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If you’re in the market for a new picture book, the gentle illustrator Elisha Cooper has two to choose from. Beaver Is Lost
is a journey told almost entirely without words: Beaver hops onto a
log, then onto a logging truck, and finds himself in a city. How will
he (she?) get home? My 3-year-old nephew and 5-year-old niece tracked
each step of the trip, picking up on the clues knit into the
illustrations. "He found his friends!" they cheered in relief and
triumph at the end. Just in case there’s any doubt, Cooper has written
"Home" on the last page. Always the best destination ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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—Conservative U.S. Christian group Focus on the Family prepares to roll out an abstinence education program in China’s Yunnan Province ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Whether or not you think Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner chose the
proper target when they took on Jonathan Franzen and started the "franzenfreude"
meme, it's undeniable that the two women writers have started what is
an important—and now international—conversation. (The pair complained
that the New York Times gives short shrift to women writers, particularly those who write popular fiction. We fact-checked their claims here.) Writing in the UK paper The Guardian, London-based, American-born novelist Lionel Shriver paints a pretty damning portrait of the way book publishers have treated her work, and by extension, the way those publishers treat women readers ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Actually, Jess, Michelle Obama shouldered the bulk of the parenting beginning as early as 2002, when Barack Obama—already holding an Illinois Senate seat that required regular out-of-town trips—cast his eye on what would soon be an open seat for U.S. Senate. It only got harder for her from there, as he entered a years-long stretch of incessant campaigning. Both Obamas have acknowledged that his political absences created a problem for their marriage. Michelle Obama has said that eventually she realized she didn't want to be an angry wife forever, so she set about building a network of friends (and her own mom) who could help with what was, for all intents and purposes, single parenting ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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This post originally appeared on TresSugar.com
A new study found more people search for the term "abortion" in red states,
where policies are conservative or abortion options are limited, than
in bluer states. The immediate takeaway is the argument pro-choice
activists have been waiting for: limiting abortion access does not make
the procedure any less in demand ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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The media keeps fanning the flames of the story of wrestler deaths in
the WWE, the domain of Linda McMahon, who ran the wrestling empire
before she became a candidate for governor in Connecticut. Here's this handy summing up from The Week:
four men and one woman dead at young ages, two of them this month. And
Democratic rival Richard Blumenthal still has had nothing to say about
this. No attack ads or even just a biting line or two ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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The PR template for savvy politicians has long been to cooperate with
major outlets on stories, because it’s easier to control the message
that way. Even if the principal won’t sit for an interview, at the very
least the principal’s staff and publicist should be talking to the
reporter on background, knocking down rumors and promoting a positive
perception of the boss ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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There’s been much ado here over the past few days about Vanity Fair’s musings on Sarah Palin’s exploitative parenting techniques. Of course this isn’t the first time Palin’s private life has been hauled out into the public square for taunting. Perhaps you remember Bristol’s pregnancy? ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Hanna and Jessica, I can’t decide whether the accounts in the Vanity Fair piece
of Sarah Palin parading her children around at rallies and leaving Todd
with the childrearing duties are sexist or just the sneering that is
typical in most profiles of Palin by what she would refer to as the
“lamestream media.” Such anecdotes usually seem pointless to me,
because, let’s face it, there are very few people who are neutral about
Sarah Palin. You love her or you hate her ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Amanda, there’s an entirely different way of looking at that study about young women
living in cities earning more than men. Yes, they are a cultural elite
– young, educated women under 30 living in big metropolitan areas. But
they are also a vanguard. Change always comes first to young educated
women living in big cities, and then the rest of the country follows.
