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The Verge
05-05-2025
- The Verge
Why I love my Brother 1034D Serger
Cath Virginia is the senior designer here at The Verge, who creates illustrations and collages for our articles. However, she also has 'dabbled' (as she puts it) in feature designs for articles such as 2004 was the first year of the future (which won the 2025 ASME Award for Best News and Entertainment Design), How the Stream Deck rose from the ashes of a legendary keyboard, and The Lurker. 'I also designed the branding for Notepad by Tom Warren and recently refreshed the look of Verge Deals,' she explains. When not doing this impressive work, Cath sews. A lot. And so, when I asked her what one of her favorite gadgets was, she said it was her Brother 1034D Serger. If you're not quite sure what a serger is (I certainly wasn't), read on. What exactly is a thread serger? A serger, also known as an overlocker, is a type of sewing machine generally used in apparel making. It has two needles and uses up to four strands of thread at a time to create the loops and finished edge you see on the inside of most knitwear, like T-shirts and leggings. It also has a knife that cuts the edge of your fabric at the same time, so the finished product looks clean and professional. When did you buy this one, and what went into the decision? I bought this one this past March as a birthday and tax return present. I've been wanting one for a while, because I sew a lot of clothes. I'm picky about style and, being fat, have a hard time finding clothes I like that actually fit me. I also love wearing knits because they're comfortable, and traditional sewing machines aren't intended primarily to sew knit garments, which need to have stretchy seams. You can use a zigzag stitch to achieve a stretch in your seam, but the serger sews and cuts all at once, as well as finishes the inside edges, so it saves a lot of time. In choosing a serger, I wanted one that was easy to thread, had an adjustable free arm for sewing cuffs and sleeves, and could sew multiple layers of fabric at a time. I watched a bunch of YouTube reviews of sergers and found this one to be pretty affordable — and it checked my boxes. It also got better reviews than its cheaper sibling, the DX. I was intimidated by it at first because four spools of thread is kind of scary. But it has clearly labeled and color-coded instructions for threading and comes with a manual, so I learned it and had it down in under half an hour. What do you usually create with it? So far, I have hemmed a couple shirts and made a maxi skirt (with pockets!) and a crop top. That was after a long and frustrating period trying to learn how to use it. I also dulled two different knives, learning that you can't sew over pins with a serger because there is a big metal knife chopping your seam off. What do you like about it? Sometimes when you're sewing knits on a traditional (lockstitch) machine, the edges become unintentionally ruffle-y (due to its one measly feed dog, which is the moveable plate that pulls the material through from stitch to stitch). This can make your piece look pretty weird and bad. Another great thing about this serger is that it has something called differential feed, which uses two feed dogs to sew your fabric together. It can be adjusted to feed one piece of fabric faster or slower, so it will flatten out your wobbly knitted seams or can be used to create a lettuce hem. It also comes with a gathering foot, which can be used to gather and sew (intentional) ruffles! Is there anything about it that you dislike or that you think could be improved? This is actually on me for not doing quite enough research, but when I bought it, I was excited to finally be able to do the coveted two-thread coverstitch you see on the hems of T-shirts and other knit stuff, only to find out you actually need a whole other machine that literally only does that one thing. That was disappointing to find out, but to compensate, the serger does actually come with a blind hem foot that you can use to do an okay impression of one. It's kind of a finicky stitch to get right, though, because you're sewing from the wrong side of the fabric, and I had to do quite a few samples to test it out before I used it on any garments. Who would you recommend it to? If you sew a lot of knitwear clothing, it can be a really useful tool for leveling up your garments and being a bit more efficient! It's not a total replacement for a lockstitch sewing machine but I'm really liking it so far. Don't be too intimidated by the four threads: they are your friends. And don't try to sew over any of your pins.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
We Know How To Fix Government - Will We?
