We bring our personal experiences to the art we see, hear and read.Read More

With Mother's Day close at hand, I am devoting this newsletter to mothers – mine, yours, all of ours.Read More

Current events should lead us to a new way of thinking about women's history.Read More

Like quilts and blankets, the history of America is composed of many strands.Read More

This month, I'm sharing an article I wrote for MS Magazine. Here it is, as it appeared on November 11.Read More

Yesterday I voted in Boston's mayoral election where there were two candidates, both women. A little more than a century ago, this could not have happened -- neither me in the voting booth nor women on the ballot. Upstate New York had a lot to do with making it possible.Read More

This month, I'm talking about art again. Actually, a book about art, The Mirror and the Palette, by Jennifer Higgie, where she covers five hundred years of women's self-portraiture, a genre women have long practiced, even if mostly under the radar.Read More

In last month's newsletter, I ruminated on how women can move history. Now I'm back with more on the subject, specifically Phebe Lord Upham, born in Maine in 1804.Read More

Two years ago I was invited to give a reading in New York. My husband Andrew came with me and, naturally, we added museums and restaurants to the trip. One evening we went to Prune, a wonderful place on East 1st Street (now regrettably closed) run by chef Gabrielle Hamilton and her wife.Read More

Vaccines are all the buzz these days. Saturated with news coverage, we’ve absorbed new terms like spike protein and messenger RNA, and learned that some vaccines, like Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s, are really a new breed. Without recent advances in biotechnology, we wouldn’t have these vaccines at all. Did you know that the polio vaccine, which...Read More