For generations, women have been told that progress means finally having a seat at the table. We have celebrated the appointments, the promotions, the professional designations and the occasional photograph of a woman presiding over a room once reserved almost exclusively for men. We have applauded institutions for opening doors they had no legitimate reason to keep closed in the first place, and we have been encouraged to regard every incremental improvement as evidence that

On lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, and the possibilities that remain open to us as we grow older. There is something rather peculiar about the way we organize education around the first quarter of our lives, as though the knowledge and abilities acquired during those formative years should be sufficient to carry us through the next five or six decades. We spend our childhood acquiring the foundations of knowledge, our adolescence preparing for examinations and cons

*** Content note: This article discusses sexual assault, trauma responses, and the harm of being silenced or denied support. Please read at your own pace and step away whenever you need to. This past weekend, the story of Jane Doe and the seven Cornell University fraternity members she has accused of rape followed me from one Facebook post to the next, bringing with it a distress that remained long after I put down the screen. According to her civil complaint, the twenty-year

When pain lasts only a few days, the most obvious door is often the right one to open: take an analgesic, if necessary, rest, and give the body time to recover. Medication is well suited to that purpose. The difficulty begins when pain ceases to be a passing event and becomes an enduring condition, recurring over weeks, months, or years until it is woven into the ordinary fabric of a person’s life. At that point, pharmacological relief assumes a different role, although the i

At some point, taking responsibility for one’s own life requires more than just making decisions. It requires becoming willing to question some of the assumptions from which those decisions are supposed to follow, usually in circumstances far more ordinary than the language of independence would suggest. I ask a second question because the first answer does not make sense, read the information for myself rather than relying entirely on someone else’s interpretation of it, wan

Gloria Steinem, the unfinished work of equality and the danger of mistaking hard-won freedoms for the natural order When Gloria Steinem died on September 2 at the age of 92, the news carried the peculiar weight of losing someone whose influence had become both immense and increasingly difficult to see. She was immediately and correctly remembered as a journalist, author, organizer, co-founder of Ms. magazine and one of the defining voices of the modern women’s movement. Tribu