Care and Feeding, Slate, 2 Feb 2025:

Twenty-five years ago, when I was 16, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant. My family was very pro-life at the time, and my parents, grandparents, twin sister “Val,” and I all worked together to raise the baby for the first few years of his life. It was hard. Val and I dropped all of our high school extracurriculars, and we attended community college instead of going to university, but it was also beautiful. I even had a short stint as a motivational speaker at anti-abortion rallies.

Now my son is grown and he is a wonderful person. I’m married, and we have been successful enough that I’m about to step back from my career to pursue some personal projects. Val never married and lives nearby, and we are still close.

She recently came to me and shared that she is pregnant and plans to keep the baby. She feels like this is her last chance to be a mother. Then she dropped the bomb: She said she expects me to help her care for the baby, and noted that the timing was perfect since I’ll be stepping back from my career. I told her I have no intention of being her babysitter, and that if she can’t care for her own baby she shouldn’t be having one. She accused me of being pro-life when it got me help and attention, and pro-choice now that it’s more convenient. She also said that she never got to choose whether to help me—our parents would have kicked her out if she hadn’t pitched in. I told her I was sorry but that was an issue between her and our parents. We haven’t spoken since. Now I feel horrible and am rethinking things. Do I owe her child care?

—Just Want to be the Aunt

Dear Just Want To Be The Aunt,

Whether you “owe” your sister child care is entirely beside the point. You are asking the wrong question! The better question is: does your sister have a right to make her own reproductive decisions, despite the fact that you have been asked to have some involvement in caring for the child therefrom? I think we both know the answer to that.

Indeed, we both know your sister is making a mountain out of a molehill, much as she has made a baby out of … whatever it is that makes babies. Regardless, your sister definitely should not have done the baby-making without your say-so, as you are the ultimate arbiter of who should have a baby, which is to say: everyone who you gave your anti-abortion speeches to, except your sister, who did not take into account your schedule when she got pregnant.

Surely you made it clear, when you were doing your fancy anti-abortion advocacy, that you meant forced birth was for everyone whose pregnancy was not immediately convenient for you personally! It’s wild that your sister did not understand that obvious fact 25 years ago, when she was a teenager being roped into caring for a child she neither carried nor asked for, and now she has some real fucking nerve to ask for vague “help” with a pregnancy you personally did not pre-approve! She’s trying to leverage your history against you by asking you to “help care” for some bastard-ass kid she had the ripe gall to conceive without someone else’s express permission. She could never in a million years understand what that kind of sacrifice is like!

The plain fact is this: everyone should have babies! No matter what! Because it’s easy and free to be pregnant and have babies and everyone will help! Except you, of course, because you have some other stuff going on, now that you are done taking care of your kid. If your sister can’t take care of a baby 10000000% on her own with no help from family and friends like everyone on earth in the whole of human history has always done, she should just abandon the whole idea and have an abortion when she doesn’t want one. After all, her pregnancy would be potentially sort of time-consuming for you in theory! Your sister is being really inconsiderate about how her pregnancy might affect you as you move into the phase of your life wherein you do whatever the fuck you want while other people have to have babies because you said so, except for your sister, because what a gross hassle babies are.

You have lived your pro-life values to the fullest by capitalizing on forced-pregnancy trauma (your own and that of others) to the extent you find it personally and professionally beneficial. What higher sacrifice could you possibly make under these circumstances? I mean, is she asking you to babysit? In the free time you and you alone earned thanks to the tireless dedication of three generations of your family who raised your kid with you? Does your sister think the time she had no control over as a teen helping you rear your child came at no cost to you? And now she’s not even married?!

If you can’t shame the slut into having an abortion she doesn’t want, perhaps you can coerce her into terminating her pregnancy by reminding her it would be sort of inconvenient for you. Not, of course, that she would understand, being as she is a kid-obsessed weirdo who thinks having a kid is a thing she should do just because she wants to.

Your sister is 41 entire years old! A veritable fertility font! She has weeks, if not months ahead of her to to enjoy the experience of geriatric pregnancy! She can easily make another baby when God, or you, wants her to, assuming it doesn’t interfere with your plans. Certainly the Lord Almighty would never interrupt your important schedule with something so meaningless and inconsequential as someone else’s pregnancy.

You’ve put in your time already, and you’ve earned the right to just step back and be an auntie. If your sister wanted your “help” caring for her child, she should have been smarter about the timing of her unplanned pregnancy, much as you were as a teenager whose family’s political views dictated your reproductive choices. Precluding people from making decisions about their own bodies is a tradition to be honored, and you are admirably carrying on that great heritage for your sister.

Telling a person who desperately wants a baby to have an abortion when their pregnancy timing is not to your liking is the pro-life way, and you are entitled to live your pro-life to the fullest.

