After climbing four narrow flights of stairs, I enter Bonnie Lucas’s SoHo apartment/studio, a three hundred-square-foot-or-so homage to her own life. The walls are teeming with art; her desk is covered in beads, bows, severed doll heads, and what looks like several lifetimes’ worth of glue. As Lucas shows me around, I can’t help but think she is the epitome of an artist, a person whose creativity does not begin and end on a canvas
Dear Readers, In 2004, I was pregnant with my first child, and Anastasia, one of my best friends, was pregnant with her first too. One day she said, “I want to nurse your baby and you to nurse mine.” I nodded like, Hmm, I’ll let you know, but inside I was shocked by her suggestion. Was feeding another’s baby even . . . legal? Was my milk safe for any old baby? Was Anastasia a
Alissa Quart is a dervish of energy in multiple roles: journalist, filmmaker, cofounder and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, author of numerous books. It’s hard to see how she finds the quiet mental space to write her spare and thought-provoking poems. (I’d like to know her secret.) “Compassion now / unfashionable,” she writes in “Only Witches,” a sentiment that seems truer by the day, what with half the country cheering the ouster of
Bonnie Lucas, Booty, 1985. Assemblage on fabric. ILY2 New York. I discovered Bonnie Lucas’s work in October 2024 while whizzing through the Paris Internationale art fair. I’d been visiting some of my closest friends, who were among the founders of the fair. I didn’t have much time to look at all the galleries, and I wasn’t there to shop. But as I passed a gallery from Portland, Oregon, that I’d never heard of, something caught
By my senior year of high school, I was about a year into the eating disorder recovery process and had finally reached a stable place with my weight and food intake. By all medical measures, I had recovered, or at least reached the right number on the scale. Still, something had been lost amid the force feeding and the constant weigh-ins. I had sacrificed a part of my soul. I lost it somewhere in the
Ace Books, 1969, 286 pp. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le GuinThe Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich Last summer I read a book about a planet called Winter. Last winter I read it again. It was better that way, trooping through ten-degree nights, slipping on poorly salted ice, and imagining myself elsewhere. Winter—that is, the planet—is a foreigner’s colloquialism. Its inhabitants call it Gethen. Ursula K. Le Guin created Gethen
Carmen Winant, The Fall of the Modern Empire, 2023. © Carmen Winant. I first interviewed Leah in a Starbucks in South Carolina in 2010, leaning closely over our drinks—black tea for me, mocha latte for her—so that my recorder would catch our voices over the whir of the coffee grinder. Leah was a young, bubbly white woman who gesticulated with her hands while talking as if overflowing with enthusiasm. Yet, two years earlier, when Leah
New episodes Wednesdays on Apple TV. I am born, and in a jump cut I’m at Barnard College in 1965, and my English teacher turns out to be Kate Millett, who will go on to write Sexual Politics and help launch the women’s movement in the United States and everywhere else on the planet. What do we want? So many things. What is one of the things we don’t shut up about? Being divided into
As someone who devoted her life to mythmaking, Rachel Pollack’s self-transformation carries an appropriate sense of magic. On a frigid winter night in early 1970, the twenty-four-year-old, then newly married and teaching English at a college in upstate New York, was giving a fellow instructor a ride home. The woman dangled an intriguing offer: Shepherd me through the snow, and I’ll give you a tarot reading. Already a fan of The Waste Land, in which
Annabelle Sharp, Portrait of Catharine A. MacKinnon, 2026. Acrylic on board. Note: This short piece is a fragment from a presentation at Oxford University that served as the basis for a broader discussion on November 28, 2022. My interlocutors there, Sandra Fredman, Finn Mackay, and Mischa Shuman greatly enriched it. Many thanks to Max Hantel for his superb technical help, and to the incomparable University of Michigan Law Library, as always, for making my work
