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98f068b
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Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported confidence.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b815c9b
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Some music has words, and rock had words that at times aspired to poetry, but the words were always sounds first, spoken to the body before the mind.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6654f27
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If it's not clear enough in the piece, I love it when people things to me they know and I'm interested in but don't yet know. It's when they explain things to me I know and they don't that the conversation goes awry.
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mansplain
patriarchal
mansplaining
patriarchy
ignorance
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0b42152
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Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they've always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it's compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the l..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4ac01b1
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That (labyrinth)...became a world whose rules I lived by, and I understood the moral of mazes: sometimes you have to turn your back on your goal to get there, sometimes you're farthest away when you're closest, sometimes the only way is the long one. After that careful walking and looking down, the stillness was deeply moving...It was breathtaking to realize that in the labyrinth, metaphors and meanings could be conveyed spatially. That whe..
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words
maze
labyrinth
goal
path
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0623c2c
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When I was younger, I studied the men I was involved with so carefully that I saw or thought I saw what pain or limitation lay behind their sometimes crummy behavior. I found it too easy to forgive them, or rather to regard them with sympathy at my own expense. It was as though I saw the depths but not the surface, the causes but not the effect. Or them and not myself. I think we call that overidentification, and it's common among women. Bu..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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1ae9627
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I talked about places, about the ways that we often talk about love of place, by which we mean our love for places, but seldom of how the places love us back, of what they give us. They give us continuity, something to return to, and offer a familiarity that allows some portion of our own lives to remain connected and coherent. They give us an expansive scale in which our troubles are set into context, in which the largeness of the world is..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f295290
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Explorers, the historian Aaron Sachs wrote me in answer to a question, 'were always lost, because they'd never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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94ebcbc
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Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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9d4b749
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Taking care of the elderly comes without the vast literature of advice and encouragement that accompanies other kinds of commitments, notably romantic love and childbearing. It sneaks up on you as something that is not supposed to happen, or rather you crash into this condition that you have not been warned about, a rocky coast not on the map. In the preferred stories the last years of life are golden and the old all ripen into wisdom, not ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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cc7b6ec
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On the crowded subway car back to Brooklyn afterwards, the youngest of my three female companions had her bottom groped by a man about Strauss-Kahn's age. At first, she thought he had simply bumped into her. That was before she felt her buttock being cupped and said something to me, as young women often do, tentatively, quietly, as though it were perhaps not happening or perhaps not quite a problem. Finally, she glared at him and told him t..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b2ef16a
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Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself.
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storytelling
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f853fc2
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As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Ce..
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central-park
parks
landscape
homeless
democracy
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Rebecca Solnit |
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3df478c
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Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the tough core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in your world, and to come into your own. ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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610a0ad
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in English the word 'peripatetic' means 'one who walks habitually and extensively.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0ce7a6b
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The anthropoligical theorist Paul Shepard writes, 'Humans intuitivesly see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.' The loss of a relationship to the nonconstruc..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ad65b7c
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Beauty is often spoken of as though it only stirs lust or admiration, but the most beautiful people are so in a way that makes them look like destiny or fate or meaning, the heroes of a remarkable story. Desire for them is in part a desire for a noble destiny, and beauty can seem like a door to meaning as well as to pleasure.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c3d4df5
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Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have, men succeeded in explaining in just the way I said they sometimes do.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c4e6f98
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Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because "the key in survival is knowing you're lost": they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help."
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Rebecca Solnit |
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459c86a
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It takes time. There are milestones, but so many people are traveling along that road at their own pace, and some come along later, and others are trying to stop everyone who's moving forward, and a few are marching backward or are confused about what direction they should go in. Even in our own lives we regress, fail, continue, try again, get lost, and sometimes make a great leap, find what we didn't know we were looking for, and yet conti..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ff5312c
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Perhaps the central question about [Eliot] Porter's work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of [Porter's] colour photographs: 'There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,' and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like.
