ŷ������

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,�� I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?�� My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,�� I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?�� My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its face. It had an egg-shaped head and small, dark eyes on the sides rather than at the front. A long, slim nose and a narrow mouth beneath. Its skin was pale and smooth, except for a wrinkled frown on its brow and more wrinkles around both eyes that made it appear older than it should. Perfectly bald, it had no facial hair or eyebrows either. “Aftab,�� I repeated. Still, my anxiety did not come out to meet me.

I continued to read, despite the Thing. No, not despite the Thing. I had a word for the Thing now. Anxiety. Naming my tormentor didn’t make things any easier. Maybe that would change if I found out more about the condition.

I held onto him tightly, as his body wracked with the force of his sobs. After a moment, I wept too. If I had looked deep into myself, I would have known why, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to face the thing I had kept hidden since the first day I came to India.

I sat in the easy chair. “Aftab,�� I said, “would you like to join me for a cup of tea?�� My anxiety did not respond. I waited a while, picturing its face. It had an egg-shaped head and small, dark eyes on the sides rather than at the front. A long, slim nose and a narrow mouth beneath. Its skin was pale and smooth, except for a wrinkled frown on its brow and more wrinkles around both eyes that made it appear older than it should. Perfectly bald, it had no facial hair or eyebrows either. “Aftab,�� I repeated. Still, my anxiety did not come out to meet me.

I continued to read, despite the Thing. No, not despite the Thing. I had a word for the Thing now. Anxiety. Naming my tormentor didn’t make things any easier. Maybe that would change if I found out more about the condition.

I held onto him tightly, as his body wracked with the force of his sobs. After a moment, I wept too. If I had looked deep into myself, I would have known why, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to face the thing I had kept hidden since the first day I came to India.

She wished that Rosella and Larry were coming now and not weeks away. She wished her mother would let her talk about them. But she barely let herse

She wished that Rosella and Larry were coming now and not weeks away. She wished her mother would let her talk about them. But she barely let herself think about what she wished for most �� that she were not in her mother’s living room trying to write a letter, hearing her mother move with difficulty in the room upstairs, but rather at home, waking to the soft light of early summer that appeared through the curtains of her bedroom on Long Island.

When the doorbell rang, Eilis stood up lazily, presuming that it was one of Larry’s cousins calling for him to come and play. However, from the hallway, she made out the silhouette of a grown man through the frosted glass of the door. Until he called out her name, it did not occur to her that this was the man Francesca had mentioned. She opened the door.

‘You are Eilis Fiorello?��

The accent was Irish, with a trace, she thought, of Donegal, like a teacher she had had in school. Also, the way the man stood there, as though waiting to be challenged, reminded her of home.

Eilis appeared puzzled, as though she hadn’t heard him properly. But he knew not to repeat the question; instead, he should give her time to take it in. He kept his eyes on her and let the silence linger. She didn’t move at all. He wondered if she was thinking about something else or if she was working out how to reply. He began to count the seconds as they went by, until he got to a hundred and then two hundred. He could feel that his own face was burned from the midday sun at Cush. But Eilis’s colour had not changed. She was pale. She looked around the room and then directly at him. He sensed that his question still hung in the air and then it became obvious that she wasn’t going to answer it.

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else co

This is the genius of Judy Blume. It’s the single most important aspect of her legacy. Her work as a children’s writer did something nobody else could manage: it helped ensure feminism’s longevity…A movement requires a multigenerational buy-in to maintain its momentum. And over in suburban New Jersey, a soft-spoken stay-at-home mom was listening. Writing cutting-edge books for kids, Judy Blume became the Second Wave’s secret weapon.

Are You There God?, Deenie, and Forever form a triptych, with eleven-year-old Margaret, thirteen-year-old Deenie, and seventeen-year-old Katherine creating a progressive portrait of the new American girl. All three are smart, spunky, and in touch with their bodies. They’re all white, middle class, and from the suburbs �� Judy wrote what she knew �� but together, they embody an ideal for Blume that transcended race or class. The trio offers a vision of how the up-and-coming generation could digest the feminist and sexual revolutions. They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures.

