Jennifer Baumgardner
- Editor's Letter
At around seven weeks of pregnancy, a mucus glob forms in the cervix and turns it from funnel into stopper. This blood-tinged plug keeps the baby in utero and anything lurking in your vagina out. When the evocatively named “bloody show” discharges, it’s time for the main event. I learned
VOLUME 3: ISSUE 1
SUMMER 2024
Dear Readers, This morning, as I traipsed the mile or so from my apartment in Greenwich Village to our new office on the Lower East Side, the Missing Persons song “Words” popped into my brain. It starts with “Do you hear me? / Do you care?” and the chorus is
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
- Close Encounter
Judy Chicago, 2023. Photo by Donald Woodman. Here’s an origin story for you. Just as America was emerging from the Great Depression, a progressive Jewish couple from Chicago, Arthur and May Cohen, welcomed their first red diaper baby: Judy. Six years later, when Judy was home alone with her little
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 4
WINTER 2024
TALK Nona Willis Aronowitz NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ is the author, most recently, of Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution (Plume, 2022), a memoir about the end of the author’s marriage, as well as a work of social history that examines the enduring barriers to true sexual freedom. She
TALK In 1972, when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in the Philippines, award-winning feminist dissident and writer Ninotchka Rosca was a young radical journalist and chair of the Women’s Bureau. She was soon swept up and imprisoned for disseminating news that didn’t adhere to the government’s propaganda machine. She served
Me and Curtis Sittenfeld. Photo by Matt Carlson. I loved playing with Barbies when I was a kid. Because it was the seventies and my mom subscribed to Ms., I was as familiar with the feminist critique of beauty standards, “girls” toys, and mandatory high heels as I was with
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 3
FALL 2023
OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi,
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 1
SPRING 2023
In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the
VOLUME 2: ISSUE 2
SUMMER 2023
Almost sixty years ago, a girl at the University of Chicago was pregnant and suicidal. Her brother begged another student (a member of CORE and SDS) to find an abortion provider. The student “hadn’t thought about the issue before” but approached this as a good deed and found a doctor.
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 5
WINTER 2022
Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia
VOLUME 1: ISSUE 4
FALL 2022