Sorry in advance for what I'm about to do to you lovely people, but I can't be alone in these feelings anymore. Ariel Levy's essay in the latest issue of the New Yorker is devastating, grim, bleak, and... beautiful. And it's the best thing I've read, on the internet or elsewhere, in a long time.

Over the weekend, Ariel Levy, who wrote a beautiful profile of DOMA star Edith Windsor for the New Yorker, interviewed Windsor during the New Yorker festival. We already knew Windsor was an articulate and beautiful human, but boy did she prove it yet again.

Despite the fact that the Steubenville rape trial is over and the boys involved have been sentenced and are incarcerated, the story's hold on the national conversation about rape culture continues to dominate, whether it's through Serena Williams or anyone less famous than that. People still have opinions, and as…

The Beauty Myth author and feminist Naomi Wolf's Vagina dropped this year (sorry—just to be clear, it's her new book Vagina: A Biography), and makes a variety of claims about "the conscious vagina," a concept that suggests—among other semi-terrifying things—that sexually-satisfied vaginas are what gives women their…

Despite much hand-wringing about the state of women and television, one person doesn't seem too worried—and she should know better than almost anybody. Here's what Amy Poehler had to say about television's depiction of women in an interview with Ariel Levy during this week's New Yorker Festival:

Of all the upsetting things people say about Silvio Berlusconi, perhaps the most disturbing is that he is "natural."

What a thrill it is, every once in a while, to read a rip-roaring take-down! Today's specimen is Reed Krakoff, the Coach designer who launched his own super-expensive namesake brand last year, who is profiled by Ariel Levy in this week's New Yorker. Levy — whose last fashion profile was an exceptionally warm…

Anne Hays noticed that the two most recent issues of the New Yorker featured almost exclusively essays and reporting by male writers. So she's returned those copies to the magazine, accompanied by a blistering open letter to the editors.

The 2008 Republican candidate discussing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in an email message to the New Yorker's Ariel Levy. [New Yorker]

Thoughtful articles by Ariel Levy and Judith Butler explore the larger issues of sex and gender behind Caster Semenya's story — and how the mishandling of the young athlete's "gender testing" has affected her life.

Ariel Levy recommends Andrea Dworkin's Heartbreak and Janet Malcolm's Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. We'd like to add Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa" and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. You? [The New Yorker]

In this week's New Yorker, Ariel Levy complains that feminism has turned into "identity politics," focusing on getting women in positions of power but not on what they should do when they get there.

Feminists love bickering about feminism. And as more women join the conversation, it gets nastier…and better! But it's time Judge Judy kept some order. (Continued from Part 1.)

Ariel Levy's profile of Alber Elbaz, the Israeli who's helmed Lanvin since 2001, succeeds in describing the designer's grasp of women's wear — which is founded in no small part in Elbaz's own troubled self-image.

In the 70s, radical lesbians traveled the country in vans, looking for a lesbian paradise. Ariel Levy has a long and fascinating piece in this week's New Yorker on these "Van Dykes" and their history.

Feminists! We don't like Sarah Palin. (Other "types" of women feel similarly, according to Time.) Of course, many men viscerally dislike the gun-toting Alaskan Governor, but talking about them is boring and doesn't conjure up images of mud wrestling. Over on Radar's website, Hipster Handbook scribe Robert Lanham tries…