From WMATA:

“Today, Metro is honoring Civil Rights pioneer Rosa Parks on her birthday, Feb. 4. To acknowledge the day, Metro is placing signs on all trains and buses, reserving a single seat for Parks and her history-changing act of brave civil disobedience against racial segregation on public transit.

Her actions — refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and the subsequent arrest that launched a bus boycott — helped change public transit and the world.

Metro has previously honored Parks’ legacy by reserving a seat with a special sign on all buses, and for the first time, a reserved seat will be saved on every train as well.

The sign features an image of Parks saying, “Today, this seat is reserved in honor of Rosa Parks.”

The tribute comes on what would have been her 112th birthday.

This year also marks the 20th anniversary of Metro’s historic Rosa Parks bus. The commemorative bus is the same model she protested on and was refurbished in 2005 after Parks’ death. It was used in the procession for her memorial service in D.C. The exterior of the bus reads “It All Started on a Bus: Rosa Parks, 1913-2005; The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.”

I’m a pilot. Not current, haven’t been for some time, but the convention is that once you get a pilot’s license, you’re a pilot for life. That doesn’t mean you can fly a plane any time – you have to have a current physical and okay for the type of license. I’m just saying this to indicate that I have some knowledge and also some feelings about what is happening.

One of the things you learn as a pilot is not to jump to conclusions when something goes wrong. There are many, many ways to misinterpret things. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigates airplane accidents, and their word is authoritative. So when I commented on Bluesky this morning, that was what I started with. You might find that whole thread interesting.

The problem is that an investigation takes time, often more than a year. That leaves space for speculation. But the convention among pilots and others in the know helps to damp down that speculation.

However, last night and this morning a person with no knowledge of those conventions felt it necessary to open his yap. Last night, Donald Trump proclaimed that the helicopter was at fault in the crash, and this morning he broadened that out to his favorite, DEI. Did he know when he said that that one of the pilots was a woman? It hardly matters – he went on about an FAA policy of hiring disabled people, whom he has denigrated in the past.

I think I also saw the video that led Trump to his impassioned post last night. It is horrifying. But the angle from which one is looking makes a difference in how speeds and locations are perceived. Similarly, a very incomplete recording of tower communications has been released, which is also ambiguous. We will have to wait for the NTSB.

Trump’s aides seem to have toned him down a bit this morning, and he had a statement to read. David Sanger’s account of the press conference reveals his shock at Trump’s blaming. Sanger understands the convention.

President Trump blamed diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration and his two Democratic predecessors for the midair collision over the Potomac River on Wednesday night, saying that standards for air traffic controllers had been too lax.

Mr. Trump cited no evidence, and even admitted when pressed that the investigation had only just begun.

Moments later, he blamed the pilots of the Army helicopter that appeared to fly into a passenger jet that was on final approach to Reagan National Airport, across the river from the capital.

Mr. Trump went back and forth between blaming diversity goals that he said were created by President Barack Obama and President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and then saying that an investigation was necessary.

His instant focus on diversity reflected his instinct to immediately frame major events through his political or ideological lens, whether the facts fit or not.

James Fallows is also a pilot. I recommend his writeups if you’re trying to understand the accident. He will say that we must wait for the NTSB report, but he will highlight and interpret the news. Here’s his post from last night.

Update: Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett just posted a thread on Bluesky.

The post The Plane-Helicopter Crash appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Robyn Creswell, who teaches comparative literature at Brown and is poetry editor of the Paris Review, has an essay in the February 13 NYRB (archived) that is ostensibly a review of two new versions of the Qur’an but spends much of its time on a useful summary of the history of such attempts. It begins:

‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph and conqueror of Jerusalem, was initially one of the prophet Muhammad’s fiercest enemies. According to early Muslim historians, ‘Umar was an exemplary pagan Arab: physically imposing, short-tempered, and somewhat sentimental, he was a lover of gambling, wine, and poetry. His conversion occurred in 616, three years after Muhammad began preaching to the polytheists of Mecca. One night, the story goes, ‘Umar was looking for drinking companions when he came across the prophet at prayer near the square shrine of the Kaaba (then a site of pagan pilgrimage). ‘Umar slipped under the great cube’s black covering and listened. Hearing the words of the Qur’an for the first time, he later reported, “My heart softened, I wept, and then Islam entered me.”

‘Umar’s experience was, it seems, typical. Early biographies of the prophet include stories of poets—the tribunes of pagan culture and Muhammad’s political rivals—who immediately renounced their art upon hearing the prophet’s revelations. Other stories recount the conversion of Abyssinian and Byzantine Christians who accepted the Qur’anic message even though they didn’t understand a word of Arabic. In the most extreme cases, hearing Qur’anic verses caused fainting, terror, ecstasy, and even death. In the eleventh century, Abu Ishaq al-Tha‘labi published a collection of such tales, The Blessed Book of Those Slain by the Noble Qur’an, Who Listened to the Qur’an and Subsequently Perished of Their Listening. Al-Tha‘labi wrote that people who died in this fashion were “the most virtuous of martyrs.”