What’s still missing from a lot of contemporary sex ed is an exploration of the way sex intersects with relationships, experts say. Even today, very few parents and educators are prepared to discuss the way dynamics of care and safety and vulnerability all contribute to true intimacy, which is crucial for a satisfying love life. That’s what Judy innately understood how to do. She taught us about our bodies and our hearts through her stories. Periods are something that happens to a whole friend group. First teenage love affects the entire family. Boys experience heartbreak, too! Truly safe intercourse requires talking and planning. You can’t go back to holding hands.

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine��

A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.

Entry from Elaine’s diary, February, 1956

Her hysteria is mounting �� and as Evelyn Tate’s screen door snaps shut, Elaine says it a third time: Can it be . . . that the acme of success . . . for me . . . is being able . . . to do my job as a housekeeper? Each phrase is separated by a troubled gasp �� but it doesn’t matter how fast she babbles or deeply she breathes, the panic has the better of her: I’m going to collapse, she thinks, then be swept up into the sky with my goddamn nightie up around my shoulders . . . The last anyone will ever see of me is the first anyone did: my bare behind, waiting to be smacked.

Dressed in slacks and a sweater she descends . . . she descends, dressed in slacks and a sweater �� in sweater and slacks dressed, she descends: each thought corresponds to a word or words, right? Mix ’em up and you get a wordy sorta salad, like the mess in my head . . .

Yes, she’d been unhappy �� upset, often, as well. But in those far-off days of a fortnight ago, with her complaisant old man, her girlish crush on his colleague, and her catty best friend, Elaine had been a goddamn poster girl for the Modern American Woman: posed in her kitchen, skirts stiff as crinolines, smile plasticized, a penis in one hand . . . a spatula in the other.

Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word.
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire,
Or �� save your reverence �� love, wherein thou stickest
Up

Tut, dun's the mouse, the constable's own word.
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire,
Or �� save your reverence �� love, wherein thou stickest
Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!

Mercutio from Romeo and Juliet

Hidy there, everybody. Good afternoon. Or evening. Sorry to be tardy, but we’ve had ourselves a dustup at the ranch. As you’ve heard by now, people have taken to calling me the Lamb, which is sure nicer than other names I’ve been called. Anyway we’ve had these pork choppers flying at us. I don’t mean to tease. I appreciate y’all tuning in, I do. Well so, okay, it’s the eighteenth day of February 1993, the year of our Lord, and I’m talking at you, through your radios, in your homes and cars and places of commerce, about the revelation of Jesus Christ. That’s the big to-do.

And still more noise �� the walls absorbing what they could, the helicopters and yelling and sobbing and coughing, my breathing coming too fast and the awful high-pitched gurgling of our chickens as they were being shot and people pleading with God and barking orders and information: Get down ! Over here now! They’re still coming! I can see them and they’re still coming! Then a single shot and the sickening muffled thunk of its impact, a sledgehammer into a sandbag. Then an enormous gasp �� like someone breaching the surface of water after too long below. The gasping continued and turned wet, and a man cried out, “No! No no no no!�� Then, as if all the agents were ordered to aim at the same thing and hold down their triggers at the same time: The dinner bell tolled tolled tolled tolled until it dropped to the frozen earth and silenced.

What happened was tragic, no question, but there’s also no doubt about who bears responsibility: Cullen. We can debate tactics and strategies, tanks and tear gas, but if Cullen hadn’t abused those kids, we wouldn’t have been there.

But even the attorney general testified there was no evidence of child abuse.

The responsibility is Cullen’s. He did this. The tanks went in because he wouldn’t come out.

Didn’t they run out of ammo? Isn’t that what being outgunned means?

I think it means we had some help.

God, you’re saying.

What’s the alternative? Some Bible thumpers defeated Uncle Sam? That so much planning and training and equipment was no match for little old us? Sounds fishy, but what do I know? Either way, it sounds like something I can shake hands with.

We aren’t built to matter. That’s the surprise here. That’s the big finale. Tell the story a million times, a million different ways, but the ones who were punished and the ones who were pardoned ain’t switching places.