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photography
aesthetics-eliot-porter
landscape
ecology
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Rebecca Solnit |
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fda6353
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A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has beco..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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7c65b1b
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For a century, the human response to stress and danger has been defined as "fight or flight." A 2000 UCLA study by several psychologists noted that this research was based largely on studies of male rats and male human beings. But studying women led them to a third, often deployed option: gather for solidarity, support, advice. They noted that "behaviorally, females' responses are more marked by a pattern of 'tend-and-befriend.' Tending inv..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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09f46cd
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Violence doesn't have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6d911ea
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Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?
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Rebecca Solnit |
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db10324
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A woman goes walking down a thousand-mile road. Twenty minutes after she steps forth, they proclaim that she still has nine hundred ninety-nine miles to go and will never get anywhere.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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b1adc51
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Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty. I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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787cf55
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It described the double bind of women in that moment: they were getting congratulations for being fully liberated and empowered while being punished by a host of articles, reports, and books telling them that, in becoming liberated, they had become miserable; they were incomplete, missing out, losing, lonely, desperate.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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0190a2b
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The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me--all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibi..
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solitude
feminism
travel
nature
rape-culture
wanderlust
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Rebecca Solnit |
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368abc6
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In contemporary parlance, sex is biological and gender is socially constructed.
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sex
category
language
sociology
gender
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Rebecca Solnit |
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befb15d
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the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.
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revolt
language
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Rebecca Solnit |
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489d46b
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I like to see the long line we each leave behind, and I sometimes imagine my whole life that way, as though each step was a stitch, as though I was a needle leaving a trail of thread that sewed together the world as I went by, crisscrossing others' paths, quilting it all together in some way that matters even though it can hardly be traced. A meandering line sutures together the world in some new way, as though walking was sewing and sewing..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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aca6ea1
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How long does it take to see something, to know someone? If you put in years, you realize how little you grasped at the start, even when you thought you knew. We move through life mostly not seeing what is around us, not knowing who is around us, not understanding the forces at play, not understanding ourselves. Unless we stay with it, and maybe this is a movie about staying with it.
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understanding
life-lessons
movies
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Rebecca Solnit |
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c0c874e
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Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It's an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the ..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ced89d5
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When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.
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travel
memories
nature
wandering
novelty
exploration
walking
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Rebecca Solnit |
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4229b2a
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Always, just beyond all these things, was the silver sea, the lace border around all land like the silence around sounds or the unknowns beyond all knowledge.
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unknown
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Rebecca Solnit |
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e4b35ff
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This means, of course, that the most foundational change of all, the one from which all else issues, is hardest to track. It means that politics arises out of the spread of ideas and the shaping of imaginations. It means that symbolic and cultural acts have real political power. And it means that the changes that count take place not merely onstage as action but in the minds of those who are again and again pictured only as audience or byst..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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6be11fc
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The term 'politics of prefiguration' has long been used to describe the idea that if you embody what you aspire to, you have already succeeded. That is to say, if your activism is already democratic, peaceful, creative, then in one small corner of the world these things have triumphed. Activism, in this model, is not only a toolbox to change things but a home in which to take up residence and live according to your beliefs, even if it's a t..
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politics
hope
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Rebecca Solnit |
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cd60b26
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Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What's your contribution to the world or your community? Do you live according to your principles? What will your legacy be? What does your life mean? Maybe our obsession with happiness is a way not to ask those other questions, a way to ignore how spacious our lives can be, how effective our work ca..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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5b24a27
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The moon is profound except when we land on it.
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profound
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Rebecca Solnit |
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016ee6e
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To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.
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Rebecca Solnit |
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f873b9d
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The sea is a body in a thousand ways that don't add up, because adding is too stable a transaction for that flux, but the waves come in in a roar and then ebb, almost silent but for the fain suck of sand and snap of bubbles, over and over, a heartbeat rhythm, the sea always this body turned inside out and opened to the sky, the body always a sea folded in on itself, a nautical chart folded into a paper cup.
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pacific-ocean
sea
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Rebecca Solnit |
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27241da
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One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had experienced as a woman in the sciences, from losing fellowships to less qualified male candidates to being told a boyfriend must have helped her with her math. He was told that he was smarter than his sister by a man who confused his former, f..
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Rebecca Solnit |
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ec4acdd
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Young feminists are a thrilling phenomenon: smart, bold, funny defenders of rights and claimers of space--and changers of the conversation.
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Rebecca Solnit |