1. Young people are abandoning the "save the world" rhetoric we were raised with and seeking out a more practical, complex analysis of social change. We don't want to "save the world." We're too smart to think we can. We want to live in it -- flawed, fierce, loving, and humble.
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I sunk into the cushy, expensive couch (so much more comfortable than the street find slumped against one wall in my Brooklyn apartment) and soaked up the sights and sounds of chaotic, emotional family life. At 24, living with two roommates in Brooklyn, facing a fridge with only condiments and...

Last week four more Iraqi suicide bombers struck, leaving the mainstream media dumbfounded. Anchors from Atlanta to New York asked pundits: "What do you make of this?" "What could the motivation be?" "Who put them up to it?"

After five years of a war filled with attacks of this nature,...

Co-written with Hannah Seligson

The 57 million dollar opening weekend for Sex and the City, the film, was just the beginning. Now, it appears, armies of young women across the country are shelling out another ten dollars twice, three, or even four times to see their hero prance about in...

As we stare down tax day, we shouldn't just be scrutinizing our ailing bank accounts, we should also be scrutinizing the government that is spending our hard-earned money. After all, just as your money is your mouth, your government's spending should be representative of your values and ideals.

How is...

Planned Parenthood was packed on a Thursday in the frigid Colorado dead of winter. I remember giving up my seat to a woman who looked to be in her thirties and totally unfazed by the crowded lobby on abortion day. She alternated between gabbing on her phone and yelling at...

Just as scarf and hat weather hit Wednesday in New York, five Columbia University students gathered on the main campus lawn, pitched three tents, and declared themselves on hunger strike. Cross-legged, among a sea of Gatorade bottles, sleeping bags, and towels, Columbia College senior Emilie Rosenblatt says, "We're prepared to...

When I closed the advanced copy of Deborah Siegel's fascinating new book, Sisterhood Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, I felt two things: relief and outrage.

First, the relief. Siegel's thorough history of the infighting that has gone on within the feminist movement contextualized my sense that...

Lindsay Lohan, actress and pop music star, has been dominating the headlines the last couple of weeks with news of her alleged drunk driving accident, drug addiction, and second stint in rehab within the year. Lohan joins the ranks of other young, hot celebrities caught under the influence acting stupid....

As pomp-and-circumstance season draws to a close and recent college grads say tearful goodbyes to their drinking buddies and favorite professors, they might want to say one addition farewell...to their naïve and often overblown expectations of the real world.

You see, so many of us Generation Y superstars --especially the...

I have carried this book around inside of me for years. At age twenty-five, far from the gluttony of college and even further from the angst of adolescence, I suspected I might finally be rid of the gagging noises echoing...

In the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy, many colleges have rushed to create lists of "banned students" and make them public on their campuses. The students who land on these lists have violated various school rules -- some of them more violent than others, all of them cause for...

You use words like "patriarchy" and "crone." You have a dream group, two book clubs, a medical psychic. On your bathroom wall, you have a photograph of a middle-aged naked woman stretched out in the curve of a leaning tree. I love you, but sometimes your ideas of feminism seem...

My grandmother's hands, ten big knuckles with twisted skin, reach over to her coke, no ice. Every Saturday during this rust hot New Mexico summer we have been going out to lunch. She picks me up in her uncomfortably clean maroon car and drives uncomfortably slow, her big iridescent...

Jennifer Baumgardner, third wave feminist shero, learned more than her feminist history while an intern at Ms. in the early 90s. Her Midwestern college experience--frat boyfriend and all--was eclipsed by the discovering of one Ms. Anastasia Higginbotham, and in turn, a more profound sense of her sexuality and self.

Baumgardner...

Forced to endure a long plane ride in a cramped seat yesterday, I decided to finally read one of the books that had taken up dusty residence on by bedside table: We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, by journalist...

Polly, a curly-haired 30-year-old from Johnson City, Tennessee, was forced to leave eating disorder treatment when her insurance ran out. She explains, "Here I was thinking, It's okay, I'm over the laxatives, I haven't had one in almost three months. But I go outside of Renfrew and I wanted them...

My boyfriend, Nik, and I will celebrate our seventh anniversary this year. Or more accurately, we won't. You see, we've never been much for the traditional trappings of romantic relationships. He's never bought me flowers. We don't exchange those daily phone calls updating one another on what we ate for...

Since the announcement of Madrid's ban on models with a body mass index of less than 18, newspapers and magazines across the world have been pulling out their most shocking photographs of skeletal models and their most scathing rhetoric about the fashion industry's disturbing normalization of anorexia.

John Scheinfeld, co-creator of the new documentary U.S. vs. John Lennon, introduced the film at this year's Telluride Film Festival with an entertaining anecdote. Butterflies in his stomach, he arrived at the Dakota--the long-time home of John and Yoko and site of Lennon's 1980 assassination--to show Ono the first cut...