Tuesday, May 12, 2009 - Posts
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Forgive me for injecting this note of sadness, but I'm mourning the
death today of my friend Eden Ross Lipson. Eden was for a long while
the children's book editor of the New York Times. I knew her after she retired. She e-mailed me one day a few years ago about a piece I wrote on reading books to boys that are usually given to girls, like Little House in the Big Woods.
I'd just started writing about kids and motherhood, and I felt the
opposite of confident about whether I had much to say worth hearing.
Eden's brisk e-mail made smarter points than mine. But she didn't point
that out. She offered suggestions for the next piece, the best kind of
deft encouragement. From then on, she wrote when she wanted to tell me
I'd gotten a children's book right, or when I'd gotten it wrong. She
suggested topics. She became my literary fairy godmother... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website, DoubleX.com!)
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A guest post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
The announcement that Gen. David McKiernan is being removed from command of NATO forces in Afghanistan—apparently the first firing of a U.S. commander in a theater of war since Korea—is
a very big deal. But what does it actually mean? One thing it means is
that the dust has yet to settle in the transition to a new U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan, which suggests that any fruits of that
strategy remain distant. Laid out in a white paper this spring,
the new strategy stems from a wholesale rethinking of our approach that
has been underway at least since Gen. David Petraeus took the helm at
CentCom last fall. It includes, but isn’t limited to... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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Apparently, if you launch a website for women in 2009, the most
important question is whether or not it's feminist. At least, that's
what you'd think, judging by today's launch of DoubleX.com. Only, the funny thing is, I thought feminism was dead. I mean, didn't we kill it already?
At best, it seems odd to judge a 21st century production by the politics of a decades-old movement, the relevance of which... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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I was perversely pleased to read this story in the New York Times
about women bullying other women at work. A new study by the Workplace
Bullying Institute—who knew such a thing existed!—reveals that men
aren't the only elbow-throwers in the workplace... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Hanna, you masterfully parse Elizabeth Edwards' public persona, but you don't really touch on the other people who might be affected by her ill-fated tale. No, I'm not talking about John. I'm talking about her children: Catharine, Emma, and Jack. When Edwards was on the Today show earlier this week, she said she wrote the revealing Resilience explicitly for her children. This morning, Tina Brown and Gloria Allred argued in front of Today's Meredith Vieira about whether or not Elizabeth's choice to speak out about her husband's affair was a good one.
Gloria was staunchly pro-Edwards. She said that Elizabeth was revealing herself "with dignity," as she had done everything else in her life. Tina was anti-Edwards. She upheld Hillary Clinton as the model of how to weather a cheating husband in public, because she barely acknowledged Bill's wandering eye. Tina described the situation as "squalid" and added "I regret that [Elizabeth] used her book to drag everyone into this."
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Are you with Tina, thinking Elizabeth's young children must be damaged by their mother's public discussion of their father's philandering? Or do you side with Gloria, who believes that Elizabeth is being a good role model for her offspring by showing them that life is "complicated"?
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In a column
today on the famous Harvard Study of Adult
Development, which has followed the paths of a group of graduates from
college to old age, David Brooks quotes lead researcher George Vaillant's
conclusion about what matters in life: “Happiness is love. Full Stop." It's a
somewhat odd conclusion since... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Today's New York Times hosts a bloggingheads debate on
breast-feeding between me and Dr. Ruth Lawrence, a researcher from from
the University of Rochester and a major breast-feeding advocate. The
occasion was my recent Atlantic story taking issue with the science behind some breast-feeding research. When bloggingheads found my opponent I swallowed hard... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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It's May, the month of nice weather, pretty flowers, weddings,
declarations of love, pregnancies, hallucinations, fatalities,
cliffhangers and shocking twists. It's the month of TV finales, wherein
shows wrap up the season that came before, while providing incentives
to watch the season that comes next, manipulating you into thinking
"Finally!" and then "Really?!" in quick succession. House did exactly that last night... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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If you're reading this you already know that Double X, the new magazine from Slate Group, about "what women really think" launched today. Double X inherits a legacy of women's content that spanned decades of comfort food factories such as Ladies' Home Journal ("Can this marriage be saved?"), McCall's, and Redbook, then spawned junior versions Seventeen, Glamour, and Mademoiselle (featuring David Newman and Robert Benton's advice column, "Man Talk"), before blossoming... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Calling all XX Factor readers: Today is the launch of Double X, the new women's site that this blog has given birth to. Come take a look! The blog will continue to live in Slate, so you can still access it the same way you always have. The one change is that to read posts and conversations in their entirety, you'll click over to the new site. We also hope of course that you'll find much more to interest you there. To kick things off today, we have:
A thought-provoking piece by a mom who is giving pot to her son. He is 9, and he has autism and a medical marijuana license.
Celebs including Amanda Peet, Margaret Cho, and Sandra Day O'Connor on who they wanted to be when they were little girls.
Hanna on the passive aggression of Elizabeth Edwards.
What's the Problem Now? A discussion about the ongoing dilemmas of feminism. Includes Linda Hirshman taking down Jezebel.
To make Double X succeed, we need you. Much of the site's vibrancy will depend on your comments about blog posts,
articles, and everything else. The comments on Double X will be
directly beneath the blog posts and the stories. And the homepage will regularly
showcase excellent quotes from commenters. Our goal is to generate dynamic
conversation. That's what has made XX Factor thrive, and now we hope your
feedback on Double X will add depth and new view points to the discussion. We're
especially eager to seed the site in its first weeks with smart, thoughtful
comments. And so we are turning to you for your help. If you post early and
well, you'll set the tone for the site right from the start.
We'd also love your suggestions about how to make your reading
and commenting experience a good one. Post a comment or send mail to
doublexletters@slate.com. We already consider you part of the
Double X community, and to that end
we're going to start having cocktail meetups and other fun events for our core
commenters in New York and D.C. Again, any suggestions for meeting places or
event ideas are welcome!
Thank you,
Emily, Hanna, and Meghan
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Like every other former sci-fi geek in NYC, I (sorry) trekked out to see the Star Trek
movie on Friday night. My assessment? J. J. Abrams has turned out a
well-made B movie: The film moves along at a crisp pace, hits all the
key retro-nostalgia moments, and is designed to be... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)