Mother’s Day Cards for the Motherless

By Sara McGrath

When I worked at a used bookstore in college, I spent hours in the cave, which is essentially a long, narrow, plywood closet. After books were priced, they were to be stacked and then shelved. I did the stacking, first sorting books by size and type and eventually learning how to make sturdy stacks of all types of books.

When You Don’t Know How to Feel About Family

By Katherine Lu

As the year draws to a close, I am swept into the ceremonial current of heavy dinners, forced family gatherings, and a pressure to love unconditionally. Don’t get me wrong—I love my family. Our unbreakable bond is usually the only part of life that I know I can rely on.

For Those “End of Days” Days (aka After Reading The News)

By Meredith Westgate

Recommending Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars is not a revelation. Smith has been US Poet Laureate since 2017, and this particular collection won the 2012 Pulitzer in poetry. You could probably figure this one out. And yet, in this moment – as an anti-science, fear-driven climate settles over our country and casts a shadow over the world – Smith’s stunning, stargazing verse delivers moments that border on transcendent.

For Rebel Girls in Distress

by R.H. Lossin

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke publicly for the first time in 1906, at the age of 15 to a group of socialists in New York City. This “mere slip of a girl” delivered a radical message that she would work to realize with various tactics and through a several organizations, for the rest of her life ...

For Doing the Laundry and Feeling Like a Murderess ...

by R.H. Lossin

Alias Grace is an historical novel based on the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his pregnant housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. Yes, it’s beach material. It is also a vehicle for interrogating common and not-so-common sense notions of memory, agency, femininity and culpability. …

For Confronting the Pitfalls of Female Solidarity…

by R.H. Lossin

During the late 19th and early 20th century, women demanded the franchise, organized as workers, advocated for birth control and educational equality, and experimented with collective living arrangements. …

For When You Are Tired of Being Used as an Excuse for Imperialism

by R.H. Lossin

Women who inhabit that vague space known as Western society are, we are regularly told, in an enviable position. Of the virtues that the United States claims to export in its on-going multi-front war, gender equality ranks high on the list. There is no escaping the fact that ...

When There Really Shouldn't Be An App For That

by R.H. Lossin

Many years before our social selves were wedded to an algorithm, philosopher Herbert Marcuse observed that any activity that seemed to diverge from technological rationality appeared irrational or even neurotic. If attempts to resist technological imperatives make us seem ...

For Valentine’s Day

by R.H. Lossin

No shortage of ink is spilled trying to terrify women into monogamous partnerships and make those who have chosen to leave them feel incomplete and pathological. The propaganda machine charged with propping up the economic unit of the nuclear family has upped its game ...

If You Aren't Sure #metoo Is Enough

by R.H. Lossin

In 2016, I was one of two women in a small graduate seminar on the history of slavery. I spent most of the semester feeling like a complete idiot. Insecurity always has its own very particular constellation. Being ...

For Better Understanding the Pan-Asian Diaspora

by Alex Laughlin

I went on a deep dive into Ruth Ozeki’s work earlier this year, and My Year of Meats was my favorite. Ruth Ozeki is a master of marrying opposing forms and of doing that uncomfortable thing of holding contradictory truths in your head at once. …

For Dead of Winter Existential Crises...

by R.H. Lossin

Maggie Nelson wrote The Art of Cruelty in the final years of the second administration of George W. Bush. A time, Nelson writes, when “there was no shortage of cruelties to contemplate.” It was also a time, like ours, when the very notion of moral …