Links for the week ending 25 March 2012

Horrifying. "An Iraqi immigrant and mother of five died Saturday of injuries from a severe beating in her El Cajon home, where a note warning the family to 'go back to your own country' was left next to her." By Pauline Repard for San Diego Union-Tribune.

This week I must have read thirty different moving pieces about Trayvon Martin's murder and what it means about racism and power in this country. You've probably read most of them already. But, if you missed it, I recommend Roxanne Gay's essay in The Rumpus: "A Place Where We Are Everything." Debra Dickerson picks out a very moving detail from the 911 tapes — this is short, but it's so packed with compassion that you'll probably need tissues. I also recommend the fascinating historical perspective present in Jamilah King's Colorlines interview with OSU professor Koritha Mitchell, who studies African-American plays and performances about families and communities grappling with the impact of lynching.

Who is immune to that message? None of us are. The only way that we can become immune to it — or at least resist it — is through community conversation; telling the truth to ourselves and each other about what is really constituting what is making our realities and our situation.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Briallen Hopper writes about protest fictions: Mike Daisey, Jason Russell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe(!): "It's been a rough week for the well-intentioned."

Irin Carmon at Salon writes about Republican opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. (The bitter jokes, they write themselves.) She particularly notes the barrier Republicans are throwing up to a provision involving violence against Native American women married to non-Native men. In that regard, this Colorlines interview of Charon Asetoyer by Akiba Solomon, "Why Native American Women Are Battling for Plan B," is relevant and heartbreaking.

Despairing? Don't give up. Have a laugh from Pemy Levy's round-up of women's Facebook posts asking male politicians for advice on our ladybits, since they're so expert at regulating them.

Are you still despairing? Here's a piece by Lisa Miller for New York Magazine about benzodiazepine use in an anxious age: "Listening to Xanax."

At Alternet, Sara Robinson argues that 40-hour work weeks are better for productivity and profits as well as for the personal lives and health of workers. Duh, right? But it's one of those little tidbits of wisdom from the early 20th century that we apparently need to learn all over again. There are a lot of those going around these days....

I bet this took more than 40 hours. From open source developer Jessamyn Smith at Geek Feminism Blog: At work, the IRC channel contained a bot programmed to insert "That's what SHE said" jokes into conversation. "I asked a number of times to have that bot function turned off, but got the usual combination of being ignored, being told it's funny, and being told I should lighten up." So what did she do? She made a bot that automatically responded with a quote from a notable woman every time the sexist joke got made. WIN. Here's how she did it.

In a week that saw more revelations about police surveillance of activists and advocates, Azmat Khan's piece for Frontline about new regulations that allow the government to retain data on US citizens who are not suspected of terrorist activity is a quick way to familiarize yourself with the very latest in dystopian realities. Whee!

Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post writes about how the health care reform law has begun to change the business model of American medicine. "These reforms, if successful, will move the country's health system away from one that pays for volume and toward one that pays for value." I am shocked, simply shocked to learn that doctors are (at least initially) profoundly unenthusiastic about the changes.

Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker has a new book coming out about climate change, peak oil, and energy needs. It was excerpted this week in Scientific American. She's one of the few writers I've ever encountered who can cover these issues without making you want to throw yourself off a bridge in despair. Go, read, buy her book!

Knock-out post from DNLee at Scientific American on being a black female scientist — and being herself. "Did you really think I came to follow in your footsteps?"

It was another fine week for women to have thoughts about the continuing relevance — or not — of certain Very Important Male Authors. I'm sure it is a complete coincidence that the NYRB chose this particular moment in time to allow Francine Prose to show what it looks like when you actually have something thoughtful to say about the relation of Edith Wharton's life to her work. And this is what it looks like when you discover, along with Michelle Dean at the Rumpus, that you don't have to read all the Very Important Male Authors; you don't have to "stay in the living room where everyone can see me, dutifully reading DeLillo because That's What's Good." (True confessions: I've never read DeLillo. And I laughed out loud at Dean's consternation that someone she considered a friend had never heard of Dorothy Parker.) Finally, this, from The Rejectionist, is what it looks like when you have something fierce and compelling to say about where Very Important Male Authors fall on the scale of things to be enraged about:

I can be angry about so many things at once, I can be angry about the big things and the little ones, the massive injustice of Trayvon Martin and the gnat that is Jonathan Franzen's opinions, I can be angry about the abortion ban that just passed in Mississippi and the books that are being banned in Arizona, and I am not in any way saying that these things are the same things, that they are weighted equally, but we have to live with all of them, and here's the thing. Nobody, but nobody, gets to tell me what to be angry about.

