Birth Control and Teenage Pregnancy

Editors of The New York Times write: “An encouraging new report shows a big decline in the rate of teenage births. . . . This good shift is largely the result of an increase in teenagers’ use of birth control — a fact that Congressional Republicans igno…

Ashley Judd leads push back against image-based appraisals of women

Anna Holmes writes for The Washington Post: “Rapid-fire, image-based appraisals of women’s worth — what I call ‘objectify first, ask questions later’ — have become so commonplace that they are less exception than rule. Perhaps even more troubling, the i…

Catholic university in Ohio ends birth-control coverage

Stephanie Simon reports for Reuters: “Xavier University, one of the oldest Roman Catholic colleges in the United States, will cut off birth-control coverage for its employees in July, a move that has divided faculty members and students on the Cincinnati…

White Until Proven Black: Imagining Race in Hunger Games

Anna Holmes writes for The New Yorker: “On Tuesday, February 28th, a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian male fan of Suzanne Collins’s dystopian young adult trilogy, ‘The Hunger Games,’ logged onto the popular blogging platform Tumblr for the first time and cr…

The Hunger Games’ Feral Feminism

Katha Pollitt writes for The Nation: “Katniss is a rare thing in pop fiction: a complex female character with courage, brains and a quest of her own. She’s Jo March as coal miner’s daughter in hunting boots, the opposite of Bella, the famously drippy, lo…