Every woman knew that the consequences of collapsing these two personas — mother and artist — were severe, resulting in ostracism and invisibility. To borrow from the Bay Area writer Ursula K. Le Guin, this “received wisdom” stipulated “that any attempt to combine art work with housework and family responsibilities is impossible, unnatural.”
Yet in midcentury San Francisco, a small group of women quietly resisted that narrative. Artists including Ruth Asawa, Merry Renk, Nancy Thompson, and Imogen Cunningham challenged the supposed incompatibility of creativity and caregiving. They didn’t just make art while raising children; they made motherhood central to their creative lives.
Ultimately, Asimov’s laws are both a gift and a warning. They helped introduce the idea that A.I., if properly constrained, could be more of a pragmatic benefit than an existential threat to humanity. But Asimov also recognized that powerful artificial intelligences, even if attempting to follow our rules, would be strange and upsetting at times. Despite our best efforts to make machines behave, we’re unlikely to shake the uncanny sense that our world feels a lot like science fiction.
I moved to Los Angeles after graduate school because I had vague dreams of working in Hollywood. Those dreams didn’t materialize, but instead of going back East, where I’d grown up, I stayed. Twelve years went by. Time disappeared like in some fairy tale. I had a daughter; we bought a house. Life felt like a pleasant purgatory, surrounded by other artists and dreamers, drifters and schemers. Meanwhile, on the East Coast, my family got old. Some of them died. I felt trapped in an easy but maybe meaningless life. Then the winds started.
If I should get distracted from my screen long enough to think about that, about how far I am from everyone I know, there is one small comfort: when I’m done playing, when I have figured out the exact five-letter word that a computer somewhere on the planet has generated for the day, I know the bot will be there for me, tapping its foot expectantly, desirously, waiting to let me know how I’ve done today compared to everyone else who has played the game, and how I measure up to his own efforts. He will be there, as always, with his open invitation, asking me, as if it is something to seriously consider, What would you like to do?
Although the forty-four Mavis Gallant works assembled by editor for the 2025 Uncollected Stories had their initial magazine publication in the 1950s and 1960s, they are still as fresh and inventive as they were when new. Gallant stories are unique, like no other writers. That is especially striking because they were written at a time when the well-made Joycean story dominated as a standard, a central character involved in a dilemma that culminates with the surprise of a personal epiphany. It was still the model when Charles Baxter’s objection essay, “Against Epiphanies,” came out in 1997. Yet Gallant had been writing story after story that did not depend on an epiphany long before Baxter attacked the device as cliched and inauthentic.
The characters in Flashlight are complex, sometimes stuck in their ways. Each carries their own shard of a bigger story, accidentally cutting themselves and others on the sharp edges. Putting the pieces together wouldn’t render a complete picture, but it can form a beautiful mosaic.
Women are judged on what they do and what they don’t do and whether they follow traditional paths patriarchy has set out for them – or not. But they’re probably judged the most based on their status as mothers. In Lucy Nelson’s collection of short stories, Wait Here, 12 women offer their perspectives of being childfree, either by choice or circumstance. The book also speaks to how the world views women in general and the judgement women receive regardless of whether or not they are mothers.
John Seabrook’s “The Spinach King” is a great American tragedy – about his own family. In this thoughtful, cautionary tale, the longtime New Yorker magazine staff writer reports on how three generations of his forebears, beginning with his great-grandfather, revolutionized vegetable farming and the frozen food business in southwestern New Jersey. And how, in the process, they amassed a fortune but fractured their family.