Sunday Morning Medicine

By Jacqueline Antonovich

-Coffee, the Viagra of the 17th century.
-Punishing children in Victorian England.
-Did Jane Austin novels cure WWI depression?
-LGBT history? There’s an app for that.
-Clowns have a history of being scary.
-How to cure a bubble boy.
-A brief history of men’s underwear (get it, brief?)

The Camp Gyno is Period Positive – Are You?

A concert, several players and a singer performing on the stage, audiences cheering

Don Lemon, Jay Z, and the Dilemmas of Black Bourgeois Politics

By Austin C. McCoy

Rap superstar Jay Z and CNN news anchor Don Lemon added some extra hot sauce to the “conversation about race” in the wake of one of the “hottest” and racially-charged summers in recent memory. In a July 24 interview with journalist Elliot Wilson, Jay Z responded to a series of comments that Harry Belafonte made about Jay Z, Beyoncé, and other black celebrities in an interview last year. When asked to respond to Belafonte’s lamentation about current black celebrities’ inability or unwillingness to use their fame to advocate for social change, Jay Z shot back: “I’m offended by that because first of all, and this is going to sound arrogant, but my presence is charity. Just who I am. Just like Obama’s is. Obama provides hope…”

Dear Kate Middleton

By Cheryl Lemus

Dear Kate Middleton,

Congratulations on the birth of your beautiful and healthy baby boy, George Alexander Louis! It really is a joy to wake up after you give birth and realize that you are a mother. However, it also a bit disconcerting to walk to the bathroom afterward (or waddle, like I did), and look at the mirror, and say “Holy crap I look like hell!” Yeah birth is awesome, and it sucks all at the same time because your body goes through this change afterward that no one ever tells you about, not even your mother or friends who have gone through the same experience.

Suicide Is Not Beautiful

Sterilization is Not the Solution

Eugenics: It’s Good for You!

Hands holding a paper with colorful hand-written slogan: stop sexual harassment

Who has your Back? Harassment on our Streets

By Helen McBride

Last week the British newspaper, The Guardian, reported on a young woman named Jinan Younis, who started a feminist society in her high school in response to a personal experience of street harassment. By rightfully acknowledging how this harassment was part of a wider culture of sexism, she was determined to do something about it: “After returning from this school trip I started to notice how much the girls at my school suffer because of the pressures associated with our gender. Many of the girls have eating disorders, some have had peers heavily pressure them into sexual acts, others suffer in emotionally abusive relationships where they are constantly told they are worthless.” This quote is horrifying.

A group of people facing the camera, one in the middle holding the slogan: abortion is a human right

Our True Enemy Has a Vagina, Not a Penis

A Historian’s Guide to Summer: Independence Day Reading Edition

By Heather Munro Prescott

Via Book Riot, where Derek Attig reminds us that “In a very real way, the Fourth of July is a huge, national holiday celebrating a piece of paper and a scribble of ink. Yes, the celebration is for what that paper and that ink did—ideologically and politically, if not practically or militarily, separate the colonies from Britain—but it’s still, at heart, a celebration of paper and ink.”