politics & culture

Is the pen really mightier than the sword? Not when you’ve got the noose around your neck. But until that moment – may it never come -- we can at least keep the door open a little, we can keep the candle burning, a little.

By sheer coincidence, just as I was writing this speech, news broke that a school board in Edmonton, Alberta – under direction from their provincial government -- had banned my book, The Handmaid’s Tale, from their school system – the classrooms, the libraries – because it was pornographic. That’s quite funny: the book has more often been... See more

One of the harbingers of autocratic takeovers is an attempt to control writers and artists, either by censoring them and dictating to them what sort of art they should produce – we saw a certain amount of that coming from the so-called academic left in North America and Britain over the past decade, twinned with online mobbing generally known as... See more

''Revolutions are not realizations of the idealistic visions of writers; they are sociopolitical eruptions in which the collapse of an existing structure of power creates a vacuum into which many forces rush. . . . The freedom that may have been the dominant desideratum in the prerevolutionary period is the first victim of the struggle for power.... See more

Why? Artists of all kinds – but especially writers – are always among the first to face the firing squads when dictatorships are on the rise. They have no armies. They have no actual legislative or physical power. They have no voter base. They are isolated individuals, and thus easy to eliminate. Above all, they say things that autocrats don’t want... See more

When we who claim any kind of feminist label look at the culture around us—and the art that reflects the culture around us—the way we articulate our thoughts about it matters. We should be intentional about it, even if the artists aren’t.

When the audit known as feminist revision became a feature of feminist theory, it was never intended to eclipse in importance the activity known as praxis: organizing, taking over institutions, seizing power to make lasting changes in policy and law. Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique , but she also co-founded the National Organization for... See more

There’s a limit, I think, to the utility of reading celebrity lives like tea leaves. The lives of famous women are determined by exponential leaps in visibility, money, and power, whereas the lives of ordinary women are mostly governed by mundane things: class, education, housing markets, labor practices.