“To know a story is to carry it always, etched in his bones, even if dormant for decades.” (Melissa Fu, […]
Reckoning with the History of Racial Marketing of Menthol Cigarettes
In Pushing Cool, Dr. Keith Wailoo presents a sixty-year history of menthol cigarettes becoming a racialized product. Wailoo has written […]
The Family Roe and the Messy Reality of the Abortion “Jane Roe” Didn’t Get
I almost didn’t read The Family Roe: An American Story by Joshua Prager. When I saw the premise – a […]
Healthy by Design? Reflections on The Topography of Wellness by Sara Jensen Carr
If the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated a unique ability to muddle our perceptions of time, it has also made us […]
A Love Letter to Intellectual Mothers
Marga Vicedo’s Intelligent Love: The Story of Clara Park, Her Autistic Daughter, and the Myth of the Refrigerator Mother is […]
What Does It Mean to Have a “Real Choice” about Abortion?
What does it mean to have a “real choice” about abortion? I am writing this book review as the Supreme […]
Matrix: Lauren Groff’s Visions of the Medieval
The title of Lauren Groff’s ambitious new novel, Matrix, is deliberately multivalent. In Latin, it points us toward the leader […]
Vanguard: The Fights that Connect Black Women Activists across More Than Two Centuries
My undergraduate and MA adviser, Dr. Angela Howard, argued that women across time and space often have remarkably similar experiences […]
Acting Up and Fighting Back: Stories of ACT UP
Sarah Schulman’s Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 and Peter Staley’s memoir, Never […]
Liberal Christians in the Making of Sex Education
In the 1960s conservative Christian leaders like Billy James Hargis and his “Christian Crusade” defined the culture wars over sex […]
