What if genes weren’t the perfect blueprint we’ve been led to believe they are? What if your body was constantly being shaped by its environment? What if your children’s ...
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The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
In the Desert You Can’t Remember Your Name
“If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? … If I didn’t obliterate cities, who would build refugee camps?” War’s futility, absurd bureaucracy, and ...
The Inequality of “Human Rights”
What if the global struggle for human rights has accidentally helped make the world more unequal? What if, in seeking human rights, Samuel Moyn asks, we’ve ...
The Earnest Elfin Dream Gay
The guy behind the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” phenomenon has regrets. In a 2007 review of Elizabethtown, film critic Nathan Rabin coined this term to contextualize ...
Against Cuteness: “Bambi” @90
Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods—which first appeared in English 90 years ago this summer—is now better known as the inspiration for Disney’s charming ...
“Test-Tube Babies” @40
Forty years ago, on July 25, 1978, an English baby of ordinary working-class parentage was delivered by caesarian section. At 11:47 p.m., her mother, obstetrician Patrick Steptoe, Cambridge ...
Women’s Suffrage @100
The woman suffrage amendment passed in 1920, the culmination of what Juliet Mitchell called “the longest revolution, ” because it took 80 years of activism for American women to win the right to vote ...
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” @200
If you walk through the streets of central London, it won’t be long before you come across one of the city’s famous blue plaques. The markers are visually ...