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Combine Equal Parts Oprah and Martha
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
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Meet the Mom Bloggers Behind @PaulRyanGosling
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
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Can Marissa Mayer Have it All?
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
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Homeschooling, City-Style
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
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Manliness Is Next to Godliness: Tim Tebow, “Muscular Christian”
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
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Do the Rich Get More Recession Divorces?
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
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The Case Against Performance Marriage Proposals
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
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The Chemistry of Love
Take this all with a grain of salt, but a book being published next month by Current/Penguin, The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction, argues that all the sexy, impatient, bored, jealous, secure feelings you think you have regarding love—about your boyfriend or husband, the hot guy in the office, your
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Couple Crushes: The Relationships We Idolize
Back in olden times, which is to say last February, a social media fan site called Buzznet declared Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson “the perfect couple.” They didn’t have much to go on — mostly a bunch of cute pictures. But Buzznet extrapolated from that non-information, lauding “Robsten’s” authenticity and down-to-earthiness and interpreting their disinterest
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The Art of the Political Wife
Six days before the Republican convention, the GOP — already with a woman problem on its hands — is endeavoring to gain its balance after one of its own, a Missouri congressman named Todd Akin, made his ignorance regarding the way babies are made, as well as a medieval blame-the-victim perspective on sexual violence, the