Women Role Models: The Weaker The Better?

So says Carina Chocano, anyway, in Sunday’s New York Times: enough with the “strong female characters,” she writes, give ‘em to us weak. Strangely, I think she has a point. And while I take issue with her choice of words, I think there’s a lesson in here for those of us in real life, too. Where […]

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Woe Be The Lady Role Models

…For they shall be ripped apart. And no one, it seems, is immune. Not even Tina Fey. The very first piece of commentary I read about Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants, which Barbara wrote about last week, was in Newsweek. And, written by Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, it was fairly critical. Check it: Edging up […]

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Air(Brush) Apparent

The other day, in the midst of a meeting of my paper’s editorial staff, I found myself waving my Feminist card in a manner reminiscent of when I used to referee kids’ soccer games, and had to deploy the whistle-yellow-card combo. (More often than not, the recipients of said cards were not kids at all, […]

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What Girls Can Learn From Olympic Grrrrrrrrrrrl Power

The other day after I got home from my run (I use the term advisedly), I got a call from the local NBC affiliate asking for a quick interview on the overall impact of “girl power”  in this year’s Olympics.  Within ten minutes, the reporter and her cameraman were on their way. While dashing around […]

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Have It All? Why We’re Asking the Wrong Question.

I woke up this morning to a message from a former student who’d sent me a link to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cover story in the new Atlantic.  If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s a brilliant piece that lays out the reasons why women still can’t have it all — and what we as a society […]

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What’s A Woman To Do? Avoid the Rush.

One of the problems with decisions is we sometimes make them before we’re ready. Sometimes we’ve forced ourselves into a box. Sometimes we entered that box with a skip and a smile. Sometimes it’s been a full-court press to please the iconic self. But as the saying goes: Decide in haste, repent in leisure. Quite […]

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Leap of Faith, Please

The other day, I ran across an interview with Susan Sarandon over there at ontheredcarpet.com that reminded me once again that good things are often born of chaos.  Or, as we so often write: We are our failures, those blips in the road that can propel us forward. But only if we let them. Back […]

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Oh Wow: The Meaning of Life

Of all the words that have been spoken or written (ours included) about Steve Jobs in the past few weeks, the wisest and most meaningful may have come from the eulogy delivered by his sister, novelist Mona Simpson, who recently shared it with the New York Times. By now, you have probably read Simpson’s opening: […]

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Fail Thee Well

What if the surest indicator of your future success–of living a happy, meaningful, and productive life–is how good you are at failing? Brace yourselves, perfectionists, because the evidence is mounting: in order to fly, you’ve first got to fail. And (worse!) how well you fail may be one of the biggest predictors of success. Bigger […]

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Do Our Friends’ Choices Make Us Regret Our Own?

Remember when you were a kid, and you wanted to pierce your belly button or stay out all night, and you’d say to your mom, “But mooooom, everyone else is doing it!”? And then she’d say, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” And then, if you were feeling especially petulant, you might […]

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