Alright, so offline is offline this week, but in its place I wanted to share one of my favorite

new podcasts here at Crooked. It's called Positively Dreadful, with Crooked Media's editor-in-chief

Brian Boitler. Each week, Brian dives below the headlines of the stories that are making us all

so anxious, which is all the stories, and gives you a richer understanding and appreciation of how

and why to remain engaged, even in the face of daunting challenges. So in this episode, he talks

with the nation's abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield about the fall of row, mistakes,

democrats, and the reproductive rights movements can learn from, and the road ahead. Hope you enjoy.

Hi, welcome to Positively Dreadful. I'm your host Brian Boitler, and if you're new to the show this

week, that may be because our first episode went live just a couple hours before the Supreme Court

overturned Roe v. Wade, which is a bad time to launch anything, but also kind of a microcosm

of what we want this show to be about. This shows about how things are happening all the time,

a lot of the news is terrible, and about how we should confront things as enormous and catastrophic

as the summary abolition of reproductive rights without just sinking into despair. Especially when

we know we may be in the last few months of unified democratic party control in Washington,

and they don't have enough votes to undo the decision right now. Metaphorically, I think of it

like an earthquake or hurricane that strikes a country that doesn't have the means to rebuild on

its own. If outside help doesn't come, the damage dwarfs the capacity of citizens working together,

and things are just kind of permanently worse than they would have been. So how do we stop that,

or at least how do we minimize the risk that we'll have to wait decades to get back to where we

were just last week? One thing we know for sure doesn't work because it's part of how we got here

is to misapprehend or discount or dilute ourselves about the scope of the challenge. And another thing

that definitely doesn't work is defeatism or cynicism about how bad things are, or about the

...