https://www.gocomics.com/lay-lines/2026/03/23
Category: Questions
Some Unrushed Lunchtime Reading-
What Was Lost: A Queer Accounting of the NY Times Book Review, 2013-2022
Thirteen Essential Books by Trans and Queer Writers,
Reviewed by Trans and Queer Writers
“Goodbye, Pamela Paul,” was the headline of Andrea Long Chu’s now-iconic, recently ASME-nominated New York Magazine farewell to the former NY Times Book Review editor, when Paul left the paper two years ago. For a little background, Paul was named editor of the NYTBR in 2013 and took over books coverage for the entire paper in 2016, effectively becoming the most powerful editor in literary criticism. In 2022 she moved to the paper’s opinion pages to publish her own ideas about the world, many of which became political lightning rods in a publishing community that had for years been beholden to her editorial decisions.
Particularly infamous was one explicitly anti-trans essay from July, 2022, which was widely criticized at the time. It also had many people wondering how Paul’s politics might have come into play in her decisions as the most important books editor in the world.
So at some point I began dreaming up an idea: to commission a whole package of reviews of books by trans and queer authors, folks whose projects weren’t covered by the NYT under Paul’s reign. I asked Maris Kreizman to collaborate and to my delight, she agreed. What followed became an exercise in thinking through what is lost—and perhaps can never be regained—when transphobes and their enablers rise to prominence as our most powerful cultural gatekeepers.
*
So, to the nuts and bolts of this project. First of all, the volume of seemingly great books published by queer and trans authors between 2013 and 2022, and not covered by the NYT, was intimidating. It took Maris and me a while to work through the many great pitches we received and arrive at our final lucky number of 13. (Funnily enough, in actually trying to commission these reviews, I felt surprising sympathy for book review editors like Paul who are no doubt constantly buried in new titles to consider.)
Our effort here offers reviews of a mere sliver of all those titles we might have covered, many of which would be worthy of inclusion if we had limitless time and resources. I’m immensely grateful to all who submitted ideas, especially to all the fellow authors who wrote to tell us about their books (some were even writers I’d call heroes). My to-be-read pile is now, as ever, impossibly tall.
On a personal note, this entire project has made me feel much less alone. I feel more connected to other trans and/or queer writers, who are doing this work despite the shitty odds we face, despite our society’s continued denial of our full humanity, despite the efforts to ban our words and to decimate our entire lives, despite the media and publishing industry’s failure to actually reckon with—let alone correct for—any of this.
What follows is hardly meant to be comprehensive. I hope it inspires others to write their own reviews of whatever books they’d wish might be covered. I’d love teachers to assign this as a group project to writing classes, as I’ve heard of at least one doing already. I hope this project won’t be perceived as anything except the start of a conversation—one I feel everyone with stakes in this must join us in having.
–Sandy Ernest Allen
(Snip: please go to the page-that’s a link, right here, too–to see the books and the reviews.
Joyce Vance Takes Us Into
The Week Ahead
March 22, 2026
On Monday, March 23, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Watson v. Republican National Committee. It’s one of, if not the most important, cases in front of the Court this term.
Conservatives have long maintained that federal laws that refer to an election “day” trump state laws that permit mail-in ballots to count, even if they are received later, so long as they are postmarked by election day. They rely on provisions like 2 U.S.C. § 7 that provide that “The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States.” Mississippi is one of the states that allows ballots cast and postmarked by election day but received by election officials shortly thereafter to count.
Mississippi is, oddly enough, defending its law, which allows a five-day grace period for ballots to arrive, against the attack from the Republican Party. The district court ruled in the state’s favor, holding that the election “day” established by Congress was intended to prevent elections from spanning several days, which would be cumbersome to administer and could result in undue influence from early results. The Judge held that allowing time for the Post Office to deliver ballots postmarked by Election Day does not implicate those concerns.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed. They held that Congress established an election “day,” and all ballots must be cast and received then. They relied on the Constitution’s Elections Clause, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1. It reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The appellate court reasoned that a ballot is “cast” when the state “takes custody of it.” Five judges dissented from the en banc decision.
In defending its position, the state argues that federal law only requires that voters cast their ballots by Election Day; it does not require that election officials receive them that same day. The National Council for State Legislatures, a nonpartisan organization, reports that “Mississippi is one of 16 states, plus Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Washington, D.C., that currently accept and count mailed ballots from any voter received after Election Day but postmarked on or before (sometimes only before) Election Day.” In addition, 29 states, including Mississippi, accept ballots from military and overseas voters sent before or on Election Day but received after, under certain circumstances.” Members of the military who are stationed away from their homes are among those whose ballots take advantage of the safe harbor.