Did we win or lose? Are we damned or saved? We occupy a liminal, leftover world, and we live off scraps. We build our religion, our very existences, with salvaged and stolen parts, waiting for the next fire. To survive is to know what no one else does: Nothing is forever. Not an alibi or shelter, not bloodline or prayer, not nation or sacrifice or any glad-hearted dream of God.

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over

The knowledge base of natural history is under threat as research funding is increasingly focussed on fast-paced, short-term experimental work over the slower-paced, longer-term observational work necessary to build and maintain it. I felt compelled to write this book because it seems to be a problem that everyone in biological research and almost no one outside of it is aware of. Like many of the extinctions quietly proceeding around the world, it just isn’t something we hear about. We as citizens and stewards of this planet owe it to ourselves and our children to be aware not only of the issue but of the opportunities we have to contribute to its solution.

Sitting down to my stack of herbarium specimens and alcohol-preserved flowers every day felt like losing myself in a good book. Scientific research topics can seem narrow to the point of absurdity, like an entire career spent on a single species, but ask any scientist, and they’ll tell you that there really is a lifetime’s worth of discovery there. It speaks to the complexity of our universe that even the thinnest slices can be so expansive. To me, sustained, close attention to a little-regarded slice of that universe felt spiritual, like time spent in quiet worship before a vast and intricate cosmos, trying to know it just a little bit better.

There was no one dramatic incident that extinguished my desire to be in research. What I’d faced was an environment in which I was under strong pressure to never need accommodation, to never let anyone see that I had other loyalties in my life. It was a death by a thousand tiny cuts. And that’s what makes this story important, because I suspect that’s how it is for many of the nearly half of all women in science who leave after becoming mothers. Each time you’re made to feel unprofessional for having caregiving responsibilities, each time you’re made to feel like a burden for requesting minor accommodation . . . it wears you down a little more. You believe that you are the problem. And when the reward at the end of those years of hard work and low pay are far from assured, it doesn’t take a PhD to figure out you might be happier and better off elsewhere, no matter how much you loved the actual science and the questions you were trying to answer.

Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but s

Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.

The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.

I wanted my drawings to smell, to stink, to seep and bleed, writhe and squirm. But I hadn’t succeeded. I told myself it was the fault of drawing itself, the very form of expression. The pen stroke served only to encase and bring under control, rationalising everything and thereby rendering it tame.

It was like looking into the unknown. It was a language, but one so foreign and incomprehensible it might just as well have been delivered to us from outer space. The truly unfathomable thing was that it was ourselves we were looking at. That what was made manifest to us was our very coding of the world around us and all that we were. The mystery was that from the inside it didn’t feel like code at all, but the world itself.

“The ddoor …�� he said.
I held his gaze.
��... is oop …��
“He’s saying the door’s open,�� said Mum. “Yes, you’ve said so a number times already, Mikael, but I really haven’t a clue what you’re talking about!��
She gave a laugh and glanced at me.
Her cold eyes were full of unease.

They stood there for a few moments, not looking at each other, and then Lucy finally looked at him and said, “I am so glad to see you.�� The day was

They stood there for a few moments, not looking at each other, and then Lucy finally looked at him and said, “I am so glad to see you.�� The day was sunny, and Bob put his sunglasses on. And then off they went for their walk. Lucy said, “Tell me everything. Tell me every single thing. And don’t leave anything out.��

A thought had taken hold of Olive Kitteridge on one of these days in October, and she pondered it for almost a week before she called Bob Burgess. “I have a story to tell that writer Lucy Barton. I wish you would have her come visit me.��

Lucy stood up and pulled on her coat. “Those are my stories,�� she said, and then bent down to put her boots back on. “But you’re right. They are stories of loneliness and love.�� Lucy stepped into the tiny kitchen for a moment and returned with a paper towel and she bent down and soaked up the drops of water on the floor left from her boots. Then she picked up her bag and said, “And the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.��

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?�� He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing qui

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?�� He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,�� he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?��

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?�� He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,�� he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?��

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

“Tad, did my mother ever talk to you about Rouge?�� He looks at me. Just for a second something flashes darkly in his eyes. Like a cloud passing quickly over the sun. It’s there and then it’s gone. And then: “Rouge,�� he repeats like a question. Too much of a question. He squinches up his face like he’s confused. “No? Never heard of that. Rouge, huh? Is that French or something?��

I have to pack this place up. Hire someone with money I don’t have, to fix all the broken shit. Sell it. Then get the hell out of here and go back to work. All in a few days. It’s impossible. It may as well be a tower full of straw that I’m supposed to spin into gold. I may as well be waiting for a goblin to show up with his dark promise to help me. In the wall of cracked mirrors, I see that my skin is in desperate need of mushroom mist.

