Some of the big stories n stuff about ILYBYGTH themes from around the interwebs this week:

The big one: Trump administration might redefine gender, at NYT.

Reactions:

• What will it mean to be a transgender Republican? At WaPo.
• A “cruel, unnecessary attack,” at WB.
• Nothing less than erasing an entire group of people, at TP.
• A “return to reality and the law,” at NR.
• Finally, some “common sense.” At AC.

Oh, no. Iowan burns gay-friendly books, at DMR.

Want to start your own NFL team? The Green Bay Packers got started for only $500, at HT.

Got 500 bucks?

Want to succeed in life? Go to a rich-kids’ high school, at IHE. HT: MM

Why did Saudi Arabia kill Khashoggi? Mark Perry says he pointed out an unbearable truth, at AC.

David Berliner on the real roots of America’s school problems, at WaPo.

Difficult truths: Peter Greene on the hardest part of a teacher’s job.

Creationism and climate-change denial lose the standards fight in Arizona, at NCSE.

The latest from the Harvard trial: If you want diversity, forget about race and use this factor instead, at CHE.

Ouch. After all the shouting, Jennifer Burns offers yet another scholarly take on Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, at HPE.

Democracy in Chains promised to do many important things: insert Buchanan and public choice theory into our history of conservative thought and politics; highlight antidemocratic tendencies in libertarian thought; and probe the intersection of midcentury libertarianism, Southern segregation, and white supremacy. Unfortunately, the book is too heated, partisan, and shallow to accomplish these tasks successfully. Even more unfortunately, at a moment when the nation desperately needs new and creative political thinking, of the kind that often emerges out of liminal spaces between ideologies and academic disciplines, the book serves to reinscribe a Manichean right/ left binary onto the past. Rife with distortions and inaccuracies, the book is above all a missed opportunity to encourage critical thought about intellectual and political change on the American right. . . . MacLean’s eagerness for a conviction leads her to browbeat the jury. . . . Ultimately it is not a book of scholarship, but of partisanship, written to reinforce existing divides and confirm existing biases. As such it will not stand the test of time, but will stand rather as testimony to its time.

Thomas Aquinas and evolution, at Touchstone.

Catholics for Fundamentalist U: Notre Dame men’s group requests a porn filter for campus.