Kaavya Viswanathan and plagiarism

By now, most of you writer types have heard about the disgrace of Kaavya Viswanathan, who has been accused of plagiarizing large sections of her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, And Got A Life from 2 young-adult authors, and how the publisher Little Brown has pulled it from the shelves. (If you’re [...]

Not such a “hot” idea

Imagine holding a beauty pageant with unsuspecting contestants. That’s what’s been happening in Seattle. A website calling itself May Madness has set up a bracket system for deciding the “hottest” women on the Seattle Pacific University campus, with open comment threads discussing the looks of the women in question. While I find that sexist in [...]

Pop Quiz

How well have you been paying attention to the news this week? Take the Seattle PI’s Weekly News Quiz to see what you’ve learned in the past 7 days. I got 8 of 10.

The mystery of The Man In The Yellow Hat

I grew up on the Curious George books, heading straight for that section in the children’s area of the library upon walking through the door. In turn, I read them all to my kids, enjoying again the antics of that mischievous little monkey. I never thought about how The Man In The Yellow Hat acquired [...]

More thoughts on language

Since I wrote about the problems I have with the words suck and f*ck (* is to avoid search engine problems, not because I won’t say the word) and you were all too polite to disagree with me :) I wanted to give some exposure to some different viewpoints. Language is important, and I think [...]

A place of eternal safety

This is the day for referrals. Last week in the Carnival of Feminists I spotlighted Unwilling Self-Negation’s piece The Hoor’s Last Sigh about the images of women in the Islamic afterlife and how it affects the treatment of women in this one. Now she’s back with a post entitled Dude, Muslim Lesbians! The piece is [...]

The Women In Between

This morning I’d like to point you to a series of essays written by my good friend A’isha Azar. (Disclaimer: I did her website.) The Women In Between focuses on a group of Arab-American women from the time they are newly arrived in this country until they are raising teenagers born in the US. They [...]

Lifetime learning

Back in February I wrote about MIT making their lectures available on line. Now Berkeley has joined the party. If you have I-Tunes installed on your computer, you can access audio files of lectures and special events on the campus. Offerings include: Computer Science – 151 tracks Biological Sciences – 57 tracks Engineering – 137 [...]

This date in history

1898: Spain declares war on the United States after rejecting America’s ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba. 3,549 Americans died. 1915: The Ottoman Turkish Empire begins the brutal mass deportation of Armenians during World War I. 1,500,000 Armenians died. Which event do you remember? Read more about the first genocide of the 20th century at The [...]

Analyze this

I have a great relationship with my shrink’s assistant. Donna is the one I call to make appointments and she’s also the one who calls randomly to check on me and just talk when she knows I’m in a bad patch. She’s single-handedly talked me down out of a panic attack when the doctor was [...]

keep looking »