I see someone posted this Rebecca Solnit essay yesterday, and someone else — Pilot Joe, I believe — sneered at it. Hmm, I wonder why? It made a lot of sense to me:

The common denominator of so many of the strange and troubling cultural narratives coming our way is a set of assumptions about who matters, whose story it is, who deserves the pity and the treats and the presumptions of innocence, the kid gloves and the red carpet, and ultimately the kingdom, the power, and the glory. You already know who. It’s white people in general and white men in particular, and especially white Protestant men, some of whom are apparently dismayed to find out that there is going to be, as your mom might have put it, sharing. The history of this country has been written as their story, and the news sometimes still tells it this way—one of the battles of our time is about who the story is about, who matters and who decides.

It is this population we are constantly asked to pay more attention to and forgive even when they hate us or seek to harm us. It is toward them we are all supposed to direct our empathy. The exhortations are everywhere. PBS News Hour featured a quiz by Charles Murray in March that asked “Do You Live in a Bubble?” The questions assumed that if you didn’t know people who drank cheap beer and drove pick-up trucks and worked in factories you lived in an elitist bubble. Among the questions: “Have you ever lived for at least a year in an American community with a population under 50,000 that is not part of a metropolitan area and is not where you went to college? Have you ever walked on a factory floor? Have you ever had a close friend who was an evangelical Christian?”

The quiz is essentially about whether you are in touch with working-class small-town white Christian America, as though everyone who’s not Joe the Plumber is Maurice the Elitist. We should know them, the logic goes; they do not need to know us. Less than 20 percent of Americans are white evangelicals, only slightly more than are Latino. Most Americans are urban. The quiz delivers, yet again, the message that the 80 percent of us who live in urban areas are not America, treats non-Protestant (including the quarter of this country that is Catholic) and non-white people as not America, treats many kinds of underpaid working people (salespeople, service workers, farmworkers) who are not male industrial workers as not America. More Americans work in museums than work in coal, but coalminers are treated as sacred beings owed huge subsidies and the sacrifice of the climate, and museum workers—well, no one is talking about their jobs as a totem of our national identity.

I’m perfectly willing to step into the shoes of Real America and see the world the way they do; I lived in Indiana for 20-damn years, and think that qualifies as pretty much the capital of Real America. But when was the last time any of these country mice were exhorted to do the same, to suck it up and get an Airbnb in the big city for a week, and take a look around? As Solnit rightly points out, most people in the U.S. live in its urban areas, because that’s where the jobs are. So why is it on us to understand them, but not vice versa? I ask you.

Alan and I drove over to Ann Arbor Tuesday afternoon, to see an installation Kate did for a final project in some interactive media class. It was interesting — a two-person curtained hut with a fabric panel down the middle, separating the occupants. Each person puts one hand on a set of sensors, and one person’s circuit controls music, the other’s lights. When they join their free hands through a hole in the dividing panel, the lights change colors, and if they touch one another in a different place, like an arm or head or whatever and don’t get any filthy ideas, even though the artist’s own mother referred to the opening in the panel as a “glory hole — when they touch in a different way, the lights change colors. It was an interesting exhibit, and in walking around the music building before and after, I spotted a couple of cultural markers that reliably drive at least some of my conservative acquaintances right up the wall. Like the restroom marked “non-gendered,” and even stuff like this:

(Yes, I’ve known conservatives who simply refused to recycle. Because freedom, dammit.)

It was such a…normal interlude. I didn’t see any pervs waiting around the non-gendered toilets to molest little girls, and if you wanted to pee with your own kind, the traditional M/F pair were right down the hall. Why is this stuff so threatening? Any of us can walk into a red-state truck stop, make our way past the MAGA merch to the lunch counter and eat eggs in peace. But I have a friend with a standard-issue Fox News-watching mother. Daughter told mother she and her husband were taking a long weekend in Chicago soon, and mother reacted as though she’d declared they were going to Syria for a little R’n’R.

“Are you sure that’s safe?” mom fretted, having fully swallowed the Fox picture of Chicago as a bullet-strewn battleground from the lake to the suburbs.

On the way home, we stopped at a Culver’s — a regional fast-food chain — for a bathroom break, and I decided to allow myself one of the few milkshakes I consume in a year. There was a video loop playing on a TV behind the counter, with the founder of the chain saying his restaurants wouldn’t be what they were without “family farmers.” Oh, really? How many “family” farms are left in this country, anyway? Five’ll get you 10 that business buys its dairy products from the lowest bidder, which in this part of the country is currently? Anyone?

