Cancer is the original sin of diseases. Like the Terminator, it does not rest. It will not ever be killed. Getting cancer means falling into a state of eternal sin. If we slice out tumor, or radiate it or chemo it into submission or send it into hiding, we remain under watch. Has it found a new home elsewhere in the body? The medical team, the medical community, becomes a dystopian Santa Claus, watching us and testing us day and night to see if we’re good or bad.

In the zoo, the lions are denied the fundamental essence of their being, their chance to hunt prey, and bring it down and kill it, and to teach their cubs the skills they in turn will need to master. At meal time, they are thrown generous hunks of raw meat. But there is no hunt, no thrill, no skill, no challenge, no chance to be a real lion.

I'm sometimes accused of being cynical or negative in my thinking. But I want to assure you from the outset that this story has a happy ending. George dies.

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.”

He was trying to think, but he was also severely distracted by the sight of Victoria’s skirt riding still further above the top of her stockings and now revealing the garters holding them up. Earlier, he had been fixated on her red hair and blue eyes; now all he could look at was her legs.

“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.

You are about to head home with them, but then they tell you, as full disclosure, that they used to be the opposite sex. They have fully transitioned, top and bottom, and enjoy sex. Would this be a deal breaker for you?

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

When my father was in his late 80s, he tried to commit suicide. My mother, who had been away for the day, found him and called me, and I called an ambulance, and he was “saved.” When he woke up in the hospital after having his stomach pumped, he was quite angry about being “saved.” Talk about no one listening to what he wanted.

My medical education has followed almost exactly the same path. I keep learning about what can go wrong when it does go wrong, one damn thing after another. I keep earning credits towards a wholly unasked-for medical degree. I have learned about so many things that can screw up, so many procedures and treatments, so many pills and injections. I accept my destiny as a human pincushion for shots, blood draws, and anything else they come up with. I am not an eager student, and t

It is argued that neither we – nor in reality even the creator – can truly “know” the intentions behind the text. Yet it is surely no more futile to cast for intention than to fish for meaning in a random sea of unsignifying signifiers.

Perhaps the most famous single line from Holocaust literature is Anne Frank's conclusion: “In my heart, I believe that people are good.” Do you feel that Kosinski would agree? Write out an imaginary discussion between Kosinski and Frank on the issue of the fundamental nature of man.

“If it can be done, it will be done. Ethics are no more than a fart in a windstorm.” ("Prolegomenon to our cryogenic future")

Cultural trends and corporate greed will doubtless continue to do battle over our nether regions until global warming and societal collapse render the question moot.

LeGuin explains to us that the Gethenians (the locals) have no shame about sex, that during heat they retire to what might be described (though not by her) as “fuck houses.” Would that Ms. LeGuin were similarly liberated. For all the mention of these houses and their significance for the Gethenian outlook (as well as the not unlikely interest that we mature adults who read science fiction may have in these intimate ways and means of alien species), the doors remain barred to

Hamlet – or the Case of the Bad Detective Peter A. Hempel The play Hamlet grows out of the tradition of the revenge tragedy, a great favorite of the Elizabethan audience. In the conventional revenge play, the focus is on the violent acts of revenge which spatter the stage with blood and make for predictable but fulfilling theater. In Hamlet, however, the central character is obsessed not with revenge but with detective work, and his self-indulgent over-scrupulousness is itsel

"Satan sends us temptations. God sends us opportunities."

After all (depending on how charitable your view of your fellow man’s chances of getting in), heaven should by now have quite a crowd, and even among those you actually knew in your own lifetime, putting names with faces can be a challenge