Paper Trail

Paisley Currah on sex and the state; Melissa Gira Grant, Charlotte Shane, and Abby Cartus on the end of Roe

The Death Panel podcast has unlocked its episode about the end of Roe v. Wade, featuring a conversation with the hosts and Melissa Gira Grant, Charlotte Shane, and Abby Cartus.

For Gawker, Zoe Hu reflects on her sense that something has been lost in feminism in recent years. She writes, “Perhaps it’s not even a loss, but a maladaptive respectability, a series of sheepish, brittle adjustments adopted after the humiliations of the Obama and Trump years.”

For Jewish Currents, Andrea Long Chu talks with professor and author Paisley Currah about transgender studies and the waves of attacks on trans people. Discussing his new book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, Currah notes, “As trans advocates, we come into it like, ‘This is who transgender people are, this is what sex is, this is what gender is.’ With this book, I decided I was going to stop caring about any of that and simply define sex as the result of a government decision.”

For the Paris Review Daily, Jean Garnett writes about her open marriage: “About six months after our daughter was born, my husband calmly set the idea on the table, like a decorative gun.”

For LitHub’s “Craft of Writing” newsletter, Patrick Radden Keefe argues against access journalism. He points out that when celebrities agree to be interviewed now, there are so many conditions that the conversation can seem indistinguishable from a press release. Instead, Radden Keefe writes, “I’m a big advocate of what is sometimes called the “writearound,” in which a journalist doesn’t have access to the central subject but writes around that void.”