Oh man. Landmark is terrifying. There's an episode of Weeds where it gets a shoutout as a "self-help pyramid scheme."

Haha, I had to look up anvilicous! Yeah, sometimes I'm a bit too much of a fan of the heavy-handed symbolism...
I read *about* the book after I'd read it, and the author had said some stuff about how he'd read the story of Herculine Barbin and wasn't satisfied with it so he wanted to write a book about how he thought it might feel to go through that experience... purposely not interviewing anyone who had. That rubbed me the wrong way, like his big artistic metaphor idea was more important than people's actual experiences. The other thing was the implication that 5-alpha-reductase deficiency is the direct result of incest. Inbreeding makes the genetic mutation more likely in population, but incest doesn't *cause* intersex children. The book acknowledges this, of course, but there seems to be a strong incest-->intersex thing going on.
All that being said, I couldn't un-like the book, and it raised a lot of the ethical issues, especially around Dr. Money's practice (ugh), so... ambivalent.

Oh, bless you and all your kin.

Judy Collins sings a lot of Leonard Cohen songs and it is a beautiful thing.
There's also a cover album, I'm Your Man, with lots of covers.

Thank you for writing this! I wrote a paper last year about infant genital "normalization" surgery as a human rights violation. I feel like so many people don't know that sex is not binary! I hadn't really thought about it until I read Middlesex, which is both wonderful and problematic, imo.

I wanted to add this link: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them...
Naomi Klein's Edward Said lecture.
Excerpt:
"Fossil fuels aren’t the sole driver of climate change – there is industrial agriculture, and deforestation – but they are the biggest. And the thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills. As recently as the 1970s, scientists advising the US government openly referred to certain parts of the country being designated ‘national sacrifice areas’. Think of the mountains of Appalachia, blasted off for coal mining – because so-called ‘mountain top removal’ coal mining is cheaper than digging holes underground. There must be theories of othering to justify sacrificing an entire geography – theories about the people who lived there being so poor and backward that their lives and culture don’t deserve protection. After all, if you are a ‘hillbilly’, who cares about your hills? Turning all that coal into electricity required another layer of othering too: this time for the urban neighbourhoods next door to the power plants and refineries. In North America, these are overwhelmingly communities of colour, black and Latino, forced to carry the toxic burden of our collective addiction to fossil fuels, with markedly higher rates of respiratory illnesses and cancers."

I hereby submit my formal request for someone to write
David Brooks Writes a Sestina about Hillary Clinton http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/opinion/why-is-...

I loved your piece on the God thing. The end especially; I want to hear more about how this has changed your relationship with money, etc.! Future writing, hopefully?

Your original problem: IT ME.
I think this probably partially a personality thing, but also probably has something to do with the way school is structured. We, the smart, people-pleasing (ish, sometimes) achievers figure out pretty early what it takes to do really well and then do exactly no more. And we're super well rewarded for it until the "real world" strikes. My problem, which probably isn't yours, tends to be that I'm way too reliant on head-pats and external validations.
Which is to say, I commiserate, also school structure, also best of luck!

Congrats to you, too!