Apparently a new movie came out this weekend? I don't know; I live under a rock. But many people who don't live under rocks have strong opinions about this movie. Via @writingasjoe, Jaclyn Friedman tells us about "Four Things The Hunger Games Can Teach Us About the War on Women." Laurie Penny (whom, for the purposes of this list, we should probably start referring to as "the ubiquitous Laurie Penny"), writing in Salon, agrees. Me, I am giving myself a pass from this particular cultural phenomenon — I don't do so well with blood and gore — but you should all enthusiastically enjoy it on my behalf, okay?

Print and save for all the middle-schoolers and middle-schoolers-to-be in your life. "On Taking Yourself Seriously," by Sadie Doyle at Rookie.

Lovely essay by Arika Okrent in Lapham's Quarterly about gesture and language. "Gestures are thoughts, ideas, speech acts made tangible in the air."

At Guernica, Eleanor Stanford writes about moving her family to Brazil, mothering, working, and looking at a landscape of colonialism, crime, poverty, wealth — and fruit.

Last — but not least! — is pixie party alumna Rachel Hartman, who took a call from her sixth-grade teacher on the way home from promoting her book, due out from Random House in July. Yay, Rachel! [Kermit arms]

Links for the week ending 18 March 2012

In any given week, there seem to be uncountable articles about the big data, the privacy, the erosion of civil liberties, and the terrifying place where those three issues intersect. This week, those articles were mostly by men (and thus you probably don't need me to help you find them), but E.J. Graff's outraged response at The American Prospect to the Obama Administration's claim to have legal authority to kill an American citizen without judicial process is a necessary reminder of why these developments are so chilling when taken all together. A government that reads your every email AND claims for itself the right to kill you if it deems you a threat? I did not have children in the hopes that they'd live in a world straight out of a dystopian novel, President Obama. I'm just saying.

On the other hand, as Lois Beckett reports for ProPublica, an anti-foreclosure advocacy group is using Facebook ads to target employees of Freddie Mac and JPMorgan Chase, asking them to complain to their CEOs about their companies' treatment of a veteran facing eviction. Not so sure that asking people via Facebook to get themselves fired is an effective way to conduct advocacy, but maybe it's the sort of thing that will make people that much more creeped out about big data and privacy?

From 2008, Liliana Segura's piece on "stand your ground" laws at Alternet is chillingly relevant following the Treyvon Martin shooting in Florida this week. In a similar vein, Farai Chideya reminds us that individual tragedies, and the fear and compassion fatigue they engender, must not stop us from pushing to change the structural biases that make those tragedies likely.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate writes about how the state of Virginia has stolidly refused to share with anyone — including dozens of people who may have been wrongfully convicted — the results of its years-long audit of a stockpile of biological evidence saved from old criminal cases. Some really troubling statistics about the reliability of eye-witness identification here: "of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing, a whopping 76 percent were misidentified by eyewitnesses."

Very long, but important article from Laurie Garrett in this month's Foreign Affairs on global funding for public health and prevention initiatives. Some jaw dropping statistics, like

The Gates Foundation, now combining the philanthropic assets of the Gates family and Warren Buffett, is responsible for 68 percent of all private giving for global health, dwarfing the efforts of even the largest public or international institutions.

And this:

Total estimated expenditures worldwide on health care in 2010, meanwhile, hit $5.3 trillion, with U.S. domestic spending accounting for nearly half of that. Even at its recent peak, the amount of money spent on the health of the world's poorest people, who suffer most of humanity's infectious and preventable diseases, represented merely .0005 percent of worldwide health spending.

We could spend the rest of the week just thinking about how the U.S. spends nearly half of the world's total expenditures on health care. Or how the world's poorest people get five-ten-thousandths of a percent of the world's health care spending. (Via Partners in Health.)

Via The Browser, a fascinating article (translated from the Croatian) by Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine, looking at how immigration is transforming Italy after a century of emigration, and how art responds to these changes faster than politics or policies.

This week in reproductive health: Pemy Levy at Talking Points Memo recaps the spread of Blunt Amendment clones in state legislatures around the country. Rachel Benson Gold and Elizabeth Nash for the Guttmacher Policy Review take a detailed look at the passage of abortion restrictions in the states in 2011, reporting that 55% of American women now live in states that are legally hostile to abortion rights. What does that hostility look like on the ground? It looks like this devastating account by Carolyn Jones of what she was forced to go through in order to spare a dearly wanted baby an abbreviated lifetime of profound suffering.

As a break from the war on women, I recommend Lola McClure at The Hairpin, who tells you everything you ever wanted to know about IUDs. (Still legal! For now!) There are pictures. And charts. And props. Seriously. I'm pretty sure she's the best thing that ever happened to the internet.

Another knockout piece from Deborah Blum this week, "Cough Syrup, Dead Children, and the Case for Regulation." I don't think there's anyone out there today who does a better job of using past history to illuminate current political controversies. (But if there is, and I'm missing her, SEND ME LINKS, okay?)

At Good, Nona Willis Aronowitz looks at sputtering attempts to unionize Gen Y's legion of college-educated baristas, bartenders, and restaurant workers, who generally have no benefits (read: health insurance), no job security, no opportunity for advancement, and, often, not even a living wage. "The average restaurant worker made $15,000 in 2009." Yeah, you can't pay off student loans on $15,000 a year. Via @MacMcClelland, of course.

Sarah Miller at The Awl takes a very funny look at a less-than-effective anti-bullying program in a northern California school. But I also recommend the following very different take on the subject of bullying, both more upsetting and more uplifting. From Hyphen Magazine and writer Helen I. Hwang, this is a long but rewarding account of racially targeted bullying at South Philadelphia High School, and how Asian-American students successfully organized to demand change from the teachers and administrators that stood by and allowed the violence to take place.

At The Last Word on Nothing, Ann Finkbeiner coins the wonderful term, "closed-system sibling knowledge." I see it in every sibling grouping I can think of — except my own kids, oddly enough. (No, wait. Little sister allows big brother to hold all the family expertise on Pokemon. Everything else, she wants to master TOO.) Does it also apply to spouses and children? Could it also apply to countries? This sort of n="people I know" piece may not be the most convincing science ever, but it sure is fun fodder for discussion.

This may be the funniest science blog post ever. How do alligator penises work… and how many "Alligator Pie" parodies can one compose from the answers? From the inimitable @scicurious.

This, on the other hand, is the feel-good science story of the week… if you're trying to justify a post-breakup drinking bender. Christie Wilcox at Scientific American Blogs writes about how sexually rejected fruit flies consume more alcohol than their non-rejected peers. (There is no research yet to confirm or deny that sexually rejected fruit flies also consume more Ben & Jerry's than their non-rejected peers. GET ON IT, SCIENCE.)

Annalee Newitz at io9.com presents "10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of… and When You Experienced Them." This is worth it for the terms alone. Normopathy, people. I am so using that in a sentence this week.

The Morning News is conducting a book bracketology tournament this month, only instead of Dick Vitale you get commentators judges like Edith Zimmerman, who issues perhaps the single most devastating take-down of the Important Male Writer ever made when she describes the male main characters of Eugenides's The Marriage Plot as "Muppet-Baby versions of David Foster Wallace and Eugenides himself." Can you ever look at any of their books on a shelf again without picturing foreshortened scruffy guys in hipster glasses with bonnets and pacifiers?

Finally, while we're thinking about fiction, here is a compelling, disturbing short story from Israeli Shani Boianjiu about boot camp in the IDF: "The Sound of All Girls Screaming." Via

As always, not all the links I tweeted made it to this post (nor do all the links I post make it to Twitter), so if you run out of reading material during the week, replenish at @PhantomsList. And thanks for reading!

Links for the week ending 11 March 2012

Good morning, internets! Here are my top picks for whiling away your idle moments this week. First, a laugh, courtesy of Jessica Winter's wonderful "Subject for Debate: Are Women People?"

