Starving women, American chic style

Barely have the baubles of the Oscars faded into Hollywood history, when the bleak news of the real world comes flooding back in. School shooting in a high school cafeteria in Ohio. Keystone XL pipeline permit back on the table. Rick Santorum is arguing against the separation of church and state, and thumbing his nose [...]

Coming to Voice, Saving the Planet

Yesterday acclaimed psychologist Carol Gilligan paid a visit to the class I am currently co-teaching at Bard College at Simon’s Rock with theater professor Karen Beaumont, “Human Rights, Activism and the Arts.” Gilligan’s ground-breaking book, In A Different Voice, was the first to examine the psychological development of girls. Yes, you read that right.  Before [...]

Who’s Afraid of Women’s Writing?

Last night I participated in a panel discussion on Virginia Woolf and Margaret Mead called “Who’s Afraid of Women(‘s) Writing,” with Bard College of Simon’s Rock colleagues Maryann Tebben and Asma Abbas. We were talking about how women’s writing is often oppositional, representing an outsider’s point of view to male-dominated mainstream discourse, whatever the discipline. [...]

Paradigm Shift: From Competition and Destruction to Nurturance & Collaboration

I am almost 50 years old, and in my current lifetime I have lived through one of the most intense, rapidly changing periods of human civilization on this planet.  The technological discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries were steadily gaining steam when I was born in the early 1960s; “progress” seemed infinite, and infinitely [...]