Eryn
Claudia Goldin tries to set the record straight on the “opt out” revolution. Are women giving up their careers to stay at home with their kids? Totally. No way. Yes. No. All the time. Never. Blah blah blah. Let’s go write another book about the mommy wars!
girls, grrrls.
Here’s Naomi Wolf writing about Young Adult fiction for girls in the Sunday Book Review:
But teenagers, or their parents, do buy the bad-girls books — the “Clique,” “Gossip Girl” and “A-List” series have all sold more than a million copies. And while the tacky sex scenes in them are annoying, they aren’t really the problem. [...]
admissions.
Waiting to find out is funny. There’s all this energy that goes into trying not to think about what it would be like if I got the outcome I wanted, convincing myself that I don’t really want it anyway, all these stern attempts to be realistic. All these ways I try to get control. There’s [...]
surrender.
Now, I love Nikki McClure, but the March illustration of this year’s calendar is just… I don’t know. I can’t say I don’t like it, even though, well, I really don’t. It’s raining down on some big tree, that I guess is maybe kale (does kale grown on trees?), since the inspirational saying for the [...]
last day of february notes.
Poppy Z. Brite is interviewed about New Orleans at the Village Voice. She’s known lately for the books Liquor and Prime, about a couple of guys who own a restaurant in New Orleans. I haven’t read them yet, but my copies of her goth-y, gay books Lost Souls and Drawing Blood are falling apart from [...]
Do yourself a favor and go pick up the March issue of Harper’s and read the article “My Crowd,” by Bill Wasik, who “invented” the flash mob. I haven’t even finished it yet but it is blowing my mind. They’re serializing it here, but you really need to read it all at once. If you [...]
Yeah, when I mentioned South Dakota yesterday? Maybe not so much.
And so I stand by trying to turn craftsters into abortionists. Can you picture that Very Special Issue of Readymade?
Phoebe Connelly looks at the political potential (or not) of crafting:
Is the resurgent craft movement a new form of consumption, albeit with more felt and assembly, or is it a bold political act that challenges the way we think about gender roles and how we engage with our commodified world?
Oh jeez. It’s an ethic people, [...]
I spent this morning searching for stock photos of people shopping in supermarkets, something to illustrate “consumer behavior” for the Annual Report. Now I have to decide which one to use. There are a lot of pictures of people talking on their cell phones as they walk around with their carts full of food, people [...]
The Observer has an interesting profile of New York Times Magazine writer Daphne Merkin (who, somewhat irritatingly, wrote about vaginal rejuvenation surgery a couple of weeks ago as if she were the first to notice that it exists), that gets at some of the thorny issues of being a woman writer who wants to write [...]