Blog

16 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

You might as well settle back. This may take me a while. Because, oh my god, this has already taken too long a while. Too many tipping points. I think it was around 1974 that Ms. magazine ran the first cover story on sexual harassment, which was already an issue in the women's movement. Almost 20 years later in 1990, Anita Hill's courageous truth-telling before Congress galvanized American women–yet Clarence Thomas, the perpetrator of criminal sexual harassment against her, still sits on the United States Supreme Court. In the mid-1990s, feminists were divided over whether Bill Clinton's semen stains on Monica Lewinsky's dress were "consensual": yes, she had told friends that she planned to go to the White House carrying kneepads in hopes of just such an encounter; and yes, many of his policies were good for women; and yes, there was a vast right-wing conspiracy out to get him...

25 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
The genuine article. I've been thinking again (always a dangerous pastime) about what passes for real in our current fun-house mirror of a country that's not so much fun.

18 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Last week, just as I was finishing the blog, I learned Kate Millett had died in Paris at age 82. It was possible to rush in a mention. But a mention about the loss of an old friend was unthinkable. So I've waited until now, remembering . . .

11 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
I hope you had a good August, despite various miseries visited on us by Trump, Kim Jong-un, climate change, and American Nazis.

24 Jul

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
This will be my last blog post until September—I think. I can't guarantee that some news development won't send me leaping to my keyboard, however, so those of you who subscribe to this blog might be surprised.

17 Jul

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

So, serious stuff is happening. Like yet another Senate attempt to delay but later slither through a health bill that would literally kill thousands of Americans. Like Antarctica's ice-shelf calving an iceberg almost as large as Delaware. Like the United Nations closing down its cholera-vaccination campaign in Yemen because the rampant spread of the disease there, combined with growing famine—both of which are side-effects of the devastation of war—would obliterate vaccination efforts. Not that anyone really gives a damn about Yemen, where a proxy regional power struggle, 1400-years-old, is being waged between (Shiite) Iran and (Sunni) Saudi Arabia, currently proxies in turn for (pro-Iran) Russia and the (pro-Saudi Arabia) U.S. Except now that Russia might be TrumPutinizing the U.S., well, Yemen's dispensable, like road kill. Can you imagine just how bad things must be for the U.N. to announce it's triaging an agonized little failed state—the poorest in...

10 Jul

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
This blog post is about six Afghan high-school girls who are robotic engineers. It's also about the recent loss of a major French feminist, and about advice from a great aviator, too. Intrigued?

03 Jul

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
The personal is political. Well, yeah, I admit it: it was a good phrase years ago, challenging the notion that feminism was just "personal stuff." It's a good phrase still, with ever widening applications. So this blog post is personal—in the most political sense.