Archives for 2009
Louis Menand, writing about the “overproduction” of Ph.D.’s in the humanities (via 11D): The moral of the story that the numbers tell once seemed straightforward: if there are fewer jobs for people with Ph.D.s, then universities should stop giving so many Ph.D.s—by making it harder to get into a Ph.D. program (reducing the number of [...]
Things are changing. We live here now, since a little over a week ago: I love Manhattan.
One of the comments on DoubleX’s reader stories of health insurance nightmares: To the woman with blood clots… Call your insurance company and ask for their Appeals department. You want to file an expedited appeal. (Expedited appeals are different legally than regular appeals. The company is required to get you a decision generally in less [...]
So, umm, let’s work on finding all this funny… this morning produced the following series of adventures for our toddler: first, she got hold of and spilled and broke my coffee cup. My fault: it seems today she’s rather taller than, say, yesterday, and my brain seems to be having a slow day because I [...]
Z can walk really well now, and she can walk fast. Like, look-away-a-minute-and-she’s-at-the-other-end-of-the-house-throwing-the-phone-into-the-bathtub fast. So there may not be a lot of writing here for a while. There is so much walking going on, and not enough time!
I shan’t be going to Blogher this year after all. Why? Well. A has to travel for work then and I’d have to take Z with me. Which would be fairly expensive. And right now, we suddenly need to hoard all our cash and then some because something so awesome I can’t quite believe it [...]
Z is now a walker. She taught herself to walk carefully, meticulously, and with lots of caution designed to avoid encounters with anything that might hurt. It was impressive to watch: she set her mind to it and practiced and practiced and slowly but surely figured it out, over the course of a little over [...]
My brother is visiting and yesterday I was walking around town with him when a woman I used to work with at the university walked by us. I was pushing Z in her stroller and looked straight at her and was about to say hello when she sort of looked at the stroller and rushed [...]
There’s the pointless embarrassment of a state governor calling a press conference to reveal he’s had something as commonplace as an affair. And the emails he’d exchanged with his Argentinian paramour (via 11D) made public, which almost made me feel sorry for them. Almost, but not quite. I don’t know why Mark Sanford is at [...]
Two icons I grew up with died today: Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. They were both too young to leave us.
I can’t take a feminist seriously if she takes a condescending tone towards traditionally female activities like crafting in order to make some otherwise valid points about the marketing practices of e-business sites (in this case: Etsy) (responses at Jezebel, Magickal Realism, 11D, etc.). In that article, Sara Mosle implies that an educated stay-at-home-mom’s non-work [...]
If medical bills underly 60% of bankruptcies, then how much of all debt, including outstanding debt that hasn’t yet crippled anyone, is due to medical expenses? The figure comes from a Harvard Law School/Harvard Medical School/Ohio University report (via HuffPo), which also found that Nationally, a quarter of firms cancel coverage immediately when an employee [...]
Kedves Zsuzsi! Now that you are a year old, it seems only fair that you should get a letter from me. After all, you can almost read! (Ahem, turn the pages of books so fast that no one can see what’s on them.) I can’t quite believe you’ve been around an entire set of 365 [...]
If those of us who grew up speaking another language can learn to pronounce others’ – to us – foreign names correctly, then isn’t it only common courtesy for them to do the same for us? I possess no special talent in this and refuse to assume that everyone else can’t do something I’m able [...]
Z got mended, of course. We did end up going to the doctor, who was great and whom I want to take home with me to New Jersey, then on the third day of her fever it all started to go down and by the fourth day, all we were left with was a lot [...]
We are in Detroit! About which I am ridiculously excited except for some minor glitches, about which more below. And no, we’re not staying in a motel at all, instead in someone’s renovated house in Brush Park. There is ridiculously beautiful architecture here: Most of it in varying stages of decay: And then there are [...]
Turns out my local mom-friends and I are in a fairly small minority. One could say fringe minority. Let me explain. Obsessions die hard and I’ve been researching everything about infant nutrition and especially breastfed babies in some of my off moments. And it turns out that in the U.S. a bit less than 12% [...]
We’re going to Detroit this Friday for three weeks. A’s going to be photographing and I’m going to spend lots of time not being on my own with Z! I mean except when he’s got to go shoot somewhere where I refuse to go on account of general unsafeness with babies. Who crawl everywhere, and [...]
I tend to have a lot of ideas for blog posts while showering, playing with Z, walking the dog, grocery shopping, and so on. Somehow I never remember any of them when I sit down to blog. On the other hand, my daughter has a wicked sense of humor. And by wicked I mean the [...]
I know that’s not a word. Or anything close to it. I just keep thinking of that school strip search story, and just what component of it scares me the most. And it’s this: that there is no semblance in it of respect for a student’s integrity. You really can’t just go searching people’s lockers [...]
Stories like this, about schools and their right to strip search, without due process, any student if they suspect s/he has any drugs on her/him, they are symptoms of serious damage to American society. It does not matter if the students actually have drugs because no lesson is learned this way, and no one is [...]
1. I realize they mean well. And yet it’s safe to say that few people have done more damage to my mental health than pediatricians since Z was born. I’m beginning to gear up for the 12-month visit. Or rather, do research till I drop to brace myself for it. I can’t believe Z will be [...]
In a good way. If you haven’t already, go watch Susan Boyle sing.
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