AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS that make health claims. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it’s more likely to be a processed than a whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big food companies that have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world.–Michael Pollan, “In Defense of Food,” which I found in Best Food Writing... Read more

BUT SHE’S TOO ROUGH AND I’M TOO DELICATE: A reader writes, after my Catholic and Feminist review: I share your disappointment that the book didn’t tackle the real fascination of “Catholic and/or/but feminist,” which is the dynamic of submission in feminism: what kinds are privileged (sorry, English major), who says so, why, etc. Take Morrissey. One of the weirdnesses of his persona is that he is avowedly feminist, and yet he totally possesses, in Laura Mulvey’s eternal phrase, “to-be-looked-at-ness.” Just... Read more

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a “picture” forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person’s every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping... Read more

“WE’LL BURN THAT BRA WHEN WE COME TO IT.” My Inside Catholic book column, on Florence King’s When Sisterhood Was in Flower. Read more

“TOWARD A BIOETHICS OF LOVE.” Helen Rittelmeyer’s provocative piece on “what conservatism can offer disability activism”: My sister’s genetic disorder is too unusual to have a name. If it seems like the person I’m talking to won’t understand a medical description—grand mal seizures, nonverbal, severe-to-profound mental retardation—the layman’s version is that she’s a 10-month-old mind trapped in a 20-year-old body. I am not often asked whether there is a cure. When I heard the question for the first time, only... Read more

THE TORTURE DEBATE (AS A BATMAN COMIC): Cussin’, bad taste, bad spelling, and gallows humor. You’re welcome. Read more

REVERSE-ENGINEERED “IRON CHEF” RECIPES!!! Read more

I SHOULDA BEEN A PAIR OF RAGGED CLAWS: A friend sent me this link with the note, “Here is a giant centipede that reminds me of you.” (Scroll halfway down the page.) Post title via Tom Eliot and Alison Bechdel…. Read more

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.–character of Oscar Wilde, in Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love Read more

BISY BACKSON. Read more