Walmart.

The mega-retailer opened a 250,000-square-foot dairy operation in Fort Wayne, and it is steadily doing to the family dairy industry what Godzilla does to Tokyo. Of course, milk is dirt-cheap in the Midwest these days, for this very reason.

Real America ™ is circling the drain in many important ways, but they don’t get that the people stripping the wealth from its people are not, by and large, city slickers who don’t turn a hair at a non-gendered bathroom, but their “friends” from Bentonville and other red-state redoubts.

Of course, Hillary was on the Walmart board for a while, so it’s probably all her fault.

Anyway, that’s a good essay. You should read it.

Not much bloggage today, but this: The Toronto van killer is a real piece of work, and of course, part of the men’s rights movement, although admittedly, on its fringes. If he hates women so much, he’s going to the right place to process those feelings.

It’s almost Wednesday. Where do these days go? See you back here in 48 hours or so.

People, you get 32 minutes of my time tonight. “Westworld” starts in …31 minutes now, and I’m committed to enjoying a little more entertainment in the form of fictional stories on page and screen. It really helps me relax more than just scrolling Twitter all weekend.

Still, reality intrudes.

By the time you read this, the latest development in the Waffle House shooting in Tennessee will be old news — that the gunman was enough of known lunatic that he’d actually been disarmed by the police after he tried to enter the White House, then re-armed by his father, to whom police had given the guns. Y’all can discuss that along with every talking head on cable news, but what I found most striking about the story is this: That the hero, James Shaw Jr., the man who tackled and disarmed the shooter, was at the second Waffle House he’d visited in the wee hours. His first choice, the Bell Road Waffle House, was full. At 2:30 a.m. So he and his friend walked to the Murfreesboro Pike Waffle House, where the shooting occurred at 3:20 a.m.

The Waffle House: Where the South Goes to Sober Up.

Every member Most members of this family is are filth awful people.* *Edited to exclude children, from whom hope for change springs eternal. I mean, every last one of their lazy, lying asses. Today, it’s Ivana:

She, too, is “very sad” about (Donald Jr. and Vanessa’s) split, but thinks her son will be fine. “Donald Jr. is a good-looking guy. He is successful. He is not going to have a problem to find a girl,” she said. “Maybe Vanessa might have a little problem because she has five kids… who is going to date and marry the woman who has five children? Especially since she is young [40] and she might want to have more.”

Ivana, the story later notes, has been married and divorced four times.

We haven’t had an OID story for a while, but this one is pretty-pretty OID:

A 34-year-old man was shot in the face early Sunday morning during a home invasion on Detroit’s east side, but managed to hit the suspect in the head with a two-by-four, Detroit police say.

Officers arrested the suspect as he was receiving medical attention at an area hospital.

Shot in the face, but still manages to brain his assailant with a two-by-four, whom the police arrest while he’s seeking treatment. I was hoping the shot guy spit out the bullet and refused further medical attention, but no. Still. That’s pretty damn tough.

Time’s up! Westworld awaits. Enjoy your week ahead, all.

So I’m sitting here, wondering what’s become of my life, why I just ate that cheeseburger, if anything super-good is ever going to happen to me again — you know, just basic end-of-winter self-pity — when what sounded like the world’s biggest truck went down the street. Like, GEM of Egypt big. Wendy popped her head up, the beams creaked, and the truck rumbled on down and, from the sound of it, blew the stop sign on the corner.

Ten seconds later, I got a text from a friend who lives two miles away. “Did your house just shake?”

It wasn’t a truck. It was an earthquake. A 3.6, to be specific. Epicenter was just across the river.

So the moral of the story is: Don’t sit on the couch feeling blue, because even the earth under your feet isn’t permanent. We never get earthquakes here. Except when we do.

Interesting bloggage today.

Not bragging, but I caught this video in the first few seconds; Jordan Peele gets the speech rhythms, but not quite the voice. Still, it’s funny, and the surrounding post is a good lesson for the coming era of fake everything.

Just another stop on Sarah Palin’s ongoing slide into the melting permafrost of Alaska. Soon she’ll be selling time shares.

