Meeting Places and Romance

"The artist’s mother taught her to crochet in the 1960s. Pepe discovered women artists working in America who were a generation or two older and associated with the feminist art movement — Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Nancy Spero — as a crucible to launch her sculptural investigations. Those women responded to the fury of the Vietnam War and became agents of activism for Pepe who overturned hoary assumptions by responding to gender, identity, and civil rights. She also questioned the materiality in sculpture, so closely linked to gender. Pepe radicalized the grandmotherly constitution of crochet into a paradigm of feminist action." more »

Director Allison Randall of the Office on Violence Against Womaen Delivered Remarks at the Launch of the National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence Federal Interagency. "At the Department of Justice, we know that sexual assault, domestic violence, stalking and human trafficking are serious violent crimes that make our nation less equal and less just. Only a comprehensive response that is deeply informed by survivors and historically marginalized communities can end gender-based violence. I travel all over the country meeting with advocates, law enforcement, prosecutors and clinicians. They are doing whatever it takes to meet survivors where they are – both figuratively and literally. Just as laid out in this national plan, they are responding to the whole person, the whole community." more »

"Most sources describe Snap-dragon as a Christmas tradition, but (Mary) Blain suggests that in the United States it was played at Halloween, and Platt notes: The game was one particular to Halloween or Christmas or Twelfth Night; I will not specify which, because in the first place I do not know, and in the second place if I were to make a mistake I would be held up to ridicule and all my statements overthrown... There were several other traditions surrounding the game of snap-dragon. Mary F. Blain describes the belief that the person who snatches the most treats out of the brandy will meet their true love within a year." more »

"An NIH-funded team of researchers, led by Drs .Jochen Buck and Lonny Levin at Weill Cornell Medicine, pn and fertility. Their findings appeared in Nature Communications on February 14, 2023. A variety of tests in mice didn’t identify any potential safety issues with TDI-11861. The team then treated male mice with a single dose of TDI-11861 before allowing them to mate with females. The treated mice showed no differences in mating behavior from untreated mice. But the sperm from treated mice lost the ability to move on their own. Sperm remained immobile after being deposited in the female reproductive tract..." "Men produce several million sperm per day — about 1,000 per second. To prevent pregnancy, all of these need to be stopped from reaching an egg." more »