X is the Best Letter in the Alphabet
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/magazine/letter-x.html
X is the Best Letter in the Alphabet
It’s now used to indicate sex and gender beyond the binary. But X has always been powerful.
Credit.Illustration by Hayley Wall
June 1, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
As a bookish child, I loved most of all an anthology of stories that sat high on my parents’ white bookshelves. At night, my siblings and I would gather on my littlest sister’s bed while one of my parents read to us. Once I learned to read, I took to raising myself up on my tiptoes to borrow that book and carrying it to the nubbly lime green couch in the playroom.
Fun Home, which was adapted into a Broadway musical that won five Tony Awards. Jake Gyllenhaal will produce and star in a musical film version. Her latest,
The Secret to Superhuman Strength, explores her relationship to fitness with creativity, with a book jacket featuring her doing a more graceful Archer pose than she can manage in real life. In instructional
videos, she bikes, hikes, walks a slackline, and cross-country skis in the woods of Vermont, where she lives with her partner.
You may have heard of her Bechdel test, which rates movies on whether they 1) feature at least two women, who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. It was the subject of a