Black, Queer and Neurodivergent: Janelle Monáe’s ‘The Age of Pleasure’ Dives Into Play, Joy and Creativity

Luxuriating in unlimited Black queer potential for pleasure—while staying present, even taking pleasure in life’s inherent uncertainty—Janelle Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure experiments with a therapeutic process as much as an artistic one. The album celebrates neurodivergence and sun-kissed, ocean-deep, lusciously melanated Black queer love.

Liberating Words: “Worth It”

The poems contained in this series, “Liberating Words,” came out of an interdisciplinary course for high school juniors at The Winsor School, an all-girls school in Boston. The course, “The Personal Is Political:  An Interdisciplinary Look at Feminism,” is co-taught by Libby Parsley, a history teacher, and Susanna Ryan, an English teacher. The second unit of the […]

Eating Disorder Awareness: It Starts With Us

Before arriving at college, you hear warnings—from parents, classmates and maybe even teachers—about the terrifying “Freshman 15”: go to college, gain weight. The warnings might seem harmless, but it matters that we present weight gain as a problem to avoid. More than incoming college students are warned to watch out for their GPA, their alcohol […]

Recognizing the Eating Disorders Plaguing Campuses

College campuses can play a huge role in preventing and treating eating disorders. A big round of applause to all the schools that participated in National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, but resources and activities for students should be implemented nationwide on a daily basis to help the thousands suffering from these disorders.

Sexual Objectification, Part 2: The Harm

This is the second part in a series about how girls and women can navigate a culture that treats them like sex objects. (Part 1 can be found here.) Sexual objectification is nothing new, but this latest era is characterized by greater exposure to advertising and increased sexual explicitness in advertising [PDF], magazines, television shows, movies [PDF], video games, music videos, […]