Hey, We Taxpayers Already Subsidize Abortion Services!

Via Ann at Feministing, I came upon Dana Goldstein’s excellent analysis of why a public option sans reproductive health coverage is doomed. She notes that while our congresscritters are under pressure not to fund abortions with taxpayers’ money, women will be less likely to choose the public option if it excludes abortions and other basic [...]

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Another Revolution around the Sun

I had the following phone conversation with my dad this afternoon: Dad: I meant to call you last night. Me: Oh, that’s all right, today is my birthday. Dad: Oh, what day is it? Me: The 29th. Dad: And when did you say your birthday is? Me: Today. Dad: And what’s the date today? Me: [...]

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Tuesday Recipe: Sungold Quiche

I’m past the peak of my tomato season. Even the cherry tomatoes have slowed way down. It almost doesn’t matter because I’m too swamped with work to make a real meal. (Today was quesadillas, sandwiched between teaching, soccer, homework, and another tidal wave of student emails.) But this quiche was wonderful just a few weeks [...]

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Enforcing Gender as Child Abuse?

I was really struck by this opening paragraph to an article by Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon on the difficulty of raising a gender-neutral child: A Swedish couple has refused to reveal the sex of their 2-year-old to anyone — except those on diaper duty. When word got out about their decision to eschew personal pronouns [...]

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“Reverse Racism,” Redux

In response to the comments sparked by my post last week on reverse racism, I’d like to let Stephen Colbert have the final word. But first, I’ll try to be concise for a change and offer the two best reasons I know for not using “racism” to refer to hatred or prejudice against the dominant [...]

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Caturday is Escaping Me (and That’s Not All)

Actually, everything is getting away from me. And it’s doing so a lot less cutely than this, which my boys pronounced the Funniest LOLcat Ever. I didn’t quite LOL along with them – maybe because it’s just, um, a hair’s breadth from being a metaphor for my life? From I Can Has Cheezburger?

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Who’s the Biggest Boob?

The charity Rethink Breast Cancer, which just produced a moronic video to “raise awareness” of breast cancer? Or LA Times reporter Dan Neil, who thinks this ad, entitled “Save the Boobs,” is a swell idea? (I think something may be rising and swelling, but I highly doubt it’s awareness.) Jeff Fecke of Alas has already [...]

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Sneaking Downstairs to Watch TV: The Carol Burnett Show

Both my boys just got tucked in for the night, but I expect them to come untucked again momentarily. They’re a bit like Weebles when you try to coax them into bed: Weebles wobble but they won’t go down. And if you’re old enough to know how the original Weebles slogan went, you might just [...]

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In Which I Argue for the Homoerotic Potential of Mainstream Porn

So you may have already heard about Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, Mike Schwartz, declaring that all porn is actually gay porn; I heard it first from Sir Charles at Cogitamus: all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an [...]

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More on Healthcare and the Various Flavors of Liberty

In comments to my post on different notions of liberty and the health care debate, a person called “Person” disputes that there’s more than one meaningful type of liberty. She or he is arguing from the tradition that recognizes the importance of “freedom from” but not “freedom to.” That is, Person emphasizes negative liberty to [...]

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Caturday Tribute to Grey Kitty

You’ve got to be a hardcore lover of feline foolishness to watch this clip to the end. I am. I did. Physically, the cat looks remarkably similar to Grey Kitty, except her whiskers were more irregular and she had a small scar on her chin from when she did a five-point landing from a tree [...]

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Will Blackboard Save Us? The Folly of Swine Flu Planning in Higher Education

One of my vivid memories of graduate school is also one of the darkest. And I mean that literally. One day I showed up to discuss modern German history with my adviser and a few of my fellow students, only to find the lights off and the curtains dimmed. My professor was there, though, and [...]

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About that “Tree of Liberty” …

One of the favorite slogans of the town hall protesters has been “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants,” a statement from Thomas Jefferson. I’d like to propose that the tree of liberty has many branches, and that the teabaggers, freepers, birthers, and deathers [...]

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“Reverse Racism” – the Return of the Repressed

I don’t normally blog about frustrations in teaching. Well, I did vent about the flood of email I got last week (which has blessedly abated, and I’ve washed up on the beach like inert seaweed until the next deluge). As a rule, though, I don’t bitch and moan about student behavior. I don’t want my [...]

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At the Crosspath of Two Atrocities against Women

Today my second hometown – my adopted one in California, not my hometown-by-birth in North Dakota – landed in the news. Twice. Placerville, California, is a town nestled in the Sierra foothills. I moved there with two years left of high school, when it dawned on my father that there were warmer places to live [...]

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Scenes from a Birthday Party

So the Tiger was invited to a birthday party this weekend, which lots of his first-grade classmates attended. Including the one boy who’s always brimming – nay, boiling over! – with aggressive energy. If this boy (let’s call him Jayden, because all boy names must now end in “N”) successfully reaches adulthood, he may have [...]

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Lefthandedness, Intersex, and Biological Variability

My son the Tiger is lefthanded. He’s getting pretty good at invented spelling, which our teachers stress in kindergarten and the first grade. His classmates’ writing is often tricky to decipher, but the Tiger’s requires skills in cryptography. Or a mirror. Because if he’s not prompted otherwise, he’ll write right-to-left and produce a perfect mirror [...]

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About That “New” Trend toward Fidelity …

Sometimes I’m mystified at what gets picked up and treated seriously even by bloggers and scholars I respect. Earlier this week, Courtney Martin at Feministing mentioned a post by Virginia Rutter at Girl w/Pen. Virginia Rutter is a smart, serious scholar. But I wasn’t convinced by this post, where she argues that monogamy is on [...]

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The 24/7 Professor

Anyone with a desk job knows what a great labor-saver email has turned out to be. But if you’re old enough to remember how it was originally hyped back in the ’80s, you probably also recall that students didn’t contact professors outside business hours unless there was a dire emergency. By the end of yesterday, [...]

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The Music That Makes Me Cry

Just over five years ago, my husband suffered an autoimmune attack on his nerve system. It was sort of like Guillain-Barré, but not exactly. It may have been a mix of a paraneoplastic syndrome (the body running amok due to cancer) and a case of MADSAM (aka Lewis Sumner syndrome), which damages peripheral nerves, though [...]

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