Many of us remember the day we first ran across Our Bodies, Ourselves, as something of a revelation; perhaps you even picked up the more recent edition of the same book focused on menopause. But have you wished your voice was in there too? Now, thanks to former WVFC editor Chris Cupaiolo at Our Bodies, [...]

As I write this I am looking out of a window in an air conditioned (!) Barnes & Noble in Houston. I have just seen a crow.  Once again I am reminded of how Lisa Russ Spaar can take the particular and poetically turn it into the pertinent, the powerful, the universal. It is snowing [...]

Last week,  two researchers from Australia announced an exciting new discovery about gender and heart disease. We have long recognized that men generally become prone to coronary artery disease earlier than women — on average a decade earlier — perhaps supporting the notion that male sex hormones increase one’s risk of heart disease. Although the [...]

I remember everything, or at least the things that matter. I remember every pore of his skin, the encysted bump he had on the back of his head, the way he looked like a droll rabbi when he steepled his fingers. I remember the smell of his skin. I remember the lopsided grin he’d get, [...]

An attractive blonde, wine glass in hand, sidled up to my husband. I could tell she was smart. She subtly moved her gaze from one end of the room to the other, checking for eavesdroppers in the crowd, as though she and he were co-conspirators in a clandestine operation. I moved in and assumed a [...]

I recently came up with an idea: that it would be revelatory to ask as many women who were willing to “nominate” our next world leaders to choose who, among women, they’d put forward to lead the world. This seems more apt than ever, given last week’s decision by the Supreme Court, which may guarantee [...]

My evening commute takes me along a highway that could be Anywhere, USA — a rootless route of chain restaurants, box stores, motels, gas stations. One evening, stopped at a red light, I noticed that the “L” in the local strip-mall Gold’s Gym sign had gone dark. I had one of those delicious negative epiphanies [...]

(Many observant WVFC readers are already fans of Julia Kay, who first told us of her Daily Portrait Project a year ago and this fall shared vivid memories of many Septembers. Since then, one of her portraits was in a Chicago show featured in the New York Times, and she keeps discovering new meanings of the [...]

Attention, all candidates and wannabees: Learn a valuable lesson from Martha Coakley. If you want to win, don’t take anything for granted. Fight as if your political life depends on it, because it does. The electorate is fickle; just because you’re a Dem running in one of the bluest of blue states for the seat [...]

The questions of children never fail to reach to the center of things. I realized this anew sitting at my table answering the letters of a friend’s eighth-grade science class. “Are people in Africa poor,” one student asked. I paused. The answer that seemed obvious to me as I wrote by lamplight in the sweltering [...]