SALTZBURG | A Grain of Salt

In most states, a box of tampons is taxed. A box of Viagra, in many of those same states, is not. New York repealed its tampon tax in 2016, lifting a 4% state sales tax that had quietly added up over a lifetime of purchases, but more than 18 states still classify menstrual products as non-essential — the same category as decorative candles. The tax itself is small, but what it tells you is not.

This is the kind of detail that should have been a bigger deal and wasn’t. It sat in the tax code for decades, written by people who decided, without ever having to say so out loud, whose biology counted as a medical necessity and whose counted as a luxury. That is the pattern I kept noticing in the news cycle, in policy fine print and in the gap between what gets announced and what gets enforced. Institutions tell on themselves in their paperwork. The line item, the eligibility cutoff, the clause buried on page 25 — that is where these decisions actually live. The press release tells you what a policy is supposed to do. The document tells you what it actually does.

I learned about this reality slowly, and then all at once. The slow part was years of watching adults describe systems as broken when they were working exactly as designed — just not for the people who were complaining. The all-at-once part was sitting down with the actual text of the Hyde Amendment — a budget rider that bars federal Medicaid dollars from covering abortion except in cases of rape, incest or threat to the patient’s life — and realizing it has been attached to the annual appropriations bill every year since 1976. A single sentence can determine whether or not a low-income woman on Medicaid can access abortion care. The amendment doesn’t ban anything. It simply says the government refuses to pay. The cost of that refusal lands on the people with the least ability to absorb it. That is not an accident; itis the design. 

Once you start reading documents this way, you cannot stop. The post-Dobbs patchwork of state laws, Gender-affirming care bans written to sound like child protection statutes, Title IX regulations rewritten between administrations — each version shifting who has to prove what to whom. The childcare cliff, the wage gap and the pink tax — small individually, structural to aggregate. Visa policies that treat international students as conditional guests. DEI rollbacks moving through state legislatures under the language of neutrality. Endowment decisions, donor relationships and housing policy at universities like ours, which shape student life far more than any speech given at convocation. 

Gender is the thread I keep pulling up on, because gender is one of the clearest ways to see how institutions function. When you ask who a policy hurts, who it protects and who was in the room when it was written, gender is always part of the answer. So is race. So is class. So is immigration status. The categories overlap, and if you read policy documents carefully, the overlap is right there on the page. 

Cornell is where I am doing this kind of document-level reading because Cornell is where I am. This means I am also one of the people impacted by the University's decisions, and one of the people who benefits from them. The University is not separate from the systems I am describing — it is one of them, with its own Title IX office, its own donor relationships, its own quiet decisions about which survivors get formal processes and which get redirected to wellness resources. It is small enough that the documents are findable and the people affected are reachable. That makes it a useful place to practice this kind of reading.

A Grain of Salt will do one thing, repeatedly. Each column I write will start with a real document — a policy, regulation, a campus memo, a line of legislation — and ask three concrete questions: What does it claim to do, what does it actually do and who was in the room to decide whose costs would absorb the difference?

The most consequential decisions rarely announce themselves. They arrive as budget riders, as administrative guidance, as appendices. The people who write them depend on readers being too busy or too trusting to check the math. 

So check the math. On housing contracts, on financial aid letters, on the policies that govern what we can say at protests — and on the memos that arrive in our inboxes from the administrators and trustees at Cornell who write them, who hope we will not read the first paragraph.

Including this column. Especially this column. Take it with a grain of salt.

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