In August, my family and I left Ann Arbor for a yearlong stay in Jerusalem. Ann Arbor is hardly a place devoid of intellectual and cultural ferment. Yet coming to Jerusalem was, for me, the chance to enter into a different ferment of ideas in a different language: Jewish ideas in Hebrew. At the summer’s…
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,…
We parents believe, at first, that we’ll keep the number of toys in our homes manageable. That we won’t become one of those families with plastic toys constantly piling up underfoot. We imagine that our kids will play school and house; that they’ll throw a ball around when friends come over. We imagine that once…
If you want to generate a spike in traffic to your website, to sell more copies of your paper or magazine, or to get more ”likes” on Facebook, you should write a screed taking down the way particular people parent their children. “Mommy wars” trigger media feeding frenzies whenever one of them rears its soft-spotted…
It was pretty impossible to be a female writer and not be aware of Judith Shulevitz’s Dec. 6 article in The New Republic on the aging of American parents. Not since the premiere of Girls was there such an eruption among the ladyblogs; it seemed as if everyone had her own perspective on the article’s…
Missing college student Lauren Spierer’s parents have slammed their daughter’s friends for “stonewalling” about key details from the night their daughter disappeared. In a new interview with ABC’s Katie Couric, Robert and Charlene Spierer, of suburban Greenburgh, N.Y. blasted their daughter’s friends at Indiana University for supposedly maintaining a code of silence about what happened…
To protect has always seemed to me to be the first duty of the parent. Living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with my husband and three young children, I knew what it was I wanted to shield my children from: violence, fear, social disorder so profound that it would unsettle their very sense of safety in…
This post is in reply to Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s Forward piece, “Keeping the Conversation Going: A Daughter Speaks to Her Mother Across the Memory Loss Divide.” When I read Margaret Morganroth Gullette’s article about learning to cope with her mother Betty’s memory loss, Betty reminded me so much of my own mother: vibrant, engaging, talkative,…
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