n+1 Magazine

David Wallace-Wells’s new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life Which explains why David Wallace-Wells’s new book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Years and decades of scientific and journalistic reticence had been so carefully erected and maintained only to be demolished in a few dramatic days as Wallace-Wells’s “alarmist” but manifestly professional take on global warming went viral, more read than any other article in the history of New York Magazine. If there is one obvious bias in Wallace-Wells’s narrative, it is not his belief that global warming might cost us more in the near future than the entire GDP of the world now or that whole countries will become uninhabitable and much sooner than we think.

Two months before the march, inspired by the President-elect’s having bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” amateur knitters Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman published a viral design for a simple rectangular beanie that, when placed on the head, buckled into the shape of a cat’s ears. If your feminism doesn’t include x, then it’s not feminism,” where x might be trans women, women of color, fat women, sex workers, nonbinary people, or any number of other groups. The conviction that it is both possible and desirable to be a feminist, in an ontologically thick way, has no parallel in any other left political discourse, and a wide array of digital media has arisen to guide and instruct initiates: just as Better Homes & Gardens once taught its readership how to cook and decorate like good women, so do Teen Vogue and The Cut offer tips on how to be a good feminist while getting dressed in the morning. They tell me that no woman feels good about herself; that no one’s actually good at makeup; that it’s very difficult for all women to find clothes that suit their body types; that everyone’s breasts are hung a little off; that everyone’s hormones are a little out of whack; that all women envy other women.

Join us for a night of drinks and readings to launch Head Case, our Spring 2019 issue! Featuring readings by Alyssa Battistoni, Andrea Long Chu, Zoë Dutka, A. S. Hamrah, Thomas de Monchaux, Elias Rodriques, Elizabeth Schambelan, Dayna Tortorici, Christopher Urban, and Troy Vettese. Free for subscribers (sign up here); $10 for non-subscribers. Price includes a copy of the issue.

In many countries of the Global North, women compose a little over half the undergraduate student body, which is only slightly more than the share of female doctoral students. It is after graduate school that the precipitous declines begin, as the number of women falls approximately ten percentage points each at the stages of assistant and associate professorship, so that finally the percentage of female full professors hovers around 32 percent. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of women have joined university faculties, but this obscures the fact that in the last thirty years much of that influx has been directed toward non-tenure-track positions. Among the most serious expressions of women’s hardship in the academy is the case of US black female scientists, who often experience desolate isolation in addition to sexual and racial harassment, according to a recent study.