Lindy West

On Tuesday, ABC canceled its “Roseanne” revival, the network’s first No. 1 show in 24 years, after its star Roseanne Barr referred to Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi, a 53-year-old Republican man, delivered his State of the State address in 2014, he said, “On this unfortunate anniversary of Roe v. Wade, my goal is to end abortion in Mississippi.” Last month, Bryant signed into law the Gestational Age Act, which bans abortion after 15 weeks...

Ricky Gervais, the British comedian, does not care what you say about him on Twitter. He does not care if you are offended. He does not care if you hate the latest joke he told about rape, or the Bible, or Caitlyn Jenner, or Hitler or your child’s fatal peanut allergy. And just to make sure you’re crystal clear on all of the tweets he does not remotely care about...

In 1975, 42 years before the comedian Aziz Ansari reportedly brought a date home to his apartment and repeatedly tried to initiate sex with her after she told him “next time” and “I don’t want to feel forced,” Susan Brownmiller published “Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.” “All rape is an exercise in power,” Brownmiller wrote in 1975, “but some rapists have an edge that is more than physical. . . ."

In 2013, in the stylish atrium of a Seattle ad agency, I moderated a panel for the 3 Percent Movement, an organization founded to address the dismal statistic that at the time of its beginnings, only 3 percent of advertising creative directors were women (according to the organization’s website, that number has climbed to 11 percent). There were three women and one man on the panel. The audience was almost exclusively women.

Yes, President Donald Trump has sexually harassed women. This concludes my ethics investigation. I hate to bore you with technical jargon, but I suppose it’s important, in the interest of nonpartisan professional transparency, to offer some insight into my methodology. First of all, as a very good sexual harassment investigator, I know that one of the sexual harasser’s classic tells is a history of repeatedly sexually harassing women, or talking about sexually harassing women, in public, either on the internet or on video or on the record with reporters, perhaps as recently as today. . .

It’s weird to think that one year ago today Barack Obama was still the president. Michelle Obama was decorating the White House with happy snowmen and gingerbread dogs instead of transforming the East Colonnade into a hell-bound gullet of witch fingers, apparently our new tradition, and the president of the United States somehow made it through the entire week without insulting a single 90-year-old Native American war hero.

If November 2016 was a study in anguish for many, November 2017 is a study in contrasts. (Well, and anguish.) At the very time when, it seems, Americans have finally begun to take sexual predation seriously and impose meaningful consequences on men who abuse their power, the far right has shot off in the opposite direction like a dog with a ham in its mouth.

Last month, an Access Hollywood correspondent asked the actress Uma Thurman to comment on abuse of power in Hollywood, presumably in light of the sexual assault allegations against the producer Harvey Weinstein. Speaking slowly and deliberately, through gritted teeth, Thurman responded . . .

Did you hear the bugs are disappearing? Amateur entomologists tracking insect populations in Western Europe discovered that, at a number of survey sites, the biomass of flying insects...

You know that part in “Jurassic Park” when Dr. Grant and the kids are about to get chomped by velociraptors, but the Tyrannosaurus rex shows up and demolishes the raptors with her superior jaws?

It is unclear what possessed Woody Allen, of all people, to comment on the accusations of sexual predation against Harvey Weinstein, when he could have just not said anything . . .

In the end, which is where we live now, it turns out that America was brought low not by war or economic collapse or environmental catastrophe (though none of those are off the table) but by plausible deniability.

Ivanka Trump, first daughter, strode into Washington back in January with big promises: She was passionate about helping “working women,” she said, and she was going to close the gender wage gap even if it killed her.