Dear Reader (excluding those of you in a romantic relationship with a fence), 

So, I emerged from recording a solo podcast to the news that the Supreme Court has overruled Roe v. Wade. While I have lots of opinions about this, I’m not going to write about any of it today. Here are my reasons: 1) I haven’t read the decision—which I gather is very similar to the leaked draft from February. 2) I can’t follow the reactions and write about them at the same time. 3) It’s not like there will be a shortage of pieces out there about this. 4) My views haven’t changed since I last wrote or podcasted (yes, that’s a verb) about abortion, Roe, Dobbs etc. 5) Everything I could rush to say today will be less considered than what I can say when I know more. 6) I don’t feel like it.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about show trials. What is a show trial? The Britannica dictionary has a pretty standard definition: “A trial in a court of law in which the verdict has been decided in advance.”

This is a fairly clinical definition. It leaves out the moral horror of how show trials actually work.