Spec Ops sends me to many places, encountering many people. While saving the world of books from those ill-intentioned enough to believe that they shouldn't have to leave well enough alone, I see and hear lots of things about people that either delight and amuse or simply stun me into silence.

Sometimes, I find I have doubled back onto something I thought I was done with.

If you are a woman, you know the uncomfortable feeling that comes from being leered at. It's the look that makes you feel small and angry and outraged and helpless. 'cause all he's doin' is lookin', know whutI'msayin'? Nothing feels so silly as wanting to yell, "Stop Looking At Me!"

Breast cancer is scary, really scary. The scariest of them all is the one that's nearly undetectable until too late. It's called Inflammatory Breast Cancer and is very rare. This video explains a lot about it.

"Regrettably, Suzanne Swift is not the first," says Anita Sanchez, communications director of the Miles Foundation, a non-profit organization that provides services to victims of military violence. "There have been several young women who have been declared AWOL for seeking treatment due to sexual assault, but most of them are too scared to speak out." ... Another recent case involved a young American woman who was raped by an Afghan soldier in a rural area. Sanchez says it took two weeks to get to a one-room medical facility in Kabul. "They had no facilities to do a rape testing, so they couldn't test for pregnancy or HIV. An American doctor literally handed her high dose antibiotics and told her, 'This will kill anything you've come in contact with.'" The young woman is now recovering in the states.

Under Saddam, women played little part in political life but businesswomen and academics travelled the country unchallenged while their daughters mixed freely with male students at university.

It's kind of ironic that Victoria's Secret, which plasters breasts everywhere, is offended at seeing breasts used for their intended purpose.

A Bush & Co. promo featuring a pre-pregnant mother popping vitamins and scheduling just-in-case "pre-conception care services"—neither of which she can afford because she's paid far below a living wage—while sending her kids off to sex-segregated public schools. Let's not forget that in Bush World her children return home from their sex-segregated schools with "knowledge" about abstinence and creationism, and some sporty brochures they got from an army recruiter in the cafeteria. Complete the picture with a local pharmacist who denies our struggling mother emerg

Language has the capacity to transform our cells, rearrange our learned patterns of behavior and redirect our thinking. I believe in naming what's right in front of us because that is often what is most invisible.

Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying and crucial work.

Feminism doesn't mean being anti-sex with a sense of humour by-pass; some of us are demanding the right to be sexual and safe. Saintly womanhood leaves a lot to be desired. It can be boring and lonely on a pedestal. And growing old doesn't mean growing more conventional - women of every age want a revolution they can dance to.

I wager that, with the exception of rape, men are more likely to be the victims of random street crime. But all the precautions about avoiding it are aimed at women, and they are all implicitly about avoiding rape. Even though we know that most rapes are not random street crime, but are committed by friends, dates, acquaintances, and so on. So not only is this advice bad advice to women, the unspoken corrolary--that men don't need to worry as much as women--is really bad advice to men. And the problem is, by giving women but not men this advice, we perpetuate the idea that violence is sexualized (and therefore men, who are not sexualized, do not have to worry about it), and we turn reasonable things like walking home with a friend into things women do out of fear and men don't do at all.

Kerry was named the Scripps National Spelling Bee Champion in the 20th round after correctly spelling the word "ursprache," which is defined as "a parent language, especially one reconstructed from the evidence of later languages."