#5SmartReads - April 17, 2023

Hitha on the Comstock Act, the future of boring, and the unknown feature that can help you break up with your phone

Why a 19th-century law is at center of abortion pill fight (Axios)

Just because something is legal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right, as the United States’ short history has demonstrated.

The Comstock Act is an 1873 law that “made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” tools or publications through the mail.” The act has been relatively dormant in recent history, but the plaintiff in the mifepristone case and Judge Kacsmaryk cited this act to essentially ban mifepristone on a federal level.

I thought this was a really helpful primer on an old law that has brought back into light, and provides an analysis of how the Supreme Court may act both in the mifepristone case and on Comstack (either in this case, or a future one).

But what really enrages me is the blatant ignoring of mifepristone’s use to treat other clinical conditions that have nothing to do with abortion - and this sets a dangerous precedent for the access of essential healthcare in this country.

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Addicted to Your Phone? Try This “Brutally Effective” Trick (Vogue)

Where has grayscale mode been hiding?? Because this feature has helped me spend more time being present with my loved ones and actually creating things, and my hands and my brain are thanking me.

Grayscale does exactly what it sounds - it dulls the color of the media on your phone, thus making it less engaging and helping cut the dopamine spike and crash that keeps us constantly checking social media apps, emails, and texts.

This piece outlines how to enable grayscale and set up the shortcut on your phone. What’s worked for me is keeping grayscale enabled most of the time, and only turning it off when I'm taking or editing photos and scheduling social content.

Highly, highly recommend.

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What doing other people’s taxes taught me about our broken tax code (Vox)

Dylan Matthews may be the only person in America who genuinely enjoys doing taxes. As someone with many a nerdy obsession, I respect it. And after reading his piece, I’m extremely grateful for his nerdery on this topic because I learned so much.

I think we can all agree that our current tax code and system is broken and messed up by design, but I didn’t realize just how much until reading this.

And especially how invasive it is.

This is a long read, but an incredibly valuable one as tax season is in high gear and has our attention. Leaders from both parties have long vowed to simplify our tax code and system, and none have managed to do achieve permanent meaningful change at the individual level.

And while we have urgent issues to call our reps about (gun safety, abortion access), it’s important to give these some of our attention as well - even if it’s just educating ourselves.

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How Kim Abrams's Underground Drilling Business Plans to Take on Wildfires -- and Elon Musk (Inc)

I love it when founders solve seemingly impossible problems in elegant ways.

Wildfire season is getting increasingly worse, and sparks that result in huge fires have come from malfunctioning power lines (which are being moved underground, but with a lot of difficulty).

Kim Abrams’ solution? A new drill that can handle any material - soft or hard. And while her company Petra competes directly with Elon Musk’s Boring Company, she’s approaching the market differently.

“Petra concentrates on boring 36- to 72-inch-wide tunnels for utility lines. In many ways, it's a task more challenging than boring larger tunnels, which can be forged by brute force. Creating a drill that can drive small holes through super-hard stone requires greater precision and is thus a more refined feat of engineering. Petra's drill, at a rate of one inch per minute, can slice through geologies that usually require dynamite for excavation.”

Not only is Petra approaching a massive challenge in a unique way, the company itself is structured differently than its peers in the engineering space:

“Petra has two women co-founders and a staff that's more than 80 percent women or people of color. With several of the startup's investors, Abrams restructured its board last year to be majority women, with straight, LGBTQ+, Black, White, and AAPI members.”

I’ll be keeping my eye on this company and Abrams herself. What an inspiration.

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The $1.6 billion Dominion v. Fox News trial starts Tuesday. Catch up here (Associated Press)

Having just finished Unscripted (which I highly recommend), my fascination with family run media empires continues. And there’s no better time, as the Fox News vs. Dominion trial begins this week.

If you need a refresher (I did!), here you go:

Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News for repeatedly airing claims that their voting machines flipped votes from Trump to Biden, and the documents in discovery show that the on-air journalists, producers, and executives of Fox News personally denied these claims and acknowledged Biden’s victory.

The details and history of this suit are important, and this article does a great job of reporting them all in a fair manner.