Karen Houppert is a Baltimore-based freelance journalist. Her book on indigent defense will be published by the New Press in March 2013 to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Gideon v. Wainwright.
Yesterday was one of those days when, having read the paper you are quite certain it is full of misprints and mistakes–either that or you’ve slipped down Alice’s rabbit hole into a logic-free world.
Virginia Tech’s commencement exercises took place this week. Columnists across the country weighed in to consider the impact of last month’s massacre on the surviving students, to walk a minute in the shoes of the grieving families of the 32 dead, and to speculate again about the motives that drove Cho Seung-Hui to gun down his fellow students.
My 10-year-old son is triumphant because he thinks he has me in a bind. He knows, from frequent dinnertime conversations, that I’m keen on Obama. And he assumes, because I wear my feminism on my sleeve, that I’ll feel obligated to vote for Hillary so that we can celebrate the first woman president of the United States.