A lesson in American election law:

With little fanfare, federal regulators took steps two weeks ago to kill a super PAC supporting former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

The Federal Election Commission’s letter of “administrative termination”—the formal process by which it shuts down a group’s operations—received no media attention whatsoever.

That’s because the super PAC was a joke. Perhaps the name gave it away.

“Blaze It for Delegate Jill Stein” didn’t spend a single cent during the 2016 election. If that wasn’t proof of its less-than-serious intentions, consider its origins.

On September 30, 2016, Charlie Baker of South Orange, New Jersey, took out a piece of lined paper, with hole punches in it, and wrote a handwritten application to form the committee. He was 14-years-old, in the middle of an 8th grade social studies in which the teacher had divided students into camps representing various presidential candidates.

Finally, we didn’t see Stormy last night. It started to sleet around showtime, the cover was $20, and if we wanted to sit down, another $40. Fortunately, the News sent one of their best writers.

Enjoy the weekend, all.

I wish I could tell you the headline for this piece is about a new exercise habit, but no. We’ve been imprisoned for most of the weekend by the weather, which can’t even be called the typical late-winter Michigan sucker punch, as we’re nearly a month into spring AND THIS SHIT IS RIDICULOUS. If you live east of the Mississippi, chances are you are, too — the storm runs from Florida to the upper Midwest, and depending on your latitude, you can enjoy tornadoes, drenching rain, freezing rain, piles of snow, gusty winds, all of it.

We avoided the snow, but northern Michigan was buried. RainrainrainrainRAIN here all day Saturday, freezing rain overnight, then more RainrainrainrainRAIN all day Sunday. I should have gone to the Schvitz, but I baked bread and did laundry and read Laura Lippman’s newest via the Kindle app. The world’s critics speak as one: It’s very good. And I agree.

In between there was a wedding:

Josephine + Ian’s day was perfection. So, SO thankful for clients like these who become friends. Any couple that has a midday taco break is a-okay in my book. CONGRATS TO THE NEW MARRIED BABES! 🎉🤗

A post shared by Erin Hannum (@erinhannumphotography) on Apr 14, 2018 at 9:16pm PDT

The groom is on Alan’s staff, so I was the plus-one, although I’ve met the couple earlier. The bride is a flight attendant, and was the first to tell me about the emotional support turkey she flew with. I post the photo because I’m so impressed by their wedding photographer, even though I suspect she may have been inspired by this earlier execution:

A post shared by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Nov 16, 2014 at 7:27pm PST

But choosing the Detroit Public Library, and its magnificent murals, as a setting was pretty great. It bookended how the weekend started, with a screening of “Beauty and Ruin” at the DIA, part of the Freep Film Festival. It was very good, not perfect, but far from terrible, a documentary about the battle over the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts during the city’s bankruptcy.

In between reading a new mystery, dolling myself up for the wedding, kneading bread and scowling at my flooded street, of course I tried to keep up with the news from Washington. I read the Adam Davidson piece in the New Yorker that someone posted, and I wish I could agree with it, but let’s face it — too many false alarms. He concludes:

Of course Trump is raging and furious and terrified. Prosecutors are now looking at his core. Cohen was the key intermediary between the Trump family and its partners around the world; he was chief consigliere and dealmaker throughout its period of expansion into global partnerships with sketchy oligarchs. He wasn’t a slick politico who showed up for a few months. He knows everything, he recorded much of it, and now prosecutors will know it, too. It seems inevitable that much will be made public. We don’t know when. We don’t know the precise path the next few months will take. There will be resistance and denial and counterattacks. But it seems likely that, when we look back on this week, we will see it as a turning point. We are now in the end stages of the Trump Presidency.

We’ll see.

Onward to the week, eh?

Glad the new design is gaining some fans. J.C., he just does this stuff for fun. He texted me and asked if I was “prepared for the chaos that is a new design,” and I replied “pull the trigger” and the next thing you know? New look. Even Alan likes it. (He didn’t like the last iteration.) Springtime calls for a new look, so a new look it is. And Wednesday is his birthday! But I got the gift.

What shall we chat about today? Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen – no, wait. Something else.

Transgender athletes.

I’m particularly interested in hearing Sherri’s take on this, because her social-justice and powerlifting bona fides are sound.

