Almost finished I promise

OK, so I'm mostly done investigating my own navel, i.e. discussing the response to my parental overshare post . But, two things. Thing o...

Office hours UPDATED

For the record, I did not write that letter (third and final) to Jezebel's new friendship advice columnist, Sara Benincasa. But there i...

Adulthood Studies: how do you buy pants?

I've decided I don't have a problem with leggings , or even leggings-as-pants (despite having once received 15 minutes of fame for ...

What my great-grandmother wouldn't have recognized as Brooklyn

Despite living in oddly-rural suburban NJ, and having had to dodge a live turkey while driving a couple days ago, I feel very connected to B...

Mansplaining and Impostor Syndrome

There is an academia-specific mansplaining-anecdote blog . If you are female, feminist, procrastinating, or the trifecta, there goes your da...

The squickiness of contraception

Ross Douthat, I'm confused . Sure, a belief that a fetus is a baby is not necessarily inconsistent with the belief that a woman should b...

Maybe she was born in Maybelline UPDATED

I've been against "natural" beauty since forever, but this is not a post about that. It's a post about how 'celebriti...

Lena-not-Dunham UPDATED

Caity Weaver of Gawker has written a hilarious but essentially mistaken  take-down of a NYT real-estate-section profile of some parents bu...

Today in misguided nostalgia

- For the good old days before abortion was legal . There's a welcome cameo from Katha Pollitt in the comments. She says it all better ...

Sharing is caring

Normally, when I write something  formal , and often informal as well, I include counterarguments. But when writing that post on parental ov...

How I stopped worrying and learned to function in suburbia

Thus far this weekend, Bisou has had one long woods-walk and one all-out woods-and-boulders  hike . And her usual walks, because - permit a ...

The millionth thing you've read about Lena Dunham and privilege

The new "Sex and the City," in case you missed that. Lena Dunham explains it all. Not as in explains it all to us - that too - but...

The navigation of Zabars

Some posts here really just exist because I saw something that so perfectly fit one of the preexisting tags. Between (on "Navigating Za...

When the hottest German is a Jew

So Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget not only share space in my dissertation, but also had the same Russian-Jewish lover. The rest of the a...

On the stairs to Susan Ross's apartment

The revisionist history of a love life, as told by a woman of a certain age, has perhaps grown into a genre in its own right. Or maybe not -...

Coffee politics

Remember the young woman so privileged she was applying for food stamps ? The detail readers honed in on was the $1.50 coffee-shop coffee t...

Anachronistic fashion-victimhood

Are you a woman (or a man)? Do you wear your hair somewhere between your chin and shoulders? With bangs? You   are, without knowing it, imit...

Cheapness made easy

Ever since Kei invented the idea of a " wanty list ," I've used this concept in my own life and spending-or-lack-thereof. At a...

Consider the nerve hit

How timely! The notorious "Vogue mom" is back, selling a memoir about putting her 7-year-old on a diet. (To the nitpickers: At le...

On writing for those outside my immediate family

So, I have a post  about parental overshare at The Atlantic, on The Sexes, which is their gender section. Woohoo! I'm going to use this ...

Adventure is relative

Oh the adrenaline: my first-ever solo drive, following a long accompanied drive this morning, which included Route 1 as well as what would h...

What is wrong with French people re: same-sex marriage?*

Frahnce. You instituted civil marriage before everyone else, thus giving me a dissertation topic. Your appeal to gay men is well-established...

The NYT endorses your cappuccino habit

As you certainly know , I believe you should drink as many lattes as you can stomach. More accurately: I find cheapness-advice that urges yo...

Ladies' night

We at WWPD are familiar with the arguments against straight women going to gay bars . These, however, assume that the bars in question are ...

Jew-fro politics

Philip Galanes, whose interviews on Leonard Lopate and such have gotten me through many a poodle-walk, addresses the Jew-fro . A man who use...

Confessions of a woods-hermit

-We're all going to get the super-flu . Even those of us who got flu shots months ago. I'm going to make use of the lack of commute ...

In which I attempt to break free from my own unpaid internship with WWPD Industries

Having completed one of my New Year's resolutions , it's of course time to get moving on the rest. The dissertation plods along, bu...

Cultural references for the new adult driver

Here's what I've come up with, off the top of my head. Please add more in the comments! -"Clueless." The ultimate driving-...

Un verre de vin, s'il vous plaît.

Think of the children. Specifically the 18-year-olds given wine on a class trip to France , with their parents' permission. To Paris , ...

"When the body isn’t working on breaking down and assimilating food, it works on repairing itself," and other bad advice on the internet UPDATED

"The fact that, thanks to favorable genetics, I can eat and drink mostly everything and still stay on the slim side is a blessing and a...