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Browning's latest book is Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas, and Found Happiness.
Mary Kennedy’s friends held a memorial service in her honor earlier this week. One friend remarked to a New York Times reporter that during the eulogies “there was nothing about depression.” She felt that people had gotten the wrong impression of her lost friend. “No one remembers her as depressed.” Mary Kennedy committed suicide, hanging [...]
There was something to be said for the old-fashioned landline, with a handset so bulky, you had to tuck it between your neck and shoulder to get your hands free. They didn’t — couldn’t — go everywhere with us. Now we’re tethered to our mobiles — addicted, even. They’ve become handy tools for avoidance, and [...]
In The Conflict, a provocative new book that was a best seller in Europe and is predictably making waves in the U.S., leading French intellectual Elisabeth Badinter argues that women have become newly enslaved by biology — more specifically, by their breasts. The ideological pressure to nurse a child — in the name of all [...]
I still remember the first time I sprawled on my back across the grass and watched the clouds drift by. I was about four or five years old. I found animal shapes and people shapes, and excitedly pointed them out to my little sister. The afternoon flew by as the wind blew a parade of [...]
I had to laugh. There it was, on the cover of Newsweek: “The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream.” Gasp. Who told? ”We may be especially drawn to this particular romanticized, erotically charged, semi-pornographic idea of female submission at a moment in history when male dominance is shakier than it has ever [...]
If you were watching the Masters golf tournament last weekend, you would have noticed it was laced with ads from Exxon Mobil calling for….better science. That’s right. The very company that funded decades of science denial takes it back. Sort of. ExxonMobil ranks high in a short list of powerful institutions that has done this country [...]
We spend lots of time these days focused on children bullied by their classmates at school, at play, and online. Appropriately enough — bullying is heart-breaking, even life-threatening behavior. A lauded documentary, Bully, takes a look at the national epidemic among children. But how about some serious soul-searching on the subject of grown-up (if you [...]
In the wake of the tragic death of 17-year old Trayvon Martin in Florida, there’s been a lot of talk about the risks to black children of being shot and by whom. Last week Harry C. Alford, the President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, testified against the new Mercury and Air [...]
Everyone on the East coast is talking about the winter that wasn’t. Ski season was a bust; as early as January, some stores began having “Global Warming Sales” on snow gear. But never mind winter. Now we may be skipping spring. So far, 2,200 temperature records have been shattered around the country. Climate scientists who [...]
Perhaps Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum have done women a favor. We now have a clear picture of what we’re up against. We have full access to the perverted (and I use the word advisedly) logic of the radio head; only the sick-minded can continue to take Limbaugh seriously. And, during the reality TV series [...]
The fight to protect ourselves from mercury pollution has just begun all over again. Within hours of posting the new Mercury and Air Toxics Standards in the federal register, Senator Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, has filed a Congressional Review Act, vowing to kill the new regulation — even though it protects us from mercury, arsenic, lead [...]
Evangelicals have opened up a fascinating new controversy around the complicated issue of fetal rights: If a known neurotoxin — being spewed into the air by coal-fired plants — enters the fetal bloodstream and causes brain damage or premature death, does that threat to the fetus count as something pro-lifers should consider? No, according to lengthy [...]
A mere 15 years ago, I was a soccer mom. I lived in a suburb; my two sons attended public school; they played soccer and little league and hockey, and I went to their games. I even ferried them around in an SUV. A small one, but still. Sorry. It worked for us. I also [...]
Birds have long had a very special place in my heart — as in most human hearts. Birds are magic, myth, fairy tale and the subject of intense scientific scrutiny. One of the startling ways in which birds have interacted with humans, of course, was the “canary in the coal mine” — the caged bird [...]
Rob Sisson, President of Republicans for Environmental Protection, has been reading up on the Mormon church’s position on climate change. “It is very evident that Romney’s is a faith that promotes science,” he says, “though I’m not finding much on global warming. Still, Romney crunches data. His business background is based on being analytical. And [...]
What’s a new year without retrograde behavior? Just in time to ring in 2012, on Dec. 30, judges on a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington agreed with some power companies to stop, at least temporarily, the Cross State Air Pollution Rule. This delay could cost Americans a year of cleaner air. [...]
It isn’t too often that the culture shifts seismically right before our eyes, but that’s exactly what happened on Dec. 10 during the latest in the reality TV series a.k.a. the GOP debates. Because everyone knows that cheating on your wife is far more important than, say, global warming, the good folks at ABC decided [...]
Most pregnant women are told by their doctors to stop eating tuna — and other large predator fish — because it is contaminated with mercury. But most of us don’t know that the mercury in our food comes from air pollution, specifically, from the mercury-emissions spewing out of coal-fired power plants. Next week the EPA [...]
Politicians are not shy people. It takes a certain arrogance to wake up, yawn, and say to the wife, “Yes, I should be the Leader of the Free World.” It is also the case that arrogant people are often the most interesting among us. Nobody earns arrogance — but arrogance might make it possible to [...]
In 1971, Dr. Seuss introduced children to resource management and environmental degradation. Well, of course, he didn’t use big boring words like that. Instead, he spun an entrancing tale, told by the ancient Once-ler, of a land of fantastical creatures — Swomee Swans, Bar-ba-Loots, and Humming Fish — who lived among the Truffula Trees (under [...]
