I’ve been sort of re-reading Jane Eyre lately – sort of because I’ve been dipping in and out and going back and forth as opposed to reading straight through – sampling more than re-reading. In a way it’s more interesting than I remembered, but in another way it’s at least as irritating as I’ve long found it.

Irritating once the Rochester plot gets going, that is. The Gateshead part and the Lowood part are immortal, but the –plucky governess meets grumpy but fascinating master of the house– plot is all too familiar. It’s familiar in great part because it helped set the pattern itself, but that doesn’t make it less predictable.

It’s far more literate, in Charlotte Bronte’s telling, than … Read the rest

The feminist philosopher Peg Tittle has written a novella that expands on Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous thought experiment in “A Defense of Abortion”:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital