Slate Voice

At least once in a president’s term, the White House releases a document called the National Security Strategy. Mandated by Congress since the mid-1980s, the NSS is usually sheer boilerplate, a collage of clichés about America’s role in the world. Few read it, but those who do come away with harrumphs of reassurance that the current people in power know what they’re doing and, by and large, are following the hallowed principles of their predecessors.

The Sweeneys tell the story of—you guessed it—a baby-sitting co-op, one to which they belonged in the early 1970s. Such co-ops are quite common: A group of people (in this case about 150 young couples with congressional connections) agrees to baby-sit for one another, obviating the need for cash payments to adolescents.

On Wednesday, Google released its annual "Year in Search," which tracks trending queries for the past year. But among the list of top memes, prominent people, and how-to questions for 2017, on both the global and United States lists, one normally inescapable topic was missing: Donald Trump. It’s nice to imagine a 2017 without Trump, but really: How did the 45th president not make it on Google’s list? It’s a matter of relativity.

On Saturday night, the high court of Fox News came to order, Judge Jeanine Pirro presiding. In the opening segment of her show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, Pirro sermonized about the need for a government purge. Wearing a blazing red blouse and enunciating like the irate director of a recalcitrant choir, the jurist-turned-professional-angry-person went medieval on the United States circa 2017.

Read a companion piece from Slate’s science editor on this investigation. On a sunny autumn day three years ago, when Kesia Lyng was 30, she had a visit from her youngest sister, Eva. The two were close, and as they sat at the kitchen table in Lyng’s apartment, Eva confronted her chronically ill sibling with a painful fact: “You almost can’t take care of your own kids,” she told her. “You can’t keep pushing yourself so hard.

One of the greatest pleasures of parenting is introducing things you love to your kids. Since the birth of my two girls, I’ve been anticipating the day I would gift them with the best show of all time, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Then my girls stopped watching TV. Once upon a time, we monitored TV time like hawks.

In a dizzying series of tweets and news stories on Monday, the Pentagon appeared to simultaneously embrace transgender recruits while the Trump administration was losing its bid in court to deny their entry into the service. Once the dust settled, it became clear that, for now, the slow policy change on transgender service that began under President Obama will continue under President Trump. Transgender people who want to serve their country in uniform may enlist starting on Jan.

There’s no shame in revisiting a classic, and on this week’s Saturday Night Live, host James Franco riffed on one of the show’s most iconic sketches: Dan Aykroyd’s legendary French Chef bit where, as Julia Child, he sliced a finger and merrily bled to death. Franco’s character, a gift-wrapper at Bloomingdale’s, is motivated by Christmas cheer rather than Bordeaux and chicken livers, but the basic premise is the same: blood, blood, and more blood.

Under Merrill’s regime, a multitude of voters—most of them in majority-black counties—struggled to cast their ballots in the race between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. Unprepared poll workers spread misinformation. Bewildered citizens were forced to fill out confusing, redundant paperwork. Qualified voters were told they could not vote. And the state may well have run afoul of federal law.

This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here's today's selection: In 1996, Michael Kinsley famously moved from Washington, D.C.’s political swamp to the salmon-spawning grounds of the Puget Sound to edit Microsoft’s first general interest Web magazine, the publication you’re reading now.

The Federal Communications Commission is poised to repeal its net neutrality rules this week, opening the doors for internet service providers to charge companies that can afford it for faster-lane access to users—a potentially significant blow to the open internet. In this week’s episode of their podcast If Then, Slate’s April Glaser and Will Oremus spoke with Tim Wu, the Columbia Law School professor who coined the term net neutrality.

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama—At the viewing party for Doug Jones supporters on Tuesday night, you could feel the energy shift from nervous anticipation to joy and jubilation as it became clear that Jones would be the next United States senator from Alabama, the first Democrat elected to represent the state in the Senate since 1992, and the first Democrat elected to statewide office in nearly 10 years.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Wednesday that the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony will be presented by women, women, and more women, as a mark of what womenfolk have been through this year and since the dawn of time. Like many award ceremonies, the SAG Awards usually pairs a man and a women to announce each winner—but this year, only women will have that honor.

The first time I met Alex Kozinski was in 1996. I was clerking for the chief judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and there was an orientation for new clerks in San Francisco. One of my co-clerks and I were introduced to the already legendary, lifetime-tenured young judge at a reception, and we talked for a while. I cannot recall what we talked about. I remember only feeling quite small and very dirty.

Think back to six months or so ago when you first encountered the fidget spinner. (Yes, for anyone experiencing Trump-related time dilation, the fidget spinner craze happened this year.) At the time, did you think the toy was cool but that it could probably be more Jewish? Well then, today—the day of the first night of Hanukkah—is your day: The new miracle of Hanukkah has arrived in the form of the fidget dreidel.

Will the Republican tax bill devastate America’s bluest states? That’s the impression you’d get from two recent op-eds in the New York Times, the first by a pair of liberal academics, and the second by a conservative policy analyst, both of which castigate Republicans for drastically shrinking the state and local tax deduction, also known as SALT.

On Monday, a 27-year-old man tried to blow up a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but really he only succeeded in inconveniencing a lot of people, since he was the only one to sustain serious injuries. Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, both of whom tape their shows in New York, were not impressed with this attempt to bring chaos down on the city’s transit system, which is already pretty chaotic.

In a little-noted passage of his speech at a Saturday rally in Pensacola, Florida, mostly devoted to support for Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, President Trump revived a theme that some of his aides had hoped he’d abandoned—his demeaning of America’s allies, his dismissal of NATO as an outfit of no real use to U.S. interests, and his threat not to send troops to defend its members from attacks unless they pony up more money.

This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here’s today’s selection: Michael Lewis has an astonishing talent for making any true story both gripping and meaningful. In this piece from 2003, he turns that talent on himself, as an ice skating accident transforms into a rumination on bad parenting, hard work, and personal identity—with a twist of a self-loathing kicker to boot.

Even if the United States Supreme Court does the right thing in Masterpiece Cakeshop v.