Art Gish Is Dead at 70: A Terrible Loss for Peace and Justice

This isn’t news for my local readers, but I want to say a few words in tribute to Art Gish, who was killed in a tractor accident earlier this week. Art was a fixture around Athens, Ohio, selling his organic produce at the farmer’s market, often including such exotica, by American standards, as dandelion greens. You’d [...]

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My Wonky Computer

I probably should know better than to wade into a controversy when my computer is acting wonky, but no. I don’t. Earlier this evening, here’s how my screen looked after it froze and I relaunched it: This lovely image has appeared several times in the past week, but this time I couldn’t go back to [...]

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Erasing Children in the Public Sphere

The worst plane flight of my life was a transatlantic hop in which a baby cried pretty much uninterrupted from takeoff to landing. To make it worse, the child was really too old to be a baby anymore. He was a chunky twenty-month-0ld! His parents appeared to have no strategy able to calm him! Things [...]

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Only in Germany: The Dildoking in the Subway

I came upon a banner ad for a very NSFW enterprise in the Berlin subway yesterday. What’s not work-safe in the U.S. is evidently subway-safe here. I’d have snapped a photo but didn’t have the gumption to explain to my kids why it was funny and disconcerting. (Oh, kids, we’re not in Ohio anymore!) At seven [...]

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The Troubles with “Rape by Deception”

In my last post, which discussed the racism behind the conviction of a Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, of “rape by deception”, I promised to address the fundamental problems of “rape by deception” in a separate post. I deferred this for two reasons: First, I wanted to address issues of racism and purity separately (insofar as [...]

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“Rape by Deception” and “Race Defilement”

Most likely, you’ve already heard that an Israeli court last week convicted a Palestinian man, Sabbar Kashur, of “rape by deception.” He met a Jewish woman on the street outside a Jerusalem grocery store. They struck up a conversation. She assumed he was Jewish due to his nickname, “Dudu,” which apparently is common among Jewish [...]

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A Viennese Treat

Once upon a time, when I was a feisty college-aged feminist, I could hardly stand to watch a James Bond movie. The sexism just pissed me off. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily shell out money to see Bond in the theater, but if he turns up on the television, I’m mostly amused. That doesn’t mean I’m [...]

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Boneheaded Ev Psych “Explanations” for Why “Older” Women Like Sex

Via the Daily Dish, here’s some rank foolishness from evolutionary psychology. Time magazine has a woefully uncritical recap: A new journal article suggests that evolutionary forces also push women to be more sexual, although in unexpected ways. University of Texas psychologist David Buss wrote the article, which appears in the July issue of Personality and Individual Differences, [...]

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Parenting, Radioactively, in the Quiet Zone

My “cleverest” parenting ideas are like radioactive compounds. They start out relatively stable, but shortly they begin to decompose. Soon, their positive effects can be measured in nanoseconds, while their toxic fallout is guaranteed to outlive me. Such was my clever idea of challenging the kids to a “quiet contest” in the stairwell of our [...]

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Overheated Caturday

The heat spell grinds on. The German Rail company now blames global warming for its massive breakdown of high-speed trains. They were built to a “Norm” (standard) of functioning that went all the way up to 32 C (90 F), so all must be well! In the early 90s, no one could imagine such high [...]

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The Goodest Thing about Being a Parent

I periodically vent here about my squabbling offspring, but I need to pause now and celebrate a moment of pure glory. A few days ago I crashed into a major professional roadblock. I was fretting about looming unemployment after next May. Feeling bitterly rejected. Trying to act brave while actually, literally crying into my ice [...]

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Financial Reform: How We Got in this Pickle

I’m still waiting for someone to help me understand what the financial reform package will and won’t do. (So far, I suspect that my understanding is vague partly because the reforms themselves are vague; on German TV, I heard them described as more of a framework than a set of concrete reforms.) Until the lights [...]

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I Write Like Who??? (And How Did Dan Brown Sneak in Here?)

Via Echidne, I took one of those silly internet quizzes, this one purporting to correlate one’s own humble prose with that of famous dudes. (I suspected they were all dudes because I took it multiple times and did not turn up Margaret Atwood, to my overwhelming sorrow. A commenter at Echidne’s subsequently turned up a [...]

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Dog-Days Entertainment for the Bird-Brained

Since the intense heat is keeping us partly apartment-bound, I’ve been grateful for any and all kid distractions. A few days ago, I came upon a wonderful set of bird pictures by photographer Andrew Zuckerman (via Andrew Sullivan and the Daily Telegraph). The Bear and I had a great time looking at them. The Tiger [...]

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The Monstrous Spawn of Soccer and American Football

Evidently, one ill-fated night soccer and American football got together in a drunken hookup. The fruit of their conception was last night’s World Cup final, a monstrosity of a match between Spain and the Netherlands. It was probably the most foul game I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve watched quite a lot of soccer. If you [...]

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Running Hot and Cold on AC

Scene 1: I spend most of the year freezing. I’m usually the first person to complain about air conditioning running too cold. I can hardly function in an office that’s cooled to 60 F, as our university consistently does to the Women’s and Gender Studies offices. I don’t think well when I’m cold, and (rather [...]

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Catbloggers Caution against Catscans

Sooner or later, most parents end up in the ER with their offspring. And if you’re a frequent customer, chances are pretty good you’ve bumped up against the increasingly ubiquitous CT scan (aka “catscan”). Our Tiger has racked up more than his share of visits, including one when he was three when he ran a [...]

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“Mama Grizzly”: Palin’s Disingenuous Bid for Mothers’ Votes

Still wondering why Sarah Palin’s politicization of her motherhood is fair game for political scrutiny? Watch and cringe: (Go here if you can’t see a functional clip.) (Click here for a visual description and full transcript at Shakesville; bless them for having a community that provides accessibility even for Sarah Palin’s gibberish.) Others have already [...]

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Poor Lovelorn Me: Spain 1, Germany 0

You know you shouldn’t do it. You know your heart will be broken. Your beloved is unsteady, fickle, transient. He’s bound to let you down. When he does, you’ll be crushed. And your friends will either be equally crushed by the same unreliable cad – or they’ll mock you for being such a trite stereotype. [...]

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Breaking News! Men Want Sex, Women Want Love!

In a recent interview at Salon, Cacilda Jetha and Christopher Ryan, authors of the new book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, conveniently tell us what sex is really like. They start with gay couples as their reference point, which is an interesting move, but then their theorizing goes straight down the Mars/Venus [...]

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