On this week’s episode of 3rd and Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is Chris Mundy, the Ozark showrunner-writer of Ozark.  He talks about mapping the path toward the Netflix drama series’ finale.
 

On this week’s Al Franken podcast, his guest is Daniel Goldman, who was Lead Counsel for the House Managers in (the 1st) Trump Impeachment.  He weighs in on the Jan. 6 Select Committee Hearings.

As I’ve written here in the past, I’m a big fan of the ongoing, limited-series Miracle Workers, created by Simon Rich.  The comedy stars Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi, with a wonderful supporting cast, most notably (for my taste) Geraldine Viswanathan, an Australian with a down-to-earth, sardonic, bone-dry comedy style and impeccable American accent.  The first season was so successful that they’ve since done two more years – totally different stories and genres, but the same cast.
 
(The first year was about a hapless angel played by Radcliffe who tries to enlist the help of other angels to save Earth from a bored, annoyed, somewhat infantile God, played by Buscemi, who instead wants to move on to his next project for the universe, building a floating restaurant.  The second season took place during Medieval times, and the third year was in pioneer days along the Oregon Trail.)
 
While I thought the first season was the best – smart, goofy, very funny and offbeat – I’ve enjoyed all three years greatly.  And they’ve all been based on short stories by Rich.  He was a long-time writer for Saturday Night Live, and among other things created the series Man Seeking Woman based on his book; wrote an HBO Max movie starring Seth Rogen, An American Pickle, based on his short story; and upcoming wrote the screenplay for the just-completed Wonka, about a young Willy Wonka, starring Timothée Chalamet.  He’s written two novels and six collections of short stories.
 
I mention his literary works as the jumping off point for this posting today.  Last year, my friend Treva Silverman (two-time Emmy-winning writer for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, to give credit where it’s due…) sent me the link to a short story that Simon Rich had just written for the New Yorker magazine.  I don’t think she even knew how much I loved the Miracle Workers series, she just found the story wonderful and really funny and thought I would like it.  She was right all around.  It’s a hoot.  I never sat down to write about it here – and it slipped my mind for a while, but I came across my notes about it, and with the holiday weekend upon us, now seemed a good time.

The piece is a detective story, written in the vein of a Raymond Chandler hard-boiled, 1940s investigator, although (being Simon Rich) with an odd twist:  the detective is a two-year old infant.  And his client is an even-younger girl who mysteriously showed up at the house a year earlier and wants him to find her missing stuffed toy.  It’s titled, “The Big Nap.”
 
Just to give you a sense of it, here’s some of the opening chapter from near the beginning –

I came across this article about six weeks ago, when the early-draft Supreme Court ruling on abortion was leaked.  Because of other news, and since the Court hadn’t officially made its decision, I held off writing about.  But Rachel Maddow did a story on it the other day, and had the Dutch woman behind it all on as a guest, and since the Supreme Court has now overturned Roe v. Wade, I scrounged through my notes to bring it back up.   You likely know about it at this point, but it’s still worth addressing.
 
It's an organization called Aid Access, based in Austria that was started by Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who in 2020 Time magazine listed as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.  At that time, it was largely because of her fight for abortion rights and her Women on Waves “abortion boat” that would anchor off coasts in international waters, providing abortions to women who couldn’t obtain them. 
 
What Aid Access does (and has since 2018) is provide abortion pills over the Internet.  As the Agence France-Presse article notes, the organization “has been working with physicians to fill requests in the 20 US states where abortion pills can be legally prescribed by telemedicine.
 
“For requests from the other states, Gompert's group has exploited a legal loophole to send the pills from abroad.”
 
Even before the Court ruling, demand had been high in the United States.  Indeed, in just over a years, Aid Access got over 45,000 requests from the U.S. alone.
 
There are other places one can order abortion pills over the Internet, but they are purely commercial.  Aid Access provides medical care and also works with people depending on what they can afford to pay.
 
It’s clearly not anything close to a substantial solution.  As Gomperts notes, "The biggest problem is that the women that are not literate, that cannot read and write, that have no access to internet -- the most impoverished group -- they will not be able to find these solutions,"  But it’s a fascinating start.
 
It’s an interesting article, and if you want to know more, here’s the full story.