The New York Review of Books is, um, not the most frequent publisher of women writers, but when it does, the results are often splendiferous. This Elaine Blair piece, positing that male American writers are paralyzed by the fear that female readers will cease to find any reason to keep reading them, is snort-out-loud funny. While we're on the topic of books, here's a lyrical piece by Lightsey Darst: "Who Gave You That Book?" (ᔥJessa Crispin.) Or there's this fierce piece by Belinda Webb on the class issues that determine which women writers go forward into posterity, and which are left behind. (ᔥVIDA.)

The second part of a two-part Diane Ravitch piece in the NRYB about school reforms and (dis)respecting the profession of teaching, is not in the least bit funny, but is essential reading. "By 2007–2008, the largest number of teachers were in their first year of teaching." Oy.

Reuters editor Chrystia Freeland writes about Cal economist Emmanuel Saez and the 1 percent recovery.

I saw hand-drawn signs for Kony 2012 around my local high school this week. Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic gave a brief analysis of the viral campaign and its articulate backlash. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing created a list of African writers talking back to the Kony campaign. She also talked to the director of communications for MSF (Doctors Without Borders) about the impact it may have on established humanitarian missions. And the indispensable Zeynep Tufecki has an essay on Kony 2012 and "slacktivism" up on her own blog this week.

At Colorlines, Jamilah King looks at some of the issues around protest, activism, and the potential surveillance of mobile phones, particularly an issue for people of color, as they disproportionately rely on smartphones for internet access. (If you missed it, this excerpt from Rebecca Mackinnon's "The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom," ran in the Atlantic last month.)

Laurie Penny appeared to be just about everywhere this week. Here's my pick, in which she argues for more rebellion and more anger in the struggle for women's rights: "Politeness, however, has bought even the luckiest of us little more than terminal exhaustion, a great shoe collection, and the right to be raped by the state if we need an abortion."

Virginia Postrel argues that many forms of birth control pills can and should be offered over the counter, but suggests that it would only happen if some corporate interest (i.e., a pharmaceutical company) lobbied the government for the change.

This post is more than a week old, but, as today is the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, it seems fitting to link to it: Katherine Harmon at Scientific American on health problems in the aftermath of Fukushima. Not surprisingly, heart disease and depression are at the top of the list. SciAm also offers a timeline by Sarah Fecht of the events as they unfolded at Fukushima. For a more general recap one year after the catastrophes, Yoko Kubota files this piece for Reuters. Among the more heartbreaking statistics: 326,000 survivors are still homeless.

Also at Scientific American, Maria Konnikova writes about our immense capacity for self-deceptive storytelling.

Annalee Newitz at io9 offers a short recap of the latest report by the Union of Concerned Scientists about how corporations produce fake science to bolster their products.

Essential reading by Jennifer Francis at Yale Environment 360º explaining how Arctic warming contributes to weird and often unseasonable weather. It's supposed to be 70 degrees here tomorrow. I'm just saying...

Last week I pointed you to a story about childhood lead-poisoning fatalities in Nigeria. This week, it's particularly fitting that Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, should write such a cogent piece protesting the federal government's decision to slash to almost nothing funding for lead-remediation efforts at home. I don't even need to tell you that this hurts poor families and children of color disproportionately, do I?

I really like SquintMom: Resources for Evidence-Based Parenting, which I found ᔥ@BoraZ, a guy (I know, but!) with truly omnivorous science reading habits. (Would that more guys were such omnivorous readers — then there'd be no need for this list!) Anyway, this week's entry is about the curiously consumerist "science" of optimized environments for development in early childhood.

On the other side of life's arc, two stories this week about aging parents. From Aimee Phan in The Rumpus, a very moving chronicle of her father's deterioration from Alzheimer's. From Lisa M. Krieger at the Mercury News, a hard look at how her father's last ten days of life cost $323,000 despite the Do Not Resuscitate order he had in place.

Food! In the right hands, it can be a frame for an exploration of almost any aspect of human society. Here are two very different approaches: Christine Baumgarthuber talks about the politics of leftovers as a lens for viewing the relationship between rich and poor at The New Inquiry, while Emily Matchar looks at cookbooks, canned food, working women, and gender politics at The Hairpin.