Then on Tuesday, the Court takes up Noem v. Al Otro Lado, where the issue is whether the government can systematically turn back asylum seekers before they arrive at the border and make their asylum requests. Immigrants can request asylum when they arrive at or are physically present in the U.S. That request triggers asylum proceedings. In 2017, the Trump administration began using CBP officers to turn away immigrants who did not have valid travel documents before they reached the border and could apply for asylum.
When the case made its way to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the court rejected the government’s efforts to circumvent asylum proceedings. The three-judge panel held that people who were turned away from entering the country before they could present themselves to apply for asylum had “arrived in” the country once officials, on either side of that border, made contact with them. The full court declined the government’s request to reconsider that decision en banc; there was a 12-judge dissent from that denial of en banc, arguing for 126 pages that U.S. law could not be applied outside of the United States and that “aliens in Mexico” were not in the U.S.
The Solicitor General has asked the Supreme Court to adopt the dissent’s view. He also relies on a case called Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, where the Court ruled 27 years ago that Haitian refugees trying to reach the U.S. were not protected by immigration law when they were intercepted at sea before reaching the U.S. The Court held that the President had the power to deploy the Coast Guard to repatriate “undocumented aliens” intercepted on the high seas.
The case is in an unusual posture because DHS has discontinued “metering,” as the practice of intercepting asylum seekers before they reach the U.S. border with Mexico is called, during the Biden administration. But the Solicitor General is arguing that the government “seeks to retain the option of reviving the practice” if it is needed in the future, a rare move by the Trump administration to ask for permission first. The rule the government is advocating for could lead to desperate scrambles to cross the border in dangerous conditions by people who would otherwise be denied their lawful right to seek asylum. On Tuesday, we’ll learn how many votes there are on the Court to permit that.
Other developments to watch for this week include:
- A hearing on Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction, in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense’s sudden rejection of the AI company when it drew a red line prohibiting the use of its models for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. We discussed the lawsuit when it was filed.
- Following a delay from last week, former Venezuelan president Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are expected in court on Thursday in the Southern District of New York. As we discussed a week ago, prosecutors say Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and hasn’t been considered by the U.S. to be so for several years, and therefore may not use Venezuelan government monies to fund their defense. Maduro and Flores’ lawyers argue that the laws and traditions of the country permit it.
- Friday, federal district Judge J.P. Boulee will hold a hearing in Atlanta in the election records seizure case. We discussed that here last week, when he set the date.
- Also on Friday, legal papers are due for Epstein survivors’ proposed settlement with Bank of America. Reuters reports that “Lawyers for both sides are scheduled to submit legal papers about the settlement by March 27, and the judge scheduled a court hearing for April 2 to consider approving the deal.”
It’s going to be a busy week.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
A Little MidAfternoon Sumpin’-
Clown Show
Ronald McDonald, Jr.
The madman whose first name is Donald
Wants to dress up like Ronald McDonald
But he’s too fat to fit
An obese monstrous twit
For this we can blame Mitch McConnell.
McConnell, he should have impeached
And the fat fetid douche would be beached
But Mitch, he’s so bad
A coward, a cad
And the rest of us now have been leeched!
The women leading the farmworker movement won’t let it be defined by Cesar Chavez
The sexual abuse allegations against Chavez have rocked them. But their focus is still on protecting other women.
This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana, Shefali Luthra and Marissa Martinez of The 19th. Meet Chabeli, Shefali and Marissa and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Monica Ramirez has spent much of her life spotlighting the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women farmworkers. She, like many in that movement, considered civil rights leader Cesar Chavez an icon.
Since allegations came to light this week that Chavez sexually assaulted women and girls as young as 12 — including fellow movement leader Dolores Huerta — Ramirez and the larger farmworker community have been left reeling. Now, they’re trying to reconcile how this man who so many revered — whose name is on streets, schools and even a holiday — could perpetrate the violence that has plagued women farmworkers for decades.
The community has been “shaken to its foundation,” said Ramirez, the founder of Justice for Migrant Women, a civil rights organization focusing on farmworker and migrant women. She and other leaders are now trying to push forward the farmworker movement and continue the work that many women — not just Chavez — spearheaded.
“The farmworker movement is a leaderful movement, and women have always been part of that leadership,” Ramirez said. But their work has often been made invisible, sometimes by the very men who stood beside them in building worker power for Latinx people in the United States.
“In order to have a movement, in order to have a boycott, in order to organize any kind of action, it’s often women who are helping to organize the meetings, helping to bring their compañeras,” Ramirez said.
Chavez was one of the most revered figures in the Latinx civil rights movement. The labor leader cofounded what became the United Farm Workers union alongside Huerta, and was most known for a series of strikes and protests that grew unionization efforts across California. After Chavez’s death in 1993, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. In 2014, former President Barack Obama designated his birthday, March 31, as a federal holiday to celebrate his legacy, which many states had already marked.
Now, many of those celebrations are being canceled or renamed after a bombshell, yearslong investigation published by The New York Times Wednesday found evidence of a pervasive pattern of sexual abuse perpetrated by Chavez. Two women said Chavez sexually abused them for years as girls, when the organizer was in his 40s and had already become a powerful global figure. Ana Murguia said Chavez first assaulted her when she was 13; Debra Rojas was 12.
In the years following the abuse, both suffered from depression, panic attacks and substance abuse.
“I feel like he’s been a shadow over my life,” Rojas told the Times. “I want him to stop following me around. It’s time.”
Huerta, the renowned activist who coined the rallying cry, “Sí, se puede,” spoke at length about emotional and physical abuse from her longtime organizing partner — a disclosure she had never made publicly. She told the Times that he raped her in a secluded grape field in 1966, and had pressured her to have sex with him another time during a work trip in 1960. Both encounters resulted in children. Huerta concealed the pregnancies and arranged for the baby girls to be raised by others.
She was shaken upon hearing the allegations from other women, and told the Times she struggles to reconcile the man she knew and the one who assaulted her.
In a statement released Wednesday, Huerta said she carried her secret for 60 years because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way.”
She said she spoke up because she learned there were others coming forward.
“The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual. Cesar’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people,” she said. “We must continue to engage and support our community, which needs advocacy and activism now more than ever.”
Magaly Licolli knew exactly what Huerta was talking about in her statements about Chavez.
Licolli is the co-founder and executive director of Venceremos, an organization advocating for poultry workers in Arkansas, and she’s heard stories about sexual harassment and assault on women for years.
Before she started Venceremos, she was fired from another poultry worker organization after speaking up about multiple accusations of sexual harassment and assault against a well-known organizer.
“Women came forward and accused the organizer of sexually assaulting them or sexually harassing them. When I brought that to the board, they didn’t believe it,” Licolli said. “I had to stand with the women … I cannot do this work pretending I’m doing justice when I’m hiding injustice.”
Licolli felt that echoed this week.
“Women of color, we are not trusted on what we go through. We have to prove with pictures, with testimony, our own stories for our own stories to be validated,” she said. “I’m happy that now it’s something that people are talking about, and I’m happy that people are now reflecting about what is the role of women in the movement and when we have to be silenced toward that kind of injustice to protect the work that we do.”
A growing share of farmworkers are women, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture: about 26.4 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. Most are Latina.
A 2012 report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy organization, found that women farmworkers are often at risk of sexual harassment or assault, with virtually every worker interviewed for the report saying they either had experienced harassment or assault or knew someone who had. Farmworkers work in mixed-gender settings, and they have limited worker protections But women typically lack avenues to report their experiences, the report’s authors wrote, in large part because of immigration status. As of 2022, most farmworkers were immigrants without U.S. citizenship.
“Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers,” the report said.
A 2024 review published in the Journal of Agromedicine suggested that as many as 95 percent of women farmworkers in the United States have experienced workplace sexual harassment.
None of the women in the Times story spoke publicly until recently because of the shame and fear associated with reporting abuse against prominent organizers.
But over the past decade, after the growth of the #MeToo movement and the release of millions of Epstein files that have implicated numerous people in powerful positions, survivors have been more willing to speak up about their experiences.
Ramirez, who also founded the public awareness campaign known as the Bandana Project to raise awareness of sexual violence against farmworker women, said she now expects more women to come forward with their own stories. At an event Wednesday night shortly after the news broke, she said one woman came up to her to tell her how sexual assault was a problem in the fields where she worked as a teenager.
“Now that we understand clearly that this issue of sexual violence is an endemic problem in our society … the question we have to answer is: Knowing that, how serious are we going to get in our commitment to ending the problem?”
