On the Square Today

Micah Mattix analyzes the first line of The Wasteland :

Eliot’s “April is the cruellest month” is not so much about his conflicted response to spring (rooted in some forgotten childhood trauma) or about creating a linguistic puzzle to help us develop our skills of attention but about hope. What makes April cruel in the poem (among other things) is that the hope of new life that spring evokes is, at least for Eliot at the time, always temporal.

Also today, David DeWolf on pro-abortion legislation in the state of Washington :

Washington already provides state-funded abortions for low-income women. And all carriers that currently provide health insurance in the state offer at least one plan that includes abortion coverage. In answer to the question of why the Reproductive Parity Act was needed, proponents said they were concerned that implementation of the Affordable Care Act might cause insurance carriers to stop covering abortions and new carriers might enter the market with more restrictive coverage.

And in our third feature, Wesley J. Smith on media bias :

The Gosnell story should be huge. But the media has generally looked the other way. As of this writing, the major network nightly news programs have not even covered the trial, and most reporting outside of the Philadelphia area has been sporadic, placed on inside pages, and written blandly—the kind of low-voltage reportage easily lost in the constant white noise of media overload.