I smoked pot when I was a teenager because other kids were doing it, but I didn't enjoy it that much.

With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.

I hate homework. I hate it more now than I did when I was the one lugging textbooks and binders back and forth from school. The hour my children are seated at the kitchen table, their books spread out before them, the crumbs of their after-school snack littering the table, is without a doubt the worst hour of my day.

Why are the architects of the family-values agenda so eager to punish into the next generation? What is being served by seeking, quite literally, a tooth for a tooth?

My father is sure that Israel keeps the Holocaust from happening again. I worry that it might hasten its recurrence.

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them.

I was born in Israel, to Canadian parents. My father immigrated in 1948, part of a wave of young men and women who came as pioneers, to fight for a Jewish homeland. Their motive was in large part a reaction to the Holocaust, and their slogan was 'Never Again.'