The trouble with girls
By Flannery Dean - Friday, February 17, 2012 - 0 Comments
In ‘Girl Land,’ author Caitlin Flanagan reflects on timeless notions of girlhood, for better or for worse.
uncurable_hippie/Flickr
What does it feel like to be a girl on the cusp of adolescence, too young to be considered a woman yet old enough to think twice about hugging your dad? The question keeps both songwriters and screenwriters busy, wracking their brains for words that rhyme with crying, as they desperately seek out fresh takes on those eternal storylines: first period, first crush, first heartbreak.
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Greatest Hitch
By Flannery Dean - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 10:54 AM - 19 Comments
Amid all the skewering, Christopher Hitchens tries a little tenderness in ‘Arguably’
Your challenge should you choose to accept it: describe journalist Christopher Hitchens without using the words ‘contrarian’ or ‘provocateur.’Mission impossible? It sure felt like it. Take away the well-worn descriptors—toss out agitator, fire-brand, fire-eater (there’s a lot of “fire” talk around the famous atheist) and antagonist while you’re at it— and you’re left with having to consider Hitchens’s work apart from the hard shell of his cultural persona.
That’s as it should be.
And not only because the author’s 2010 diagnosis of esophageal cancer has drawn a line under his mortality, but in an era in which Lady Gaga is also considered to be a provocateur, the term has lost something of its cachet, if not its thrust (political rather than pelvic). Continue…