Also from The Hairpin, this wonderful look at the last performance of 87-year-old Marta Becket's one-woman desert show, by Maude Standish, with equally wonderful photos by Jennie Ross. (You must click through, if only to see the audience Ms. Becket painted on the theater walls to watch her performance when no one else came.)

Victoria Johnson is a cartographer who writes a monthly column for The Awl, and I can't recommend it highly enough. This week she offered "A Reading List For People Who Like To Know About Places." I've only read two of the books on it (ahem, /humblebrag), and can't wait to read the rest.

Wondering about the occasional inexplicable squiggles in this post? ᔥMaria Popova at Brain Pickings a proposed new format for attributing discovery. Like "via" and "hat tip," only signified by Unicode symbols. There's a bookmarklet if, like me, you doubt your ability to remember which symbol means what or how to represent it. (There is, as yet, no bookmarklet to help you redeem yourself if you can't for the life of you remember who first pointed you towards something interesting, alas.)

Finally, breaking my own rules here: this heartbreaking piece from Lapham's Quarterly is by a man, but it is about a woman, Barbara Newhall Follett: made famous by publishing her first novel at the age of 12, betrayed first by her father and then by her husband, disappeared without a trace at the age of 26. "Her writings, out of print for many decades, only exist today in six archival boxes at Columbia University's library. Take together, they are the saddest reading in all of American literature." Those of you who remember photos of my daughter typing determinedly at a laptop before her second birthday will not be surprised to hear that this essay made me sob…

As always, there are more links throughout the week @PhantomsList.

Links for the week ending 4 March 2012

This week VIDA published its statistics on the percentage of women published by major magazines in 2011. The results were, how you say, not surprising for anyone who has made a habit of glancing at the first names of the bylines in any major publication lately. Lots of women in the field suggested lots of different responses to the continuing disparity, ranging from editor-focused hashtags for "lady journos" on Twitter to raising the profile of some wonderful and underutilized women journalists to ignoring all the male-focused mags and letting them trundle into inevitable irrelevance to (uh) giving Salon some more of your money. (Oh, sorry, that was to make Rush Limbaugh mad, not to address the gender byline disparity. Still. Really? There's a fine line between editorial and advertising these days, eh?) As a reader, I am going to continue voting with my eyeballs and my dollars (which go to Mother Jones). And I'm going to keep offering this as way to balance out aggregators like #longreads and The Browser (which I think in any given week selects more articles by male economists than they do by women in any field at all, though Saturday's editor, Evan Kindley from the Los Angeles Review of Books, made a better showing than usual). Also, as Shani O. Hilton reminds us in a look at her own employer's gender parity — and racial parity — stats, there are a whole lotta ways that magazines are failing at diversity. Gender is only one of them. So.

Even The Browser highlighted the long-form reporting that Mac McClelland did for Mother Jones this week on working conditions in the shipping centers that fulfill your online shopping orders. If you read one long article this week, it should be this one. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to bring myself to buy a book online again, not unless someone can guarantee me that no one is going to get an electric shock powerful enough to knock her down while getting my book off the shelf.

There were plenty of other stellar (and very depressing) works of essential and bravura long-form reporting from women this week. Most terrifying was the Texas Observer's cover story by Melissa del Bosque on wartime levels of violence ripping apart Mexico's Juarez Valley.

Equally sad, if marginally less hopeless, was Elizabeth Grossman's report for Yale Environment 360 on an epidemic of — in hundreds of cases, fatal — lead poisoning among the children in Nigeria's gold-mining region of Zamfara.

Elizabeth Kiem writes for The Morning News about the upcoming Russian elections and what she describes as a Russian civil-rights movement that may — or may not — be on the verge of springing from the forehead of online-savvy urban elites.

Speaking of movements and online participation, there's no smarter thinker than Zeynep Tufekci, who was interviewed in The European this week, "How Social Media Is Changing The Cultural Landscape." Too many thoughtful sentences to have a pullout do any justice to it. It's long and terribly formatted, but worth sticking with.

