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  Every advance in information technology and every expanded frontier for its use seems to propagate media stories of new ways that governments and industries are infringing upon the once sacrosanct zone of individual privacy. From facial recognition software to cars that... Read More →

  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This oft-quoted phrase, usually attributed to the philosopher George Santayana, was probably coined by Edmund Burke when he said “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” A more trenchant... Read More →

  “The baby won’t live to be fourteen.” Our grandmother would announce her skepticism about my cousin’s life expectancy as easily as she would announce that the weatherman had predicted rain. Of course, there was nothing magic about the age of fourteen—every anticipated... Read More →

My ex-husband’s mother had a poet’s will. She was a silken beauty, vulnerable, observant, wondering where I belonged. I told her the forced abortion is why I left my marriage. However, she never said a word to him, and he never said a word to her about it. But she and I... Read More →

  Recently, Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas Solicitor General, filed a taxpayer lawsuit, Zimmerman v. City of Austin, seeking to block Austin from implementing a program designed to assist low-income women seeking abortions. The program would provide grants to... Read More →

  Emily Post has been kidnapped!  In the years following the Roe v. Wade decision, women I had known for years would tell me, in a manner ranging from blithe to bureaucratic, that they had had an abortion, and then wait for me to deliver the expected: “Hey girl, i... Read More →

In 1990, I was invited to defend life in a Manhattan theater setting. Mounted by the Art & Work Ensemble in Syncronicity Space (located on Eleventh Street, just west of Sixth Avenue) there would be six one-act plays: three pro-choice, three pro-life. After the performance,... Read More →

  To compound a prescription for limitless, international emergency support, we need only extrapolate from an American anthropologist’s recent study of Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake. There can be no doubt that more natural disasters await us—whether earthquake or... Read More →

  Settling into a chair at a barbershop in Japan, one enters into the same kind of preliminary conversation one does in the United States (or, I imagine, anywhere else in the world). In my case, I usually tell the barber to cut it “very short, just shy of looking like I’m... Read More →

  I briefly wondered who had taught him the English words “soap” and “five.” He couldn’t have been more than ten years old, standing out on the sidewalk in 90-degree heat with his satchel full of soap and a smile that radiated to his eyes. “Soap? Five shekel.” Our guide... Read More →