So you are all grown up but still get agitated every time you see your parents. They never were really there for you -- even if they brought pleasure to millions of others. Or maybe you realize it's about time you learned more about a grandparent whom you never really...

I woke up in sunny Los Angeles this morning, picked up the newspaper, and three stories caught my eye -- and broke my heart.

First, a serial killer has apparently been apprehended in Southern California. It turns out he had recently returned from a tour in Iraq. "I feel...

For a generation or so, we have been about empowering girls, whether on the ball field, in the math and science classrooms, or in heightening their political aspirations. So is it any wonder that boys should be making a comeback?

One place they are doing it this year is at...

I haven't been on a horse in many years, though as a young girl I rode every weekend and collected my share of the plastic versions. As an urban creature now, I rarely come across them -- other than the painfully tolerant variety leading tourists through Central Park. But I...

FACE IT: We Can Dial With Dignity

Face it, few of us really use phones for the right reasons anymore. Our kids prefer we text them, and most of us have gadgets that send a quick email message even to friends or business associates. When the phone goes off at...

It is hard to believe that I love Lucy, the iconic television series that competes with Law and Order in the "show that is always on somewhere" category, is 60. What's even more amazing is that Lucy seems less scatterbrained and a lot more entertaining than most the television housewives...

I have been hearing similarly discontented -- or at least conflicted -- mumblings lately: in Betty Friedan parlance, I'd say they are murmurs with no monikers. Are you too hearing more and more women saying either: they need time and space to themselves; they are happy when their spouses are...

The viewers have spoken. The Playboy Cub is the first show cancelled of the new television season. Women could have told the networks this would happen, but from the looks of the current lineup, the networks don't really care about how real women feel about their shows.

At lunch the other day, someone was marveling how uber-editor Tina Brown keeps taking on new endeavors, every one of which would be a full time profession for most people. Just hearing the list made me go home and take a nap.

When I awoke, I began seriously thinking about...

What does true empowerment mean for women?

Clearly, it means the right to choose, and that encompasses everything from having the baby to having the job to having a mate of either sex. But it also means proving ourselves at the box office, on the Billboard charts, on...

I was sitting in Starbucks reading my paper the other morning and in walked a startlingly lovely young woman. Long, perfect straight hair, pristine features, slender body wrapped in a black pantsuit. I immediately felt old, shapeless, short and unattractive. I played a little game: how long would it...

I know a woman who has 2,000 friends on Facebook and she is proud to tell you so. What I would never tell her is that she is one of the most awkward -- even tactless -- of people, with a minimal social life.

I also know...

So I was at a party recently and noticed that at least eight women were huddled around an attractive and charismatic fellow. I was informed that the man (not available on a sexual basis, by the way) is the face of Bravo, and the women were smothering him with...

With the humiliating burnouts of a group of powerful -- and horny -- men, we must turn once again to women to be the role models. The usual suspects emerge: Oprah for her classy exit and self-empowerment message; Hillary for her ability to roam the world doing good deeds, remain...

Clearly, I am no doctor or expert but I do think I have come up with a way of looking at life that seems much friendlier and less prone to bouts of the blues. Rather than standing back to assess the big picture, see your time spent as a series...

I have started doing something that I have not done in probably 40 years: I have started to share my dessert.

This is no minor feat, and not merely about getting over an eating disorder that has plagued me since boarding school. It is about being able to change something...

I think back to when they closed Eigers, my family's favorite ice cream shop. My young son literally bawled, imagining California visits to Poppa and Grammy without the nightly trek to grab some one-of-a-kind Rainbow Sherbet. We all have places, things and flavors that signify "it must be California," "it...

When did I stop playing music in my home? As a child, I had a transistor radio attached to my ear. I would take it to and from school, sometimes even falling asleep with it. I remember my brother and I regularly entering a contest in which listeners guessed the...

I have come to look at life these days as B.C. and A.C. -- as in, before we get the call that changes our life, and after.

It can be a good call, of course: You are cancer free! Your kid got into Northwestern! You got...

I am constantly being scolded for asserting -- self pityingly -- that everyone else has perfect and perfectly happy children. I may finally be disabused of that belief.

Last week in Santa Monica, a 14-year-old boy announced to his baseball teammates that he was going to kill...