by E. Kay Trimberger Last fall, I began to study single women in India in preparation for attending a Women’s Studies conference in New Delhi in January 2008. I knew beforehand that marriage was even more dominant there, and that... Read more →

by Renée Bergland When I started my book on the nineteenth-century scientist Maria Mitchell, I expected to find that she had triumphed against impossible odds. “Bias and Barriers” against women’s achievement in the science are pretty intense in the twenty-first... Read more →

For those of you who have been enjoying Suzanne Strempek Shea's posts from the roadtrip that inspired Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, tune in to Weekend Edition on NPR tomorrow, Easter morning, to... Read more →

Fred Pearce is the author of When the Rivers Run Dry: Water the Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century, March 22nd is World Water Day, an initiative that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development... Read more →

by Kelly Bulkeley At the conclusion of a recent New Yorker story about her new website posting people's dreams of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, Toronto novelist Sheila Heti said, "I sort of hope that the campaign managers will change... Read more →

by Harlyn Aizley Oh sure I'm a daughter/ sister/ mother/ partner/ friend/ Jew/ writer/ runner/ painter/ cook/ researcher. But when it comes to my daughter's kindergarten all I'm aware of being is a LESBIAN. "Yoo-hoo, you in the carpool line,... Read more →

by Suzanne Strempek Shea Want to celebrate St. Patrick's Day in an authentic manner, but without having to pay ever-rising trans-Atlantic airfares or swallow a startling dollar-to-euro exchange? Skip the trip to Ireland and stay stateside for a journey to... Read more →

by Carl Elliott In his 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, Maurice Pappworth tells the story of a poor student who had volunteered for a number of medical experiments in exchange for cash. As the student was undergoing a highly complex... Read more →

Eight of Mary Oliver's poems were set to music by Ronald Perera and performed by the The New Amsterdam Singers this past Sunday afternoon. From the New York Times: Ms. Oliver’s poetry, which has drawn comparisons to the work of... Read more →

by Martin Moran I write from the edge of Washington, DC, on a freezing day. I'm here performing a one-man play, The Tricky Part, which was developed from my memoir of the same title. There's an Obama event going on... Read more →

Helen R. Deese is the author of Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman, Caroline Healey Dall, and she is the Caroline Healey Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society. She lives in Flint and Ann Arbor,... Read more →

by Margot Adler It's not something you read in a newspaper or hear on an ordinary news show; it's only on the comedy shows like Real Time with Bill Maher where you hear it whispered: the idea that John McCain... Read more →

Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental... Read more →

by Mara Sapon-Shevin When I was in middle-school, the way the “popular kids” tormented those of us who weren’t so lucky, was through something called “Slam Books.” A popular kid (it was usually a girl) would start a notebook with... Read more →

"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain... Read more →

Jay Wexler is Professor of Law at Boston University. He is the author of Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars and The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions.... Read more →