Letters to the Editor
glorious girl
Published Letters: 335 Editor's Choice: 46
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This Boy Can Write
[Read the article: "The Best People in the World"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I read the "The Laser Age" last summer in the New Yorker and I thought it was a masterpiece. I snarfed up all those beautifully-crafted, sad, funny sentences like they were dipped in chocolate. I shared the story with friends. It held up after the third read. I will buy this novel.
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Hey Jude
[Read the article: Only the GOP can save us]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's Repeat what Jude said: Say it over and over... WE didn't elect them
Jimmy Carter says our voting system is more corrupt than many 3rd world countries. Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Florida again. Gore and Kerry probably won.
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Half of the balls are CGI for Allah's sake!
[Read the article: Balls out]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]maybe because my screen is so small, but the ball thing with the (lovely, yes) music is not so lovely to my eyes. Maybe I'm wrong, but many of the balls look like CGI (computer generated imagery)and fake. I'm so tired of CGI. This commercial could have really been a contender but they geeked it up.
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We Live Among Them
[Read the article: The wily coyotes of New York]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]we live in southern California near a canyon and it is such a treat to hear the coyotes vocalizing at night. It's eerie and haunting at 3am. We also hear (what we think) are their feeding frenzies which are primal and shocking, but we mostly revel in our peaceful co-existance with them. It's hard to keep outdoor cats around here. They can be snatched up as well as the smaller dogs. Children have been snapped at also--but that's rare. Mostly the coyotes, lovely and aloof, live among us like mother nature's ghosts. We know they're here; we see their scat, full of berries and rabbit fur on the trails we hike on, and you will catch one every so often staring at you from the shadows. They are amazing creatures. I mourn the unnatural passing of Hal.
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"However, part of the art of loving is sometimes sacrifice."
[Read the article: Madness, medication and motherhood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Xema Gold, I like your feistiness, but you had me three letters back with your line about sacrifice. Of all the letters I read over the last day, this line moved me the most. Ms. Casey, I hope you read my letter and take this to heart: I practice a crazy mantra: I have been blessed with infertility. While a part of me has mourned my inability to have children, I have, in later years tried like hell to accept this with grace and well, curiosity. What does the universe want of me? I ask this every day of my life, and the answers (I think) are coming: we might adopt, absolutely. We have a wild sense of responsibility to the little critters already here, and it surprises me-- along with a growing keenness for how we might parent in creative ways. How I can "mother" others not of my genetic material: from my friends' children to my nieces and nephews, to neglected animals, to the downtrodden and disenfranchised, to my sometimes difficult family. As my biological clock ticked away into a little time bomb, and I said goodbye to my youth, I also have felt an awakening because I had to...or I'd go wacko comparing myself to others. And the genetic lottery on both sides of the family would do well to perhaps lay dormant for a few centuries.
I almost stopped reading your article because I was nervous that it would end in "now I dandle a baby on my knee..." But you didn’t and you aren't. You're still hanging in there, doing the hard work of considering your sacrifice. You're teaching your students; you're no doubt inspiring. You have a place in this world. You have hopefully helped people think about--I mean really think about-- what it means to bring a child into the world. I like this.
I’m no Pollyanna. I have my dreary, isolated days. But I'm trying to own this 'gift' of infertility I have been given, live it--in all its blank-slateness, do right by it. Love is sacrifice. We are changed when we love. I sacrifice for my partner, and he for me--oh lord do we sacrifice. I sacrifice for animals, and get in lots of trouble for it. On and on. And loving the soul of an unknown child ahead of time, be he/she an orphan or a future zygote of your own...this may be the biggest, strangest most intangible love. We have these big, big brains, we humans. So we sacrifice; we suffer; we think. We don't slave to biology if we don't want to. So you're weighing it out, and who knows, maybe the difficulty of saying no can become the greatest grace.
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Everybody Does Not Love Patricia Heaton
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Re: anti-choicer Patricia Heaton http://www.feministsforlife.org/ possibly filling in for Meredith Vieira when she leaves for NBC. It's one thing for Patricia to play an angry, constantly disappointed wife on a sitcom, it's another entirely for her to sit at that table as herself: a real-life, angry anti-choicer.