Immeasurable Outcomes

Missing Persons

Insomniac

The Woman Who Knew Too Much

Academic Work

 
My 2023 book, Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm (Johns Hopkins UP) is winner of two awards:
Northern California Book Award, general nonfiction, 2024.
And Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY) gold medal.

My writing life began with books and articles about Shakespeare, Doris Lessing, feminist criticism. Then I got interested in women’s health. What came of that was a front-page article in The Nation: A Toxic Link to Breast Cancer? 
 
My writing on the environmental causes of cancer brought me in touch with Dr. Alice Stewart, the physician and pioneer  epidemiologist who discovered that when you x-ray pregnant women, as doctors did in the 1940s and 50s, you double the risk of a childhood cancer. She was 88 when I met her, a guru to the anti-nuclear movement, and I spent the next five years working with her at her cottage near Oxford while still teaching in California, writing her biography: The Woman Who Knew Too Much.

Writing was my way of mourning my mother’s death, which turned into a memoir. Missing Persons is an elegy not only for a family but for California, the "Valley of Heart's Delight" become Silicon Valley, as gross today as it was idyllic once.  
 
Around this time, I embarked on a first-person account of living with insomnia. It started out as a memoir, but became as much about sleep science as about me, an expose of how little is actually known about insomnia, despite the glib advice so liberally dispensed. Insomniac was shortlisted for the Gregory Bateson Prize by the Society for Cultural Anthropology:  “Shakespeare scholar turns ethnographer, sleep specialist, and science detective…[and] reveals just how little the contemporary medical community knows about the world of sleeplessness…”   
 
My most recent book, Immeasurable Outcomes argues that the liberal arts matter now more than ever, at this time when they are most endangered. I bring you into my Shakespeare class and show how a small discussion class can build a complex human ecosystem where students can develop the kind of intelligence and imagination that a democracy depends on. Teaching to human scale can speak to human needs and become a site of resistance against dehumanization and authoritarianism.

I'm currently at work on a book about aging. Here's an article, "Crow's Feet," published by Oldster.


I’ve published in mainstream venues such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Ms,The Nation, as well as scholarly journals such as Signs, Contemporary Literature, Renaissance Drama.  Lately I've published online in HuffPo, Psychology Today, The American Prospect, Counterpunch, Times Higher Education. 

Below are links to some of these articles. The first is an elegiac piece in the Los Angeles Times about my mother's piano and the power of the arts. The second, from HuffPo, is an analysis of the Orwellian language of corporate reform. The third is a review of Molly McClain's biography of Ellen Browning Scripps, founder of Scripps College, whose philanthropy sets an example for philanthropists today --leave education to the educators.  The last links are to a review of the Netflix hit, The Chair; to an article about ed tech in The American Prospect, and a Times Higher Education article: “Faculty need to find ways of seizing back the control that’s been wrested from them in the past few decades."

“Mother’s Day Memories, Piano Lessons—for Life”
 
“In the Public Schools It’s Been 1984 for Quite Awhile”

​"Buried Treasure": Ellen Browning Scripps: New Money and American Philanthropy, by Molly McClain

"Ed Tech Cashes in on the Pandemic"

"The Country Moves Forward, Education Falls Back"

"The Liberal Arts are not Disposable"

"Toxic Cliches", review of Netflix The Chair

"For better education, let's cut bloated administrations and class sizes", Times Higher Education, Dec 6, 2022

“The Terrible Tedium of ‘Learning Outcomes,” Jan 4, 2023,
Chronicle of Higher Education

"On the legacy of Carolyn Heilbrun", The Nation

Oh, yes, and my (one) published poem, “Death’s Brother".  Here.