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    Susan Brownmiller, Who Reshaped Views About Rape, Dies at 90

    Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence, died on Saturday. She was 90.Alix Shulman, a longtime friend, confirmed Ms. Brownmiller’s death at a hospital in New York, which she said came after a long illness.“Against Our Will,” published in 1975, was translated into a dozen languages and ranked by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.Among other things, it offered the first comprehensive history of rape across the centuries, starting with ancient Babylon, and examined its use as a wartime military tactic to further subjugate the losing side.The book’s publication — along with real-time reports of mass rape in war-ravaged Bangladesh — joined a tide of events that were reshaping society’s attitude toward rape.The ascendant women’s movement was already opening the public’s eyes about sexual violence. Anti-rape groups had started to form in the early 1970s. Groundbreaking works like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” (1971) were empowering women to take control of their bodies and their sexuality. When “Against Our Will” arrived, the country seemed ready to grapple with its implications.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Man of the Moment Is 3,000 Years Old

    The figure lying on the hospital bed — silent and immobile, its head swathed in bandages and arms webbed with IV lines and oxygen tubes — barely resembled my father. And yet I was sure he was in there somewhere. It was January of 2012 and my dad, a retired research scientist and computer science professor, had just had a massive stroke, from which, we were told, he was unlikely to make a significant recovery. In the days and weeks that followed, as my mother and four siblings and I visited the I.C.U., we tried to understand the relationship of the inert figure on the hospital bed to the man we had known. Was there some core essence to him — the “him” I was convinced I could still feel — that remained constant, even as so much else had changed?As it happened, these were the same questions my father and I had spent the previous spring contemplating, when he sat in on the first-year seminar on the Odyssey that I was teaching (an experience that later became the basis of a book I wrote). Dad, a rational thinker, brought more than a little skepticism to Homer’s 12,110-line epic about a sly hero with a penchant for guile, trickery and outright lies, an adventure story full of cannibalistic giants, seven-headed man-eating monsters and love-struck nymphs. But by the end of the semester, even my father came to admit that Homer’s poem raises questions about who we are and how we can be known, questions that are at once profound and startlingly modern — or, as Homer puts it at the end of his introductory lines, “for our times, too.”Small wonder that the Odyssey, a staple of the Western canon and the progenitor of so much from sci-fi to rom-com, has been enjoying a bump in popularity of late. Earlier this year we got a major theatrical adaptation at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., by the feminist playwright Kate Hamill. Then came not one but two significant film adaptations: “The Return,” directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche; and, expected next summer, an adaptation written and directed by Christopher Nolan, with Matt Damon as the “man of many turns,” as Homer calls Odysseus. That epithet speaks directly to the question of his tricky hero’s multifaceted and sometimes slippery self. If every era finds its own interest in the Odyssey, it’s the slipperiness that today’s audiences and creators recognize, steeped as we are in debates about identities political, social, gendered and sexual in a world that, like that of Odysseus, often seems darkly confusing.The poem complicates the question of identity from the start. Its opening lines, where a poet typically announces his subject and theme, conspicuously neglect to mention Odysseus’ name, referring to him only as “a man”: “Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways / To wander, driven off course .…” (Compare the opening of the other great Homeric epic, the Iliad, which tells you right up front who it’s about: “Rage — sing of the rage, Goddess, of Peleus’s son, Achilles ….”) Just who is this “man”? Hard to tell. Later, at the beginning of one of the hero’s best-known adventures, Odysseus will adopt a pseudonym, “No-one,” when first encountering the one-eyed giant Cyclops. This is a useful fiction. (After the hero blinds the Cyclops, the creature calls out to his concerned neighbors, “No one is hurting me,” so the neighbors leave him to his fate.) And yet, in another sense, the false name is eerily true: Odysseus has been gone from home and presumed dead for so long that he really is a “nobody.” His struggle to reclaim his identity, to become “somebody” again, constitutes the epic’s greatest arc.Throughout his famous adventures, this trickster’s talent for altering his physical appearance and lying about his life story saves him. But when he returns home, that ability becomes a problem: When he is finally reunited with his wife, Penelope, she is disinclined to believe that this stranger, who only moments before had appeared to be an elderly, decrepit beggar, is really the same man she bade farewell to so long ago. Although he does eventually prove himself to her (they exchange the ancient equivalent of a secret password), the unsettling question remains: How could he be the same person after two decades of life-changing experiences and suffering?That paradox animates some of the most profound questions that this ancient work continues to pose, and which haunt me more than ever, over a decade after my father’s death. Just what is identity? What is the difference between our inner and outer selves — between the “I” that remains constant as we make the journey from birth to death and the self we present to the world, which is so often changed by circumstances beyond our control, such as pain, trauma or even the simple process of aging? How is it that we always feel that we are ourselves even as we acknowledge that we evolve and change over time, both physically and emotionally? I’ve been teaching the Odyssey for nearly four decades, but I can’t remember a time when it has spoken as forcefully to my students as it does today, when so many are embracing fluid identities and asserting their right to self-invention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Leslie Epstein, Writer Who Could Both Do and Teach, Dies at 87

