The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies...
The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel Regeneration, Pat Bar...
The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we're meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe eve...
The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from creative banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data and the manufacturing of products desi...
The whites who administered Native American subjugation claimed to be recruiting the Indians to join them in a truer, more coherent worldview—but whether it was about spirituality and the afterlife, t...
The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.
To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to...
We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t.
We need to stop telling the story about the woman who stayed home, passive and dependent, waiting for her man. She wasn't sitting around waiting. She was busy. She still is.
What escapes categorization can escape detection altogether
What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.
Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seaho...
You can rescue someone from danger, but not from change and death; the soldier who survives the battle becomes someone else, something else, somewhere else. His war subsides; his memory fades; his nat...
Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't ha...
In English the word 'peripatetic' means 'one who walks habitually and extensively.
A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you’re doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.
Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, is the radical notion that women are people, a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.
Hysteria derives from the Greek word for uterus, and the extreme emotional state it denotes was once thought to be due to a wandering womb; men were by definition
I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays . ....
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