Let’s skip cleansing and go right to acid, my favorite. Mother’s favorite too. Acid is like cleansing but better, right, Mother? It goes deep into the ick you can’t see with your human eye, and it just melts that away like a witch. Shall we do the one that smells like it’ll numb your face or the one that smells like burning? You pick, Mother. Mother’s smile says surprise me.

Nothing saves us in the end, Tom said, stroking my hair. Not gods or shadow gods. Not heaven or the endless deep. Not blood or cream red as blood. Rouge, as they say. And he smiled his smile that lit me up.

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind

We’ve got excellent reasons to engage in the wisecracking life, but we may also have serious moral qualms about doing so. My title points to a kind of pun: Wisecracks may both bridge cracks and crack bridges, bond people and divide them. Which one occurs depends crucially on what role, if any, empathy plays in the exchange.

Wisecracks are ways of interacting with other people, but they are distinctive because what makes wisecracks aesthetically good �� amusing �� is often the very same thing that can make them morally bad. They tweak or ignore some of the norms that sustain our interpersonal lives, such as our expectations of trust and honesty, our desires for respect and equal worth, our concern to be viewed as the particular people we are (rather than as members of some group). These features make them very different, and far more interesting, than jokes.

What crucially matters in responding correctly to both the funniness and the moral status of a wisecrack are the wisecrackers intentions and motives, which amount to what the wisecracker means by it and what his or her attitudes are toward others affected or targeted by the wisecrack.

neither

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whos

neither

TO AND FRO in shadow from inner to outershadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once neared gently close, once turned away from gently part again beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded neither
unspeakable home

SAMUEL BECKETT

Historically, the Balkans �� that gorgeous, ungovernable, godforsaken peninsula always in turmoil, always on the fringes of civilizations, always a broken-up borderland �� had for centuries been a place to survive, endure. It had also been a place to fail to escape from and �� both because and in spite of this �� to love fiercely. If you were from this lush volatility, chances were you’d in some way participate in at least one war �� two or even three if God really had it in for you and gave you a long life.

The complexity of the narrative structure that involves not only multiple levels of diegesis and various diegetic combinations discussed by Genette but also an unusual correlation between verifiable reality and fiction, invites theoretical speculation primarily concerning elements that can be qualified as ‘disruptive�� to the memoir, related to trauma.

I’m not writing a biopic here; this is not that kind of story and mine is not that kind of life. I’ve got my conciliatory designs on the synapses between life and story of life �� my own timid, wide-eyed attempt at living it �� which is why I’m compelled to leave my sketches in, to show the work, as it were. If you spend your time on Earth trying to understand how you fit in life instead of living it, then to you, trying to understand is living, and what you’re reading is that hard admittance.

Obituaries of the scathing variety are really what inspired our ventures into the world of the macabre. I mean hello . . . it’s why we put the bitc

Obituaries of the scathing variety are really what inspired our ventures into the world of the macabre. I mean hello . . . it’s why we put the bitch in OBITCHUARY! Yes they’re hilarious, in an absurd morbid way, but really it’s the shock factor. Who would have thought that such a thing existed, and what would prompt somebody to write one? Well, as it turns out, there’s a variety of reasons. The truth of the matter is, some people just plain suck. We can all probably name at least one person in our lives worthy of some petty last words.

�� Philip Clover of Columbus, Ohio, developed a device he called the “coffin torpedo�� in 1878. In his words, it was a device created to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies.�� It involved a system of triggers and springs that detonates an explosion of lead balls if the casket lid is opened after burial. Judge Thomas N. Howell invented his revision of the coffin-torpedo with the catchy slogan, “Sleep well, sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make mincemeat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat.�� Hot damn. Imagine you’re just trying to get some cash for gold to get a bump on a Saturday night and �� WHAMMY�� your meat is minced, babe.

