An object that looks like a braided horse’s tail sits on a shelf near my desk, because I cannot bring myself to throw it away. At the end of one of the braids is a tiny dark reddish-brown stain. The muscles tightened around my heart the day I realized that stain was […]
“… like the way guys find women with guns hot,” my husband was saying. “What?” Surprised that this was news to me, he rattled off examples of women warriors in hit movies, superheroes in the comics, female soldiers in the military…. “You find that sexy?” I blurted. He shrugged, carefully noncommittal, […]
I nearly missed marrying my husband. Our first real date (after a mutual, happily married friend gathered her single college friends in a hopeful blind double date) was for an art exhibit, and he was picking me up late on a Sunday morning. Earlier the same morning, I met a friend […]
I made the classic media mistake last week: Read a story with a clickbait headline and forget that the truth might be more nuanced. What I read (and the flurry of outcry that followed) suggested that we are now to speak of “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding.” Which does make sense, in certain cases. […]
Dr. Seuss was okay with red fish and blue fish; he could imagine an elephant sitting patiently in a tree to hatch another species’ egg. So why was he such a bigot when it came to human beings? And does that mean we need to abandon his books? During China’s Cultural Revolution, there […]
“Our perfunctory observations on what kind of day it is, are perhaps not idle. Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it, to know how the sky is grey, paler in the south, […]
The sound coming from the kitchen table started as a groan, stayed in back of the throat as a teeth-clenched yyyynnnghhhh, hit crescendo with the yowl of a cat in heat. In the interest of pandemic sanity, my husband dug out a model kit bought a few years ago on […]
“Has the sacrificial victim arrived yet?” ”He has arrived.” “Thank God.” Those are quotes from Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Turkish intelligence obtained (one does not ask how) an audio recording, and highlights from the transcript are part of the new documentary The Dissident. Directed by Bryan Fogel, who won the 2018 […]
Two months ago, the country was melting down, the virus was winning, and the prospect of being sucked into a black hole in outer space was the only scenario terrifying enough to dwarf the rest of my angst. I read to distract myself, but the explanations confused me from the start: Black holes […]
All those stereotypes you struggle against? Dig them out and brush them off, because of course the German language invented the most complicated, somber, interesting words for life in a pandemic. And French added the most nuance. And Spanish emphasized sociability. As for us? Quite a few of our neologisms sound like a […]
