When I eased away from Roman Catholicism and then from Anglo-Catholicism, I knew what I would miss most was the stirring beauty of the rituals. Those gestures and incantations, the solemn bell, the use of fire, water, oil, and ash, touched something deep inside me. The New Agey rituals people “invented” […]
Which of these examples is current, and which is fifty years old? An elaborate system of callbacks and blindfolded trips Overseas abortifacients sold to American women Women without medical degrees training to perform abortions Homemade extraction devices using Mason jars and aquarium tubing Women drinking bleach or turpentine Criminal charges […]
Doubtless, Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 oration, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July” will find itself more popular this year in some quarters than it may have been in the past. The mood of the country is fraught. There is a sense that perhaps the nation is on the brink […]
Six of Washington University’s plant-science biologists are female. They travel the world easily. Not one of them, to my knowledge, has had to shear off her hair and bind her breasts to do so. That was the trick used by Jeanne Baret, a self-taught herbalist who became the first woman to […]
• When I was a boy, I might have added actress Janet Leigh to this list after seeing her in the film Houdini, playing the wife/assistant of the famous magician/escape artist. I would not have been wrong as women assistants worked hard in magic, curling up inside boxes and cabinets, providing sex […]
Last Friday (June 24), I attended a Las Vegas Aviators baseball game at Las Vegas Ballpark, located in Summerlin. The Aviators are the AAA-affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, the Major League team that many Las Vegans feel will move to Sin City one day soon. It was over 100 degrees at the start […]
Psychopaths have different brains than the rest of us. That much is obvious. But what does it feel like? In a new study, individuals diagnosed with psychopathy (egotistical, antisocial, and devoid of empathy, guilt, or remorse) were compared to individuals with low or zero scores on the standard checklist of psychopathic traits. Those […]
What we have always thought of, with a shudder, as waste…need not be. Because now, having learned to recycle just about everything else, we are relearning how to peecycle. That is the term of art, and the practice is taking hold in Sweden, France, Germany, South Africa, India, Mexico, and here, especially […]
“Xiang Haitao hasn’t posted lately” says his LinkedIn page. It lists him working as an advanced imaging scientist for Monsanto “2008 – Present”—which is a bit awkward, since it omits the economic espionage conviction that jailed and then deported him. What LinkedIn does not know is that Xiang quit in 2017—and booked […]
The pro-choice rally at the last clinic in Missouri to offer abortions was held Friday evening in St. Louis. Hundreds of people packed the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood building on Forest Park Avenue; dozens more lined the sidewalk and median, waving signs and calling to traffic that honked back. Missouri became […]
