A new recommendation to extend IVF to gay couples could be just the beginning.

Last year, while fighting the French presidential campaign he would ultimately win, Emmanuel Macron was forced to defend his family. Married to a woman 24 years his senior, he has no biological children, a fact that became a point of ridicule for the far-right National Front (now called the National Rally) against whom he contested the election. But when opponents suggested that a man with “no children” couldn’t truly care about the future, he struck back with passion: “I have children and grandchildren of the heart.”

Perhaps that devotion to families that don’t quite conform to traditional nuclear ideals was partly behind Macron’s promise to extend the right to state-sponsored in vitro fertilization to lesbian couples and single women.

Last week, the change was recommended by France’s highest court. While the executive branch is making no promises — it cautioned that the court’s recommendation isn’t binding and is likely wary of a conservative backlash to such a move — it could portend a major step forward for equality in reproduction. It also is expected to further deepen social and political fissures on a subject that remains acutely sensitive in France.

Freelancers are setting up low-cost shared offices at home — but can they stop chatting?

It is a Thursday afternoon and I am frantically vacuuming, trying to strike the right balance between sterile and homely. Do I have time to buy biscuits? Too late, there’s a knock at the door. My guest, whom I met via an app, is here.

This is not a romantic date, though I do have the jitters. Rather, I am hosting a stranger to work alongside me in my kitchen, to test out a new concept called home coworking. It appeals to lonely freelance workers hoping to find a sense of community without incurring the expense of formal coworking spaces — think of it as Airbnb meets WeWork.

The app that introduced us is called Kitchin Table. It matches female hosts with female guests, in the latest iteration of the home coworking trend.

Doing something extraordinary using totally ordinary means is a magic we should all be lucky enough to master. Enter poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

Poetry is dead. Sure, there’s slam poetry — and the griot, as embodied by hip-hop stylings, is close. There’s no shortage of people claiming to be poets, but that’s really like saying because we all have fists, we must all be boxers. Poetry is another sweet science, though, and one that’s sometimes so fundamentally complex that just having eyes might still not be enough to get it.

That is something you’re going to need to square yourself with when considering poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Especially if at any point you find yourself perched frontside to The Anniad, her long narrative poem drawn from Annie Allen, her 1949 second book of poems. Square, because while there’s the comfortable cheap-seat read that follows the flow of a young woman’s life as she traverses her time from singledom to married motherhood, there’s also much more. Much, much more.