Can’t Decide on a New Year’s Resolution?

Here you go:  in no particular order, a dozen New Year’s resolutions designed especially for the undecided.  Let us know what speaks to you – and add a couple of your own. Ready?  Set.  Go! • Inhabit the moment.  You can’t rewrite the past.  You can’t be sure of the future.  All you really have [...]

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Happy Holidays from Undecided!

In the spirit of the season:  an iconic duo of  feel-good Christmas Eve moments, movie style.  Just enough gratuitious Christmas cheese to make even Ebeneezer Scrooge  a little teary — plus a few life lessons, Undecided style. “If things don’t turn out the first time, you’ve still got to believe” (from the original “Miracle on [...]

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Just Don’t Call Me Ambitious

Forget the B-word; if you want to hit a woman where it hurts, one word’s sure to do it, according to longtime Vanity Fair contributing editor Leslie Bennetts in a piece titled “The Scarlet A” in this month’s Elle magazine, and that word is Ambitious. Here’s Bennetts’ lede: Over the past three decades, I’ve interviewed [...]

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Cries and Whispers

So today I thought I’d offer a quick riff about double standards. Case number one, the most obvious:  Rep. John Boehner’s weepathon on “60 Minutes.”  The prospective Speaker of the House cries.  Don’t know why.  But as USC Professor Kathleen Reardon points out on HuffPo, it’s perfectly fine — if somewhat creepy — if a [...]

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Freedom, Fertility, and Feminism

Today’s post is one of those ones that I’ve thought about writing often, but been happy to shy away from. It’s tricky territory. But over the past week, fate intervened: first, in the form of the New York Magazine in my mailbox, which screamed from the cover: Fifty years ago, the pill ushered in a [...]

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In Praise of Real: Of Elizabeth Edwards… And Cher

I write today of two strong women.  One recently deceased, one very much alive.   On the surface, they’ve got nothing whatsoever in common — I’m sure they’ve never been mentioned in the same article, much less the same sentence — except for the lesson they have to teach us. It has to do with being [...]

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Whipsawed by Confusion? Just Do It–Well

Hi, I’m Shannon, and I’m an advice-column-aholic. From Elle‘s “Auntie” E. Jean to Salon’s Cary Tennis, theirs are my go-to pages. I typically get a couple Q-and-A’s from Auntie Eeee down while still standing by the mailbox, and, no matter the top headlines of the day, “Since You Asked” is my first click on Salon’s [...]

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Backlash bedamned: Fear not the alpha gals

Successful women, watch out.  The menfolk, they don’t like us. At least that’s the message from a New York Times piece by Katrin Bennhold, titled “Keeping Romance Alive in the Age of Female Empowerment”.  And since we’re all, you know, successful women, we thought we ought to parse it out if only to share the [...]

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