Being Against Biden

It is important to oppose him without demonizing him

Everything that has happened since his entry has confirmed this judgment. On the one hand, Biden has tripped over a series of hot-button issues -- #MeToo, the Hyde Amendment, and now racially coded language -- with his unique combination of tone deafness and stubborn self-righteousness. On the other hand, he ...
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Matters of Life and Sex

Trans-ing Psychoanalysis

In 2010, feeling the need to reflect upon the lessons I learned from my practice, I wrote a book about patients who identified as transgender entitled Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism. This book summarized my experience during a time of reform that ...
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Coming Out of the World

The 19th-century activist tactic that queers should reclaim (again)

In opposition to generations of concealment and shame, the story goes, the Stonewall protesters came out of the closet and into the streets, agitating for the decriminalization of homosexuality, but more broadly, for the social transformation of gender and sex. Indeed, “coming out” was a core strategy for the achievement ...
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Shakespeare on Helicopter Parenting

‘And so shall starve with feeding’

Minor disagreements have been overshadowed by common findings; first, helicopter parenting is hyper-present, characterized by abundant parental support but only to craft a child's behavior and public image. And second, helicopter parenting hinders the child's ability to develop an autonomous character -- the ability to make critical, life-changing decisions, more ...
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How Stories Knock on the Inside of My Head

An interview with Alice Barber

--- Public Seminar [PS]: Thank you for this wonderful, literary meditation on your therapeutic work. I was immediately struck by the gentleness and vulnerability of the voice and language you found to write about such delicate subject matter – childhood abuse, trauma, neglect, loss and environmental alienation. Can you remark on ...
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An Unexpected Concertmaster

How Shakespeare Influenced the Romantic Era

You thought Shakespeare was all about the language? Not according to the scholars who estimate there are over 20,000 Shakespeare-inspired pieces of classical music! During the Romantic Era, composers such as Johannes Brahms, Giuseppe Verdi, and Antonín Dvořák drew inspiration from tragedies like Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello. They gravitated to ...
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Blue Butterfly Open

An Excerpt

--- This is a story about two photographs, both of butterflies. What you need to know about the first photograph is that it was never an actual photograph, although I wished it so. What you need to know about the second photograph is that it is not from my camera, and ...
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A Different Way of Reading

Samuel Beckett, Melanie Klein, and the Voices of Intuition

It's not that I'd never tried before. But something had to have happened, it seems, to make it possible to read the novel -- and that something appears to have been a period of depression. The reasons were complex -- to repeat someone else's phrase, a cocktail of circumstances -- and I’m not ...
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Why Freedom of Expression Is At Stake In Italy

The suspension of a teacher is sparking debate across the country

At this very moment, hundreds of Italian teachers are expressing their open dissent with this decision on social media, and writing in solidarity with the recently suspended 63-year-old teacher. My aim is not to analyze whether the comparison between Interior Minister and rightist populist League party leader Matteo Salvini and Benito Mussolini ...
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Representation, Currency, and Generation Z

How the Tubman $20 Bill Became a New Front in the American Culture Wars

Although they are digitally-native Generation Z teens, my students think that it matters who we see on something as ubiquitous as our money. Even though they spend a lot of their time online, they still feel passionate about adding diversity to the historical figures that grace our paper money. The ...
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