I like to think of the introduction to a book or magazine as something that gives you a glimpse of what to expect in the rest of the publication, the way the entranceway to a house might give you an idea of what to expect in the rest of the house. You get a sense of how the place is decorated, the tastes of the author of the house you are about to enter. The Introduction to Tessera’s “Feminism and Self-Help” issue might be a bit misleading. It’s theory, and there’s definitely a fair amount of relatively hard-core theory happening in Tessera. Theory is something which is often appealing only to other theorists. It can be pretty hard going if you’re not accustomed to the terms that theorists tend to bandy about: “To conceive of discourse as a contagion that somehow infects and determines the actions of individual human subjects or to theorize language as something that imprints itself on an always passive matter is to divest the subject of the agency involved in interpellating a constitutive discourse.” To continue the house analogy, there are rooms in Tessera that were definitely not decorated by any theorist. There’s a series of black and white photos with brief, hilarious descriptive narratives. Included in the series is a photo of a big rock descending toward the head of a person who is standing at the edge of a cliff, apparently waving at the camera: “Leo Bloom, 41 yrs. was the survivor of the greatest number of motor-vehicle accidents ever surveyed. In 65\% of these mishaps, Mr. Bloom was involved as a pedestrian. Despite his remarkable history of being struck by moving objects, Bloom developed an unreasonably high degree of optimism and became a successful motivational speaker. He died 3 days before the publication of his self-help booklet “Success is Not an Accident” from head injuries sustained on Mt. Bialystock.” Tessera is full of an eclectic and wonderful assortment of images and words. It’s more like going into a mall than a house. Good reading for everyone, theorists included. (KS)