From My Own Archives
“There is no feature of the American economy,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in 1969, “so sounds as that which causes attractive young women to work, far below their talent, for deserving older men, in order to put their husbands through graduate school.” The eminent economist’s perhaps ironic tribute to his typists is the opening of a story I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in 1983 on sexual harassment at Harvard University.
It was not the beginning of the women’s movement (Ms. magazine had been around for over a decade), but it was the first time Harvard had looked into the problem of sexual harassment. Three and a half decades later, although the faculty at Harvard and other educational institutions now includes many deserving older women, that problem continues to emerge in ever widening publicity.
From 1980-84 I was managing editor at Working Papers for a New Society, for which I wrote this story on a harbinger of the gourmet and gentrification take-over of Manhattan’s upper west side, the Dino Di Laurentiis Foodshow on Columbus Avenue. At the time it seemed like the last word in excess, and I prefaced it with a quotation describing a lavish shopping expedition from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
Think I’ll Give Up Living And Take Up Shopping Instead
As a freelancer, I wrote a story for the Boston Review in 1986 reviewing the genre of the academic lecture as theatrical performance. At the time was not in fact imagining my own future in the academic world. Or maybe I was. At any rate, I began with a famous professor at Harvard Medical School:
Finally, here is a very short piece that appeared in the Sunday magazine of the Providence Journal in 1988, a reflection on intense physical pain: