Books
Hard Times: At the <em>New York Times Book Review</em>, all the misogyny is fit to print
The New York Times Book Review has never exactly embraced passionate advocacy—unless it was promoting Pynchon's and DeLillo's place in the postmodernist canon. Even worse, it has become the place where serious feminist books come to die— or more accurately, to be dismissed with the flick of a well-... Read more »
Depressing News...
I awoke this morning to the news that the music magazine, No Depression, will cease publishing after its May/June issue. Citing many of the same reasons that other indie publications have closed their doors (check out the story in Lost/Found issue of Bitch: Paper Cuts: Saying RIP to some of the... Read more »
What I'm reading right now
Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. I'm only on page 97, but so far am (unsurprisingly, given her track record) blown away by her brilliance.
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto. A voice of sanity among the nutritional madness of processed... Read more »
Karaoke for shy people
Sometimes I find it difficult to keep up with my reading pile, especially now that I've inherited a coffee table so enormous it almost begs for piles and piles of magazines, books, and zines to be stacked atop it.
But I set aside some time this weekend to catch up. A few things I enjoyed. Maybe... Read more »
An "arrghhh!" end to a "gaaaah!" week
Wow, was this a bad week to be in the midst of production on the new issue of Bitch. As we all know, it was Super Super Tuesday, which will now be remembered as the birth of the Crying Jag Heard 'Round the World, and it was impossible to keep up with the avalanche of press necessitated by what was... Read more »
Abortion: the "shmashmortion" of 2008?
In a tiny bit of synergy, I read this excellent piece by Katha Pollitt only an hour after sitting at my ob-gyn's office next to a pregnant teen gabbing on a hot-pink cellphone. In other news, all the abortion discussion that was nowhere to be found in 2007's trifecta of unplanned-pregnancy films... Read more »
The Great Cover-Up: Can High Necklines Cure Low Morals?
In an era when it's possible to turn on the television on any given night and see a clutch of bikini-clad women crawling over their male prey (ABC's The Bachelor), a sex-toy demonstration (HBO's Real Sex), or a 9-year-old showing off her moves on her parents' personal stripper pole (E!'s Keeping Up... Read more »
Shelf Lives: Paging Through Feminism’s Lost & Found Classics
In the 1976 cross-country race film The Gumball Rally, the late, great Raul Julia rips off his rearview mirror and tosses it over his shoulder, saying "What's behind me is not important."
He didn't win the race.
Maybe that's because what's behind us actually is important. Feminist literature... Read more »
Save the Shorts
Perhaps my love for the short story is due to my sometimes short attention span, but if you, too, adore them, you should consider subscribing to One Story. A nonprofit literary magazine, they publish one writer's short story every few weeks. That's it—literally one short story per issue in a stand-... Read more »
Andi Z on the B-word
For the third time this year, the word bitch has made national headines. Read cofounder and editorial director Andi Zeisler's take in the Washington Post.
Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we've done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated... Read more »
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