Sunday Radical Roundup: What We Are Reading

It’s Easter, it’s Passover. But what is Tenured Radical doing? Visiting Mom and catching up on email, that’s what. But in the middle of everything, there is time to read, and here are a few things that have caught my eye:

• Oh My God! I Left the Baby on the Bus! A brilliant essay about choosing not to have children -- many times -- by M.G. Lord, “You’d Be Such a Good Mother. If Only You Weren’t You,” Dame (April 3, 2015.) Yes, yes, and yes.
• You Must remember This. Daniel Zalewski’s essay, “Life Lines,” The New Yorker (March 30, 2015), is about an artist and illustrator whose hippocampus and memory were zapped by encephalitis. I cannot even begin to describe what an amazing essay this is. Not one of those New Yorker pieces that endlessly devolves into brain science, it teaches about the brain and brain research through the life this former New Yorker cover illustrator Lonnie Sue Johnson is now living as a woman with no memory.
• Department of Shameless Self Promotion. A series of short essays by Seth Denbo, Lara Putnam, Frederike Teute, Timothy Gilfoyle and Your Favorite Radical about “History as a Book Discipline,” Perspectives on History (April 2014.)
• Transnational Feminism and Sexual Assault. Historian Niamh Cullen on a courageous Sicilian woman’s role in reforming rape law in Italy, “Franca Viola says ‘No': Gender violence, consent, and the law in 1960s Italy,” Notches (March 21, 2015.)