    His Holocaust novel “King of the Jews” was widely praised. He also wrote about his show-business family and taught writing at Boston University.Leslie Epstein, a celebrated novelist and revered writing teacher who was born into Hollywood royalty — his father and uncle collaborated on the script for the classic 1942 film “Casablanca”— died on May 18 in Boston. He was 87.His wife, Ilene, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was complications of heart surgery.The best known of Mr. Epstein’s novels was “King of the Jews” (1979), a powerful, biting and at times humorous story about the leader of a Judenrat, or Jewish Council, in a Polish ghetto during the Holocaust.Councils of elders, which were established by the Nazis to run the ghettos, provided basic services to the Jews who were forced to live there; they also had to make the morally fraught decision to provide their occupiers with lists of Jews to deport to labor and concentration camps. When Adam Czerniakow, the leader of the Warsaw council, received an order to round up Jews for deportation, he apparently chose to end his life rather than obey.Isaiah Chaim Trumpelman, the protagonist of “King of the Jews,” was modeled on Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the megalomaniacal leader of the Jewish Council in Lodz, Poland. The character of Mr. Rumkowski had resonated with Mr. Epstein since he read a single paragraph about him in a book about the Holocaust in the 1960s.“He rode around with his lion’s mane of hair and his black cape, put his picture on ghetto money (to buy nothing) and ghetto stamps (to mail nowhere), and decided which of his fellow Jews should or should not be sent to death,” Mr. Epstein wrote, about Mr. Rumkowski, in an essay for Tablet magazine in 2023.Writing about “King of the Jews” in The New York Times Book Review, Robert Alter praised Mr. Epstein’s focus on “the morally ambiguous politics of survival” practiced by Council leaders “who were both violently thrust and seductively drawn into a position of absolute power and absolute impotence in which no human being could continue to function with any moral coherence.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Ditch Weekly, a Teen-Run Newspaper, Reports on the Hamptons From a Different Angle

    On a Saturday morning in May, five hard-nosed reporters filed into an office on the South Fork of Long Island and picked up their red pens.For two hours, they combed through the drafts in front of them. Clunky sentences were tightened. Inelegant adjectives were cut. Powdered doughnut holes were eaten, and mini bags of Cheez-Its, too.This was the final proofreading session for an issue of The Ditch Weekly, a seasonal newspaper about Montauk that is written and edited by locals ages 13 to 17. Its staffers had gathered to put the finishing touches on their first paper of the year, which would be published over Memorial Day weekend.Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.“We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What It Means to Be a ‘Well Woman,’ According to Amy Larocca, Author of ‘How to Be Well’

    In her new book, “How to Be Well,” the writer Amy Larocca draws readers down a rabbit hole of serums, supplements and colonics. We know a lot of it doesn’t work. Why do we want it anyway?When I met the writer Amy Larocca at a cafe in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn on a recent afternoon, I could not help but notice: She had the glow. Or seemed to.The glow, as Ms. Larocca explains in her new book, “How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time,” is what happens when you purify yourself “from the inside out.” When you never miss a day of your skin care routine, regularly drain your lymphatic fluids and take your collagen supplements. But to truly glow, you must also practice mindfulness, self-care and, ideally, transcendental meditation, avoid processed junk and sleep at least eight hours every night.Such are the exacting standards of a contemporary wellness culture that has swelled to encompass nearly every facet of life. Not just the serums we slather on our faces or the Pilates classes we scurry off to but the food we eat (always whole foods), the bowel movements we pass (must be “firm and beautifully formed”) and the very thoughts we let enter our minds (intentional ones only).It sounds like a lot of work. Or one might say it sounds like a lot of work — if it were not so incumbent on a well woman to be perpetually at ease.After talking to Ms. Larocca, 49, for an hour, I learned she did not do everything a well woman should. She tries to sleep a lot. She exercises regularly. And yes, she wears an Oura ring, the latest in wearable tech for tracking one’s blood oxygen rate, body temperature and other biometrics.But she does not observe 12-step routines of any kind. She is aware of the fact that dry-brushing may be a great way to exfoliate but that it probably does not drain your lymphatic fluid.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More