Well, a tennis match between Serena and Federer would not even be competitive, but that is completely beside the point. Federer is great, but he has not dominated the men’s game and Serena has the women’s game.

I wonder how many young women suppress their rape experiences because they were hanging out with a crowd their parents didn’t approve of, maybe cutting class, maybe telling their parents they were somewhere they weren’t, basically being teenagers. They kept it too themselves because they didn’t want to admit they had…

It’s dumb, but not inherently racist. The native people Hawaii may have a history as victims of racism (they do), and Sessions may have a history of supporting white supremacy (he does), but the text of that “joke,” divorced from mind reading, is not racist. In academia, racism/white supremacy is talked about in…

I think you’re oversimplifying the way art and artists converge. It is certainly different for different artists, but we know quite a bit about Lena Dunham and there is a lot of Lena Dunham, especially pre-Girls Lena Dunham, in Hannah, just as there was a lot of Larry David in George Constanza and of course, the…

Is there some thoughtful rebuttal to Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed “school of thought” that I’m unaware of? Something a little more fleshed out than “when people make mistakes, thousands of people should pile on in a shaming campaign, because screw them.”

The books are a mess. GRRM has totally lost control of his material. Don’t get me wrong, they are also, great, especially the first 3. But the show is a more focused, structured narrative, and I can appreciate that.

Inspired by the billboard campaign of Vidor, Texas? It’s about the murder of woman Kathy Page, and her father has had billboards up around Vidor for almost 30 years. I remember as a kid in the 90s driving through Vidor on my way to New Orleans and reading one of the early ones that said “Welcome to Vidor, where you…

You can certainly be the voices of your experience, but you cannot speak for the experiences of others, others such as my son. You are doing what Autism Speaks is accused of doing. This is the problem.

I’ll let this go with only a reiteration of my main point, which is my wish there were different diagnoses, because…

On one hand, the debate around “curing” autism is a distraction, as no such cure is around the corner, and anything resembling a cure couldn’t work on all cases, because autism not only expresses itself differently, but is also likely to be caused by different things. It’s a diagnosis that grounded in neither…

While I understand your sense that focusing on the worst cases dehumanizes autistic people who can function and who don’t have significant cognitive deficits, thinking about yourself, and about people in your situation. I also feel that this insistence on “shades of grey” minimizes the struggles of individuals who…

I’m a fan of Autism Speaks, but that’s probably because they seem to be trying to establish a voice for the severely disabled autistic children like my own. The people who don’t like Autism Speaks tend to be associated with higher functioning autism. There really needs to be some way to distinguish those who are on…

Love ain’t blind. She didn’t love him despite his douchiness, but because there was something about his douchiness that appealed to her.

The past election has really clarified for me the way culture and economics are just different spheres of interest, even though they are, of course, often connected. Maher is a liberal in economic terms, but probably best described as a libertarian when it comes to our current cultural battles, in the same way that I…

Dressing up as a geisha isn’t part of a system of oppression. Who is being oppressed? The Japanese? By whom?

It’s hard to break these awards down, because I think whatever measure you employ, some other artist is going to do that better than Beyonce, whether it’s technical proficiency, songwriting, overall “arty-ness,” experimentation, somebody specializes in that aspect of music and does it better. Given that, then, popular…

I don’t think anyone would argue that she has the best pipes, or that she writes the best songs. There are other other artists who specialize in that. But has any pop artist inserted herself into the zeitgeist to become a cultural phenomenon as she has done? At this particular moment, nobody comes close. It’s not…

I suspect many will only show up to show support for planned parenthood. Some will show up because of climate change, probably the most important issue in that it effects everyone. It threatens life on earth, according to some of the smartest people. Wealth inequality is something that kills people, when one looks at…

I would say, yes, kind of, but there is not a distinct line between biology and culture, as if something arises from one or the other. Taking the long view, culture can and does reflect biology, and vice versa. I think this position of: it’s not innate because it is culture is itself a reductive simplification.

Geez Robin, let a woman, you ex-wife in this case, attend the funeral of a man she knew since she was 15, a man who was family to her for a long time, who is the grandfather to her child. Don’t assess the quality of their relationship and decide she can’t attend. I’m sure you had a large role in generating whatever…

I may be mistaken, but I think Erdrich took some heat earlier in her career about not being a real Native American. In fact, I think it was a very young Sherman Alexie who was leading the attacks, but I may be misremembering things, and I don’t have a source/link.