California lawmakers already plan to change the name of Cesar Chavez Day on March 31 to “Farmworkers Day,” and efforts are underway to remove his name from landmarks. But the real work to come will be about investing resources and support to improve the culture that has protected perpetrators in organizing spaces over victims.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, an Illinois Democrat who worked in organizing before entering politics, said it was “devastating” that the claims took so long to come out. She said when she became an executive director of a nonprofit at 21, she, too, had faced situations that in hindsight were not appropriate, and left the organization with a responsibility to create safer environments for other young women.
“Oftentimes women, especially women of color, we end up having to hold so many things for the sake of the movement, family, community,” Delia Ramirez told the 19th. “I don’t believe that there is one hero for our movements. Movements are led by a collective, and you can’t create some pedestal for one person, because humans will always fail you.”
Moving forward, Monica Ramirez said people will be watching how leaders in the farmworker movement respond to the allegations. Do they take a defensive posture or question the veracity of the survivors’ accounts? The revelations about Chavez come at a time when sexual misconduct by powerful men has been in the spotlight, all while the country grapples with a wave of immigration enforcement actions that are targeting Latinx people.
Licolli, the poultry organizer, said she has “never romanticized the immigrant community and the immigrant movement.” Sexual abuse happens in every movement and it doesn’t negate the work that’s been done to secure worker power, she said.
And for the farmworker women who are leading this work, it feels more urgent than ever that they continue leading.
Rosalinda Guillen, a farmworker and organizer in Washington state, leads Community to Community Development, an explicitly feminist and women-led organization — a perspective that she said lends itself to advocating for workers who are also parents, and that she said offers space for women farmworkers to assert their needs.
Guillen never met Chavez but was inspired to devote herself to organizing on behalf of farmworkers after his death. The news has been a “revision of everything that many of us know about the farmworker movement,” she said.
Her organization is removing images of Chavez from its office, Guillen said. “We revisited our values and principles in how we work together, reiterating there is no room for that,” she said, referring to sexual misconduct.
On Wednesday, while staff were still processing the reports, five farmworkers walked in. They had just lost their jobs.
Her staff switched gears, turning to figure out what those workers needed and how they could support them.
“They walked in reminding us this is the focus,” Guillen said. “This is why we’re here: To protect farmworkers.”
Reblogging da-AL:
I Did A Thing
Cartoon One Two Four One
Culture
Josh Lieb Mar 18, 2026
Caption: SHAKESPEARE FOR KIDS. Child actors on stage in Elizabethan costume. One says: “The first thing we do, let’s eat all the ice cream.”
That’s relatable.
Ali Redford makes my day with this one two three seven:
I love the way she stages this — friends at a bar, from the back. That’s exactly where this conversation would take place. It doesn’t matter who’s saying it. And I think this might be the first time Ali has used color. I like it. Thanks, Ali!
Draw my comics. I’ll post them here.
(snip)
DOGE Bro’s Humiliating Deposition Is MUST SEE
This is very interesting. The doge guy is under oath so can’t lie. But he realizes he is going to have to admit to be antisemectic. He works for a nazi and it is well known a lot of the doge people were Nazis themselves. He suddenly realizes he will have to say it was the Jews people who were discriminating during the Holocaust. First he tries to say it is DEI due to focusing on women which is gender so the grant had to be slashed. But then he says women were discriminating against the males. Finially when the lawyer asks how, he just gives up and admits it was the jewish people / Jewish women. He probably thinks women discriminate against men because he can’t get a girl to date him or have sex he doesn’t have to pay for. I think Brandon who is the black gentleman on the far right of the screen has the best and correct take on why the doge man / kid simply did not want to or couldn’t honestly answer the question. Hugs
Remember Stormy Daniels?
Here’s an update.
Happy Pi Day! 🥧 3.14… 😉
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2026 March 14
A Year for K2-315b
Artist’s Illustration Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle, Christine Daniloff, MIT
Explanation: Want to visit a planet that has 3.14 days in a year? Then plan a trip to K2-315b, an earth-sized planet orbiting around a cool, red, M dwarf star about once every 3.14 days. The exoplanet’s discovery, based on publicly available data from the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope’s extended K2 mission, was announced in 2020. K2-315b’s measured orbital period in days is nearly equal to the extremely popular irrational number Pi. That puts the exoplanet so close to its parent star that its surface is likely very warm, baking-hot in fact. And this Pi planet is over 185 light-years away. So instead of trying to arrange for an interstellar vacation to K2-315b, there may be easier and more comfortable ways for you to celebrate Pi day on planet Earth.
Tomorrow’s picture: equinox at the pyramid
Scottie's Playtime 