You probably missed this story yesterday, about a trans woman’s effort to win weightlifting gold in Australia’s Commonwealth Games this week. (She didn’t. Injury.) But it started me thinking about all the nuances of transgenderism we still have to deal with, and athletics is a big one.

The story made reference to her testosterone levels being low enough to compete as a woman, and I know T is a big factor in muscular strength, but it’s hard for me to see how a champion male weightlifter isn’t still going to be the best in her weight class, post-transition, all else being equal. How could it not be? Hormones change a lot, but they can’t change everything. Men have more muscle, a different angle in their pelvises. This is one reason I flip right past vapid remarks on trans women’s fashion choices. Don’t tell me about Laverne Cox or Caitlyn Jenner and how great they look in gowns with a high slit; genetic men don’t get cellulite on their thighs. Don’t go on and on about her shoulders; I could lift weights nine hours a day and not get shoulders like that, because they’re the product of XY chromosomes, not work.

All of this is something we’re going to have to figure out if we’re going to fully integrate trans people into stuff like sporting contests. Don’t we?

Or is this just going to be yet another thing we wrestle over forever and ever, and have a big culture war, and end up hating one another even more afterward? I wouldn’t put money on either.

So, then: Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen Zuckerberg Cohen.

And happy birthday, J.C. Many more, because without you, this place closes up shop.

I don’t know what it is with me and the Friday post these last few weeks. No excuse, but it seems the weekend errands and chores have been intruding into my Fridays. Not this week, with an official day off on Good Friday for maybe the first time in my whole career. I celebrated by meeting a friend for breakfast, then moving to another place for a single bloody mary.

It was Opening Day, after all. (The real O.D. was rained out.) It’s like a rule that if you live in the Metro Detroit area, you have to consume at least a little alcohol.

Then home to clean bathrooms, and ended up meeting Alan at the Schvitz, doing another of their great one-off events: Steam, followed by “Eastern Promises” upstairs. We skipped the steam, but the movie was great, and if you saw it, you know why it was selected for that venue, right? It features a fantastically blocked and staged knife fight in a steam bath, with a buck-naked Viggo Mortensen up against two Chechen mobsters. No one does movie violence quite like David Cronenberg.

All in all, not a bad Friday. Saturday was consumed with preparation for Sunday. We took lunch down to Defiance. I got out the beautiful cut-glass deviled-egg plate my sister gave me a while back for its annual appearance. I wondered if it was worth risking chips and potential breakage, then thought eh, go for it. We drag the good china around our lives, and hardly ever use it. My recent philosophy: Use it. Use the good china. Your children won’t care if it comes to them with a chip or three.

Back to work tomorrow. In the meantime, some links for you guys to enjoy. Or not enjoy. Although mostly enjoy:

I haven’t seen “The Death of Stalin” yet, but I’m a big fan of Armando Iannucci, so of course I read this piece about how to do political satire in, um, this fraught moment:

But reality has jumped the shark right now, and any attempt to present a fictional version of today’s events would never be as crazy as the real thing. The truth — in Washington, London or Moscow — is much more demented than fiction, signaling a full-on existential crisis for the comedy writer. No showrunner in his or her right mind would make their sitcom president urge his press secretary to go out on Day 1 of his administration and change the laws of math. If a hapless Sean Spicer character on a TV comedy had to spin photos showing a half-empty Mall into proof of the biggest inauguration crowd ever assembled, ever, period, President Trump would tweet that it was “unwatchable.”

Unwatchable comedy has come to Britain, too. Last year, Prime Minister Theresa May stood before her party conference and had a coughing fit while the letters in the slogan “Building a country that works for everyone” started falling off the screen behind her. If that had been presented to me as a script idea, I would have rejected it as too childish. It would have been a step up in maturity if the writers then suggested that the remaining letters should form the word “butt.”

Funny catch phrases from 40 comedies. Most of which aren’t that funny, and from movies I haven’t seen, so pfft.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, please watch. I’m torn between believing these people are whores, actors or victims. Right now I’m at “whores,” but that will change.

Let’s charge into the week ahead. APRIL.

Most days, I don’t go around feelin’ all feministy. The older I get, the less touchy I get about things that some women are extremely touchy about. Please don’t misunderstand: I’m absolutely a feminist. But I’m taking a longer view, watching the arc bend toward justice, and trying to be more charitable toward the entire human race, not just women.

