When a French feminist informs us that the toils and snares of naturalist mothering are not only unnecessary but contribute to women's marginalization in the workplace and in society at large, it's tough not to have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it's absolutely true that the boot camp of modern motherhood can feel beyond oppressive. On the other hand, do we really require a privileged French academic to tell us all this?
“Nice just to walk and breathe and not worry about every goddamn thing. Nice, too, to know that when I return life will quickly become very different than it has been.” I wrote those words a decade ago, jotted them down in a marble-covered Mead composition book I’d brought with me to record
"Taylor has had many biographers. Yet their books often reveal more about their authors than her," observes M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and this new meditation, The Accidental Feminist. "Some [biographers] dish," she writes, "some fawn." And some turn their targets into feminist teaching
On December 9, 2011, the ABC News program 20/20 aired a dramatic report from India, presented by the show’s Emmy Award–winning anchor Elizabeth Vargas. In an uncharacteristically long piece devoted to social issues in a foreign country not recently liberated from tyranny by an American
The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires? In
In a scene near the end of Page One, Andrew Rossi’s 2011 documentary about the New York Times, Brian Stelter, a reporter on the Times media desk, learns that NBC is preparing to declare the end of the Iraq war. The network’s correspondent Richard Engel is embedded with what NBC describes as the
Isaiah Berlin split intellectuals into two groups: foxes, who know a great deal about many things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing. But I wonder if there isn’t a third type, too, mysterious and misunderstood: the individual who knows a great deal about one thing—and that thing is herself.
Sarah Manguso’s prose elegy for a friend who died when he jumped onto the tracks as a Metro-North train pulled into the 254th Street station in Riverdale is odd, fragmentary, obstinately unbalanced. On July 23, 2008, musician and software engineer Harris Wulfson checked himself out of a
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker stakes out a boldly optimistic view of the world, at a time when his readers are no doubt processing all kinds of bad news. Straining at the bigger picture of the trends afoot in human history, Pinker argues that violence is at an
God bless Caitlin Flanagan. Without her, who else would give voice to the sorts of anxieties that make upper-middle-class women break out in hives? Whether she’s wringing her hands over the prevalence of sexless marriages, the costs of overscheduled children, the depravity of hookup culture,
