The Goldilocks Dilemma

A week or so ago, I saw a slide show of “strange plastic surgeries” on MSNBC’s web site.  While I’m pleased that the site listed these procedures as extreme (even “oddball”), I was struck by one thing in particular.  Two of the surgeries were meant to remedy complaints about women’s calves.  If a woman had [...]

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Paint it Black

By now you’ve probably heard, read about, or experienced the odd Facebook meme of women posting their bra color as their status, supposedly in order to raise awareness of/for breast cancer.  Mashable’s brief article about the phenomenon was picked up by The Huffington Post, but I can’t find any other media coverage.  Moreover, no one [...]

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So what would a lioness be?

This post has nothing to do with best of/end of the year/end of the decade/retrospective. Jes sayin’. So a friend sent me a link to this New York Observer essay. After reading it several times, I’m 99% sure it is a joke, a satire on the way we’ve taken to describing various types of women [...]

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Dancing Queen

The blogosphere has had quite a reaction to this image, originally posted in an article on Gizmodo: Brett Singer wrote an interesting response to the image on ParentDish, and the article prompted some fervent discussion.  While I think the image is a hoax, I’d like to consider some of the implications of its being real [...]

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Stress Test

I came across this article on Yahoo news a couple of days ago, and my initial reaction was that the author’s interpretation of the study’s findings was not quite right.  So I dug a bit more and unearthed this article by Reuters.  I’m intrigued by the different approaches to the same information by two journalists [...]

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Ambush!

Like all good liberals, I get most of my news from MSNBC.  Every Thursday, the MSNBC web site features the Today Show‘s newest “Ambush Makeover” participant.  There are a few things about this “news” feature that I find problematic.

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Feminisn’t

Last week, Slate’s Culture Gabfest mentioned a column in the New York Times Magazine about UrbanDictionary.com.  Curious to explore this cultural phenomenon, I started by looking up “feminism” at the largely youth-authored site.  After sifting through 71 definitions (some near-duplicates), my initial disgust turned to confusion and eventually a realization that UrbanDictionary.com’s babel may eventually [...]

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