The Department of Government Efficiency noticed a snag: the sign-in button on the IRS homepage wasnt where it ought to be. Instead of the upper right-hand corner where we, the people, have been trained to look for logins, it was stacked with other buttons in the middle of the page. It was not too hard to find, but its unusual placement disrupted the interface between taxpayers and tax collectors. It was a simple fix. Yet an IRS engineer reportedly estimated that it would take at least 103 days to move the button. Thankfully, Elon Musks team posted last month on X, "This engineer worked with the DOGE team to delete the red tape and accomplished the task in 71 minutes." If DOGE has revealed anything in its first 100 days, it is the depth of government dysfunction. While Musks detractors are reveling in his most obvious shortcoming - to date, it has cut an estimated $160 billion in government spending instead of the promised $2 trillion - the urgent need for reform is clear. The difficulty smart and dedicated cost-cutters are encountering in paring the mounds of federal waste is the canary crying in the coal mine. To take a favorite word of progressives, the issues we face with government inefficiency are systemic. Fraud and abuseare real problems, but, as the IRS button example shows, the deeper issues involve what passes for standard operating procedure. We have built a leviathan that is strangling us with process. Fred Kaplan provides a telling example in his New York Review of Books piece on Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoffs new book, "Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War." As a U.S. Air Force captain, Shah was flying missions over Iraq in 2006, Kaplan writes, when he noticed that his F16s display screen did not "indicate his location in relation to coordinates on the ground." Back in his barracks, Shah loaded a pocket PC he had for playing video games "with digital maps and strapped it to his knee while he flew. The software in that $300 gadget let him see where he was - basic information that the gadgetry on his $30 million plane could not provide." A decade later, Shah was tapped to lead a small Pentagon start-up, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), that sought to apply Silicon Valley innovations like the pocket PC to the military. An early challenge was coordinating the refueling of planes in midair. Kaplan wrote that this is a "very complicated task … Yet to plan these operations, they were moving magnetic pucks around on a whiteboard, just as their forebears had done during World War II." He continued: "Northrop Grumman had won a contract to overhaul this system; by the time Shah saw the whiteboard, the company had spent $745 million - twice the original estimate - over ten years with nothing to show for it, and the Air Force was now asking Congress for more. " Kaplan reports that Shah connected with "a small Silicon Valley firm" that developed "a working product … in four months, at a cost of $1.5 million." Needless to say, "they faced intense resistance from the Air Force officer managing the Northrop Grumman program and from staffers on the House subcommittee overseeing the defense budget." Happily, an advocate in the Pentagon brass helped them "break through the blockage." No one knows how many $745 million problems can be solved with a $1.5 million solution, but it seems safe to assume that the answer is plenty. As much as DOGE has drawn attention for firing federal workers and closing a few government programs, its most significant contribution has been exposing the jaw-dropping patterns of waste and inefficiency that bloat the size and cost of government. One more example: On March 21, DOGE reported that "the IRS has the transaction volume of a mid-sized bank, running similar infrastructure. Those banks typically have an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) budget of ''.ord('~').';'$20M/yr. The IRS has a ''.ord('~').';'$3.5B O&M budget (which doesnt include an additional $3.7B modernization budget)." Keep that in mind when you read the next scaremongering headline about job cuts at the IRS. Error is inevitable in human action. DOGE has certainly made mistakes. But a bigger blunder is pretending that every government worker and government contract is essential. That is the implicit argument of Musks detractors. Even if that risible claim were correct, our current spending trajectory is unsustainable. Something has to give. Still, there is reason for hope. Instead of just celebrating those who found a way to move a homepage button in 71 minutes, lets identify and eliminate the layers of bureaucracy that would have turned it into a 103-day ordeal. If software engineers can solve Pentagon problems on the cheap, lets compile and void a list of stupidly expensive contracts - before increasing its annual budget north of $1 trillion. It can be done. This effort might even be bipartisan. As the Trump administration has proposed funding cuts to scientific research, his opponents have argued this will kneecap one of Americas greatest strengths: our unrivalled ingenuity and know-how. Why dont we all agree to use that dynamism to create a government as smart and effective as our nation? J. Peder Zane is an editor for RealClearInvestigations and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. Follow him on X @jpederzane.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why overturning Roe v. Wade only made America's abortion rate rise
Republican politicians owe the pro-choice community a thank you card for saving the right from the worst impacts of their policies. After the Supreme Court overturned nearly five decades of abortion rights in the infamous Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case, the fallout has been terrible: women nearly bleeding to death in hospital parking lots, women having to be airlifted to safer states for abortions, and, unfortunately, a few highly publicized deaths because abortion bans prevented timely care. Still, the impacts have fallen far short of what anti-choice activists hoped and what pro-choice activists feared. There haven't been hospitals filling up, as they did in the days before Roe v. Wade, with patients mutilated from botched abortions. It's not because women have, en masse, given up and submitted to forced childbirth. