Issues

The other day, while walking down my driveway to get in my car, I noticed what looked like an enormous tangle of grape jellyfish: my bloody tampons, littered all over the street, spilling out of our garbage cans. Someone had rifled through our bins, looking for recyclables or whatever, and instead found bags of bloody tampons, which they decided to fling into the air like biological confetti. I started to shovel the purplish stumps back

Librarians feature prominently in my two most “controversial” books for children. In Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, a white child visits the library with their mom and learns from a library book about the history of systemic racism in the United States and the legacy of white people who aligned with black leaders and liberation all along. Not My Idea encourages white children to tune into their instincts about racial justice and step

Convinced that the vast volume of murder podcasts I was listening to was making me both dumber and more paranoid, I recently made a major intellectual upgrade and tried out . . . murder audiobooks. The kind of terrible women’s psychological thrillers that usually feature secret pasts, betrayals, specious plots, spouses who are not who they seem to be, etc. So some miscellaneous Lisa Unger was the soundtrack to my dish washing and laundry folding

In 1969, while a grad student at Yale, the renowned poet and nonfiction author Honor Moore became unexpectedly pregnant. Today, she teaches poetry at the New School and is the author of several award-winning books, as well as the co-editor of Library of America’s 2021 volume collecting the greatest hits of the second wave. At the time of the pregnancy, though, she was not really aware of the burgeoning feminist movement and was by her