Cooking

  • Joan Fontaine

    Rose Madeline Mula: If You Can’t Stand the Heat

    Rose Madeline Mula Writes: “It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that I entered the kitchen of my hostess, the legendary actress, Joan Fontaine, one long-ago Thanksgiving morning, to offer my assistance. Acting was not Miss Fontaine’s only talent. Not by a long shot. She was also a hole-in-one golfer, a prize-winning fisherwoman, a hot air…

  • An Undocumented Childhood by Rose Madeline Mula

    An Undocumented Childhood by Rose Madeline Mula

    Rose Mula Writes: Some people never leave home without their American Express card; I never leave home without a camera. Digitized pictures of the twenty-five countries and forty-plus states of America that I’ve visited since my first tour of exotic New Hampshire constantly flash on my computer monitors and digital frames throughout my home, helping…

  • Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library

    Julia Sneden Wrote: Love Your Library

    Julia Sneden Wrote: My mind’s eye can still see the face of the Children’s Librarian, although I have long since forgotten her name. We will be wise to continue to back up our knowledge of history and literature and art and science with hard copy. She kept up with my reading level, suggesting writers and…

  • high heels

    Julia Sneden Wrote: If The Shoe Fits … You Can Bet It’s Not Fashionable

    Julia Sneden Wrote: My mother was a mini Imelda Marcos. She kept upwards of 40 pairs of shoes well into her 80’s, and was crushed when she had to give up high heels following a heart attack at the age of 89. Her sole criterion in buying shoes was style, not comfort, and she was…

  • Vintage jewelry, Wikimedia Commons

    Joan L.Cannon Wrote: A Family Inheritance: More Than ‘Things’ … Emblems of Our Lives

    Joan Cannon wrote: As one advances in years, one accumulates possessions the way a caddis fly larva accumulates grit. The glue that makes us carry it all along with us is in a way self-secreted as well. However, it’s psychic rather than physical — emotional rather than material. Perhaps the most obvious example is a…

  • ways to grasp a pencil

    Julia Sneden Wrote: Old Dogs, New Tricks

    Julia Sneden wrote: At the age of 37, I started a new career as a kindergarten teacher. My first day on the job, the lead teacher, who was in her 70’s and scared me every bit as much as she scared the children, watched me writing a note. “You’ll have to change the way you…

  • Captain Charles E. Yeager

    Joan Cannon Writes: Finding the Right Excuse; Committing Words to Paper Because …

    Joan Cannon Writes: Think of the poets and novelists and playwrights whose words sink into the consciousness of thousands and even millions and remain there, as emblems, guides, beacons of hope or warnings of disasters, and the excuse (as if one is needed) presents itself. Maybe there’s information or a revelation for some unknown viewer…

  • stack of books

    Joan Cannon Asked: What is a Book Club? An Old-Fashioned Book Report? A Program Given By an Author? What Is the Accepted Practice?

    Joan L. Cannnon wrote: A year or so ago, I was invited to attend a tea given by the combined membership of all the book clubs in the town where I now live. A presentation was scheduled for the proprietor of the much-loved local independent book store cum gift shop. She is a legend in…

  • Culture Watch, March 2010

    Joan Cannon, Jill Norgren and Julia Sneden Review:  Kristin Hannah’s The Winter Gardenis a slightly flawed but enjoyable tale about people who fit the fiction, but some of them perhaps not quite to the life; Daniyal Mueenuddin’s In Other Rooms, Other Won…

  • Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

    Research profiled in this report shows that people judge women to be less competent than men in “male” jobs unless they are clearly successful in their work. When a woman is clearly competent in a “masculine” job, she is considered to be less likable.

  • My Own March Madness

    You got the papers?””Check! You got the checkbook and cash in your wallet for lunch?” I asked.”Check! What route are we taking?””Oakdale Road, turn right at Floyd Avenue, another right onto McHenry,” I recited. We sounded like a pilot and co-pilot going through a pre-flight list before getting permission from the control tower to take…

  • My Family Health Portrait; A Tool From the US Surgeon General

    It is private — it does not keep your information. It gives you a health history that you can share with family members or send to your health care practitioner.

  • Candide at 250: A NYPL Digital Exhibition

    “Have men always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”

  • Were You ‘Dethroned’ In Your Birth Order? Birth order effects in the formation of long-term relationships

    In two large surveys of diverse populations, we found that people are more likely to form close platonic and romantic relationships with other people of the same birth order. This effect cannot be explained by confounds of family size.

  • The CBO’s Health Plan Cost Debut and Medicare Benefits Enunciated

    It improves Medicare benefits with lower prescription drug costs for those in the ‘donut hole,’ better chronic care, free preventive care, and nearly a decade more of solvency for Medicare.

  • How Ethical is Your Travel Destination?

    People from wealthy and powerful countries often express their opinions as if they are the absolute truth. Such preaching invites anger and resentment. We suggest tempering conversations with phrases like “I believe,” or “My view is,” rather than, “Everybody knows ….”

  • State of the Packaging Art: Educational Wine Labels Help Consumers Make Smart Choices

    The lemon on the Muscat de Rivesaltes goes best with yellow desserts like lemon, creams, ice creams and pineapple. (It also has an affinity with foie gras, Roquefort cheese, peach desserts, exotic fruits and mint.) The apricot on the Grand Roussillon color-associates apricot, orange, caramel and cinnamon-flavored desserts. (Foie gras, goat cheese and coffee desserts…

  • Looking at Why Do Investors Trade Too Much?

    Men tend to be more overconfident than women. The difference emerges most strongly in areas such as finance that are perceived by our society to lie in the male domain. If overconfidence leads to excessive trading, one might then expect men to trade more than women. They do. In short, trading is a mistake made…