Unwelcome turns. An upbeat e-mail arrived this week from my friends at Zipcar, and it made me so sad. “Add a damage fee waiver for smooth sailing, Lisa,” it said. “Be prepared and enjoy the ride.” Zipcar, launched in 2000 to transform a maddening industry, was selling me collision insurance I probably don’t need. It […]

>Watching Hillary Clinton testify before Congress yesterday, in what will probably be her last big act as secretary of State, all I could think was, The woman is bulletproof. After more than two decades in the public eye, she comes across — at long last — as a powerful, authentic, and authoritative leader, not some

The new domestic ideal owes more than a little to the fading moguls. Apart from their plainest similarities—you can count the living women’s-media tycoons who are also lifestyle icons on two fingers—Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey would seem to come from different planets. One is blonde, thin, tall, chilly, exacting. The other is brown, sometimes

Five hours before the presidential debate on Tuesday, the celebrity avatar known as @PaulRyanGosling was unceremoniously shut down. “We have received a valid report that your account is engaged in non-parody impersonation,” wrote Edward Mayfair from Twitter HQ. The suspension was ill-timed, and not just because the debate was the perfect venue for the feed’s

There comes a moment in every very ambitious person’s life when she sees with perfect clarity that the path before her is blocked. For Marissa Mayer, Google employee No. 20 and Silicon Valley’s reigning “geek queen,” this moment occurred last year, when her former boyfriend, Google co-founder Larry Page, kicked her off the company’s elite

Why more and more city parents are teaching their kids themselves. Homeschooler Ocean, 5, of Cobble Hill, playing with his 2-year-old sister, Billie. “When school was created, it prepared people for the industrial revolution or factory jobs,” says mom Oona Hart, who shares homeschooling duties with her husband, Danny Timmins. “It’s limiting.” It’s 1:15 on

Tim Tebow is the answer to the prayers of a certain kind of macho Christian, one who recoils at the image of Jesus Christ as a mild, effeminate savior presiding over some nice bread and wine at supper. Such Christians prefer a tougher king, Mel Gibson’s bloody action hero in The Passion of the Christ

I am rereading the Little House books with my 8-year-old daughter, and this time around, things between Pa and Ma don’t look as peachy as they did when I was a child. Ma, we learn, wants to live in town so the girls can go to school and church. She wants neighbors; she’s afraid of the

Last week, David Pogue, the New York Times tech columnist, proposed to his girlfriend and she said yes. That’s the short version. The Times wedding announcement version would go something like this: David Pogue, the eminent columnist, somehow found time between writing his newspaper pieces and his Scientific American column, his NOVA series, and his