When in the early nineties I lived in Oxford , England, as the new mother of a six-month old, nurses regularly came to our flat for well baby check-ups. All of my medications and doctors' visits and all those for my child were free for the first year of her...

I have been trying to dissect two stories that have come across my desk (or, perhaps I should say my computer) the past couple of days.

In one, a youngish blogger is in the middle of a brouhaha that involves a man asking her to his room as...

I was into my 30s before I began to tell the truth. I hadn't exactly been lying in the three previous decades; but what I had been doing was, at best, dissembling, and at worst, well, let's say I was avoiding the truth. And all the while I had no...

My daughter came home recently and told me that she had found the tattoo she would get were she to get a tattoo. It was a quote that said, "A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not why ships are built." When I looked it up, I saw...

Michele Bachmann is not a feminist but she is running for president. Michele Bachmann, a congresswoman and a lawyer, is running for president. Michele Bachmann is a mother and a foster mother and a wife and she is running for president.

What part of this makes any sense at all?

I have been thinking a lot about Maria Shriver lately. Not simply or solely because of the huge betrayal by her husband. I actually began thinking about her when I viewed her you tube video asking questions about how to handle transitions. She looked like every other woman...

I was standing with family and friends in Collioure, France, watching the most spectacular and beautiful fireworks I had ever seen when I knew my marriage was finished. It was Bastille Day, 2002. A little less than a year earlier, my family and I had moved to Paris for two...

Within the past few days, young and famous feminist Jessica Valenti defended her decision not to take part in a panel based on More magazine's recent list of hip and important young feminists and Nora Ephron all but dismissed the old-line feminist movement of the...

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. We were talking politics, the Democratic Party, The Tea Party, Republicans, and, well, passion. Mostly...

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 women writers angry...

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 and denial, perhaps, masked others. Once my mother finally entered a rehabilitation facility and was no longer drinking, it...

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,...

Weirdest story of the week: The New York Times today ran a piece on some schools and some school officials discouraging students from having a "best" friend. Being friends with everyone is supposed to, well, put an end to bullying.

I was bulled in middle school and...

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 difficult for me to decide whether this is an actual war or another incursion/occupation based on our idea of promoting democracy around...

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" that health care reform will not make a difference in...

In the Christian tradition, Lent is a period of forty days, beginning Ash Wednesday, when the observant go into a period of denial, penance, and prayer, and, more commonly give up something important to them until Easter. While, as a Jew, I do not subscribe to the risen Christ --...

"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 certainly felt that way more than once or twice.

Arguably,...

In this spot was a post I wrote a few weeks ago which talked about Obama (and the failure of good health care reform) and Woods (right after his debacle was revealed) as heroes who had been fallen by pride.

There are post-it notes all over my mother's room at the assisted living place where she has lived since being diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the summer of 2005. She loves post-it notes. She likes them in bright colors like hot pink and green. Some of them have her name...

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 become an incumbent insider who plays golf and hangs around with big money guys. He...