Christie Aschwanden writes for The Last Word on Nothing (which I have already convinced you to read regularly, right?) a devastating piece about the lingering effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the political realities that make it impossible to say for sure that Agent Orange is, in fact, the cause of the suffering she observes.

Tracie McMillan is pushing her new book in a lot of places this week, but the most interesting coverage I've seen is at Colorlines, where Julianne Hing gets McMillan to talk about healthy food, race, immigrant farm labor, and working conditions.

There has always been a very deep rift in the organic community, especially in the organic certification conversation, about whether or not to include labor standards in that. And most growers argue against that because yes, organic farming is better in terms of pesticide exposure, but it’s a lot worse in terms of musculoskeletal injuries because you’re having farmworkers do all this work by hand.

So much excellent science writing this week! I can't recommend highly enough Julia Whitty's devastating and beautiful piece on ocean acidification for OnEarth.

In a totally different vein, Kate Clancy hit it out of the park (er, there must be a roller-derby analogy I could use there, but I am not so much with the knowing about roller-derby terms) with a three- blog series about vaginal pH. With so much awesome knowledge about our most legislatively regulated body parts on offer, how can you not add Context and Variation to your regular reads?

Another regular read: Maryn McKenna at Wired Science, who will this week give you the vapors about the levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in some of your favorite meat and poultry products. (I'd feel smug as a vegetarian, but, well, I eat a lot of peanut butter. Sigh.)

An article in this week's Washington Post by Lonnae O'Neal Parker about how black women report a much less negative correlation between body weight and self image than white women do got a strong response by Debra Dickinson about how body weight isn't where the self-esteem bludgeon hits black women: hair texture is. In this context, @DNLee5's critique of a clutch of scientific studies proposing a link between use of hair care products and development of uterine fibroids in black women seems even more essential.

The news this week being what it was, there were uncountable posts and pieces from women describing or reporting on the reality of American women's experiences with contraception, abortion, and pregnancy. From Irin Carmon at Salon, "The ultrasound fallacy" looks at the past 20 years in anti-choice legislation, and asks whether the outrage about transvaginal ultrasound can turn that tide.

Very affecting and nuanced piece from Emily Rapp at Slate in response to Rick Santorum's attacks on prenatal testing, regretting that she did not know ahead of time that her son, Ronan, has Tay-Sachs.

I'm so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he'd never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.

Also in Slate, Allison Benedikt takes on the What To Expect When You're Expecting juggernaut.

In any given week, one could happily drown in the endless numbers of fine personal essays and cultural criticism women have written on the web. Thanks to @jillheather for pointing me at this thoughtful defense of the Twilight movie franchise — no, really, all three parts are worth a read on a lot of levels, even if the very thought of seeing the movies makes you want to (as a wise man once said) strangle yourself with your own large intestine.

Francie Latour is blogging now, though readers of the Boston Globe will recognize her name from plenty of investigative reporting pieces over the years. She deserves a wider audience. This short piece, "You Will Never Be a Fireman," is just one reason why.

It was eating disorders awareness week. Laurie Penny (whom I should probably just plan to link to every week, or until you cry uncle) has a brilliant piece in the New Statesman today. There was also a long, thoughtful piece in The New Inquiry (which is shaping up to be a very interesting publication) by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano arguing a similar point, that body image is not necessarily the hinge against which anorexia swings open or shut.

Finally, via Julianne Hing again at Colorlines, from Momo Chang, an interview at Hyphen with Grace Lee Boggs, a 96-year-old activist. I love, love, love being able to learn from women activists who worked their way through the length of the twentieth century. Also, I found it fascinating how she described her Chinese-born mother's resentment at the opportunities her American-born daughter had, and how it was always a barrier in their relationship. My American-born grandmother reported a similar painful dynamic with her Ukrainian-born mother, who had no formal education and insisted that her daughter go to college no matter what.

Are you good to go on reading material for the week? If not, I'll be tweeting fresh links @Phantomslist. Or there's always a good book. I'm reading Mary Lee Settle's WWII memoir "All The Brave Promises."

I had forgotten the silence, not mystic but halted, as if we were all waiting in one vast depot for an interrupting train that never came but was always coming, so that nothing could be planned and carried through.

What are you reading by women this week?