There is No Having It All, There is No Perfect (and, Spoiler Alert: There is No Santa Claus Either)

So, the subject of our book is certainly in the air as of late. First, Ann Marie Slaughter, and now, a piece on The Daily Beast by Debora Spar, whose take on the issues of women chasing perfection, juggling roles and choices in a not-adequately-changed world was, frankly, so similar to the things we’ve written […]

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Fear Mediocrity? Five Reasons Why

Is mediocrity the last taboo? The question came to mind a while back when I spied a column by Thomas Friedman, who suggested that in our global economy where work gets done cheaper overseas and where, here at home, technology is eating jobs in a rapidly accelerating pace, only the strong  will survive.  His overall […]

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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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Is Work-Life Balance The New Prince Charming?

Ahead of September’s “I Don’t Know How She Does It”–a movie based on Allison Pearson’s best-selling novel about the realities of life as a working mother, which stars Sarah Jessica Parker as the harried “She” in question–this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine ran a story about the film’s screenwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna, whose other credits […]

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Perfection: A Zero Love Game

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Barbara’s post from last week, Choosing the Iconic Self, about how women–now freed from the simple definitions of either wife or daughter–struggle to define our authentic Self, and wind up trapped by the iconic image of whatever dream-self we aspire to become, saddling each choice with a […]

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The Zeitgeist: Resonance revealed

Or, to paraphrase John Lennon: “I am (s)he as you are (s)he as you are me and we are all together.” In other words, you identify.  That’s what we’ve found in many of the thoughtful comments that rolled in over the past few weeks, either on our blog or Facebook. (Ahem. Are you a fan?) […]

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On Purpose, Take Two

Back when Harvard Business School’s class of 2010 started grad school, those best-and-brightest had no reason to expect that their high-flying dreams might crash along with a tanking economy.   Which may be why they asked HBS buisness administration professor Clay Christensen to deliver a commencement address that focused on his strategies for measuring a […]

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Helicopters Gone Wild

This just in: parents take helicoptering over the top. To wit, this post on the NYTimes Motherlode blog that links to a CNN story on moms who quit their jobs to help their kids get into college. No joke. According to the piece, these are highly educated, professional women who take a “college prep leave” […]

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Ka-ching: The Cost of The Time-out.

Apparently, when it comes to the wage gap, it’s the time-out that kicks us in the pocketbook. That’s the word from labor economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, experts on the gender wage discrepancy, answering questions in Thursday’s NYTimes Freakonomics column. They’ve got some darn good data. If you’re a numbers geek like me, you’ll […]

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Ideology vs. Identity: Of Burning Bras, Sarah Palin, and Health Care Reform

Given the –well, the shitstorm that’s erupted over the attempt to saddle health care reform with the cynical, sabotaging, decidedly anti-choice Stupak-Pitts amendment, it’s fitting to revisit an issue that simply will not go away. Us versus Them. But first. There’s some awesome, mandatory reading currently waiting for you over at the New Yorker‘s website, […]

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