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I use the app Insight Timer on pretty much a daily basis. The app features a quote from a famous person each day. What a nice surprise when I saw that today’s quote was from Virginia Woolf.

The quote, certainly a source of inspiration, comes from The Waves (1931). The full text reads:

I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.

Here is a screenshot of the quote as it appeared on the app. 

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Several Virginia Woolf/Modernism-related items here, all gleaned from Facebook friends who teach Woolf in the college classroom.

  • Elisa Kay Sparks and her students are building an iPad app called WoolfPlace that will provide maps, histories, references, pictures, links and videos for different sites in Woolf’s life and works.
  • Anne Fernald’s students are blogging about Woolf as part of the undergraduate Woolf elective course Fernald is teaching at Fordham University this spring. You can find their posts at 3504 Woolf. Fernald kicked off the course by playing Florence and the Machine’s “What the Water Gave Me.”
  • Also from Fernald is the news that Faber has launched a new “Wasteland” app that includes the full text of the poem, a variety of audio readings (including two by T.S. Eliot himself, and one by Viggo Mortensen), plus a video rendition.

 

Florence + the Machine – What The Water Gave Me [Official Music Video] from Back Alley Journals on Vimeo.

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I feel as though I am missing something. But the writers who reference Woolf must be busy with their holiday preparations, as there is only a dusting of Woolf sightings this week.

incidental music

  1. Virginia Woolf made her gayXtra.ca
    “One of my recurring jokes, because I just create jokes that explain how this all came to be, is that Janet McTeer in Portrait of a Marriage made me gay, or Virginia Woolfmade me gay,” Perovic says. Incidental Music Lydia Perovic Inanna $22.95. Share 
  2. A Second BirthBrooklyn Rail
    When winter comes, I find myself drawn to books with a strong authorial voice that matches my inward thoughts: Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust; To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf; The Lover, by Marguerite Duras, to name just a few. Joining these is Kim ..
  3. Murderous Little World, 89.3 KPCC
    … Linda Bouchard is based on poems by MacArthur genius Anne Carson from her collection Men in the Off Hours (2001)—notable for blending free verse with prose and reinventions of figures such as Lazarus, Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf and Hokusai
  4. The Lure of the Writer’s CabinVW's writing Lodge, New York Times (blog)
    A standard Internet search can quickly yield images of the writing rooms (cabins, huts, sheds) of legendary scriveners: Dylan Thomas, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Roald Dahl, Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and — a writer of a markedly different sort 
  5. IoS paperback review: To the River, By Olivia Laing, The Independent
    In it, Laing describes a walk along the length of the River Ouse in Sussex, interlacing her travelogue with the story of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself there in 1941. Though Laing’s reflections on the connection between psychology and water are 
  6. This Thing Called LifeAbout – News & Issues
    In Virginia Woolf‘s Mrs. Dalloway, the heroine spends her day preparing for a party. She collects flowers, prepares her clothing, and makes all the arrangements; but she also carefully recollects her past–loves and loss 

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When it comes to Virginia Woolf and just about anyone worth mentioning, there are no degrees of separation. For example, #24 in this week’s Woolf sightings links Woolf to writer Nora Ephron, who died June 27.

Other sightings worth a shoutout: #2 mentions the latest occupant of Woolf’s Richmond home, and #3 cites essay writer Siri Hustvedt’s reference to Woolf in a chapter on her father in her latest book of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking. No surprise that Hustvedt makes that connection, as Woolf had many complicated thoughts and feelings about her father Leslie Stephen.

