When the world was sheltering in place, Takeyla Benton was coming out. It was March 2020, and the Wisconsin, US-based financial-services professional and mother of two had just quit her job at a credit union, and broken off an engagement to a man. Lockdown gave now 39-year-old Benton time to rest and reflect on whether…
How to Overcome Masturbation Shame
When I was 12 or 13, my mother gave me and my sisters a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. It was a revelation: a whole chapter on having sex with other women! Diagrams of vulvas! Frank discussions of birth control! My favorite chapter was the one on masturbation. It was any hormonal, nerdy bisexual teen’s dream: an instruction manual…
Help Curate This Vast Trove of Kitchen-Table Remedies
HÉCTOR CALDERÓN WAS 19 IN 1965, when he was hired to help compile what would later become the Archive of Healing. He had entered the University of California Los Angeles hoping to become an accountant. That all changed when he started working for Professor Wayland Hand, the Director of UCLA’s Center for the Study of Comparative…
A Field Guide to North America’s Wild Crops
When I was a child in New Jersey, summer meant berry picking. As the wild raspberries ripened, the emerald woods around our house became spotted with bright bursts of deep purple. We would plunge through the brambles to collect enough juicy, tangy-sweet berries to make a pie. We didn’t realize that the local black raspberries were…
Go Beyond the Grocery Store With These Seven Innovative Spice Companies
IN 2016, SANA JAVERI KADRI found herself at a crossroads. After moving from her hometown of Mumbai to California, she wanted to learn more about the historical forces shaping her own identity and experience as a queer woman of color in the United States. A food photographer, Javeri Kadri turned to culinary history to better understand…
How freelancing can improve your dating life (and vice versa)
A few years ago, I left a job, a relationship, and an apartment all in the same month. One, the job, came to a natural ending; I set off to begin my full-time freelance life. The other two endings were far more abrupt, and both were related to gender-based violence. I’m a food, sex, and mental…
This Writer is Tweeting Everything Sylvia Plath Ever Ate
LIKE MANY YOUNG, ASPIRING WRITERS, Rebecca Brill was obsessed with Sylvia Plath’s diaries. Their luminous, sensual, and often dramatic prose charts the ups and downs of Plath’s internal state with a serious attention that young women’s feelings rarely receive. So when the pandemic lockdown began in 2020, Brill, in the grip of a depression brought on…
Why LGBTQ couples split household tasks more equally
For Kara and Jo Chambers-Grant, communication has been key to maintaining equilibrium during the upheaval of the pandemic. The couple, who live in Bath in the UK, married in 2017, shortly after meeting through an online group that offers peer support for women, trans and nonbinary people coming out later in life. Following a whirlwind…
Keep Your Quarantine Garden Growing With These 8 Unique Seed Companies
WHEN THE REALITY OF THE pandemic hit, nearly a year ago, something unexpected happened: Americans began gardening. Alarmed by a possible breakdown in food supply chains, and inspired by wartime Victory Gardens and lockdown boredom, people across the country who never grew food before developed green thumbs. For many pandemic gardeners—including me—the experience was a revelation….
How to Make Peace With Your Jealousy
I called her the jealous woman. She was fierce and relentless, and during a difficult period in my life she arose in me when she sensed a threat. I was dating someone around that time. The butterflies were flying, and much of the time it felt so right, but the jealous woman kept popping up….
