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This week, Vice Magazine unveiled a fashion spread featuring images based on famous women writers who killed themselves. To call it merely tasteless would be to understate how calculated it was as well as how revolting it was — it literally created an image based on a real writer who really hanged herself with a pair of stockings, and then it told you where to buy the stockings.

And because it was awful, a lot of people wrote about how awful it was, and Vice eventually took it down from the online magazine while (of course) leaving it in the print edition, and they apologized, sort of, in that "sorry if you're mad about the fashion model we posed with a gun to her mouth" way that's so very common and dispiriting.

If I had to guess, I'd guess whoever thought of it will get a promotion.

Yesterday, my Twitter feed filled up with people who were horrified by the spread, but also with some folks arguing that it was the duty of all of us to ignore it and stop talking about it. The magazine, this thinking went, was obviously only were doing it to make people angry, to attract the attention that comes with horror, to get eyeballs that showed up expecting to be disgusted and were not disappointed.

If I had to guess, I'd guess it's probably true. The magazine's semi-apology claiming that this all stems from their attempt to be editorial isn't remotely persuasive; nobody puts a gun in a model's mouth and doesn't know that's going to be a storm. You only do it if you want the storm. They wanted the storm, they got it, they probably counted the clicks and are perfectly happy.

This particular line of thought, the settle-down line, holds that when you know something is bait, when you know it's there to make you angry, you simply ignore it. You see a fashion spread, for instance, where women killing themselves is used as fashion and commerce and smarmy provocation, and you know that if you say anything, they win. So you say nothing. You stay quiet.

There are times when this approach has some appeal to me. When I see on Twitter that someone with an egg avatar and two followers has gotten a writer I know to spend ages arguing back and forth about nothing, there is part of me that thinks, "Why bother? The world is full of awfulness; you will never beat back all of it." We all ignore things all day long; if we didn't, we'd never get anything done.

But Vice asks for credibility. It's trying to position itself as a force in a kind of gonzo journalism for bros. They have a series on HBO. They don't have an egg avatar. They get — and want — attention for the things they do that are serious. This isn't scouring the internet for obscure horrible people doing horrible things in tiny corners and exhausting yourself howling at the moon over it. This is seeing a powerful media brand selling degrading images of violence in an issue they're claiming is all about women in fiction.

It's insidious and frustrating, the idea that the more blatant an effort to offend for attention, the more the offended are to blame if they react. It imposes a sort of duty of measured inertness, as if you owe it to the greater good not to challenge something if the people who dumped it out into the world don't really believe in it but only want a reaction. It rewards anything you believe to be craven exploitation by suggesting that the more you believe it's just craven exploitation, the more you owe it to the world to sit silently, roll your eyes, and be quiet. It makes craven exploitation bulletproof.

It's insidious and frustrating, but (or maybe because) it's true. It's true, I suspect, that Vice probably got what they wanted from this when Jezebel wrote about it. It's true that we may all be following the intended script, including me. It's not that I don't get it; we all get it. And I can't speak for anybody else, but as a writer, I feel sort of bullied either way when things like this happen — bullied into responding as I know I'm expected to, or bullied into sitting quietly while somebody flicks me on the ear. Neither feels good; in fact, both feel awful.

But both feel awful because both are responses to something that feels awful already, which is seeing real and serious issues (I've seen it with race and sexuality and faith; in this case, it's the gross ways in which degradation, violence and fashion are mixed) exploited for attention. And that's still bad, even if it works.

When this happens, when I believe or half-believe that something is only there to make me angry, it feels less like simple click bait and more like taunting. What are you going to do about it? Go ahead. Get mad. You're only going to make it seem important.

Well, so be it. Perhaps there isn't a good way to call out quests for attention without rewarding them in the short term. But in the long term, this spread still happened, and Vice will always be the magazine that published it. And I will always be a writer who predictably wrote about how gross it was. I suppose we'll both have to live with it.

No such thoughtfulness greets Gretta's sensitive, guilt-prone first-born, Michael Francis, when he trudges home from his dreary job teaching history. After a shotgun wedding, he had to abandon his Ph.D. studies and dash his dreams of a professorship at an American university. Now that their second child is ready to start school, his wife, Claire, who's barely talking to him, is paving the way to her liberation by studying to complete her long-abandoned degree. Michael Francis is distraught at the thought of losing her.

