We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”-Martin Luther King Jr.

When people ask me how I make a living, I say, ‘I get paid to trust the universe.’ Rodney Crowell

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best ones, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d experience after being clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of grace. It’s like the revelation I had when I was a kid the first time I ever flew in an airplane: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold onto and take back with you when you descend once more beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.

And Wallace’s voice sounded so much like the voice already in our heads—brilliant but colloquial, cerebral but confiding, like the very smartest and best part of us—that to lose this voice feels a little like a lobotomy.

‘Every minute I’m standing up talking about women in science, my male colleagues are writing the research papers, getting increases in salary.’

Some pro-life groups are issuing statements of condemnation and attempting to paint this murder as the work of an extremist. But this latest act of terrorism is, sadly, not an anomaly. It is part of a clearly-established pattern of harassment, intimidation and violence against abortion providers and pro-choice individuals. And mainstream pro-life groups shoulder much of the blame.