That makes no sense. But here’s where I’m going with it:

Even with this mellow outlook, I can still be prodded to incandescent heights of rage from time to time. This week was one of them. The catalysts, in order:

Larry Nassar’s boss. William Strampel, the former dean of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine, has been primarily known so far as the man who told the perp in the biggest institutional sex-abuse case in god-knows-how-long that he was doing a great job, and keep doin’ what you’re doin’. Which makes him look like a twit, but this week new charges were filed against him, and now he looks like another monster from the same mold:

Four women told investigators that, while they were medical students at MSU, Dr. William Derkey Strampel, 70 either sexually harassed or sexually assaulted them, court records say. The women said he made sexually inappropriate comments, groped them and appeared to offer them favorable treatment in exchange for sexual acts.

He also had plenty-plenty porn on his office computer. Police said many of the photos appeared to be of MSU students, likely the same medical students whose lives he was making miserable. If you read the story, Strampel comes across as a 70-year-old man who combines the arrogance of too many medical professionals with the sensibilities of the Mad Men era. He grabbed asses, eyed women up and down while they stood in front of him, and oh yeah he was a bully, too:

In 2011, a woman identified as Victim 2 fell asleep in class and Strampel summoned her to his office later. He told her not to sit down but to turn around twice so he could observe her body, she told police, before going on a rant degrading her body.

The woman told police Strampel told her she needed to dress sexier if she wanted to advance in her profession. The conversation lasted about an hour and Strampel never brought up a reason for the meeting.

For anyone likely to cut this guy slack because it’s a different era now or whatever, please consider that there’s probably no group in America who’s had more training on the subject of sexual harassment than academics. Which means this geezer just plain thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted and get away with it, more or less forever.

You wonder how people like Nassar get away with it for so long? It helps to have bosses like this.

Then the Atlantic hired Kevin Williamson.

You might know Williamson as a troll-y scribe for National Review, the conservative magazine. It’s safe to say that getting beamed up to the more mainstream Atlantic is a big career move. A few years ago, and not that many, Williamson got into a tweet-spat about abortion and the appropriate punishments for doing or having one. Unlike most right-to-lifers, who like to tell women they’re “the other victim” of the procedure, Williamson took off the gloves and got right to the point: Women who have abortions should be executed, he said. Painfully, perhaps by hanging.

He has deleted the tweets, but never retracted the statements. Women having a legal procedure he disapproves of should be executed painfully. That’s what Kevin Williamson said, and apparently still believes. So of course he’s working for a high-profile national magazine now.

Ask yourself how likely this would be if Williamson had expressed similar thoughts about African Americans, or any other group of people in this country. Ask yourself why this sort of statement is acceptable. If that’s too depressing, amuse yourself by considering, first, how common this belief is among virulent abortion opponents (it really is) and how much the very same people are clutching their pearls over some of the potty-mouthing coming from the Parkland kids. Oliver Willis puts it plainly:

the whole right-wing argument model relies on the left acting like the right's bullshit arguments are made in good faith and deserve a fair hearing. the parkland teens just viciously dismiss them and it makes them so mad. i love it.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) March 27, 2018

Jessica Valenti gets it:

How can you say that you want a workplace that values women when you hire someone who wants 25% of those women dead? How can you lead in a newsroom when your female subordinates now know that you consider their lives worth less than the clicks you’ll generate from a handful of articles?

I have had two abortions — one when I was younger and not ready to be a parent, another when I was a mother who desperately wanted more children but doing so could put my life at risk. I do not believe I should die because of this. I cannot believe that I need to write that sentence.

Any time I have written or spoken publicly my abortions, I have been threatened with death — and I’m far from alone. Women are terrorized about their reproductive decisions — whether it’s threats online or the increasingly frenzied violence against abortion providers and clinics. And, of course, it was just over two years ago that a shooter killed three people and injured nine others at a Colorado Planned Parenthood, screaming about “baby parts” — rhetoric directly taken from conservative writers.

By hiring Williamson, The Atlantic is sending a clear message: That the worst kind of harassment and intimidation women face — extremism that has been directly linked to real life violence — is acceptable. And that it’s more valuable to the magazine than the women who read it or work at there.

Yup. So right now I’m feeling real feministy. How do you feel?