  1. Photo-Op: Hall of FameWall Street Journal
    Virginia Woolf was a little sharper when she declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed,’ as Modernism coalesced. Despite what textbooks say, art travels both fast and slow, and people don’t swap styles the way they change hats.
  2. ALCHEMY VIRAL OPENS HEAD OFFICE IN RICHMOND-UPON-THAMES CisionWire (press release)
    Alchemy Viral is proud to announce the official opening of their head office in July ’12 in Virginia Woolf’s esteemed former home, Brooks House, in the centre of Richmond-upon-Thames. The company also launches its website, http://www.alchemyviral.com. For the ..
  3. Sober judgmentsThe Age
    As a woman of letters, she looks for inspiration to Virginia Woolf, who demanded that ”the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea”. But while Hustvedt can match Woolf for high seriousness, she doesn’t have the same snap or ..
  4. Message regarding the passage of John H. Willis, Jr., William and Mary News
    His first book, William Empson, based on his dissertation, was issued by Columbia University Press, and in 1992 his second book, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41, was published by the University Press of Virginia.
  5. Shakespeare’s Sister Company Presents THE BIGSLEY PROJECT, Now thru 8/13Broadway World
    Shakespeare’s Sister has discovered some great pieces launching its reading series with the American premiere of “Vanessa and Virginia”, Beth Wright’s play based on Susan Sellers novel about the life of our patron saint Virginia Woolf and her sister 
  6. A story of notesFinancial Times
    Given that Gunn teaches creative writing at the University of Dundee, and that she thanks real people for their help in making sense of these “papers” – including the director of the Scottish Arts Council and two Virginia Woolf scholars – it’s a …
  7. But what are you really reading?National Post
    Last night I told some friends I was reading The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, begun about six months ago when I was reading anything mildly related to swimming or the seaside — but was really reading One Dark Night: 13 Masterpieces of the Macabre, ..
  8. The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack – reviewThe Guardian
    Twenty years on in London, Virginia Woolf had a different kind of home education, reading her way through her father Leslie Stephen’s library. “I am to re-read all the books Father has lent me.” These (she was 15) were Carlyle, Scott, Macaulay, Hakluyt …
  9. ‘Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage’ at Concord MuseumBoston Globe
    Almost all of the photographs in the show relate in some way to a famous individual: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study, Virginia Woolf’s desktop, Lewis and Clark’s compass, the hat Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was killed. It’s telling that the most …
  10. ‘Pilgrimage’ sets the model for travelBoston.com (blog)
    By and large, they were spots associated with major artists, thinkers, and public figures ñ Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Virginia Woolf’s desk in the ”room of one’s own with a lock on the door,” and Ghost Ranch studio in New Mexico, where Georgia O 
  11. An artist’s ‘Pilgrimage’: Annie Leibovitz opens new exhibitMetroWest Daily News
    Filling three second-story galleries, “Pilgrimage” comprises color photos taken between April 2009 and May 2011 in homes, studios and museums devoted to artists and luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf and ..
  12. Jack Dorsey created Twitter, now he’s taking on the banks with SquareWired.co.uk
    Job interviews pivot into 30-minute disquisitions on the New York Yankees. Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square — which lets anyone accept credit cards — triggers a 
  13. Travelling in Time, plus Swords and SorceryDaily Mail (blog)
    Neither of them pretends to be Tolstoy, and (thank heaven) neither of them is in competition withVirginia Woolf either. But both have obviously read widely, know a great deal of history, and have an enviable skill with words. Yet I still have a deep …
  14. Free your mind on this Independence DayMuskogee Daily Phoenix
    Like an early day Virginia Woolf, she wonders why her brother can learn Latin and Greek, but she cannot. And like Woolf, Bethia must teach herself to exist within the strict confines of proper society, plagued by the guilt inherent in a modest, but …
  15. Good, bad — and just plain uglyNational Post
    In attempting to ridicule my claim that Virginia Woolf’s reviews can provide models for those of us who are looking for alternatives to getting out the chainsaw, Mr. Lista fails to distinguish between what someone does and what they say. Nor does Woolf …
  16. Aiman, Adele and Agnes ObelDAWN.com
    IN THE first quarter of the last century, Virginia Woolf, famous for taking on subjects as complex as the streams of consciousness and a vociferous feminist, wrote that in a hundred years woman will have ceased to be a protected sex, and logically she …
  17. Book lover: Paula GreenNew Zealand Herald
    Emily Perkin’s The Forrests, with whiffs of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. The book I want to read next is … Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance as he left me spellbound at Wellington Writers and Readers Week. My favourite bookshop is … The …
  18. Statue of Liberty, Viewed From Afar With AffectionNew York Times
    The space between Liberty and me brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” In that novel the remoteness of the lighthouse matters more than the arrival there. It reminds me of a visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994, when I became riveted …
  19. A new era at the American National BiographyOUPblog (blog)
    Then my husband started referring to me as the next Sir Leslie Stephen, and as a lifelong feminist who has been reading Virginia Woolf since I was a teenager, this was almost too much historical lineage to shoulder. But once I began to settle in to my
  20. Rewrites a blight on Blyton’s legacy … by gollyCasey Weekly Berwick
    In London, Virginia Woolf’s most influential stream-of-consciousness novel, Jacob’s Room, and Katherine Mansfield’s first collection of stories, The Garden Party, came out within months of each other; towards the end of the year, T. S. Eliot’s The …
  21. Dear Life by Dennis O’Driscoll – reviewThe Guardian
    Illustration: Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk. “Virginia Woolf thought that the income tax, if it continued, would benefit poets by enlarging their vocabularies and I dare say that she was right.” So wrote Wallace Stevens in 1942, confronting the …
  22. Olympics Field Guide: Hiroshi Hoketsu, The 71-Year-Old Olympian, Deadspin
    Click for more field guides. On the day Hoketsu was born, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in the River Ouse, and Judy Garland performed live at the Shrine Auditorium to benefit the Greek Resistance against its Nazi 
  23. 4 Tips for Writing on the Road in ChicagoBusiness 2 Community
    In fact, solitude is so important that writer Virginia Woolf wrote an entire essay about it, “A Room of One’s Own“. Writing on the Road in Chicago. You can choose from a number of downtown Chicago hotels — there are plenty of luxuriously appointed …
  24. Nora Ephron’s Hollywood EndingNew York Times
    A lot of female writers are famous for not having happy endings — besides Virginia Woolf. Nora admired and wrote a play about Mary McCarthy and Lillian 
  25. The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack: reviewTelegraph.co.uk
    At the beginning of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf made a case for a “Room of One’s Own” for all women, without which they could not become writers. Near the …
  26. Travellers along two blind alleys?The Island.lk (subscription)
    He married the famous novelist and literary figure Virginia Woolf, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of unorthodox liberals like-Lytton …
  27. Fiona Apple’s ‘Wheel’ Of Extravagant EmotionsWBUR
    I mean it as a compliment to say that Apple is working in the literary tradition of “the difficult woman,” closing in on Virginia Woolf and already superior to Sylvia …

