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OVER CHRISTMAS BREAK, I watched all twenty-four episodes of the anime Parasyte: The Maxim (2014–2015). Big picture, it reframes the relationships of hosts, parasites, and invasive species in perceptive and disturbing ways. Do all living things have a right to life? Is humanity the invasive species of earth? Narratively, Shinichi, age seventeen, is partially infected by a murderous corkscrew cyclops and has to learn to live with “Migi” (his literal right hand, now quite maternal,

In Sync I worked a bunch of minimum wage jobs in college, hard-selling suede bomber jackets at Wilson’s Leather, guzzling Frangelico-flavored coffee while reading Backlash at a failing coffee shop, and nude modeling for figure drawing classes. That last one paid twice the hourly wage of the others, but the real pay-off was the impact that holding a pose (nude, for two to three hours, in front of my peers) had on me as a

Anne Heche, who died suddenly in August, was seventeen in 1987, when she began playing the twins Marley and Vicky on Another World, my favorite soap. Marley was a kindly drip in mauve Ann Taylor suits and a pained smile. Vicky, the conniver, had bouncy hair and dressed like Olivia Newton-John at the end of Grease. Even in comas after separate car accidents, Marley was a pill and Vicky was the draw. A decade later,

Some people find the analogy of mothers and daughters to describe intrafeminist generational tension annoying and inaccurate, but not me. Chapter six of Manifesta, my book with Amy Richards (2000), is titled “Thou Shalt Not Become Thy Mother” and ends with an open letter to “older feminists,” the theme of which is “you’re not the boss of me!” Mothers are everything to children at the beginning of life, and maturing is the child learning to

Magazines used to be valuable—an important medium to read, to write for, in which to be covered. This past week, I counted how many magazines I was sent despite not being a subscriber—Time, Scientific American, Vanity Fair, People, Wired, and National Geographic—all of which, pathetically, wind up in the recycling bin after a cursory glance. I’m not sure why I’m on these comp lists, but I’d guess it is that the magazine industry is collapsing

A quick (yet somehow exhaustive) memory inventory of where I glimpsed feminism while growing up in Fargo in the 1970s and 1980s: My purple, clothbound Free to Be . . . You and Me book and accompanying record My Judy Blume books, especially Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Forever Mom’s subscription to Ms. The first Simon & Schuster edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, where I read about masturbation, lesbians, and abortion Mom’s

I’ve been reading and loving Marilyn Hacker’s poetry ever since her first book, Presentation Piece (1974), which means just about my entire adult life. I can’t think of another poet who combines so many opposites: she’s a swashbuckling formalist, a love poet who’s obsessed with politics, a Francophile (she’s lived in Paris for many years) whose continuous self-making is quintessentially American. Whether she’s writing about lesbian love or croissants in the shop down the block or

I just finished reading issue 1 of LIBER cover-to-cover. What a wonderful contribution to the conversation! Half of it seemed to have been written directly to me. Thank you! I was especially pleased & surprised to find Charis Caputo—who wrote one of my favorite reviews of Women’s Liberation!, the anthology I edited with Honor Moore—discussing in “Just Go” some of the same subjects I wrote about in my 1993 essay “Women Writers of the Beat