The main engine fueling this change – the fact that for every 2 men
graduating from college, 3 women will do the same – is not going to
change anytime soon, which suggests that the next many waves of
educated women will also outearn men ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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We've noted before that the NYT has a tendency to run multiple stories on the same topic within the same brief time frame, suggesting that sometimes, the Times' left hand isn't reading what the right hand is writing. This morning, the Business section has a lengthy piece on the dangers of prescribing psychosis drugs for young children,
profiling a boy with "severe temper tantrums" who was prescribed a
substantial cocktail: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the
antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines, and one for
attention-deficit disorder, beginning at 18 months and all before the
age of three ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Time trolls for panicked sexist responses with a headline that
really seems too good to be true: "Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women
On Top." Of course, as you read on in the article, you find out that,
yes, women are making 8 percent more than men ... as long as they don't
age past 30, don't get married, don't have children, and get more
education than their male peers. Oh yeah, and if they live in 147 of
the largest 150 cities in the country ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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—Unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities now earn more than their male counterparts. [Time]
—In Tony Blair’s new memoir, the former prime minister refuses to apologize for joining the war in Iraq or taking his time in the loo ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Today’s Wall Street Journal
has the latest in a series of articles I’ve been reading the past few
years about the bizarre, emotionally stunted lives of Japanese men. In
this story, young, romantically inclined Japanese men go for the
weekend to what formerly was a popular honeymoon resort, only these
guys show up with hand-held devices which contain their virtual
girlfriends. This follows the story
about the Japanese men who don’t date actual woman, but instead are in
love with body-length pillows with images of women printed on them. And
the story about Japanese men who wear bras because it makes them feel calmer. And the story about Japanese men who have given up all together and refuse to come out of their childhood bedrooms ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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As far as tell-alls go, Meghan McCain’s new campaign memoir, Dirty Sexy Politics, isn’t so shocking—especially coming from a woman who’s known for oversharing.
The perplexing back cover, which has a very Def
Leppard-consults-for-the-GOP vibe and features a wet-haired McCain in
reptilian black boots perched atop a gold-flecked elephant, is about
the most outré thing about it. The Washington Post highlights some of the “juiciest” bits,
which include a night of too many beers in Nashville, a White House
snub from an elegantly coiffed Jenna Bush while Meghan is dressed
inappropriately in glitter heels and cornrows, and some Xanax-induced
passing out on Election Day ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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A post from DoubleX contributor Helaine Olen:
This past weekend, the New York Times Magazine
published a piece about the push to diagnose depression in
preschool-age children, highlighting the work of Joan Luby, a professor
of psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis. The article concluded by demonstrating the uses of a cognitive
technique Luby, a pioneer in the arena of depression in the smallest
among us, recommends called "Parent-Child Interaction Therapy" (PCIT).
The therapy teaches unhappy little ones and their parents how to work
through stress, guilt, anxiety, and misery, as well as demonstrating
how to manage their emotional lives more effectively. Then I discovered the one detail the NYT neglected to mention: Luby has a long-documented history of receiving money from the pharmaceutical industry ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Jessica, the opening anecdote of Vanity Fair’s latest Sarah Palin takedown,
in which little Piper is forcibly ushered onstage for a public display
of maternal affection, didn’t do much for me either. I can’t imagine
any political road show operates any differently. The kid is backstage
playing with friends or dolls, and then the kid is pushed onstage to
wave and look cute. Malia and Sasha have done it a hundred times ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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Despite the fact that writer Michael Joseph Gross could not get anyone close to Sarah Palin to talk to him, he went ahead with this story in the latest issue of Vanity Fair,
which depicts the former Alaska Gov. as "a closed book and a constant
noisemaker," someone with a hairtrigger temper whose relationship with
the truth is iffy. Gross does a good job of pointing out Palin's
various dishonesties. She tells an audience that before she had her son
Trig, who has Down syndrome, "I had never really been around a baby
with special needs." This is a lie. Gross points out that Palin has an
autistic nephew, which she discusses in her book, Going Rogue ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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—Vanity Fair peers inside the increasingly strange and secretive universe of Sarah Palin and her traveling political circus ... (Read the rest of this post here.)
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August is a slow news month, hard on increasingly desperate journalists who don't get to spend it at the beach. But I'm still annoyed by this ginned-up story (on the first day of September, when news ought to be making a comeback!) from ABCNews, " 'The Town' Poster's Nun with a Gun: Too Sacrilegious?: Ben Affleck's New Movie's Poster May Offend Catholics." Italics mine, because the reporter calls the Catholic League and heads to a couple of very conservative Catholic universities for the bulk of her quotes, which are predictably outraged about the image, featuring two "nuns" with horror-movie faces robbing a truck ... (Read the rest of this post here.)