Issues

The Netflix series Bridgerton features a plotline about a nineteenth-century noblewoman desperately seeking a sexual “pinnacle” that coitus withholds from her yet not her husband. Meanwhile, the New York Times Wirecutter product review site recommends vibrators you can buy at Walgreens. My, times have changed. Fifty years ago, when feminist writer Shere Hite (1942–2020) published The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, one of the best-selling books of all time, conventional wisdom dictated

As someone who was completely broke and mostly sober throughout my twenties, I never went to bars much. So when I got asked to review The Lesbian Bar Chronicles: The Living History and Hopeful Future of America’s Dyke Dives and Sapphic Spaces, I thought I should check out some of Pittsburgh’s spaces. First, I stop by The Soft Spot, a Sapphic-centered sober space. It’s game night, and a group of multiracial queer people are playing

I had anticipated that Rachel Cusk’s latest would be a captivating work of big ideas. The premise—a nameless narrator encounters one of the great and celebrated film actors of the era and then attempts to write an “autobiography” of said star—is both juicy and think-y, a stage upon which brilliant observations can mingle with feminine angst and glamour. I was enthralled by a similar quality in Cusk’s novels of the last decade, which were distinguished

Cotton-candy platinum wig, bright pink lipstick slathered onto a slightly crooked smile, pastel eyeshadow, big shiny jewelry, and a short, grandmotherly body perched atop high heels, often seen leaning against a pink Cadillac: at first glance, it’s tempting to view Mary Kay Ash as a cartoonish emblem of regressive womanhood, Texas-style. Easy, also, to dismiss the cosmetics company she founded in 1963, Mary Kay, as a pyramid marketing scheme—if not as a tool of the

Year two of the pandemic, the nurse at the office of the specialist I see to help manage chronic illness began evincing incredible behaviors. Although she worked with immunocompromised patients, she refused to get vaccinated until threatened with job loss. She discouraged patients from getting vaccinated themselves, alluding to rumored surveillance devices hidden in the vaccines. She offered treatment regimens—out of earshot of the doctor, of course—that she found on social media. Ingesting a small

The back cover of Elizabeth Pryor’s new book labels the work biography/autobiography. More accurately, it is an amalgam of coming-of-age memoir, celebrity bio, African American history, and a scholarly treatise on the fraught, explosive evolution of “the N-word.” Her interest—let’s say obsession—with the word, though, is not merely academic. A professor of history at Smith College, Pryor was winding up a lecture about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, in which she was noting the prevalence

My first day ever in New York, age sixteen, I got stuck in the middle of Central Park in the pouring rain with no umbrella and zero sense of direction. Drenched, cold, and hopelessly wandering from the Alice in Wonderland statue to the steps of the Met, I was in remarkably high spirits. I had read Just Kids earlier that summer and regarded this trip as a rite of passage in my Patti Smith pilgrimage.

A painter friend of mine told me recently, upon returning from a trip to the Venice Biennale preview, that she always finds herself escaping the pavilions to go see the “old stuff.” In the Biennale venues, she says she saw few paintings. There was foremost the ballyhoo of lavishly catered parties and art-world intrigue. The event kicked off with boycotts, attempts at censorship, and resignations over the participation of Russia and Israel. From reports and