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to decline while the abortion rate went up after the Dobbs decision. Sociologist Carole Joffe and law professor David Cohen explore a major reason why in their new book "After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion." (Full disclosure: I blurbed the book.) Both abortion providers and activists reacted to the Dobbs decision by rising up and creating, almost overnight, an infrastructure of helpers to make sure that women in red states still had access to safe abortion, despite the bans Republicans were rapidly passing. Even though it's shielded Republicans from the political consequences of their hateful policies, this small army of pro-choice patriots has managed to protect women's health, despite the often-daunting obstacle before them. Joffe and Cohen spoke with Salon about these often unsung heroes, and the ongoing Republican war to take this crucial healthcare access away. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In your previous book "," you wrote about the hoops that women have had to go through to get abortions, even in the pre-Dobbs era. This book is "After Dobbs." What changed in the years since Roe vs. Wade was overturned? Joffe: It's like before Roe, but on steroids. People have to travel further. Before Dobbs, 1 out of 10 patients had to go out of state. Now it's 1 out of 5. But even though things are harder, many people are surprised that the number of abortions has risen in the United States since Dobbs. Our book helps explain that. It's because of the extraordinary efforts of the abortion-providing community, the advocacy community, the activist community. There's been a huge amount of money and organization that mobilized right after Dobbs. For some, abortion became more feasible. Not necessarily easier, but more feasible. Obviously, some people were still left behind. Even though our book, in some respects, tells a surprisingly upbeat story, we have no illusions. We end the book on a note of caution. Everything boils down to sustainability. Will the donations keep coming? Will the activists and providers still keep working their butts off? And of course, what will the Trump administration do?Cohen: One of the big differences is that Dobbs mobilized pro-choice states to do things that they've been asked to do for decades, which is to take an inventory of their laws, see what restrictions are on the books, and get rid of them. There were so many restrictions, even in good states, and the legislators didn't seem to care. Dobbs made them care. And so you saw states that got rid of, for instance, physician-only requirements or waiting periods or minors restrictions. They started paying under Medicaid and funding clinics through other ways. Dobbs got people to pay attention, who should have been paying attention. Now, in a lot of states, abortion is more accessible than it was before. Providers are taking a lot of risks under threat, such as red states demanding they be extradited if they help women get abortions. But there's also an army of activists and donors connecting women to those providers. Cohen: Many providers in blue states are under telehealth shield laws that allow them to mail pills to people in other states. It's not many, but they can mail out pills in large numbers. There are about 10,000, maybe more, pills mailed every month from these telehealth shield providers. They are providing abortion care to people in abortion ban states, so those people don't have to travel. The other part of the equation is the activists, the everyday people who want to help. They're helping in small to huge ways. The drive for someone who needs to get from an airport to the clinic a couple of miles away, after they've traveled from Florida? That 10 or 15 minutes changes someone's life. But others are driving patients cross country or accompanying people on flights several states away. They're housing people overnight, coordinating their travel, or donating money to fund it. It's unjust. It should not be this way, but while it is this way, they're going to do everything they can to help the people who need care right now. We have to fight for the long term to change this, but in the meantime, there are still people who need care. We have a chapter about folks like that in the book, showing the extraordinary lengths they go to to get people care. Joffe: We report on a patient who got rerouted because of a snowstorm. The patient navigator rebooked the patient at another appointment at a clinic in Las Vegas, changed her flight, and got her a hotel. All within a couple of hours. It's just extraordinary how the system worked on very short notice. It's inspiring to see how many people are helping women get the care they need. What impact is it having on patients themselves? Joffe: Most people don't have to worry about getting on an airplane for basic healthcare. In some cases, patients have literally never been in an airport before. They don't know how to deal with TSA, didn't know what you could bring and could not bring. The staff at the National Abortion Federation told us patients who brought two bigger suitcases or tried to pack a whole bottle of shampoo. They have to be talked through even this process. Then there are ones left behind. These are people so poor, they don't even have a computer. They don't even know that there are organizations to help or about abortion funds. There are single parents with three or four kids. There's no way in hell they can get on a plane. One story that struck me in the book was the group of Texas ministers helping patients fly from Dallas to New Mexico. Can you tell me more about that? Joffe: Before Roe, Dr. Curtis Boyd was a very active abortion provider, with a clergy consultation service. He had a clinic in Dallas as well as in Albuquerque, and he had a long-standing relationship with the Unitarian church in Dallas. I mean, Dr. Boyd himself was, at one point, a minister. After Dobbs, his patients who qualified for medication abortions were helped by a minister group in Texas. They were met by a minister who flew with them, and once they got to New Mexico, would accompany them to the clinic. Since then, things have gotten a lot tougher, in terms of legal surveillance. So that program sadly no longer exists to our knowledge. Because activists and doctors have been so good at filling in the gaps, anti-choice forces are reacting. Texas and Louisiana are going after a New York doctor who sent abortion pills out of state. The governor of New York said, basically she'd extradite this doctor over her dead body. What does the current legal situation look like? What should readers know about the dangers? Cohen: There's almost no criminal risk for people who are providing care physically located in a state where abortion is legal and someone travels to them. There is a risk that the patient goes home and an angry boyfriend or ex or parent tries to sue the doctor, even though the abortion took place out of state. Still, that's a very low-risk proposition. The providers who are at the highest risk are the ones we talked about before, the shield providers who