Lisa Miller

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

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

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

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

In the current cultural moment, marriage is painted as a state completely without pleasure. Permanent domesticity is thought to be so stultifying that to endure it married people must resort to lying, cheating, drugs, and/or secrets. There’s Gone Girl, the best-selling thriller by Gillian Flynn that features a marriage between a liar and a psychopath.

The shrinks and marriage experts call this “financial infidelity,” and it’s the latest thing in the secrets-and-lies category of relationship stories. Dr. Phil has warned against its harmful effects. Bloggers at Forbes, the New York Times, and CBS have weighed in. Last spring, SELF magazine published a poll revealing that although 70 percent of women

Marissa Mayer and the lessons of Sarah Palin. A beloved editor long ago bestowed upon me her loathing of what she called “women who” stories. Women who fight wars. Women who fight fires. Women who accomplish anything significant in worlds once reserved exclusively for men. Nearly 50 years after The Feminine Mystique, and 40 years after