The Handmaid's Tale

The cultural tier has to do with language and public imagination. The strategy is far more insidious than just taking part in public debate. Anti-choice propaganda is relentless, loud, gruesome and repetitive. It ignores reality, it appeals to deep-felt anxieties. It can be brutal, as with images of cut-up, bloody foetuses paraded in front of schools or driven around on the sides of vans.

Margaret Atwood released the much-anticipated sequel to her award-winning 1985 novel "The Handmaid's Tale" on Sept. 10 with "The Testaments" set to become a similar smash.

Television's glittering Emmys placed politics front and center on Sept. 17, lavishing "The Handmaid's Tale" with awards for its bleak portrait of an authoritarian America.

The glitzy ceremony in downtown Los Angeles was widely expected to have a strongly political flavor, and host Stephen Colbert set the tone in his opening monologue.