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Two controversies take up significant space in our Woolf sightings this week.

Dust-up number one: V.S. Naipaul’s arrogant claim brought to light in a Guardian report that no woman writer can match him — not even Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. For this topic, see sightings numbered 23 through 27.

Dust-up number two: Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, is justly criticized by participants on the VWoolf Listserv for reducing Woolf to an insecure mad woman in another Guardian interview. Other complaints include the factual inaccuracies in his musings about Woolf and her work, the false modesty inherent in his complaint that he is considered a peripheral expert on Woolf and his lack of knowledge about her. See numbers seven through nine.

  1. Can You Learn About Happiness From Virginia Woolf? I Think So, Forbes (blog)
    Assay: Recently, I posted a quotation from Virginia Woolf for my weekly quotation. I often quote from Woolf, because she’s one of my very favorite writers. And, as has happened before, I got a few comments from readers saying,
  2. More Re-read Recommendations from Ms. Cheap & friends, The Tennessean (blog)
    Here is the list plus some other great ones that people have recommended to add to the list: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Patrick O’Brian series of Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin sea stories. Let me know what books you would add (just
  3. When bad people write great books, Salon
    TS Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I’m not ready to shrug off “The Waste Land,” “To the Lighthouse” or “The Cantos.” Charles Dickens’ shortcomings, on the other hand, were more personal than
  4. Old-fashioned fun, Buffalo News
    “I spent a lot of years trying to be Virginia Woolf, trying to be Chekhov,” Simonson said. “With the Major, I have found my authentic voice. And it is funny.” To celebrate “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” being selected as The Buffalo News Book Club’s
  5. The philosopher, his dream for an Oxbridge in London and a rumpus on campus, Evening Standard
    “Yes, but then you think of Virginia Woolf looking mournful. No, we think New College of the Humanities works pretty well, has the right kind of resonance.” At around this point, the doorbell rings and I nip to the loo. I count no fewer than nine
  6. Alchemist’s “Fool for Love”; too cool?, ThirdCoast Digest
    The play’s Virginia Woolf-like premise and powerful tension are grueling, but even so, this cast seems under-wrought. Ligocki Peters’ May maintains a singular, disconnected mode. As the focal point of two lovers, she seems aloof.
  7. Across the literary pages, Spectator.co.uk (blog)
    Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, disabuses readers of the Guardian of their misconceptions about Virginia Woolf. ‘Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year,
  8. Woolf, my mother and me, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of
  9. Michael Cunningham discusses The Hours, The Guardian
    Drawing inspiration from the life and work of Virginia Woolf, the novel is told through the narratives of three generations of women. In 1920s Richmond Virginia Woolf struggles to make a start on her new book. In 1940s Los Angeles Laura,
  10. Captivating Portraits and Raw Collages: Why Carl Köhler’s Art is Worth the Looking, NY Arts Magazine
    Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, Antonin Artaud – Carl Köhler knew them all. At least, so it seems when facing his portraits. From the edgy, black lines of Franz Kafka, crudely cut in wood, to the airy blue shades used to capture the sensitivity of Joyce
  11. Our Dinner with the Dead at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF Weekly (blog)
    The conceit was that 12 dead celebrities, through an elaborate metaphysical contrivance/wormhole, had ended up at a dinner salon hosted by Virginia Woolf. Over the course of two hours, McSweeney’s editor and poet Jesse Nathan held forth with imagined
  12. 6/5: McSweeney’s Jesse Nathan and composer Chris Janzen’s Dinner at the , San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
    What would happen if Gertrude Stein, Thelonious Monk, Bobby Fischer, Salvador Dali, Billie Holiday, and Michael Jackson showed up for a dinner party at Virginia Woolf’s house? This fantastical scenario comes to life in “Dinner,” a
  13. Diary: Patti Smith, Vanity Fair