�� Also known as lachrymatories, or tear vials, these were small containers that were believed to collect the tears shed by mourners during times of grief. These delicate glass or ceramic vessels were usually ornately designed and came in various shapes and sizes. It became a tangible expression of grief one could hold on to, to demonstrate the depth of their emotions, as it was believed that capturing tears symbolized the depth of one’s sorrow and love for the departed. Some even thought that evaporating tears were a way to send messages to the afterlife. We think these catchers are especially sweet because once the tears dried up, some would say it symbolized the end of mourning.

�� Funeral strippers are just that, exotic dancers who sing and dance while removing their clothes at a funeral or in a procession to a funeral as a way to celebrate the life of the deceased and attract mourners. See! Everyone is afraid nobody will show up to their last party! If strippers can’t bring ’em in �� what will, really? The tradition originated in Taiwan and has since spread throughout parts of China. Some say it brings good luck. We’re not experts here, but we’re willing to bet those people are straight men…It seems China has significantly cracked down on this controversial performance, since this little strip tease act is often considered obscene. In fact, they started giving rewards to people back in 2018 to snitch on others for hiring funeral strippers.

�� In March 2013, four men in northern China were sentenced to prison for exhuming the corpses of ten women and selling them as ghost brides to the families of deceased, unmarried men. The women’s bodies were to be buried alongside the dead men, ensuring eternal companionship. Guess the saying is true: romance . . . is dead.

�� In Sardinia’s past they would allegedly throw their sick elders off certain cliffs. Sometimes senicide would be done by a select group of women named accabbadoras, a.k.a. the terminator or ender. They would bless them and then proceed to either suffocate them, or kill them with blunt-force trauma by hitting them on the back of the head with a wooden mallet.

�� In 1888, Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludvig Nobel passed away, but the French newspaper accidentally published an obituary for Alfred �� oopsy daisy. The obit referred to Alfred as the “merchant of death�� due to his invention of dynamite, which was then being used in warfare. Imagine not only was your obituary mistakenly printed but also . . . they dogged you in it? This incident reportedly had a profound impact on Alfred Nobel, leading him to establish the Nobel Prizes in order to leave a more positive legacy. Mission accomplished. We didn’t even know about the dynamite.

We hope you enjoyed our little romp through death. Our aim was to make you laugh and teach you something new while maybe changing how you see death. It’s a scary topic, one that is hard to comprehend, but learning about it gives us power. We wanted to show that it’s okay to talk about it and that knowledge can help us understand it better.

As a child it would put me in mind of a line of that poem that had been read aloud to us by our poetry-loving Master back in Ontario: “‘In winter I

As a child it would put me in mind of a line of that poem that had been read aloud to us by our poetry-loving Master back in Ontario: “‘In winter I get up at night ,’�� he had begun, “‘and dress by yellow candle-light.’�� Then came the musical rhythm of poetics, with a onesyllabled final verse that began with the line “‘And does it not seem hard to you?’��

My family, whose ancestors had endured the outlawing of their language and religion, the imperial takeover of their land, and the peril of famine, could never free themselves from property hunger. They gobbled up land in Ontario, field by field. Then they sent my father out to feast on the prairies in a similar fashion. All this without giving more than a passing thought to those who had for millennia inhabited the geography my family coveted. One tribe, forced out of its homeland by imperial dominance, war, and scarcity, migrates across the sea and forces another tribe out of its homeland.

When I think of the scene now, my legs braided with Harp’s, my head on his arm, speaking about my brother, it seems to come from a country so far away and visited so long ago, no memory can recover its shorelines. Harp’s long body. And that woman who was me, not young, but so much younger than I am now. What of her? How did she manage it all? The man, his body. No one before or after. I was helpless and adrift. He was unknowable. And that meant there wasn’t any part of me that I didn’t want him to understand, to know.

How strange we all are! Most of us come from Irish and Scottish tribes cast out by the mother country. But we are still reading her poems and singing her songs. How odd that we define foreignness as those whose speech hold the trace of another language, and then we ignore altogether our own foreignness on land that was never our own.

