Worry is a way to pretend that you have knowledge or control over what you don't--and it surprises me, even in myself, how much we prefer ugly scenarios to the pure unknown.
Women’s work, like much blue-collar work and agrarian work, is often invisible and uncredited, the work that holds the world together—
When a corporation writes something off, it accepts the cost. When we write off corporations as inherently corrupt, we accept the cost, too.
What are human murmurations, I wondered? They are, speaking of choruses, in Horton Hears a Who, the tiny Whos of Whoville, who find that if every last one of them raises their voice, they become loud...
To feel for someone enlarges the self and then the self shares risks and pains.
This work will only mater if it's sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren't immediate or ob...
There’s no good reason (and many bad reasons) colleges spend more time telling women how to survive predators than telling the other half of their students not to be predators.
There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people...
There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-s...
The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future.
Sometimes it's valuable to return to the circumstances of childhood with an adult's resources and insights, and that time around I realized that I could not feel at all. Not for her, or for myself, ex...
Solitude in the city is about the lack of other people or rather their distance beyond a door or wall, but in remote places it isn’t an absence but the presence of something else, a kind of humming si...
Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be ren...
On the crowded subway car back to Brooklyn afterwards, the youngest of my three female companions had her bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn’s age. At first, she thought he had simply bumped in...
Language is like a road, it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read. This narrative or temporal element has made writing and walking resemble each other.
If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.
Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a plan to liberate us all
Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, ‘were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at...
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or decline from it. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Ho...
But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I l...