The Power of Stories
The Power of Stories On tasting her first radish, the gorilla Koko signed to her human companions, “Red hurt food.” Just three words: one for the beginning, one for the middle, one for the end. That is all a story requires. Koko’s story, one of many possible stories about a radish, was complete in itself: […]
What Feminism Missed
What Feminism Missed Economics tells us the obvious: that when supply goes up, price goes down. And price does not only mean the cost of diamonds or real estate; it also means wages. In the early 1960s my mother returned to nursing after a break while we children were small. She was the first mom […]
Dare to Dream Madam Vice President
Dare to Dream Madam Vice President We live in history every day, and some days that truth is crystal clear. As I write this it has just been announced that Kamala Devi Harris, a 56-year-old woman of African American and Indian American ancestry, is Vice President-Elect of the United States. She will be the first […]
A Week of Nobel Queens
A Week of Nobel Queens What a week for older women! Poet Louise Gluck, 77, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Gluck is a professor at Yale who previously won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her lifetime of […]
Life in the Third Act with Plague
Life in the Third Act with Plague. What it’s like to get what you want in a pandemic I recently read a fabulous article [registration required] by Caitlin Moran with the subtitle “Goodbye, nice, jolly, happy Caitlin. Hello, angry Caitlin.” Moran’s premise is that women spend most of our adult lives drunk on a biochemical cocktail […]
What I Did Not Know About Racism
My guest blogger Mirinda Kossoff, who grew up in small-town Danville, VA, shares a powerful recollection in What I Did Not Know About Racism of what it was like to grow up in the South one hundred years after the Civil War. She has lived and worked in Japan and England as well as the […]