When I think back to my time in Ashiya, the day Mina showed me her boxes of matchboxes stands out as the day she really took me into her confidence

When I think back to my time in Ashiya, the day Mina showed me her boxes of matchboxes stands out as the day she really took me into her confidence. Of course, we’d been on good terms before then, but the boxes of boxes opened the final door to our friendship. I was the only one among her friends or family who knew her secret. In that enormous house in Ashiya, she and I were the only ones who knew what was hidden away in those little boxes.

Whenever I return there in my memory, their voices are as lively as ever, their smiling faces full of warmth. Grandmother Rosa, seated before the makeup mirror she brought from Germany as part of her trousseau, carefully rubbing her face with beauty cream. My aunt in the smoking room, tirelessly hunting for typographical errors. My uncle, impeccably dressed, even at home, endlessly tossing off his quips and jokes. The staff, Yoneda-san and Kobayashi-san, working hard in their respective domains; the family pet, Pochiko, relaxing in the garden. And my cousin Mina reading a book. We always knew when she was about from the rustling of the box of matches she kept in her pocket. The matchboxes were her precious possessions, her talismans.

With the passage of time, even as the distance has increased, the memories of the days I spent with Mina in Ashiya have grown more vivid and dense, have taken root deep in my heart. You might even say they’ve become the very foundation of my memory. The matchboxes from Mina, my card from the Ashiya Public Library, the family photo taken in the garden �� they’re always with me. On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. I remember that Sunday adventure, when I went alone to the Fressy factory, received a matchbox from a batlike man, and found the Ezaka Royal Mansion. And when I recall those things, I feel somehow that the past is still alive, still watching over me.

The expression “tits up�� is American showbiz slang for an upbeat attitude, often used as a positive send-off from one woman to another. “Tits up�� r

The expression “tits up�� is American showbiz slang for an upbeat attitude, often used as a positive send-off from one woman to another. “Tits up�� reminds a woman to stand up, pull her shoulders back, and flourish. It’s a cheer that reassures a sister that she will succeed.

Tits Up explores beauty, health, respect, self-esteem, self-determination, humanness, and equality. I hope to shed light on breasts in ways that elevate their value, not just because I believe in some happy, shiny body positivity, but because these organs are emblematic of womanhood. Put another way, I have no doubt that the status of breasts �� not to mention tits, titties, jugs, racks, and apexes �� is integral to women’s social position. For as long as breasts are disparaged as silly boobs, we will remain the “second sex.��

Strippers, as professional manipulators of male desire, are acutely aware of the dynamics of patriarchy. Sitting here, I’ve come to respect their position on the frontline, observing their shrewd navigation of the global gender war. In the past, I might have assumed that they pandered to patriarchy, but I’ve come to see this perspective as prudish and thoughtlessly classist.

Most of the “breast is best�� conversation has focused on the benefits of breastfeeding for infants, as if the health of mothers were irrelevant �� a phenomenon that a militant might dub medical misogyny but which I prefer to call patriarchal obliviousness.

While most feminists have seen beauty as a form of submission, others have argued that it is a means of resistance. I think the binary logic of this “structure versus agency�� debate is a dead end because the problem is not an either-or. The pursuit of beauty can be both a form of obedience and an effort to subvert and surmount. I read a compelling article by critic Rita Felski, arguing that feminists need to craft thicker descriptions of aesthetic experience so we can balance the political costs of being beautiful with the emotional benefits. Only then can we do justice to the reasons why humans pursue and take solace in beauty.

Through being here and researching the place of breasts in spirituality, I have come to understand that there is no necessary opposition between feminism and religion. Women’s emancipation is not exclusively secular. In fact, our liberation may be enhanced by flights of fancy and leaps of faith.

When I observe women who relish their cleavage, I am delighted by their good fortune. Breasts and chests are the literal front and center of body positivity.

