Last year I learned how to chop a carrot with my eyes closed. While being filmed. Sounds like one of those crazy reality cooking shows,...

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine asked me to write a blog post about how women handled menstruation in the nineteenth century,...

For three decades, my dad’s brothers framed houses. The three of them had a small construction business in rural Connecticut. The eldest...

In childbirth politics as in all politics, extreme viewpoints make the news, and sensible centrists are ignored. A couple of years ago,...

My friend’s father is in the hospital, and it’s been rough. His cancer treatment did not go as expected. “He’s suffering so much!” my...

I was born into 1970s feminism. I came into the world in 1972, the year Free to Be You and Me came out. It must have made a big...

“We are a divided nation,” Donald Trump repeats again and again.  And then he makes plans to divide us still further: registration of...

“What makes a mother real?” asks writer and performer Alice Eve Cohen in her newly-published play, What I Thought I Knew. In 1999, Cohen...

“His BMI is on the high side of normal. See?” The pediatrician showed me a chart. “This is something we need to keep an eye on.” I had...

A year and a half ago, I gained a permanent dance partner. That’s what I’ve decided. That’s how I need to think about the damage to my...

“Sorry,” I say, “Sorry, but would you mind giving me the directions again a little slower? I have a visual impairment and I didn’t see...

The Indiana legislature claims it wants to protect unborn children and their parents. Last week Governor Mike Pence gave his blessing to...

This week I had the pleasure of interviewing historian Jessica Martucci at length about her new book, Back to the Breast: Natural...

Friday night I went to Joe’s Pub and saw B.A.N.G.S.: made in america, a wonderful dance performance full of sequins and fur, cutoffs and...

As a kid, I loved shooting a rifle with my uncle, out back at my grandmother’s farmhouse. My dad and I would go out with Uncle Bill, in...

The year my second son was born, I went to work, and my husband stayed home. It was the most luxurious year of my life. In the mornings,...

A friend of mine recently lamented that when he sat his teenage son down to have “The Talk,” he had to focus on the internet instead of...

This is my fantasy: I’m standing at the Main Street corner in my little New Jersey suburban downtown, waiting to cross the street. As...

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg joyfully announced on Facebook that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are expecting a daughter. More solemnly,...

It seems like every day a new health tracking gizmo appears in stores. The fitbit. The Apple Watch. TICKRx. Leaf, a tracker that’s...