Phillip Smith, AlterNet

Joe Arpaio made his conservative bones as the hardline, long-time sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, home of Phoenix, the state's largest city. Housing inmates in sweltering tent cities in the desert heat, forcing them to wear pink underwear and feeding them slop as incarceration porn voyeurs watched with glee on internet feeds helped make Arpaio a hero of the reactionary right.

A municipal court judge in Louisiana with an apparently limited understanding of the U.S. Constitution is forcing first-time drug offenders seeking probation to attend a Christian program called "Life Choices" offered by a local church.

Marijuana: A Short History by John Hudak (2016, Brookings Institution Press, 217 pp., $14.95 PB)

The growing acceptance of and access to legal marijuana has some people worried that the youth are going to start using it more frequently, but that's not the demographic where pot has really taken off. Instead, it's senior citizens.

When I went in for my annual physical in 2011, I knew something was up when the physician's assistant who usually dealt with me deferred to the actual doctor. It was up to him to take on more serious issues, and as he soon explained, I had one. My blood work had come back showing I was infected with the hepatitis C virus. Hep C is a serious, life-threatening illness that attacks the liver and can result in fatty liver, cirrhotic liver and liver cancer. One out of five people carrying the hep C virus will die of liver disease within 20 years. And a lot of people have it—at least 3 million, and perhaps as many as 7 million, in the United States alone.