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ON NOVEMBER 9, 2006, Ellen Jane Willis died of lung cancer. That this happened when she was only 64 is a tragic event that prematurely robbed my former graduate school adviser and now colleague, Stanley Aronowitz, of his cherished life partner, and their daughter Nona Wilils-Aronowitz of a mom she obviously adored. But her death strikes me also, overwhelmingly, as a loss to the world. We need you, Ellen, I have cried since her death, far from public places where mourning surfaces only apparently. Already, in this era of seemingly unabated conservatism, I have thought of Ellen many times. What would she be writing as the Supreme Court, in a disturbing April 2007 decision limiting women's right to choose, set up a real constitutional possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade} Why, I fret, could Ellen not have had a chance to finish the ambitious book on psychoanalysis and society on which she was laboring when she became ill? Ellen knew that new frameworks of thought are desperately needed to fathom why people vote for politi- cians who don't represent their/our interests, and why calamities from Virginia Tech to Baghdad continue to overwhelm us now just as Stalinism and Hitler plagued us before. Who but Ellen Willis will link, as she started to and as Wilhelm Reich did with fascism, contemporary terrorism and sexual repression?
Others have described, in a flourishing...