While the chorus of “Bella ciao�� played over and over again, the movement became rhythmic. At first it just wobbled, heating, until it got much hot

While the chorus of “Bella ciao�� played over and over again, the movement became rhythmic. At first it just wobbled, heating, until it got much hotter than the rest of me, until finally it was blazing and spinning inside my body. And then I understood at once. It was the coin. I had no doubt about it, I just knew. I had put it there when I was little, in the car ride down south. For more than two decades the coin was gone, I didn’t know where it was. And then, for some reason in New York, it was resurrected.

In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean.

�� To be honest with you, in New York I saw the dirtiest people I had ever seen, although I’d never been to a third world country. I came from Palestine, which was neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing, and the women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.

�� When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster, the rich want to look poor.

�� It was reported that fifty-five people were killed in Gaza, and I felt a pinch in my chest. But when I looked up at the trees, at the sky, I saw that nothing was changed.

I come from a land that is a graveyard. For millennia, all kinds of people were born there, they died there, or were killed, and some were even resurrected or reborn. It was bloody, haunted, and doomed, but it belonged to mankind. Nature in America was uncivilized and untamed. I didn’t know how to read it. If a deer was some kind of warning sign, I wouldn’t have known. Before Sasha could see him, the deer turned around and left. I saw his fluffy white tail behind him, like the tail of a rabbit, and all my fear turned into giddiness. Sasha didn’t leave the house to look for the deer, he stayed indoors, keeping a distance from nature. He was a complex man, but you have to understand that everything outside of me only serves a function. Yes, I am a good woman, I respect people, I listen to their voices. Yours too. But this is not Bakhtin’s carnival, this is a centralized nervous system.

“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,�� Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.�� Go looking for hop

“Hope is the pillar that holds up the world,�� Pliny the Elder is supposed to have observed. “Hope is the dream of a waking man.�� Go looking for hopeful climate stories and they turn up everywhere.

It’s easy now to poke fun at Arrhenius for his sunniness. The doubling threshold could be reached within decades, and the results of this are apt to be disastrous. But who among us is really any different? Here we all are, watching things fall apart. And yet, deep down, we don’t believe it.

From the observation deck, the drought’s effects were scarily apparent. An abandoned dock lay, in pieces, high above the lake’s edge. Instead of being submerged, the power plant’s four intake towers stuck up in the air, like lighthouses. The steep walls of the reservoir, which in pre-dam days formed Black Canyon, were lined in an enormous black stripe �� a geological oddity known as the bathtub ring. The ring, composed of minerals deposited by the retreating waters, runs as straight as a ruler, mile after mile. At the start of the drought, the stripe was as high as a giraffe. By 2015, it had grown as tall as the Statue of Liberty. In 2022, it reached the height of the Tower of Pisa. The water level was so low that the dam's generators could operate only sporadically.

Recently, a Princeton-based team issued a report detailing how the United States could reduce its net emissions to zero by 2050. The researchers considered several possible decarbonization “pathways��. The one labelled “high electrification�� would, they projected, eliminate sixty-two thousand jobs in the coal industry and four hundred thousand in the natural-gas sector. But it was expected to produce nearly eight hundred thousand jobs in construction, more than seven hundred thousand in the solar industry, and more than a million in upgrading the grid.

Something inside the boy crumbles, a hesitancy, a fear, and he surrenders to the car’s movements, surreptitiously seeks to make contact with the fa

Something inside the boy crumbles, a hesitancy, a fear, and he surrenders to the car’s movements, surreptitiously seeks to make contact with the father, to touch him through the leather jacket in a tentative, clumsy attempt to convey his affection �� or what he considers the affection expected of a son for his father, of a child for this man, this stranger who, out of the blue, has been designated his father.

The leader stops, looks up at the sky and, for an instant, the black disc of his pupil aligns with the white disc of the sun, the star sears the retina and the creature crawling through the matricial mud turns away to contemplate the valley through which he is trudging with others of his kind: a landscape whipped by winds, sparse undergrowth dotted here and there with shrubs that have a mournful air; over this bleak terrain floats the negative afterimage of the day star, a black moon suspended on the horizon.

There are other stars, he says, other planets, some so dark that no sun ever reaches them, and beyond that, there are other galaxies, thousands of them, and each galaxy contains billions of suns, billions of planets, and beyond everything that is visible, he says, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.