I wasn’t able to watch the march Saturday — cut the cable cord and only regret it two or three times a year — but I saw a few snippets on the gym TVs, and stayed on the treadmill a few extra minutes to take them in. It was a remarkable spectacle, I’m sure we’d all agree. Even more remarkable is the response to it from the other side, who are seemingly having a competition to see who can say the stupidest thing, from stocking classrooms with buckets of rocks to chiding students for not taking CPR classes to the too-numerous-to-count “sit down kids and listen to your elders” stuff.

That’s how you know you’re winning. That, and when Rod Dreher clutches his pearls and calls you Robespierre.

Kids, rock on. This is their fear talking.

I did some thinking on the treadmill (but just a few extra minutes of it). I once used to say things like, “America has made its bloody bed, and now it has to lie in it.” But I’ve come around to the more hopeful idea that something is better than nothing, and to do nothing because no one thing will solve the problem is a lazy and cynical position. In my lifetime — hell, just in the middle-aged portion of my lifetime — we’ve seen sea changes on smoking and homosexuality. Why not guns? So I’m choosing optimism. This just feels different.

Also, the graphics are pretty great:

Dahlia Lithwick on the march, too. Not-a-spoiler alert: This was not the work of George Soros.

Still cold here, insultingly so. I was going to take a walk to the bakery this morning, until I checked the temperature: 22 degrees. Newp. And that’s why we had stale bread at breakfast.

I have believed this for a long time, but it’s good to see I’m not alone:

You wouldn’t want to be operated on by a physician with only a few surgeries under his or her belt, and the assurance that this doctor brought a fresh perspective to anesthesia and incisions wouldn’t thrill you.

You would choose a pilot who had flown 999 flights over one with nine, and you would want your child’s teacher to be practiced with pupils, not merely a vessel of great enthusiasm.

So why the romance with candidates who have never done a stitch of government work before?

That’s Frank Bruni about the gubernatorial candidacy of Cynthia Nixon, but it could be me watching campaign ad after campaign ad by people promising to “run government like a business” and yelling at the screen, “But government isn’t a business, you twit.”

I lived 20 years in Indiana, which has a part-time legislature, and further limits its time in Indianapolis to alternating “short” and “long” sessions. Republicans are always emoting over how this makes the Hoosier state a true “citizen legislature,” and weeping over the founding fathers’ dreams that all legislatures would be made up of citizens, as though politicians aren’t actually citizens. The idea behind term limits, which we have in Michigan, is roughly the same: Make these bastards go home after a few years, because they suck. New blood! New ideas! No more career politicians!

One hazard of treating the U.S. Constitution as the revealed word of God, and the founding fathers (and mothers) as oracles of heaven is, we’re no longer an 18th-century collection of former colonies with a big idea and a wilderness close enough to see from the front porch. So maybe lawmaking for a nation of more than 300 million souls equipped with guns, smartphones and cars should be a little more than a regular meeting over the cracker barrel. Just a thought.

On to a cheerier topic: Your worst fears realized on a theme-park ride.

In a quest to be the record holder for the world’s tallest waterslide, investigators say, Schlitterbahn Waterpark of Kansas City rushed to build a dangerous and structurally complicated ride, ignored glaring safety red flags and replaced mathematical calculations with “crude trial-and-error methods.”

The string of negligence, according to a recently unsealed indictment, resulted in the 2016 death of a 10-year-old boy and more than a dozen injuries. Caleb Schwab, son of Kansas state Rep. Scott Schwab, was decapitated while riding the nearly 170-foot-tall Verrückt, a German word that means “crazy” or “insane.” On Friday, a year and a half after the boy’s death, the Kansas Attorney General’s Office announced criminal charges against the company and one of its former employees.

Schlitterbahn and Tyler Austin Miles, former director of operations, have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and several counts of aggravated battery, aggravated endangering a child and interference with law enforcement. Investigators say the company knew the waterslide was unsafe and could result in injuries and deaths, but still rushed to open it to the public. Perhaps more disturbing is the allegation that several injuries, from neck pain to concussion, had already occurred before Caleb’s death. Still, investigators allege, Schlitterbahn and Miles kept the ride open to the public — and even hid reports of those injuries and other alarming safety problems from law-enforcement officers who were investigating the boy’s death.

