On the bus ride home to the Shenandoah Valley with some of the nearly two hundred people who made the hours-long journey to the Rally for Sanity, October 30,  we were fired up. &nb… Read full post »

 

For all those tired of debating who is a "real" American and to whom Constitutional rights apply, and don't, the feud between literary star Jonathan Franzen and bestselling novelists Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult is a welcome distraction.

Actually there is no feud. It's just two popular wo… Read full post »

 

 

                Five years ago, right before her seventy-eighth birthday, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.  The symptoms had been apparent for several years but alcohol masked some of them… Read full post »

On a recent short getaway I was sitting over breakfast one morning with my friend B, clearly jonesing from both the absence of my netbook and the dearth of decent newspapers available at the hotel at which we were staying.  While I pushed my eggs around my plate, B pulled out… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

                Bill Press had a discussion on the “war” in Afghanistan on his radio show this morning.  I put the word “war” in quotation marks because it remains diff… Read full post »

 

Belief systems are a funny thing.  They’re hard felt, hard won and nearly impossible to shake.  And unfortunately, most of them are often built on things other than facts.

Polls frequently tell us what the American public “believes.”  We “believe”… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

 

                In the Christian tradition, Lent is a period of forty days, beginning today, Ash Wednesday, when the observant go into a period of denial, penance, and prayer, and, more… Read full post »

 

 

 For King and Cary, with love, a re-post

 

                Ever since I was a little girl living in rural East Tennessee, I remember seeing jars by the cash registers of drugstores, convenience stores a… Read full post »

 

 

 (in light of recent events, a repost of a recent column)

 

“I’m going to go out in the yard and eat worms,” is how the rest of that sad ditty goes.  If you didn’t say it as a child, you know someone who did.  And we have all… Read full post »

 

 

 

         

As women, we’ve all had our “aha moments.  Mine came when I watched Anita Hill testify at the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in the early Nineties.  I found nothing she said fantastic or unbelieva/… Read full post »

  

                        

 

        My daughter asks a lot of questions; she wants to know the definitions of words, what things… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

                “I’m looking forward to Christmas,” an old friend tells me over the phone.  She’s spending it with her Jewish ex-husband and two half-Jewish college-aged… Read full post »

 

                 “Every customer is valuable and, they’re even more valuable today because there are fewer of them.” Ron Frasch,  chief merchant of Saks Fifth Avenue, on improving service in… Read full post »

 

 

 

                Ever since I was a little girl living in rural East Tennessee, I remember seeing jars by the cash registers of drugstores, convenience stores and small supermarkets. The jars had hand-letter… Read full post »

             

 

 

 

                          There are post-it notes all over my mother’… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

 

Whenever  I am lucky enough to go to the ocean, whether it is to stay in a friend’s house or a rented hotel, I always drive around the neighborhoods and look at the prime oceanfront properties.  Part of me continually wonders:  Who  are the/… Read full post »

 

 

 

 

 

Arianna Huffington ‘s headline in HuffPo  Tuesday was “Obama One Year Later:  The Audacity of Winning vs The Timidity of Governing." On Wednesday’s Hardball MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews was pissed:  he thought  Obama had already/… Read full post »

 

 

 

I don’t think I or any woman I know needs to read  The Shriver Report:  A Women’s Nation Changes Everything http://www.awomansnation.com/ by  Maria Shriver and The Center for American Progress.  Although the Report is being  highly touted as i/… Read full post »

 

All of you writers and would-be writers who have never been sexually abused by your parents, suffered from domestic assault, been abandoned on a highway somewhere by grandparents when raising you got to be too much; any of you who have never suffered from anorexia or bulimia, are not… Read full post »

 

 

TV Guide is published weekly; everyone knows they can get their television listings in their local newspaper or on their newspaper's website.  Television and movie reviews are all over the web and the nightly news is available on  three national networks, two all news net… Read full post »

 

 

                 Duh.

 

Okay, perhaps the New York Times article that graced the front page of the Style section recently deserves a little more parsing than that.

 

    &nb… Read full post »

   

 

 

Once upon a time, a little Pollyanna-ish I know, I actually believed that most people were decent, most people were inherently good, and most people when given the chance were kind.  I also believed in a) manners b) civility and c) generally good behavior in pub/… Read full post »

 

 

 

        It’s not often that television shows speak to my life.  Mostly they provide entertainment, escape, and, if I choose wisely, elegant writing and some humor and pathos.  Thirtysomething is the last show I recall that hit me… Read full post »

 

         

 

            Sometime in the middle of the self-help movement in the early seventies, my father came to the dinner table with a book he had just bought. It was by Thomas Har… Read full post »

According to  today's  Daily Beast  the legendary and, yes, old, Bob Dylan was questioned by a twenty-something police officer in New Jersey when someone reported “a scruffy old man acting suspiciously.”  The twenty-something cop had no idea who Dylan was and made him/… Read full post »