Creswell points out that “Many Islamic authorities—and indeed many translators—believe that the Qur’an, as the word of God spoken to Muhammad via the angel Gabriel, is strictly speaking untranslatable” and continues:

Leaving theology aside, the Qur’an isn’t a book Muslims have historically encountered through reading. Instead it is recited, memorized, and used in devotional practices. ‘Umar converted after hearing the prophet recite the Qur’an; al-Tha‘labi’s martyrs were listeners, not readers. And this is only the beginning of the translator’s difficulties.

He goes on to discuss Robert of Ketton’s twelfth-century Latin version, Ludovico Marracci’s 1698 translation (also Latin), George Sale’s 1734 translation (“the most popular in English for some two hundred years”), Muhammad Ali’s 1917 The Holy Qur’an: Containing the Arabic Text with English Translation and Commentary (adopted by Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam), Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall’s 1930 The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation (still widely used), Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s The Holy Qur’an: Text, Translation, and Commentary (1934-37), Arthur J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (1955), and Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’án (1999) before getting to the books under review. For many of them, he provides their versions of Surah 100, al-‘Adiyat, which is a convenient way to compare their qualities. (I wish he’d included my own go-to edition, Muhammad Asad’s The Message of The Quran with its superb commentary, but you can’t have everything.) Here’s a sample passage on M.A.R. Habib and Bruce Lawrence’s new The Qur’an: A Verse Translation:

The punctuation marks point to a larger problem. Although Habib and Lawrence work hard to come up with an English equivalent to the Qur’an’s oral poetics, their own relation to poetry—like that of most contemporary scholars—depends on the written and not the spoken word. This is evident throughout their translation, but particularly in the editorial apparatus. In the longer suras, for example, they include numbered sections to mark changes of topic. This makes for easier reading, although the original has no such sections. They also include several hundred endnotes. In a note to the first verse of “al-‘Adiyat,” they explain the “like” in line two, which adds a simile that isn’t in the Arabic, as an acknowledgment of the standard interpretation of the racing horses as symbols of ungoverned desires. Without that explanation, “like” is indeed puzzling, but recitations don’t have endnotes.

Habib and Lawrence also include many bracketed words and phrases where the Arabic is hard to construe. In “al-‘Adiyat,” their bracketing of “the world’s” is clarifying—it resolves the ambiguity that troubles Arberry’s version—but misleadingly suggests that everything not in brackets is more or less a literal translation of the Arabic. Literalism is a chimera, however, as authoritative interpreters of the Qur’an have pointed out: God’s words can bear more than one connotation, making literalism untenable even as an ideal. The added simile in line two suggests that Habib and Lawrence don’t take the ideal seriously either. So it’s unclear why the brackets are there at all, especially as they interfere with oral performance. How is a bracketed word to be recited? Do we say it aloud, like all the other words, or ignore it—or speak it in a whisper?

He ends with The Devotional Qur’an: Beloved Surahs and Verses, selected and translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa, which he likes quite a bit; the essay ends:

Toorawa’s rhyming is as experimental as his versification. Where one rhyme falls flat, another opens our ears. He’s especially fond of consonant rhymes, an alliteration of word endings rather than beginnings, as in the first four lines of “al-‘Adiyat.” It can’t be a coincidence that this type of slant rhyme mirrors the Arabic, where rhyme is made by a repetition of final letters. (If this sounds easy to achieve, it is: Arab poets commonly use one rhyme for fifty or even a hundred lines.) Toorawa sometimes makes that parallelism explicit. “Al-Insan” (“Humankind”) is a short sura that mostly rhymes on the letter ra’, pronounced similarly to the English r. Toorawa’s version rhymes on “hear,” “favor,” “fire,” “camphor,” “pleasure,” “far,” and “pauper.” In this way the original echoes uncannily into the English, though one needn’t know Arabic to hear the music.

Yusuf Ali hoped to Islamize English through his translation of the Qur’an. In Toorawa’s devotional texts, we have a sense of what that might sound like. In his version of “Ya Sin,” a sura often recited to a person on their deathbed, we hear the happy susurrus of a life to come:

That Day, the Garden dwellers will be busy in their joyousness. They and their spouses will recline on couches, in shade and coolness. They will have fruits and whatever they request in abundance. The Ever Compassionate will greet them with a salutation of peace.

(The only Toorawa Google seems to know of is Shawkat M.; does anybody know anything about the name?)

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