When Barbie wonders, “Are they shtupping?,” “shtupping” is not likely to be a word that Barbie would’ve picked up from the family parties at Esther’s parents’ home

Then he went on, “And, sadly, there are budget constraints. As a Muslim, you would normally be eligible for up to four wives, but they only allow me the budget for one. You understand, at times like these, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices.”

“A fuck is just sex, but a head-fuck is art.”

“For you, if you get the flu, you know you’re going to feel like total shit for a week. Then maybe another week, and you feel like crap. But after that, you forget all about it. It’s gone. You’re bouncing around like it never even happened. But suppose the worst day with the flu, when you couldn’t even get the fuck out of bed, was the best you were ever going to feel for the rest of your life? Then you’d start to fucking understand.

In the end, “trans” leaves out some crucial information – specifically, how trans they are (or what kind of trans they are). It’s a term without nuance, that we are expected to accept without question.

There are families in our culture who commemorate the memories of loved ones with rituals such as lighting yahrzeit candles on the anniversary of a loved one’s death, or going out to visit the graves of parents and loved ones, sometimes on particular days or in some cases as a weekly picnic or whatever. If the loved one is frozen, resting in some unclear legal and religious limbo, what happens to these kinds of visits? You wouldn’t exactly be mourning a “loss.” But neither is

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin is offered to us as a book full of insight, a new, fresh, and informed exploration of that stickiest of all human adventures—sex. Within the action of the book, however, we see proclaimed not the joy of sex, but the heroism of abstinence. Estraven, Genly Ai's closest native friend, normally a lusty sort of character (we gather), abandons his sexuality and suffers the tortures of the celibate in the name of the quest.

The play Hamlet grows out of the tradition of the revenge tragedy, a great favorite of the Elizabethan audience. In the conventional...

"Satan sends us temptations. God sends us opportunities." Dear pastor O, Last week while I was hiking out in the woods for fun, I found a...

My opening question was inspired by a well-intentioned idea on the part of the committee that organized my 50th high school reunion this...

Age is the money shot in an obit. Followed by cause of death as a close second. My father, Carl G. Hempel, was a professor of...

One of the things that gets a lot of coverage in the news these days is the search for exo-planets circling around other stars in our galaxy and in the universe at large. Recent advances in technology have allowed astronomers to perform ever more sophisticated surveys and analyses on behalf of that search. And indeed, recent results suggest that a sizable number of stars appear to have planets rotating around them. Beyond that, our search is preoccupied with how many of those

“Life is. It goes. And it does not count. That was the hurtling truth that comes to rattle everyone as they grow up, grow old.” Jim Crace, Being Dead (quoted in a book review in Men’s Journal , March 2000, p. 56) "The meaning of life is that it ends." Franz Kafka “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Friedrich Nietzsche “There’s no way to explain human beings. We shouldn’t be on this planet.” Ancient Aliens (the Histor

April 25, 2009 · I received a fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant a little while ago which read: "Fear is the darkroom where...

June 25, 2009 · So apparently philosophy is not dead. In a bid to enrich the passenger experience on the London tube, they have decided to add philosophy to the mix of station announcements and safety messages. Cezanne's, "We live in a rainbow of chaos," and Jean-Paul Sartre's, "Hell is other people," are among the philosophical ideas to be recited by Tube drivers. (The latter being a somewhat odd reminder on an over-crowded rush-hour subway car.) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/

July 17, 2009 · Subsidize Viagra to ensure quality of life: Swedish court Published: 10 Jul 09 18:40 CET Arguing that having sex is...