Issues

Like any broad social movement, feminism contains many currents. You can take one of two approaches to that. The first would say we’re all in it together against the patriarchy so differences within the movement have to be subordinated to unity against a common foe. The other approach would acknowledge that we’re not all in it together, that some versions of feminism are implicated in oppression, and that the cause of women’s liberation has to

“These days, when people sling words of criticism like ‘performative’ or ‘saviorism,’ I hear scornful dismissal, not sophistication. Allies can be ‘proven,’ ‘potential,’ or ‘problematic,’” Loretta J. Ross writes, but importantly “they are allies.” In Calling In, her sixth book, Rossmixes memoir with advice for dealing with conflict. The advice centers on why and how to invite people who’ve upset you into honest conversation, rather than immediately writing them off as politically retrograde or ejecting

Spent,the new comic novel by Alison Bechdel,is a study in what happens when a doom spiral develops centrifugal force. The book is set in 2021, mid-Covid, both post- and pre-Trump. A fictionalized version of the author, Alison, and her wife, Holly, run a pygmy goat sanctuary on their Vermont farm. While Holly goes viral for her chainsaw sculptures, Alison attempts to write her latest book, $um: An Accounting, a memoir of the role of money

The other day, I received a press release sent by a publisher. He was hoping to interest me in a forthcoming memoir. It was the story of a man, driving across the country, in search of information about his father’s life. Something along these lines. A man and his father. Two men and their whatever. I thought, Jesus (as it were), another book about men excitedly wanting to know about being men—about being sons or

Voicing experiences of childhood sexual abuse counteracts the techniques perpetrators use to sustain their patterns of criminal abuse; namely, silencing the victim and controlling the narrative about what happened. Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, recently published in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer, is an intelligent hybrid of survivor memoir and literary criticism. A sensation when published in France, it was shortlisted for the 2023 Prix Goncourt. Sad Tiger joins Consent by Vanessa Springora as

The Trouble with Angels (1966), a playful comedy about mischievous girls at a Catholic boarding school, was a beloved film in my family. My grandmother took her daughters to see it in the 1960s, and it became one of my mother’s favorites, rivaled only by Grease (1978). Growing up as she did in a large Catholic family with four girls and attending parochial school, my mother related to the film’s plucky lead (Hayley Mills) who

It’s hard to think of another topic on which educated people misspeak so glibly as the naturalness of patriarchy. Claims like “most societies have been male-dominated” are tossed out to right and left with only a murmur of thought: Maybe men habitually rule through physical strength, or because women are busy with babies? And in turn, the falsehood sprouts truisms that reinforce it further:Human nature is just violent, we assume; greed and inequality are intrinsic

Like Eiren Caffall, I have spent many hours in the Long Island Sound. On its beaches I have watched tiny barnacles feed in the tide, ospreys hunt for fish, horseshoe crabs scuttle like living fossils in the surf. And then there were the jellyfish. They appeared one day out of nowhere. A bloom that filled the entire harbor, translucent bells bobbing just under the surface of the water, then disappearing again into its murky depths.

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.” So wrote David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). A founder of empiricism, Hume argued that miracles are extremely unlikely since, by definition, they subvert our sensory understanding of the world. “It is a miracle, that a dead man should come to life; because that has never been observed, in any age or country.” Nobody, according to Hume, has ever seen a violation