I came across two good news stories today, and I thought I would share them, to balance out all the bad news that slurries around. Here are two people to be inspired by. I read today about Mighty Girl Tiana, who saved the lives of three babies in a house-fire last night: A 12-year-old bundled […]
‘The Second Shift’ has persisted through the several decades that women have been working outside the home in large numbers. It’s the name authors Arlie Russell Hochschild and Anne Machung gave to the phenomenon of working women coming home and doing another whole shift of house-based work. Also known as the double burden, the problem […]
I first encountered Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty a few years ago with this striking video showing the (tenuous) relationship between a billboard photo of a woman and her face without the hours of work on her and her photograph. The neck-stretching is particularly astonishing. Dove’s recent addition to this series is doing the rounds […]
Playschool, Rainbow, Sesame Street: I could still sing you the theme songs. The Muppets. The Smurfs, though I was disdainful of the lack of female representation, even at six. The Flintstones and every other Hanna-Barbera cartoon ever made. Happy Days, Diff’rent Strokes, The Cosby Show, Benson, Charles in Charge, M*A*S*H, The Beverly Hillbillies, Hogan’s Heroes, […]
I love a good list, and I’m a sucker for book competitions. So I was excited to see that the New Zealand Post Children’s Book Award finalists have been named. I was not excited to read some of the conclusions of the judging panel (Bernard Beckett, author of the very clever Genesis, Lynn Freeman from […]
There’s an emptiness inside her And she’d do anything to fill it in But all the colors mix together – to grey And it breaks her heart My dear friend Angela did something extra brave today, and you can hear her do it by visiting this Radio New Zealand National page. On Afternoons with Jim […]
I don’t want to say our Pancake Party wasn’t the best time in town, but it can hardly be compared to the scale and splendour on offer at Carnival, Karneval and Mardi Gras celebrations around the world. One of my favourite blogs is The Big Picture, a collection of news photography from around the world, […]
We’re in Melbourne for a course my husband is doing (lucky me to be here and not doing a course!) and today I was out walking with SBJ in the suburbs. I saw a sign I liked on a building. I didn’t have my camera, but it said something like: One in five Australians lives […]
In Steve Biddulph‘s new book, Raising Girls, he apparently calls for an army of aunts to take their place in helping parents to raise resilient young women in a difficult era. The Guardian reports: It is a view about to be revived by bestselling author and psychologist Steve Biddulph, who is calling for an “aunties […]
O email! O you super-convenient marvel! O you disappointing eater of time! Are you in control of your inbox or does your heart sink when you open your email? How much time a day, a week, do you spend on reading and writing email messages? How much of that would you like back? If there was […]