Doesn’t Hurt to Ask, and Other Excellent Advice We Talk Ourselves Out of Taking

Well, it doesn’t hurt to ask! How many times have you used that very line, psyching up a friend before sending her into the field of battle, whether the battlefield be the boss’ office over a raise or a promotion or just a couple of days off, or the next cube over, daytime home of [...]

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A Knuckle Sandwich?

The strangest thing popped into my inbox the other day: a BCBG ad for this season’s statement jewelry. Front and center were a couple of iterations of what you see on your left: a knuckle ring. I kid you not. Look closely and you’ll find that the “ring” is actually two of them linking your [...]

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Feminism 2010: We’ve Only Just Begun

Are We There Yet? asks a recent Newsweek headline, with the kind of slug that leaves you with a distinctive sense of dread: In 1976, 46 women filed a landmark gender-discrimination case. Their employer was NEWSWEEK. Forty years later, their contemporary counterparts question how much has actually changed. It’s a great piece, as it shows [...]

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Life, According to Alice

Well, I never thought of Alice In Wonderland as a particularly feminist fairy tale of a movie, what with Johnny Depp and all. Alice is, you might note, not much taller than a teapot. But HuffPo blogger Marcia Reynolds apparently sees past the Mad Hatter to find several models of womenpower jumping off the 3D [...]

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One Flew Over The Chicken Coop: The Femivore’s Dilemma

What do you think Betty Freidan–or Betty Draper for that matter–might say to the idea that, come 2010, women everywhere would be finding their purpose right in their own backyards? Tending to the chicken coops in their own backyards, that is? Don’t think that would fly? Peggy Orenstein offers an interesting take on the Extreme-Homemaking-as-Feminism [...]

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Expectations? Check.

So clearly, you don’t often start the day thinking of “The Graduate.” But I was reminded of the iconic film about post-grad angst this A.M. via an op-ed from the Daily Pennsylvanian, written by Juliette Mullin, a senior at Penn, where, Mullin writes, students tend to equate the Penn seal on their diplomas with a [...]

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International What Day?

Yesterday was International Women’s Day, and I spent it wondering how to write about it–without sounding like I’d been body-snatched by Debbie Downer. (Why? Well, I’m not especially interested in beating a dead horse, but by now you know the score: we’re paid less and underrepresented. Child care and health care are dismal. Our ranking [...]

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Choose This!

Or, how to explain why we spend hours trying to decide between the red one or the blue one. And sometimes walk away with nothing at all. There are any one of a number of research studies out there on the science of choice. (You’ll read about many of them in our book, in fact. [...]

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Killing Your Darlings

Here’s something you might not know: a writer generally spends as much (or more) time cutting words as writing them. And it can be heartbreaking–once you finally have your thoughts out and onto the page in clear, organized, rhythmic form, the last thing you want to do is commence a blood bath. But, assignments usually [...]

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