My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war.

Right now religion has the romantic aura of the forbidden - Christ is cool. We need to bring it into the schools, which kids already hate, and associate it firmly with boredom, regulation, condescension, makework and de facto segregation ... Prayer in the schools will rid us of the bland no-offense ecumenism that is so infuriating to us anticlericals: Oh, so now you say Jews didn't kill Christ - a little on the late side, isn't it?

Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times

Every gain women have made in the past two hundred years has been in the face of experts insisting they couldn't do it and didn't really want to.

If you run into trouble doing what's expected, people sympathize with you, while if you try something else and flop everyone says, You see?

Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf.

One of the very important ideas of feminism for me has always been women helping and supporting each other.