are mailing pills into states where there are abortion bans. The anti-abortion movement is, right now, flummoxed about what to do about that. The numbers are so high, almost 10,000 abortions per month. Antis are trying different attacks, because, as we all know, they don't just want to stop abortion happening by providers in their borders. Joffe: They wanna stop as much abortion as they possibly can. Louisiana wants New York to extradite a doctor, so they can prosecute her for mailing abortion pills into their state. New York has a shield law, however, so the governor and the Attorney General of New York have said they will protect the doctor. Eventually, will probably wind up in federal courts, maybe the US Supreme Court. Right now the doctor is still, to the best of my knowledge, providing care to people and mailing pills. And to the best of my knowledge, it hasn't stopped any of the shielded providers from doing so. They understand the risk, but they think it's important to take this risk because there are so many people who need care in the states where abortion is banned. One of the inspiring stories of the post-Dobbs era is people who know that they are needed. They have the training to do it. They have the technology to do it. There's some risk, but they're doing it anyway because people need the care they can provide. This is too recent for your book to cover, but there's a whole new case in Texas. The . We don't yet know if there's any truth to these charges, but what's your sense of how much red-state abortion is happening outside of the channel of doctors mailing women abortion pills? What are the risks of people offering this more direct care? Cohen: We know there are informal networks of people distributing pills not as part of a medical clinic, just volunteers. They're like mutual aid groups who have gotten pills through one way or another. To the best of my knowledge, that's happening in every state with abortion bans. I've heard varying estimates of the volume they're doing, from just a few to quite a lot. It's really unknown. The studies from the Society of Family Planning and Guttmacher do not include informal network distribution of pills. As far as what [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton is alleging, first of all, I don't trust a word that comes out of his press office. For all we know, this midwife was providing miscarriage management, and Paxton thinks it was an abortion. We must be super skeptical of everything he says. Joffe: The similarity with the pre-Roe era is that law enforcement was more likely to go against people under the rank of physician: nurses, midwives, and lay people who had learned to perform abortions. And we know that the accused is a woman of color. Like David, I am deeply, deeply, deeply skeptical of anything Ken Paxton says. Cohen: Maybe the big story here isn't that Texas midwife was charged with alleged illegal abortions, but that Texas closed three clinics providing prenatal care for low-income Spanish speakers. Those clinics are now closed and people aren't getting care. Anti-choicers were ecstatic after Dobbs. You heard highfalutin' rhetoric about how they were going to end abortion in the U.S. forever. Project 2025 has language about "ending" abortion. What does your research tell us about how realistic that goal is? Joffe: Even if the FDA manages to withdraw the approval of mifepristone, the first pill used in a medication abortion, they're not going to withdraw approval of misoprostol, which is widely used in other medical procedures. [Note from the editor: While both pills are recommended, misoprostol by itself will usually terminate a pregnancy.] Now that these networks exist, even if there's a national ban, there always are going to be these pills available. There are also groups sending them over the border from Mexico, or ordering the pills from Aid Access. You can but these pills in Europe. However, there will likely be more cases like what happened to this midwife in Texas. There will be more prosecutions, I assume, but they will never stop abortion. Cohen: We've seen this historically. We've seen this around the world. Where abortion is banned, people still get abortions. If they crack down even more, there will be more prosecutions. But there will always be people who are committed to making sure people have the freedom to live the life they want and have their bodily autonomy. People who say, "I am so committed to that principle that I'm going to use my time, my money, my skills, my license." Whatever someone has to offer, they will help people access this form of care. As much as the anti-abortion movement was saying this is going to end abortion, everyone in the abortion rights and justice movement feared Dobbs would dramatically cut back on the number of people getting abortions. But they were wrong. We should have known better, because the people we interviewed for the book, we've known how committed they are for a long time. We knew they would find some ways. I never thought it would be as successful as it's been. Yes, there are people left behind. We need to make sure fewer people are left behind, but they're doing their best to care for the people they can see. The anti-abortion movement, like you said, were so excited. A year later, the reports were that they were depressed at their conferences. They haven't been able to stop abortion. Abortion is never going to be ended, because people are going to fight for it. People who need it will seek it out and find ways to get it.
New York Times
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: Lucy Dacus Might Not Text You Back
'I think I have a reputation of being the person that will put the issue on the table and be like, 'Here's this. Let's speak on it.' I'm a conflict lover, because where else are you going to learn?' On her fourth solo album, 'Forever Is a Feeling' (out March 28), Lucy Dacus contemplates the fears and delights that go along with falling hard for someone. The song 'Best Guess' celebrates the leap of faith involved in committing to a partner with the knowledge that both of you will change over time. And in another track called 'Talk,' a couple realizes they've grown apart because they have nothing more to say to each other. In this episode, Dacus reads Molly Pascal's Modern Love essay 'How the 'Dining Dead' Got Talking Again,' about a couple who sets out to bring conversation back into their marriage. And Dacus tells Anna Martin why she's not afraid to put in the work for long-term love. Lucy Dacus' fourth solo album, 'Forever Is a Feeling,' is out March 28. Molly Pascal's essay can be found here. Here's how to submit a Modern Love essay to The New York Times. Here's how to submit a Tiny Love Story.