    Patti Smith as pictured on the Vanity Fair website

    I was an artist, but the world insisted on treating me as though I were just another little girl with a tattoo on her shoulder, a reefer in her mouth, and a Virginia Woolf doll drowning each day in her basin. Walking into the lobby of the Chelsea hotel

  14. Theater review: ‘Ordinary Days’ at Serenbe Playhouse, Access Atlanta
    In “Ordinary Days,” aspiring artist Warren (Serenbe founder Brian Clowdus) finds a notebook that belongs to graduate student Deb (Laura Floyd) and contains all her thesis research on the English novelist Virginia Woolf. The pair meet in front of a
  15. A Wider View of Authorship: Eroticizing the Past, Bookslut
    Her narrative draws upon many texts, most readily Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and Rainer Marina Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. The first part of the book, entitled “Journeys,”
  16. Four Economic Questions to Ponder, Minyanville.com
    2008 and (to a much lesser degree) in 2011 resemble the frail psyches of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest and Margaux Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Vincent van Gogh, Billie Holiday, Diane Arbus and Virginia Woolf.
  17. Battle of the sexes, The Hindu
    “I love authors like Virginia Woolf, Mahashweta Devi and Ismat Chughtai not because of their feminism but because of the frank portrayal of human nature which can put to shame any man worth his salt,” admits Payal Tewari. She adds that the diversity
  18. TODAY THE CELEBRATED AUTHOR CELEBRATES HIS BIRTHDAY, BASIT MALIK PROFILES , GreaterKashmir.com (press release)
    Orhan Pamuk born this day (7th June, 1952) often calls himself an admirer of modern writers like Faulkner, Proust and Virginia Woolf. In his teens he sought painting but soon gave up the idea after winning a Novel Contest for his novel kakanlik ve Isik
  19. Hans P. Kraus Jr. to Exhibit Early British Masters of Photography at , Art Daily
    Julia Margaret Cameron’s dramatic portrait, Stella – study of Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, an 1867 albumen print, depicts the timeless Victorian beauty who was Cameron’s niece and the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The skies over prewar London
  20. Lost generation, Boston Globe
    Virginia Woolf, feeling faint on a wintry Berlin trip, needs to eat; she points to some pastry at a nearby table; Heinrich Mann, who is eating it, nods politely. Joseph Roth walks by. (Woolf, representing a different kind of contemporary shattering,
  21. The Other Mann, Wall Street Journal
    Amid so many germane references to writers sent abroad by the Nazis, the book includes dozens of passages about a writer who was not: Virginia Woolf. This tick is, at best, irrelevant; at worst, ludicrous. (She had nothing to do with Heinrich Mann or
  22. House of Exile by Evelyn Juers, The Independent
    Apart from the Mann brothers, the likes of BertoltBrecht, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Roth and Ernst Toller jostle for space with Virginia Woolf, whose struggle for life and art is threaded through the narrative. But it is Heinrich Mann who stands at the
  23. Naipaul reconciles with Theroux, then denigrates all women writers, Buffalo News (blog)
    Is Virginia Woolf the “equal” of James Joyce? Is Toni Morrison a better writer than Saul Bellow? Each us us can advance our respective arguments, but these are arguments about status and value, not about reading and writing as creative experiences in Read Woolf vs. Joyce in the context of women’s history.
  24. Offensive but VS Naipaul’s views also reflect the malady of a “mimic man”, Economic Times
    Virginia Woolf isn’t around to point out he’s, with due ill-will, inverting precisely what she said in A Room of One’s Own. Jane Austen too can’t make a character out of him, in her quiet, sharp way. But if she could, with her hinted-at knowledge of
  25. Naipaul is right in part about women novelists, Evening Standard
    And no, I’m afraid Virginia Woolf doesn’t do it. I adore (early) Muriel Spark and I’m prepared to hear it for Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edith Wharton and the back catalogue of Virago, but, pound for pound,
  26. uncommon reader, Calcutta Telegraph
    Trying to justify the merit of the novels of Virginia Woolf or the stories of Katherine Mansfield is as absurd as defending the works of James Joyce or DH Lawrence. Apparently, it does not take Mr Naipaul long to decide whether a book he is reading is
  27. Against Art in Politics, and Politics in Art, The Atlantic
    Much less from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, JD Salinger, Virginia Woolf, or the utterly appalling Percy Bysshe Shelley. So it doesn’t surprise me that Naipaul is kind of a jerk about women. Nor does it really bother me.
  28. First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren – review, The Guardian
    Beer was examined by the doctor who subsequently treated Virginia Woolf, and she seems to have fallen victim to a practice she had once described as the popular tendency for head doctors “to imprison those from whom they differ in opinion”.
  29. House of Tammam Debuts U.K.’s Only Ethical Ready-to-Wear Wedding Gowns, Ecouterre (blog)
    Founded by Lucy Tammam, who also serves as the label’s creative director, House of Tammam is based in London’s Bloomsbury district, where novelists such as Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley lived just around the corner. Whereas Woolf and Shelley were …
  30. Classics scholar turns his attention to 20th century author’s letters, Shetland Times Online
    He has published work on Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers, and now his edition of a collection of letters written by Rose Macaulay to her first cousin Jean Smith has been published under the title Dearest Jean. Macaulay was one of the most versatile
  31. Works by Ivy Ma on display tomorrow, 7thSpace Interactive (press release)
    Through this exhibition, visitors will be able to better appreciate scenes depicted in the classic films of Fei Mu, Yasujiro Ozu and Yoshimitsu Morita and the writing of Virginia Woolf from another perspective. The exhibition’s movie-related imagery
  32. More Than a Room of One’s Own, New York Times (blog)
    He goes on to explain that, in part, women fall short because they aren’t the boss at home. “She is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.” Maybe Virginia Woolf should have asked for more real estate.
  33. Charleston: the Bloomsbury Group’s favourite house, Telegraph.co.uk

