It is hard to think about growing vegetables in weather that won't even let you drive to the grocery store to buy them. But planning your garden may be just what you need to distract you from the blizzard outside. And Mel Bartholomew makes that planning so much easier. This civil engineer-turned-gardener is the originator of square-foot gardening, a system of 4-foot-by-4-foot aboveground…
February 28, 2010
Sixty years after Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer, the Baltimore County, Md., woman's cells live on in laboratories around the globe. Collected by Johns Hopkins researchers as she was being treated, the cells grew incessantly and have since helped scientists make blockbuster medical advances, including cancer treatments and the polio vaccine. Decades passed before anyone…
February 24, 2010
When comedian Jim Gaffigan needs inspiration for his stand-up routine, he looks to the low end of American life. Gaffigan loves to romanticize about lying on the sofa, eating unhealthy food like Hot Pockets and piles of bacon, or making a late-night Waffle House run. He plays a stereotypical American - whiny and ultra-lazy - like few other comedians. That could be why so many Americans…
November 21, 2009
A report released last week reveals that most of us believe only teens from poor or single-parent families get pregnant. And we are wrong. According to research conducted for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, only 28 percent of those who report having given birth or fathered a child as a teen lived in families with incomes below the federal poverty…
November 6, 2009
My mother gave birth to four daughters in five years, and my sisters and I grew up fighting like cats in a pillowcase. She didn't help matters much by giving each of us a capsule description and then using those descriptions almost in place of our names. I was the oldest and her "rock of Gibraltar." Cynthia was born 14 months later, and she was "a joy to behold." Ellen came two…
October 22, 2009
The Pill earned its capital letters in my house when my mother found mine after my freshman year in college. The packet had been designed to resemble a woman's compact so that birth control could be discreet. But I was a flower child and we didn't wear makeup, so I hid mine between the mattress and the box springs of my bed. I think my mother was looking for trouble. "You know,"…
October 9, 2009
Thomas Perez, the Maryland lawyer selected by President Obama for the administration's most important civil-rights post, won Senate confirmation yesterday after months of delay. On a bipartisan tally of 72-22, the Senate voted to approve Perez's nomination as head of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. Only two senators, both Republicans, spoke out against the nomination.…
October 7, 2009
Ricky Gervais has cast himself perfectly as the hero of The Invention of Lying. Playing mild-mannered Mark Bellison, the first fellow to practice the art of prevarication in an alternate world where everyone tells the truth, he's a master of covert-ops performing. Gervais makes it fun to follow an abject failure like Bellison on the worst day of his existence. His squeamish boss…
October 2, 2009
The list of sins against women in the United States is long. We still lag our male counterparts in pay. We just about outnumber men in college but are only a fraction of the bosses in business. We just about outnumber men in law school too. But there are only two women on the Supreme Court. We work outside the home but still handle most of the chores in it. We are in regular…
September 26, 2009
The NFL season has begun, and I know who I am rooting for. Michael Vick. Once the highest-paid and perhaps most dynamic player in professional football, Vick has paid one of the highest prices in the history of animal cruelty. And he is still paying. Now working as a gadget guy and back-up quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, Vick has a target on his back and a price on his…
September 21, 2009
How could kids resist chicken coated with potato chips? By having their mother tell them there are potato chips on the outside in such a way as to suggest it might be the world's greatest treat. I think my kids would have liked these little chicken poppers, adapted from the book The $7 a Meal Healthy Cookbook, if not for my buildup. However, I wished the potato chip exterior had…
September 16, 2009
They say that the work of a parent is never done. It just changes.
It is a truism that carries a lot of baggage for those of us who came of age in the era of professional motherhood, when their report card might as well have been our report card. When we were only as happy as our most unhappy child.
Now those children are young adults, and those hyper-involved chickens have come…
September 14, 2009
It looks like the White House vegetable garden - first lady Michelle Obama's effort to model healthful eating for the nation - is infested with a pest previously unknown to horticulture. It's the boll weevil of the blogosphere: the conspiracy theorist.
June 26, 2009
My son has a thing for lemons, so I was pleased to find this recipe on Tastespotting, a food photography site.
I was encouraged when my daughter said, "This is not too bad . . ." Though she followed up with: "But it is bad." (She's 8. Tweenhood has begun.)
And Sam, the lemon lover, was simply unconvinced that there…
June 24, 2009
