I felt it long before I ever saw it. Every day the house shook with a deep rumbling that made my ribs thud in my chest as workers tore off the back wall and roof for a kitchen bump-out. What was that monstrous tool they were using? The groaning of wood and unearthly crunching of […]
Jennifer Loviglio
Posted inNews & Opinion
The XX Files 11.09.05
Laughter pours from the studio audience at the comic actors’ antics. A moment later, the studio audience is silent and here at home; we’re the ones who are laughing. That’s because here at home, we can see things neither the actors nor the studio audience can. We’re watching Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show, which marries […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
The XX Files 10.26.05
“Can I wear fake gunshot wounds for Halloween?” my 9-year-old said. At a party store, he had seen a kit that contained theatrical glue and a scrap of rubber shaped into a dark bubble of blood — where the bullet went in — surrounded by torn-up rubber skin. I suddenly felt like vomiting. Does he […]
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The XX Files 10.12.05
It wasn’t until I heard the cup clatter on the street behind us that I realized the panhandler had thrown his coffee. I whipped around and saw the jumbo plastic travel mug bounce up, splash coffee toward us, and hit the ground again, the lid rolling away. My first thought was: it’s a good thing […]
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The XX Files 9.28.05
It’s funny what Americans say when talking to pollsters. A recent poll shows that two-thirds of Americans think creationism should be taught alongside evolution. What’s even funnier are the poll results the media choose to ignore. The same poll found that a majority of Americans favor government-guaranteed health insurance. And nearly 70 percent favor “more […]
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The XX Files 9.14.05
Let’s blame the mothers, okay? It’s all their fault. It always has been. Eve got busy with that apple and caused a world of misery. Pandora, ditto, except with a box. Freud’s archetypal mother, complete with her rejecting womb and withholding boobs, caused all our quirks and peccadilloes. Today we’ll start with Mother Nature. Mother […]
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The XX Files
Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” comes on the car radio, and suddenly I’m sitting by the pool at Lisa Scandelli’s 6th-grade end-of-year party. The next song I hear is Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” and it’s nearly a decade later. I’m dancing on the sunken dance floor in my college’s bar. Now the radio is playing […]
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XX Files – 7.20.05
I’ve been thinking about dead bodies lately. Iraqi civilians. American troops. Suicide bombers in London. Their victims. I’ve also been thinking about deaths involving motorcycles and scooters. Thinking about war and terrorism sends me into a deep, immobilizing funk. So I’ve chosen to obsess about accidents instead. This is a rich vein for me to […]
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The XX Files
Bush is the nation’s BMOC, swaggering around as if the world were his campus, despite record high disapproval ratings. The Republican-led Congress, also tanking in the polls, is a bunch of power-drunk frat boys who can’t keep their wandering hands off the Constitution. But the judiciary? The third branch of government? That’s the branch for […]
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The XX Files
Spring arrived and as our thoughts turned to the birds and the bees, a new book came out and rained on my parade. The book claims female orgasms do not play a role in evolution because a woman can get pregnant without having one. (Male orgasms, of course, are directly tied to reproduction.) Dr. Elisabeth […]
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The XX Files
It’s hard to be a liquored-up fornicator, but someone has to do it. In an era when conservative policymakers promote abstinence and substance abuse programs that are ineffectual at best and dangerous at worst, someone has to stand up for the truth. Of course, suggesting we need to return to a more honest, tolerant approach […]
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XX Files
There were two pharmacies in the village where I grew up outside of Boston: the neat one owned by Mr. Margolis, where my brother and I picked up my father’s medicine, and the cluttered one with the nudie magazines on display. This is where we bought my mother’s cigarettes. Even though we had to cross […]
