Nancy Ko
How to Freeze Your Eggs
Nancy Ko
Step One: Acknowledge some difficult facts. You are a young woman. Like most everyone else around you, you might want kids — just not right now. Yet it is right now — in your twenties and early thirties — that your eggs are most viable. As a fetus, you had six million of them. By birth, this number diminished to one or two million; by puberty, to four hundred thousand....
No Returns | On Family Functions and Dysfunctions
Nancy Ko
In December, The New Yorker asked, “How Did Polyamory Become So Popular?” in a piece that tracked the rise of the open relationship, from the obscure “province of utopian free-love communities” to its status as a mainstay of “Park Slope marriages and prestige television.” In January, New York magazine took on the same topic in a cover story, which explored the “increasingly mainstream world of ethical non-monogamy” and included “a...
Turning the Tables | The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process Revisited
Nancy Ko
Deep down, here’s what we already know: this is not just a war. It is not just a war because wars happen between states. It is not just a war because there is a world of difference between a military with the capacity to even consider cutting off water, electricity, and routes of escape to more than two million of its captives — and the people who are those captives....
The View from Jeju | Behind Nancy Fraser’s Hidden Abodes
Nancy Ko
It is said that in Korea there is a strange-looking, fantastical creature called a bulgasari, which can dissolve iron and swallow it whole. — Kim Sokpom, 1972 Fifty miles off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, in the sea passage that connects Korea to Japan, sits a small island of nearly 700,000 people that began to form when an underwater volcano erupted more than a million years ago. Home to...
