Johnna Kaplan
By Johnna Kaplan
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Life Does Being ‘Moderately Attractive’ Matter?
Sometimes it’s the smallest offense that tips annoyance into full-blown outrage. CTBoom, a rather juvenile Connecticut news/entertainment/humor site I sometimes read, recently posted a video of a McDonald’s commercial involving a Hollywood actress-type who has never heard of Connecticut. But it was the post’s title, not the commercial, that set my metaphorical hair aflame: “Moderately…
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Culture Abrom Kaplan’s Cajun Dream
Driving west on I-10 out of New Orleans, you plunge almost immediately into a world made more of water than of land. First you cross the Bonnet Carre Spillway, which channels overflowing river water into Lake Pontchartrain. Later, in Baton Rouge, you rattle 175 feet above the Mississippi on a rickety cantilever bridge. And then,…
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Life More Fertile Than I Thought?
By now every woman with even the slightest interest in birthing babies has probably read Jean M. Twenge’s article “How Long Can You Wait To Have a Baby”, in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. If you’ve managed to miss it, and the comments it generated in all corners of the Internet, here’s the short…
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Life Who Does the Internet Think I Am?
Recently the Internet decided it knew a few things about me. The first was that I’m into Jewish news. Yahoo, a site I visit frequently to check my email, started personalizing the news stories it shows me. (And not just me; the company introduced increased personalization on the site several months ago.) What struck me…
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Life I’m An Unaffiliated Jew — So What?
I would describe myself, in Jewish terms, as a secular, cultural, Zionist, history-reading, challah-baking, lover and cherry-picker of tradition who by upbringing and affinity feels a deep connection to the Jewish people. The UJA-Federation of New York’s recent population survey would call me “other,” meaning, as Forward editor Jane Eisner recently defined the term, “Jews…
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Life When Diet Gets in the Way of Shavuot
This year, like other years, I am doing nothing special (read: nothing at all) for Shavuot. It is not, as Marissa Brostoff recently noted in Tablet, not hugely popular as Jewish holidays go. Every year I see Shavuot on the calendar and think, What’s that one again? And then I remember, That’s the one about…
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Life Meet the Women of Jewish American History Month
May, I recently found out, is Jewish American Heritage Month. (It also happens to be Mental Health Month and National Salad Month.) I don’t know how the existence of JAHM eluded me until now; it was first proclaimed by President George W. Bush back in 2006. (Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Senator Arlen Specter introduced…
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Life Who the Hell Am I Supposed to Marry?
The rebuttals to Julia Shaw’s Slate article titled “Marry Young: I got married at 23. What are the rest of you waiting for?” began almost immediately. There was Amanda Marcotte, also writing in Slate, who slyly pointed out that young marriage often leads to young divorce. There was Tracy Moore in Jezebel, who deftly dismantled…
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