Issues Links

  • 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…

  • Ten Amazing Facts about Beauty…

    The Communist regime of Mao Zedong banned the use of cosmetics in the 1970s, and visitors to China struggled to tell men from women. Today China is the world’s fourth largest beauty market, with most leading Western brands sold as skin lighteners.

  • CultureWatch, July 2010

    It’s enjoyable to find a story told in a layered way. This one reads so convincingly like a memoir that the reader is tempted to forget that it really is artful fiction. It could also be a non-academic dissertation of food with implications of the intimate connections between who we are and what we are…

  • Travel Notes; Tales to Tell

    “Oh, didn’t the guide call you? They have come and gone out on tour.” A scary feeling of being left behind in a strange city overtakes me and, trying not to panic, I ask him to call the guide for me on his mobile.

  • Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too:

    We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees.

  • A Summer Destination: 2012 Genealogy Workshops Across the US

    The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) offers the public a comprehensive program of genealogical workshops and courses in its facilities nationwide. Topics include an introduction to genealogy and research into records such as census schedules, military service and pension records, and passenger lists.

  • Appreciating Seahorses, Dragon Fish and an Albino Alligator

    The difficulty and the exertion in sampling and filming marine life is a unique challenge, at times exhilarating but also occasionally disappointing. Sea horses and their kin are being harvested intentionally for the aquarium and medicinal trades, and incidentally as bycatch in the shrimp and bottom trawl fisheries

  • Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World) at CJM

    We went as grandparents, whose grandchildren have discovered a number of the books she wrote for them … for her … for us. We can’t recall books that we’ve so enjoyed reading out loud, and perhaps ‘loud’ is the operative word. The characters become more alive when we stress the words, the outrageous but oh-so-real…

  • When Does It End? Gender Equalities in 22 Nations

    Many say that men get more opportunities than equally qualified women for jobs that pay well and that life is generally better for men than it is for women in their countries. This is especially so in some of the wealthier nations surveyed.

  • The High Art of Photographic Advertising

    “Inventive angles, extreme close-ups, and manipulation of light and shadow could create a sense of movement, reveal new dimensions and textures, and transform the mundane and everyday into beautiful abstractions”

  • The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government

    Basically, they slipped back under the radar, becoming moles more like the early 1960s feminist insiders. In that capacity they could still feed information where it could do the most good, award grants and improve policies around the edges. Banaszak concludes that the sympathy of the Administration matters, but not as much as scholars have…