Introduction “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many year in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. …

Introduction “Like most gay men I know of my generation, I spent the better part of my late teens and twenties trying to convince myself to go to bed with women while my eyes knew they were following the hips and shoulders of men. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in…

Introduction “About six weeks after the fertilized egg implants in the uterus, there is a wash of masculinizing hormones. The male blastocyst (a group of cells that will form the embryo) responds to this by developing its “prefab” universal genital hardware into the male configuration of penis, testicles, and scrotum. …

“To enter a conversation, you ideally want to connect to something someone else is saying. So first we’ll look at “trigger words.” But sometimes, if a hole doesn’t open up in a conversation, you just have to blast one yourself, and this calls for “cold openings.””

“There have been a million ways sick and disabled people have accessed the care we need over the centuries, and I don’t have time to go over them. A light once-over will say that in many precolonial contact communities, there existed ways of being disabled that did not mean stigma…

Introduction “And yet — the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what “he” demands of us — from our diet to our observances to…

Introduction “While Vanessa Williams may not have wished for the unsanctioned exposure, she is the only Miss America to have a real, infomercial-free show business career — Phyllis George, Lee Meriwether and Mary Anne Mobley are examples of title holders who have not-real not-quite-careers — and it’s probably in no small…

“Great Britain’s and France’s policy of appeasement toward Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s had damaged the reputation of the West in Eastern Europe even before World War Il, an era when for significant periods it was mainly the Communists who were associated with standing up to the Nazis.” “You don’t…

Introduction “When people are asked to report how much they think about the past, present, and future, they claim to think about the future the most. When researchers actually count the items that float along in the average person’s stream of consciousness, they find that about 12 percent of our daily…