Mary Beth Edelson’s 1977 poster “Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper” not only means to spread the word that there are, in fact, dozens of American women artists who have not yet become household names, but also to appropriate the sacred images of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” by giving that point an in-your-face punch....

There are whole afternoons when a part of me wishes I had paid more attention in Bio 100 because then I might have ended up in cancer research, where being on the cutting edge makes sense. But for better or worse, I settled on literary criticism, a “discipline” that wears inverted commas around its neck...

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the 92-year-old Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, died without an heir, or that he sorely disappointed a considerable faction of his most zealous disciples by refusing to cheat death and thus show himself as the Messiah, what followed the traditional seven days of mourning turned out to be...