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Over the past many days, in a quiet house, I have been reading and re-reading my students' memoirs. Turning their considered pages with care. Filling the margins with notes. Reminding the students' of their own aspirations for themselves. Saying yes, or how about this, or what if, or ....

There could be no higher privilege.

What stretches me, fulfills me, energizes me? Teaching. What campus feels like home? My alma mater, my employer, the great and glorious University of Pennsylvania. I am lucky to teach and lucky to teach there. But I am an adjunct, plain and simple, and as an adjunct I am aware of the concerning status of the job.

Yesterday a friend pointed the way to this story in Salon.com, about the challenges faced by adjuncts. Becky Tuch wrote the piece. It was titled: "Professors in homeless shelters: It is time to talk seriously about adjuncts." It presented a conversation Tuch hoped to have with AWP, which did not (apparently) address the adjunct crisis that has thrummed for many years across American campuses during AWP's recent Seattle gathering. From the story:

Here’s the thing, AWP. The percentage of teaching positions occupied by non-tenure-track faculty has more than tripled in the past four decades. According to the Adjunct Project, “Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day aren’t full-time or permanent professors.” The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that “the shadowy world of would-be academia is filled with people cobbling together five or six such teaching gigs at once. That’s possible because some 70 percent of college courses offered are now taught by adjuncts — part-timers who are paid a pittance and have no job security.”

Dig deeper into the adjunct story (as I often do) and you will discover stories of heartache—stories about teachers who changed the lives of students but who lived, and died, as paupers. Stories about teachers who must drive and drive and drive—from one post to another—just to bring a sustaining wage home to a small room. The job of a teacher is to give—the right lessons, the right hope, the right instructions, a listening ear. It is so very difficult to be a giver—to have the energy to care—under grueling circumstances.

I am lucky. I work—as an author, as a consultant—so that I might teach one course one semester each year. I go to a campus that I love in a city that I love and work among colleagues for whom I have great respect. I meet students who change my life. I learn from them.

I am hardly alone in loving this job. But I am cognizant, as we all must be cognizant, that others who love this work as much as I do are struggling, mightily, to be able to do it. Struggling to afford to be able to do it. Struggling to buy the gas for the car, the ticket for the train, the cup of coffee for the student who needs to talk.

If all the underpaid teachers in this nation just one day up and quit, what would happen then? What would become of our students, our campuses, our planet? Sure, there are new ways of learning—online courses that get some of the teaching done. But what matters, too—what adjunct teaching can and often does provide—is that  teacher who knows your name, that teacher who sees if you've gone missing, that teacher who searches for you and says, Are you okay?, that teacher who says, Do I have a book for you.

We need our teachers—it's obvious, I think.

And we need our teachers to be okay.

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Whether they are stealing scenes on the silver screen or reppin' the 99% in Denver, CO, everyone can agree that dogs occupy a special place in the hearts and minds of humans the world over. But how much do we actually know about our four-legged friends? Dog expert Mark Derr, author of How the Dog Became the Dog (available now) has made a career out of exploring the dog/human relationship, debunking myths through scientific research and canine journalism. In recent essays and interviews with The Wall Street Journal, Salon, and NPR, Derr sheds light on the evolutionary history of man's best friend.

In the WSJ, Derr brings a fresh perspective to an ancient artifact: 26,000 year old paw prints left behind in the Chauvet Cave of southern France. "Attributing that paw print to a dog or even to a socialized wolf has been controversial since it was first proposed a decade ago. It would push back by some 12,000 years the oldest dog on record. More than that: Along with a cascade of other new scientific findings, it could totally rewrite the story of man and dog and what they mean to each other." Below, Derr discusses the latest scientific findings that challenge the consensus model of dog domestication with WSJ's Christina Tsuei.

In a recent interview with Salon.com's Emma Mustich, Derr delves into the co-evolutionary development shared between humans and dogs and rev

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Kate Moses, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, and I are friends. We met, as I've noted here before, over the essays we wrote about mothering—our work ultimately appearing in Salon.com and in the two wildly successful anthologies that Kate edited with Camille Peri, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. We continue to meet, from time to time, in San Francisco, in New York City, or here outside Philadelphia. When we can't meet, we email and call. We read the other's books long before most people do. We rely on one another.

This year, both Kate and Reiko have new books due out; they have both also launched new blogs. Kate's Cake Walk, a recipe-infused memoir about surviving childhood, is due out from Dial Press in May. The book, so irresistibly Kate, is excerpted here.

Reiko's memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning, is due out from Feminist Press in September. It's a book about motherhood and Ground Zero, a book infused with freighted questions about what it means to survive and to love. Reiko is a mother, a teacher, a reader, and, of course, a writer, and in her new blog, you get to see all sides of her.

The photos above, finally, are this: Kate's cats, looking out through her kitchen window, while she made dinner for us this past August; and my husband, my son, Reiko's family, and Reiko during our trip to Hawk Mountain, a few years ago.

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This pretty kitty belongs to Kate Moses, whom I first met when writing for Salon.com. Kate (along with Camille Peri) went on to edit two anthologies on motherhood (I was lucky to have an essay in both volumes); to write Wintering, the Sylvia Plath novel; and, most recently, to complete a memoir called Cake Walk, which will be out next year. She is a dear and good friend, an impassioned hostess, an enthusiast, a seasoned romantic, and one of the only people in the world who has ever called me Bethie.

A few days ago, I sent Kate the smallest snatch of this novel I am writing. I am ready to read more, she wrote back.

Sometimes it's just words like these that keep us writers going. You who comment on this blog: You keep me going, too.

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M. Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, talks to Katharine Miezkowski of Salon.com about the "many ways that young girls' sexuality is shaped and exploited by a marketplace where younger is better and the line between child porn and art gets ever blurrier." In a wide-ranging interview (podcast is available on Salon), Professor Durham comments on the marketing of grown-up sexuality to little girls, the Miley Cyrus fiasco, and ways parents can open up the conversation with their daughters about images of girlhood sexuality.

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