    Charleston Farmhouse

    Virginia Woolf wandered its corridors, discussing philosophy with her sister Vanessa Bell. John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in an upstairs bedroom. Duncan Grant – who lived here until his death in 1978

  34. A Book For All and None, Oxford Times
    As is the way in Oxford, he knows Beatrice — a Virginia Woolf expert — by sight and by reputation. The progress of their affair is interwoven with details of Nietzsche’s involvement with Russian émigré Louise von Salome more than a century before.
  35. Professors prepare for new fall courses, K College Index
    Smith’s new class, Early Modern Women’s Literature, will look at the work of “Shakespeare’s sisters,” a phrase coined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. In the work, Woolf laments “why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature,” the
  36. Modern Is Modern Is … New York Times
    was in her late 20s and early 30s, she wrote her masterpiece, “The Making of Americans,” the first major modern experimental novel in English, predating by a decade the mature work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and offering an analog to Cubism.
  37. Femme- fiction unbound, Pasadena Weekly
    Mansfield left her native New Zealand for England to start her writing career, associating with notable literati like Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1923 at age 34. Gilman wrote thousands of works and journalistic
  38. SFist Tonight, 6/2: ‘Resistance to the Indignities of Modern Life’ Art Show , SFist
    poem songs that narrate — with words, jazz, rock and roll, and electronica — a fantastical, salon-like dinner party populated by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Bobby Fischer, Michael Jackson, Billie Holiday, Glenn Gould, and other dead
  39. Honing in on the Humanities, The Stanford Daily
    However, the guidance of his fellow, Heather Love, led him to a thesis on the transience of identity in Virginia Woolf’s Waves, which relates to her topic, the power of group stigmatization. “She recognized what I was interested in and pushed me in
  40. Movie Title: Dish: Women, Waitressing & The Art of Service (Until June 9 , Uptown
    Waitressing, we see, may perfectly illustrate Virginia Woolf’s famous observation that men need women so they may feel superior to them. Of course, it goes deeper than that: it shows us that everyone seems to need to feel superior to someone.

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