SOCIETY NOW
Ode to a Pizza Box
All is not lost, my friends
There was a cardboard pizza-box top on the sidewalk last night, just sitting there, missing its lower half. I wasn’t the first to trample on it. I probably wasn’t the first to take a picture of it.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday — a champion of gender equality, a legal icon, a cultural force. She was notorious. She was 87. Mitch McConnell went to work quickly, announcing that there would be a vote on a new justice sooner than later. The press is already reporting on a potential conservative replacement; she has three names, too. The fighting has begun. We’re about to battle again over abortion and gay marriage — struggles that we thought were already won. But there was a pizza box on the sidewalk last night. An Italian man with a playful mustache is grateful. He wants you to call again.
It’s getting cold in New York. Just a slight chill. I wore a jacket to dinner. We sat at an outdoor table in the West Village, in front of a fence adorned with 9/11 art. I shivered for the first time since February. Out west, the sky is orange — not Maple Ginger, not Pumpkin Spice, but Nuclear Autumn. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest are burning, and the president doesn’t think science has the answer. Our California friends are checking the AQI (air quality index) before they…