A reader comment:

I live about 30 minutes from this waterpark, and from the moment I saw them breaking ground on this ride, I determined that my daughters would never go near it. I live in Missouri, but I know Kansas well enough to know that the state does not require government inspections of such rides—part of what has made Kansas the GOP utopia that also included ruinous tax cuts that have nearly destroyed the state’s schools and social services.

Kate has aged out of her going-to-Cedar-Point phase, at least going with me, but whenever we were there I would dream of a book project: Embedding with a design team for a new roller coaster, and tell the story from blueprint to ribbon-cutting. If you still think of roller coasters as the wooden ones of your youth, you have no idea. Just the engineering has to be fascinating.

With that, I’m out of here. Good week ahead, all.

Spring-ish weather finally arrived, which is to say not warm enough for shirtsleeves, but the sun was out and it felt like a promise of better things to come. It was 57 at one point.

Monday’s high? 37 degrees. We’ll always have Sunday.

Thank god for this little warmish breath, though, because if we’d had another gloomy weekend, I might have sat inside all weekend reading Twitter, instead of just part of it. Are the wheels coming off? Finally? I’m hesitant to believe, because the wheels have been coming off for more than a year now, and there always seems to be one lug nut still hanging in there, doing its job. But this weekend — just this weekend! — we had the mop-up from the Tillerson fiasco and the will-he-or-won’t-he-fire-Mueller thing and then, on Saturday (Sunday if you’re a normal person and wait to read your Sunday paper), the Cambridge Analytica bombshell. And I’m probably forgetting a few.

Yeah, Comey and Putin and all the rest of it. Oh, and the nondisclosure agreements.

Truth be told, I’m halfway between horror at what’s happening and a secret thrill that I’m living through a period we’ll tell our grandchildren about. I just want to behave honorably through the course of it.

That’s the point of the first link up there, a column calling on the outgoing secretary of state to finally prove he was one of the adults in the room:

Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing. …Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.

Yes. We’re at a unique moment in history. Do you want to be one of the good guys? Better start talking.

Great comment discussion going the last few days, guys. Rock on, but I have some work to do.

There’s been a great comment discussion the last couple of days, over small towns, large cities, and what we owe both of them. It made me think of 2001-02, when we were both miserable at work, and Alan had a promising job interview in Traverse City. I gave considerable thought to how we’d live and what I’d do there.

“You can freelance,” everybody told me. “After all, with the internet, it doesn’t matter where you live.”

This was a big article of faith with the head of our editorial page, who, truth be told, was a bit of a hermit. The internet meant anyone could work from anywhere, which meant…all sorts of things. Less traffic, fewer days spent in boring offices, and of course, the flowering of many charming towns for those who love them. You could have a house with a walkout deck overlooking a lovely valley, while behind you the world of work simmered away on your monitor, and you joined it when you liked.

Not 20 years later? That hasn’t happened.

It’s happened for a handful of lucky souls, sure, but for most of us? No. In fact, a lot of these towns don’t even have broadband. And didn’t Yahoo call a bunch of work-at-homes back to the office corral a while back? The aphorism I recall from that was, “if you want people to be productive, keep them apart. But if you want them to be creative, they have to be together.” Yahoo needed some creativity, so the roundup began.

Someone said on the thread yesterday that cities are the future. Well, duh. But cities can’t be everybody’s future; too much density isn’t good for anyone, and I for one don’t want to live in some slightly cleaner and less polluted version of Mexico City, or even Los Angeles. In the last six months, I’ve met two couples who’ve bought houses in Grosse Pointe because, get this, they were priced out of Detroit. Not all of Detroit, mind you — you can still find hundreds of houses for a pittance — but the good parts, yes. Not everyone can live close in, where the action is.

But everything some of you have been saying about small towns — and small cities — is true. This is a painful time for the U.S. economy, and everyone is right, at least in part. This is about a shift, and if you can’t shift, or at least adapt, you’re going to be left behind. Anyway, I’m glad I have some smart readers willing to bat this stuff around.

So. Today in other Chaos Reigns news:

Subpoenas for the Trump Organization.

The president admits lying to our closest neighbor and their very handsome prime minister.

A brand-new bridge falls from the sky in Florida. It was put up using something called Accelerated Bridge Construction Methods, which I’m going to bet maybe don’t come out of this smelling like a rose.

Oh, and Don Jr. and his wife are splitting. Five kids, these two have. As Philip Larkin said, they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

Boy, am I tired. Good weekend to all.