Elissa Strauss has written for the Forward over a number of years. She is a regular contributor to CNN, whose work has been published in a number of publications including The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and Longreads.
Elissa Strauss
By Elissa Strauss
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Life Kids and the Happiness Factor
For a few years there, it seemed like everything published about parenting was about how miserable it made you. This collective freakout was largely sparked by a 2010 story in New York magazine called “Why Parents Hate Parenting,” by Jennifer Senior, which centered on a study that showed that childcare ranked sixteenth in pleasurability out…
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Life Give Sheryl Sandberg A Break
Can we all please give Sheryl Sandberg a break? I mean, come on. She is hardly the worst thing to happen to intelligent women since the “Real Housewives” franchise, and yet, for some reason, we are treating her like she is public enemy number one. Her new book and media campaign “Lean In,” written to…
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Life Leave Friedan and Dunham Alone
The 50th anniversary of the publication Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” has inspired many to reconsider the book, warts and all. One of the abiding criticisms of Friedan’s book over the past few days is that it was limited to the worldview of an upper-middle class white woman. Today, Lena Dunham, who very well might…
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Life Women’s Messy Name-Change Situation
Dear Abigail, You end your recent essay about changing your last name after you get married in a state of ambivalence. Simply put, there is no easy answer to the age-old and hugely common dilemma of how to preserve one’s family while simultaneously creating a new one. Just as surely as I want to share…
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Life Women’s Gray Hair Problem
Remember that “Sex and the City” episode about secret single behaviors? You know, those quirky activities many of us do during our alone time, like Carrie’s grape and saltine sandwiches or Charlotte’s pore-staring, that, according to the New York Times, are done by real people. Well, mine is searching for gray hairs. I have about…
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Life Why Mayim Bialik Retired the Boob
One of our most famous endurance breastfeeders, if not the most famous endurance breastfeeder, Mayim Bialik, has decided to retire the boob. Her 4-year-old son Fred has officially weaned. As she writes over at Kveller: Fred isn’t going to nurse on his way down the wedding aisle or at his high school graduation. I didn’t…
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Life Why Relaxing Stresses Me Out
Once again, science tells us what we long suspected was true: Never-ending work days, weeks and years are not ideal for human productivity. According to a recent story in the New York Times, a “new and growing body of multidisciplinary research shows that strategic renewal — including daytime workouts, short afternoon naps, longer sleep hours,…
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Life We’re Angry, Mayor Bloomberg!
We all know that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is straight to the point when it comes to politics, but many of us were caught off guard when he used this same bluntness to describe a woman’s backside in front of a journalist. As recounted in a recent New York magazine profile of New…
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