Sarah M.

This week, in January 2013, it’s worth pausing to commemorate a watershed inaugural moment of four years ago—a moment when America made a space for an erstwhile outsider at the center of its cultural life.  I speak, of course, of the moment when Adam Lambert beat Danny Gokey, progressing to the American Idol finale....
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Of the uncertainties circulating on Friday one crucial question recurred: should I tell my children? There are many important and valid reasons why one might not. But here is one reason why the answer might be yes. This website has mostly been about learning how to know wonderful things. Knowledge and emotion should be...
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Here’s a thing about my students: they cannot imagine a world without birth control. Or rather, it does not occur to them that a world without birth control is something that needs to be imagined. The young women I teach are all on birth control.  All the women they know are on birth control,...
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At the exact midpoint of the novel Cloud Atlas, in a post-apocalyptic future with nuclear contamination so severe that children are born deformed more often than not, the narrator watches the birth of a baby—his baby—who is born without a mouth. The baby dies within moments, panicked but silent, held in his helpless parents’ arms....
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