More Than A Magazine, A Movement
An excerpt from Jill Elaine Hasday’s latest book, We the Men:
“From the start, women mobilizing for equality have endeavored to enrich and expand America’s dominant stories about itself. But attempts to focus public memory on women have repeatedly faced determined and protracted opposition, for generations and to the present day.
“Consider the opposition to placing Harriet Tubman’s image on the $20 bill.”
An excerpt from Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (out April 22 from Wilfrid Laurier University Press), Chapter 5: “On Catching and Being Caught.”
“I knew enough stories of violence to know that if I did not try and something happened, I would be to blame. … I went to the police station … The tall white man with a buzz cut who came out to talk to me was dismissive. What do you want us to do, ma’am? I wanted a restraining order. Unless our neighbors were caught in the act of trespassing, unless we could prove without a doubt that we were being followed, there wasn’t anything they would do. …
“The camera was visible from where they parked their car, no branches or shrubs hiding its location, its lens pointed directly at where they stood. … Their yelling entered through our living room window and took up all the air in the room. Since the camera only recorded image, I felt I was watching a terrible movie with surround sound, their voices not coming out of the television, but through the windows, bouncing off the plaster walls. … I didn’t want to watch them anymore. I could not stop watching them. I know you have a crush on me. You want to watch me. You want to look at me. I know it.
“This sounds familiar. When children are teased, especially when it’s boys teasing girls, adults will often use crushes to explain away the trouble. He is pestering you (or worse) because he likes you.”
Happy April, and Happy National Poetry Month. Since my dormant love of poetry was reignited, I’ve found it so refreshing and inspiring to read beautiful collections each year and share them with you.
Here are some of the most exciting and extraordinary poetry titles I’ve read in the last year. So I hope you enjoy and find some collections below that will have you reflecting on how poetry moves you, challenges you and represents you.
Despite its promise of progress, Blue Origin’s all-female spaceflight exposed the persistent double standards women face in STEM—where success is still too often judged by sparkle, not substance.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The iconic query—best known for the public takedown of U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his fearmongering campaign and persecution of Americans with supposed ties to communism and other “transgressions”—is making a comeback.
With renewed relevance and urgency, U.S. Rep. Bill Keating invoked the line a few weeks ago as a rebuke of fellow House member U.S. Rep. Keith Self whose boorish behavior at a committee hearing included deliberately, cruelly misgendering Congressional colleague U.S. Rep. Sarah McBride.
But the appeal took on technicolor form last weekend, thanks to the vision and handiwork of award-winning graphic designer Bonnie Siegler. Her Hands Off! protest signage is serious, next-level art: capturing the political moment and long litany of transgressions by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and so many of their cronies and capitulators.
Since stumbling on “underconsumption-core,” I’ve been deep in a world of no-buy rules, budgeting spreadsheets, and influencers who turn frugality into an aesthetic. What started as a seemingly productive financial reset now feels more like a lifestyle that rewards domesticity and quiet femininity over real economic empowerment. The deeper I looked, the more it felt like a soft return to tradwife ideals.
It’s not that saving money is bad, but when frugality becomes a moral performance, especially for women, it’s worth asking who this trend really serves.
When cultural texts such as Severance show how characters experience and endure attacks against bodily autonomy, it can help make the threats more salient for viewers. Questions and commentary about bodily autonomy pervade Severance and are a key concern for protecting and strengthening workers’ rights in the real world. Yet, bodily autonomy in the contemporary workplace is under threat.
An excerpt from Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores by Katie Mitchell, out April 8:
“Meeting Desiree Sanders made me wish I had a time machine so I could travel back to the 1990s and 2000s and just once, experience Chicago’s first Black woman-owned bookstore, Afrocentric Bookstore. …
Before the store closed permanently in 2008, Afrocentric Bookstore served the Black community for 18 years. Thousands sat at book signings, partied at book festivals, browsed curated inventory, and soaked in the artful aesthetics that Afrocentric became known for—no time machine required.”
With South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin’s rearview mirror, some of its most talented female filmmakers still have a long road ahead to bring their movies to public screens. Even the women who clinched premieres at one of America’s most prestigious festivals have to hustle to support their craft.
“The streaming channels that dominate global viewership are no longer buying many smaller or risk-taking projects,” wrote Keri Putnam of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.
“The number one challenge is fundraising,” said Anayansi Prado, director of Uvalde Mom, which premiered at SXSW and tells story of Angeli Rose Gomez made worldwide headlines during by jumping a fence during a school shooting and racing in unarmed to save her two young sons.
Each month, Ms. provides readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.
I hope you find some titles among the 25 here that will provide you with what you need now so that you can continue to keep going in your corner of the world.