One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had...
One day in Auschwitz, the writer Primo Levi recited a canto of Dante’s Inferno to a companion, and the poem about hell reached out from six hundred years before to roll back Levi’s despair and his deh...
Moths and other nocturnal insects navigate by the moon and stars. Those heavenly bodies are useful for them to find their way, even though they never get far from the surface of the earth. But lightbu...
Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don't.
Many heterosexual marriages are childless; many with children break up: they are no guarantee that children will be raised in a house with two parents of two genders. The courts have scoffed at the re...
Love is a constant negotiation, a constant conversation; to love someone is to lay yourself open to rejection and abandonment; love is something you can earn but not extort. It is an arena in which yo...
Language, loose language, vague language becomes an out. Things happen.
I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.
Feminism is not a scheme to deprive men but a plan to liberate us all
After all, many people make babies; only one made To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas...
You don't have the memory of your future; {that}the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold...
When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in—the surrounding culture’s illness.
We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous...
Those who are threatened by marriage equality are, many things suggest, as threatened by the idea of equality between heterosexual couples as same-sex couples. Liberation is a contagious project, spea...
This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.
The question then is how to get lost. Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita in between lies a life of discovery.
Thanks to demographics, that conservative push is not going to work—the United States is not going to be a mostly white country again—and because genies don’t go back into bottles and queer people are...
So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no on...
She was making the case that we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile. I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you don’t know if your actio...
Many love stories are like the shells of hermit crabs, though others are more like chambered nautiluses, whose architecture grows with the inhabitant and whose abandoned smaller chambers are lighter t...