In last week's Last Days: The Week in Review, words about the Bill Cosby rape allegations (and the 77-year-old comic's bizarre responses to said allegations) filled the majority of the column. And that was before this week's daily explosions of new accusers and canceled projects and insane bullshit.

But out of all this ugliness has come a wealth of powerful writing and discussion about sexual assault, the power of celebrity, the slipperiness of reporting alleged crimes, and the need to hear and support women who go public with claims of rape.

One standout: Ta-Nahisi Coates's essay in the Atlantic, "The Rape Accusations Against Bill Cosby Must Not Be Ignored":

Rape constitutes the loss of your body, which is all you are, to someone else. I have never been raped. But I have, several times as a child, been punched/stomped/kicked/bumrushed while walking home from school, and thus lost my body. The worst part for me was not the experience, but the humiliation of being unable to protect my body, which is all I am, from predators. Even now as I sketch this out for you publicly, I am humiliated all again. And this happened when I was a child. If recounting a physical assault causes me humiliation, how might recounting a sexual assault feel? And what would cause me to willingly stand up and relive that humiliation before a national audience? And why would I fake my way through such a thing? Cosby's accusers—who have no hope of criminal charges, nor civil damages—are courting the scrutiny of Cosby-lovers and rape-deniers. To what end?

The heart of the matter is this: A defender of Bill Cosby must, effectively, conjure a vast conspiracy, created to bring down one man, seemingly just out of spite. And people will do this work of conjuration, because it is hard to accept that people we love in one arena can commit great evil in another. It is hard to believe that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist because the belief doesn't just indict Cosby, it indicts us. It damns us for drawing intimate conclusions about people based on pudding-pop commercials and popular TV shows. It destroys our ability to lean on icons for our morality. And it forces us back into a world where seemingly good men do unspeakably evil things, and this is just the chaos of human history.

Read the whole Coates essay here.

Beyond Cosby, this week's discussion of rape was fueled by another brutally powerful piece of writing, Sabrina Rubin Erdely's investigative feature for Rolling Stone, "A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA."

Focusing on the sickening assault on a female student at the University of Virginia and the fallout that followed, Erdely's piece immediately plunges readers into a world where barbaric sexual violence is a rite of passage, and it's harrowing—emotionally, physically, morally. Most shocking to me is the view the piece gives of the students' criminally warped humanity. The male students who participated in the central gang rape egged each other on—"Don't you want to be a brother?"; "We all had to do it, so you do, too"—in a way that suggests that not even they were necessarily happy about participating in a brutal sex crime, but traditions are traditions, you know? Meanwhile, female students who heard about the attack and knew the victim offered their input: "Why didn't you have fun with it?" Cindy asked. "A bunch of hot Phi Psi guys?"

Read the whole Rolling Stone article here, and let us please, please keep talking about all of this. The goal of such talk isn't all us lucky bystanders "figuring it all out" so much as it is about creating a culture where assault survivors feel safe to talk, and where it doesn't take 15 near-identical allegations lucky enough to find a home in a viral comedy video* to make people pay attention.

*No shade on you, Mr. Buress. You've done the Lord's work.