“Are there other earths like ours?��

“I hope not,�� says the father after a prolonged silence. “I hope there’s nothing. Nothing but rock, silence, ice and fire.��

Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him

Alone, we had become the lies he had told us. Together, we were learning to unravel it. We were building the chain. We were learning to replace him with ourselves.

I reached for my keys, but put them away. I turned the handle on my apartment door and expected, rightly, that it would open. The shirts he left in my closet were no longer there. His T-shirts that had filled the bottom drawer, gone. His sneakers that had formed a neat line against my shoes, and some of my belongings too, gone with him. No one should love me. And I believed him. Because I had been taught to.

Comedy is an invisibility cloak for the men who hate women. It’s not objectification, it’s social commentary! It’s not chauvinism, I’m in character! It’s not a rape joke, it’s intellectual critique! It’s not bullying, it’s risqué! It’s not harassment, it’s banter! It’s not a slur, it’s a play on words! “Good�� comedy is meant to push boundaries, meant to shock, meant to provoke. If you don’t like it, maybe you’re too sensitive, too literal, maybe you’re just not smart enough to get it.

There is no singular experience of womanhood and we create the chain to remind ourselves of this. We stand beside each other in such a way that we may say, Tell me your story as a woman, and yours, and yours, and yours. I do not know what it is to be a Jewish woman, a Black woman, or trans, or gay, or disabled, or a sex worker, or a prisoner, or a pilot, or a seamstress, or four husbands deep (yet). Where I fall in our flawed verses of womanhood is that I am unlucky in some ways and fortunate in others. What we share is history. What we share is the need to talk, to say we made it or we didn’t. Survival isn’t enough and it musn’t be.

Mauro sprang to his feet as we approached and congratulated us on finding the restaurant. I’m afraid the others might not solve the riddle so quick

Mauro sprang to his feet as we approached and congratulated us on finding the restaurant. I’m afraid the others might not solve the riddle so quickly, he said. It’s typical of this city’s attitude to fashion, he said, that the most desirable meeting place should also be impossible to find. Not so impossible, Julia observed, since they found it. It’s the parade that has confused everything.

It occurred to me in the time that followed that I had been murdered and yet had nonetheless remained alive, and I found that I could associate this death-in-life with other events and experiences, most of which were consequences in one way or another of my biological femininity. Those female experiences, I now saw, had usually been attributed to an alternate or double self whose role it was to absorb and confine them so that they played no part in the ongoing story of life. Like a kind of stuntman, this alternate self took the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity. Despite having no name or identity of her own, the stuntman was what created both the possibilities and the artificiality of character. But the violence and the unexpectedness of the incident in the street had caught my stuntman unawares.

�� Perhaps men had always painted nudes in the same way as they committed violence �� to prove that their courage had not been damaged by morality and need.

�� Not to be understood is effectively to be silenced, but not understanding can in its turn legitimise that silence, can illuminate one’s own unknowability. Art is the pact of individuals denying society the last word.

�� Something had changed: somehow she had become identifiably female. This was not a sexual but a social femininity, offered to her as a form of weakness.

�� Psychologists tell us that little children are proud of their own shit, and enjoy showing it to other people, until they are informed that their shit is disgusting and should be hidden, and I suddenly wondered whether artists somehow never got this message and kept on being proud of their shit and wanting to show it to people.

�� A woman artist marries a male artist because she sees her ambitions mirrored in him. She thinks that because he’s an artist he’ll let her be an artist �� she thinks he’s the one guy who will understand her. But a male artist wants a slave, and when he marries a woman artist he gets the bonus of a slave who thinks he’s a genius.

His style, so uninterfering, drew attention to itself without meaning to. He rarely, for instance, showed his characters in close-up, believing that this was not how human beings saw one another. His films had no particular aesthetic. They often took place in public spaces, and his characters seemed barely to notice that they were being watched. They wore ordinary clothes and rarely looked at the camera. They were absorbed in their own lives. For those accustomed to the camera’s penetration of social and physical boundaries and the strange authority of its prying eye, this absence of what might be called leadership was noticeable. People were often baffled or even angered by his films. They expected a storyteller to demonstrate his mastery and control by resolving the confusion and ambiguity of reality, not deepening it.