Jeanette Winterson’s most recent novel, The Stone Gods (Harcourt, 2008), spans time and space to critique humanity’s off-kilter relationship to science, technology, and nature. Over email, fittingly, Winterson chatted about the book, and meditated on the power and potential of art to connect us to history, each other, and the world around us.

“Hope is a curse, a bane,” radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen has written. Why the pessimism?

Living in a city—where poverty is juxtaposed with wealth, where trash and concrete abound, and where it’s not unusual to see people arguing, crying, or urinating in public—it’s hard not to feel an occasional apocalyptic despair.

In her last address to Congress in 1892, “The Solitude of the Self,” women’s rights suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton famously urged, “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone.”

It’s hard to classify Ben Greenman, author of the forthcoming collection of stories A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love. Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker, but it would be unusual for the New Yorker to publish fiction like his.

Jake Halpern, Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) In 2004, ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined total of 481 network minutes covering the Martha Stewart Trial. The number of minutes spent covering Abu Ghraib? 336. It’s no exaggeration to suggest that most Americans know more about Brangelina’s international jaunts than they do about the US government’s. We’re a nation enamored of celebrity culture.

Educating women risks endangering the perpetuation of the species—or so argued Harvard professor Edward H. Clarke in his nineteenth-century bestseller, Sex in Education, or, a Fair Chance for the Girls. According to Clarke, a girl who studied during her period arrested the development of her ovaries, ...

Female facial hair, the politics of urination, gay parenting, the racial segregation of prime-time comedy, the gender bias of science—since the mid-nineties, the pages of feminist ’zine-turned-magazine Bitch have been witness to some of the past decade’s most creative indie cultural criticism about the intersections of pop culture, gender, and sexuality.

On September 4, 1882, down by the East River in lower Manhattan, Thomas Edison flipped the switch on a technological innovation that would permanently alter the cultural and environmental landscape of the U.S.: the coal-fired electric power plant. At the time, the plant, known as “dynamo,” or &ldqu