So, yeah, things are getting a little crazy, what with our ongoing push to find out what happened to all these pregnant women who were, via Dr. Maria New, given a drug (dexamethasone) that New described as “safe for mother and child” which, in fact, was a drug considered by most of the medical profession to be risky, scary, and highly experimental... Truly excellent reporting on this story by Catherine Elton at Time magazine. It’s good to know there are still intelligent, hard-working reporters out there. If you want to learn more, you can read my media advisory on all this.

In the midst of all the fetal dex stuff, we also discovered that New’s colleague, Dr. Dix Poppas has been vibrating little girls’ clits at Cornell, to see whether he cut off too much when he shortened them. Yowza. So a couple of weeks of attention went to that, now culminating in a new piece with Ellen Feder in Bioethics Forum. And then that Dr. New is maybe looking to prevent girls from turning out to be lesbians who don’t want babies and who want to be scientists? Huh? Dix and dex and there go my days.

But hey, it’ll turn into the last chapter of the book I’m working on now, on scientific controversies in the Internet age. I got to take a break from the insanity in early June by going to this kick-ass workshop on the science of sexual orientation organized by my friend Paul Vasey at the University of Lethbridge. The workshop gave me lots of great leads on stunningly interesting sex research that I plan to write up in my new invited blog at Psychology Today, Fetishes I Don’t Get. My first blog there featured some of Paul’s team’s recent findings.

I spent the month of April in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, as a Presidential Fellow at Cornell College, teaching an intensive interdisciplinary course on sexual orientation. Kinda like a whole semester crammed into 18 work days. Phew! Great experience -- great people! -- great material for two books from now!! -- but I need a bit of time to catch back up. (Check out my series on signs of Mt. Vernon here.)

The fellowship at Cornell has allowed me to finally fund my little dream writing shack in the backyard. That’s a picture of it, in the works, up there on the right. My charmer is modeled after a potting shed at Planting Fields on Long Island, a beautiful place with a lot of memories for me. The pink Planting Fields shed is shown in the next picture. (Thanks, Jim, for the reconnaissance roofline work.)

You can see that Bob the Builder (yes, our builder’s name really is Bob) modified the prototype’s roof line to make our cottage shorter and the siesta loft over my desk a little cozier. (I need a lot of naps when I write intensely.) You can see my writing space, in the raw (with siesta space above), in the next picture on the right. Soon as I get a breather, I’ll put up some pictures of the finished product. Sheer heaven.

I am hoping to wrap up the book manuscript (an accidental travelogue-slash-memoir-slash-polemic on activism and scholarship) soooon, and then to finally submit to a journal my work that I presented last December at the American Anthropological Association meeting. That followed on a year-long investigation into the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book, Darkness in El Dorado. (That investigation forms chapter 6 in the new book. The session was covered in Science magazine, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of HIgher Education.) I think my favorite part has been being called “demonic” by a fellow I criticized. So many of my colleagues have been jealous of being denounced as demonic in the press, I’ve had to reassure them of their own demonic tendencies.

The ever-demonic Dan Savage was one of those expressing friendly jealousy. He ran my advice for a “letter of the day,” from a girl with a big clitoris, while I was sick with whooping cough and was trying to deal with a flood of nice fan mail from the AAA session. (I had actually written the response for Dan a few weeks earlier.) I love dealing with fetishists’ email while I’m on antihistamines! It’s really the best time for it.

I’ve got a few new blogs on all this. And I’ve got a piece in the new issue of Atrium, something of a tribute to MK Czerwiec’s cartoon of me. The piece is about trying to use historians to help with individual medical trauma.

OK, what else... Besides the fact that I can’t stop cooking since I got back to the kitchen Bob built me. Rack of lamb (fifth picture). A marvelous bean and corn dish, with a tomatillo and avocado salsa, and fresh bread (sixth). Red beans and rice (seventh).

Not too long ago (though in some ways it also now feels like ages ago), in an effort to advance public understanding of sex via the frenzy over Caster Semenya, I hit a triple in the New York Times Sports section (check out essays one, two, and three) and helped Ariel Levy with a piece in the New Yorker. (I was stunned to learn from Ariel’s work that Semenya discovered from watching TV that the tests doctors were running on her were for “sex testing” purposes. And then I thought, why would poor Semenya be any different from other people with sex anomalies, whose doctors also hid the truth from them?)

Someday I hope to figure out the perfect balance between savoring working and savoring not working. In the meantime, I’m going to crisp-fry some kohlrabi with garlic scrapes from our garden, and rework chapter four.

1. ‣To see my c.v., which could use updating, click here.
   

2. ‣To read about my mystique, click here.
   

3. ‣To see a running list of new pages on this site, click here.
   

Updates on my work