Ross DouthatVerified account

If you're looking for an editor to deliver your baby on the side of the road, I highly recommend @SethAMandel. https://instagram.com/p/BTcIbhBAT4T/ 

((To get to the dystopia of Gilead, that is, you have to enter another dystopia first.))

(Which suggests that the creators have thought through some of the basic plausibility issues more fully than some of the story's fans.)

Two episodes into "The Handmaid's Tale" adaptation and the "Children of Men" parallels are even more overt than in the book.

Nothing would be more Kasich than running as an independent four years too late.https://twitter.com/henryjgomez/status/857758346073583616 …

Thus far Theresa May is the only product of the Western leadership class who seems equal to the moment.

Jonathan Demme, RIP. "Rachel Getting Married" was his late near-masterpiece.

The pro-natalism we've been waiting for ...https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/857035043449040896 …

Idea of an American theocracy is, yes, a fever dream. But Atwood works harder to make it plausible than is sometimes acknowledged. /finis

... to the brink of self-destruction and a theocratic backlash was the result. Which strikes me as a more interesting idea to contemplate.

She doesn't just say, "oh, Christian men hated modernity and set out to destroy it." She implies that modernity brought society ...

This doesn't vindicate Atwood's view of the Christian right. But her imagination is more subtle than just "Falwell today, Gilead tomorrow."

This is why it's an interesting companion novel to "Children of Men"; their dystopias are different but have a common root.

... it envisions it being imposed amid catastrophe, when sexual + industrial revolutions seem like they're destroying human reproduction.

So the novel doesn't envision Gilead just evolving naturally from Falwell-ism, one step at a time ...

And it's explicitly linked to both pollution and STDs (remember Atwood was writing during the AIDS epidemic).