How to tame a wild tongue / Gloria Anzaldúa -- Of studies / Francis Bacon -- Road warrior / Dave Barry -- Toys / Roland Barthes -- Femininity / Susan Brownmiller -- Casa: a partial remembrance of a Puerto Rican childhood / Judith Ortiz Cofer -- Calculated risks / K.C. Cole -- Burl's / Bernard Cooper -- Natural selection / Charles Darwin -- Marrying absurd / Joan Didion -- Living like weasels / Annie Dillard -- Learning to read and write / Frederick Douglass -- Joyas voladoras / Brian Doyle -- Of our spiritual striving / W.E.B. DuBois -- About men / Gretel Ehrlich -- Living with music / Ralph Ellison -- Value of science / Richard Feynman -- Arriving at perfection / Benjamin Franklin -- Landscape of history / John Lewis Gaddis -- Company man / Ellen Goodman -- More than just a shrine--Ellis Island / Mary Gordon -- On the pleasure of hating / William Hazlitt -- Colonel / Michael Hogan -- Salvation / Langston Hughes -- Nowhere man / Pico Iyer -- Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. -- On discovery / Maxine Hong Kingston -- Bachelor's complaint / Charles Lamb -- Coming home again / Chang-Rae Lee -- Gettysburg address / Abraham Lincoln -- Morals of the prince / Niccolò Machiavelli -- Shul / James McBride -- Way to rainy mountain / N. Scott Momaday -- Of smells / Michel de Montaigne -- Are you somebody? / Nuala O'Faolain -- Shooting an elephant / George Orwell -- Din in the head / Cynthia Ozick -- Medium is the metaphor / Neil Postman -- Under the influence / Scott Russell Sanders -- Woman's beauty: put-down or power source? / Susan Sontag -- Declaration of sentiments and resolutions / Elizabeth Cady Stanton -- Just walk on by: Black men and public space / Brent Staples -- Modest proposal / Jonathan Swift -- Mother tongue / Amy Tan -- Why I went to the woods / Henry David Thoreau -- University days / James Thurber -- And ain't I a woman? / Sojourner Truth -- Once more to the lake / E.B. White -- Vindication of the rights of woman / Mary Wollstonecraft -- Death of the moth / Virginia Woolf.