O'Farrell piles on the misery in this section of the novel, though Monica, 10 months younger than her brother, is too peevish and self-righteous to arouse much compassion. Her first husband left her after a rude discovery of just how determined she was not to have children. Now she's terribly unhappy in her new country life, married to an older antiques dealer whose two small daughters treat her with disdain.

O'Farrell's sympathies generally lie most solidly with black sheep — or rather, black ewes. As such, Aoife (pronounced like Eva with an F sound, we're told) is the bleating heart of the novel. Ten years Monica's junior, she had, in her mother's words, "gone off the rails" and "flounced" to New York City three years earlier after a major falling-out with her sister. This defection capped a miserable childhood blighted by undiagnosed dyslexia. Enthralled with her freedom from family censure, Aoife has managed to support herself by working multiple jobs, including the first she's ever loved, as a photographer's assistant. But her carefully hidden illiteracy threatens her job and a serious budding romance.

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The House has passed one of the most far-reaching abortion bills in decades. But it's unlikely to ever become law.

By a mostly party-line vote Tuesday of 228-196, lawmakers passed the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," which would ban nearly all abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization.

"At 20 weeks maybe sooner, the baby feels pain," said physician and Rep. John Fleming, R-La., on the House floor. "And so I would just submit to you today Mr. Speaker; this bill is not just about abortion; it's about pain, it's about torture to that young life."

The contention that fetuses can feel pain starting at 20 weeks is hotly disputed. But it's been used as a justification to pass similar bills in multiple states over the past several years.

Bringing the federal bill to the House floor now was meant to capitalize on the publicity surrounding last month's murder convictions of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

"After this Kermit Gosnell trial and some of the horrific acts that were going on, a vast majority of the American people believe in the substance of this bill and so do I," Boehner said at his weekly news conference.

Democrats, however, say there's one huge and glaring problem with the bill: It's unconstitutional.

"The bill bans abortions prior to 20 weeks," said Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, ranking member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "Since Roe v. Wade, it has been well-settled law that no bill is constitutional that bans abortions before viability, which is later than that."

Most experts agree that viability begins somewhere around 23 weeks, depending on how you count.

But Democrats use the abortion-ban bill to make a larger point, as well: that Republicans are continuing this year where they left off last year, attacking the rights of women.

"This bill is extreme, an unprecedented reach into women's lives, and a clear indication that the well-being of women in this country is not something that Republicans care to protect," said Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

And Republicans, perhaps inadvertently, played into Democrats' hands.

During committee consideration of the abortion ban last week, the bill's sponsor, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, tried to fend off an amendment that would have provided an exception for victims of rape or incest.

In arguing against the exception, he said, "You know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy is very low."

Franks later said he was trying to say that most women who get pregnant as a result of rape have abortions well before they are six months pregnant. But the PR damage was done.

Republican leaders late last week decided not to let Franks manage his own bill on the floor. Instead, they turned to Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a longtime anti-abortion voice. They also added exceptions to the bill for rape and incest.

But Democrats were outraged at the choice of Blackburn to handle the bill, because she's not even a member of the Judiciary Committee that considered it.

"And if that is not PR, I don't know what is," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairwoman of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. "And if that is not simply trying to fool you, I don't know what else that is."

On the other hand, Republican leaders couldn't have chosen a woman from the Judiciary Committee, because the Republicans on the panel are all male.

Still, the entire effort was likely all for show. The Senate is not expected to take up the bill. And President Obama issued a veto threat against it on Monday.

The furor over recently exposed government surveillance programs has posed an abundance of political challenges for both President Obama and Congress. Relatively unmentioned in all of this, however, is the role of the courts — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and how its role has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Obama has said that there are tradeoffs between privacy and security in an age of international terrorism. But he emphasized that the two surveillance programs exposed this month were repeatedly authorized and reviewed by Congress, with federal judges "overseeing the entire program throughout."

Despite being overseen by judges, they are not examined in the way that a normal application for a search warrant is.

For decades, the government conducted warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States deemed to be a national security threat. But in 1978, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such warrantless searches unconstitutional, Congress passed legislation that created a special intelligence court to review government requests for warrants. The law was tweaked over the years, but the core of the court's powers remained unchanged for decades. If the government wanted to listen in on conversations or other communications in the U.S., it had to get a warrant from the foreign intelligence court based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that national security was being compromised.

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