Sunday, September 20 was the 19th anniversary of my father’s death. He was killed when he was only 60 years old, in a car accident in Russia. In retrospect, almost 20 years later, the situation seems ridiculous. Russia was still the communist Soviet Union, and the people there were going hungry from the inefficient and, […]
Love & Family
Women’s Rights: All We Take for Granted
I know it’s more than a week ago—old news—that Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (authors of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, to be released next week by Knopf) wrote an epic cover story in The New York Times Magazine about women’s rights around the world (or lack thereof). But […]
What We Can Learn about Working with People from Working with Horses
I’m one of those women who would have been horse-crazy as a girl if my parents had allowed it. So I tentatively began learning about horses after I grew up. One of the places I started at was called Last Chance Ranch (doesn’t that sound like a great title for a romance novel?). There, Lori […]
Food Inc: Worth Seeing, Even More Worth Believing
I finally got to see the film Food Inc., which took a few months to reach a multiplex near me in Pennsylvania. So, on a hot Saturday night I took my 12-year-old daughter Eve to see the 8:10 show. Unfortunately, there were only two other people there. I was tempted to veer to a different […]
Ponyo: Finally, a Great Family Movie
If you haven’t seen it in the theatres yet, Ponyo, a new Japanese animated film by Hayao Miyasaki, is one of the rare gems of a movie that the whole family will enjoy, and that is worth seeing on the big screen. Our family doesn’t get out to see movies together very often. Between the […]
Reading For Pleasure: My Top 5 Favorite Authors
By now, most people know I’m a lover of romance novels. I’ve been trying for years to break down some of the stigma and erase the shame. The truth is, I need romance novels to survive, and if they didn’t exist, I would have to invent them. The very reasons I need them all year […]
The Summer That Never Was…
My 12-year-old daughter keeps begging me to go back-to-school shopping, and I tell her she may not ask again for at least two weeks…but then that’s only a week before school starts. ARRRRGGGHHHHH! I feel like summer never even started! Between the constant rain and cool weather (there wasn’t one single night where I lay […]
Top 10 Tips for Sober Entertaining
I haven’t had an alcoholic drink in over 10 years, and I don’t miss it one bit (except maybe once in a while, after a hard day in the office). But it does make entertaining different, and slightly challenging. You don’t quite realize just how much entertaining revolves around alcohol, until you stop revolving around […]
Scratch
Raised on America’s first organic farm, Scratch author Maria Rodale learned how to make everyday favorites from, yes, scratch — the way you remember them; the way they turn out best.
Order NowOrganic Manifesto
Drawing on findings from leading health researchers as well as conversations with both chemical and organic farmers from coast to coast, Maria Rodale irrefutably outlines the unacceptably high cost of chemical farming on our health and our environment.
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