"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

Pride Month 2025 – Words of the Day

Not by Nature, but by Habit: Christine de Pizan and the Complexity of Gender Roles

“If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as boys are taught, they would learn just as well… Not because they are female, but because they are not taught, women are thought incapable.”
Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (1405)

At the dawn of the 15th century, Christine de Pizan stood alone among the scribes and scholars of the French court. Widowed and self-taught, she became the first woman in Europe known to earn her living by writing. Her texts – part allegory, part polemic – dared to argue not only for the education of women, but for a radical reconsideration of gender itself as a social construct.

In The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine stages a conversation with three personified virtues – Reason, Rectitude, and Justice – who instruct her to build an imaginary city to house the stories and worth of women. It is a visionary act of reclamation, but also one of subtle subversion. Her critique of misogyny goes further than defence: she dismantles the idea that women are inherently less rational, less moral, or less capable.

In doing so, Christine touches on something that would not be formally articulated for centuries: that gender is learned, performed, and enforced, not fixed by nature. Her call for education, representation, and reimagining the feminine role within civic and intellectual life forms an early blueprint not only for feminism but for gender-expansive thought.

Though her language is shaped by the moral and religious norms of her time, her questions echo across eras: who gets to define womanhood? Who benefits from that definition? And how might other ways of being – of knowing, of writing, of imagining – remake the world?

books and literature

Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (21)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père. Chapter XXI: The Genius of Evil The next evening, about nine o’clock, a man might be seen walking along the Puits-Sarrasin road and making for for the Osieres forest-path. It was Thibault, on his way to pay a last

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architecture, engineering and construction

Do Tools Think? Automation, Intuition, and the Designer’s Role

Who (or What) Is Designing? Somewhere between the mouse click and the model update, a question sometimes lingers, one that makes architects react with violence. Who is really designing here? “Me,” will answer the architect. “The computer is Just A Tool and I’m in Control.”

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Werewolves Wednesday: The Wolf-Leader (21)

A werewolf story by Alexandre Dumas père. Chapter XXI: The Genius of Evil The next evening, about nine o’clock, a man might be seen walking along the Puits-Sarrasin road and making for for the Osieres forest-path. It was Thibault, on his way to pay a last

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