I’ve been spending a bunch of time poking around the wonderful site, longform.org, which curates longer works of journalism and creative non-fiction from around the internet – including some pre-internet era pieces that are available online. Recently in their archive I came across Ellen Willis’ review from the NYRB of Alice’s Restaurant and Easy Rider. It was fascinating to read that, watching Easy Rider at the time it came out, someone immersed in the counterculture reacted to so many things in the same way my friends and I did when I saw it for the first time in a frat house in the midwest, inexplicably going through a Phish-inspired tye-die revival in the mid-nineties. (I know, I know.) But what really made me smile was the exchange of letters between Willis and one Thomas M. Kando, of Sacramento State College. True, a few of the touches are very 1970, like addressing her as “Miss (Mrs.?) Willis” and the reference to “Momism,” but by and large the whole thing could come straight out of the moderation queue of your favorite feminist blog, with a quick pause to use the search and replace function and put in “feminazi” for “women’s lib” and “child support” for “alimony.”