"Sonic Youth are always zeitgeisty,” says Cafritz, “so it sounded really appealing at that moment.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness explores a mono-gendered alien culture with tact and nuance. In one scene a human, Genly Ai, and a monogendered Gethian, Estraven, discuss the differences between their cultures. “Ai brooded, and after some time he said, ‘You’re isolated, and undivided. Perhaps you are as obsessed with wholeness as we are with dualism.’” Estraven replies, “‘We are dualists too. Duality is an essential, isn’t it? So long as there is myself and the other.’” In other words, for the Gethians, otherness comes not from inherent sexual or racial difference, but in the inherent distance between two aware beings.

It was reserved for Christians to torture bread, the staff of life, bread for which children in whole districts wail, bread, the gift of pasture to the poor, bread, for want of which thousands of our fellow beings annually perish by famine; it was reserved for Christians to torture the material of bread by fire, to create a chemical and maddening poison, burning up the brain and brutalizing the soul, and producing evils to humanity, in comparison of which, war, pestilence, and famine, cease to be evils.

Symptoms consist of various foliage spottings and blotchings.