset by the system is not an indictment of the system — it is evidence that the child does not yet understand how the world operates. The parent is, in their own accounting, preparing the child for that world. Preparing them well. Getting nothing but grief for it.

This is the parent who operates on what we might call tit for tat logic: affection in exchange for compliance, attention in exchange for performance, validation in exchange for emotional regulation. The child learns quickly. They learn that the relationship has an exchange rate. And once you understand that a relationship has an exchange rate, you stop bringing it the things that can’t be priced.