I'm a 26-year-old woman just starting my career and this is exactly what my mom has always told me. She's a lawyer who was about to make partner when she stopped working to raise my sister and me. Part of that decision was driven by the difficulty she was having being accepted as a full member of the firm while trying to raise kids at the same time and part of it was driven by the fact that she realized she barely knew me during my first year of life.

When she tried to get back into the workforce when my sister and I were teenagers, she had a very difficult time of it, despite her excellent credentials. She has since started a second career and has been working full-time (albeit making much less than she would have had she kept working as a lawyer) for the last 10 years or so.

She has always told me to never stop working, even if it's part-time, and to always make sure you can support yourself, no matter how certain you are that your partner won't leave you.

On a related note, this is one of the reasons my fiance and I are almost certainly only having one child. We think it'll only make it easier for us to both keep working full-time.

NYT Commentator The Opt-Out Generation Wants Back In

There was one thing deep in Master's nature that he himself never knew how to adjust. This was his love of his country and the resentment of her suffering. Throughout the years in which I saw him daily, the thought of India was to him like the air he breathed. True, he was a worker at foundations. He neither used the word 'nationality' nor proclaimed an era of 'nation-making'. 'Man Making', he said was his own task. But he was born a lover, and the queen of his adoration was his Motherland. Like some delicately poised bell, thrilled and vibrated at every sound that falls upon it, was his heart to all that concerned her. Not a sob was heard within her shores, that did not find in him, the responsive echo.....

His country's religion, history, geography, ethnology poured from his lips in an inexhaustible stream..... Just as Sri Ramakrishna, in fact, without knowing any book, had been a living epitome of the Vedanta, so was Vivekananda of the national life...But of the theory of this, he was unconscious...

-Excerpts from The Master As I saw Him
Sister Nivedita

She also argued against the prevailing belief that the country’s economic expansion was “pro-poor,” demonstrating that most of the benefits accrued to the rich because there were few mechanisms to let growth trickle down to lower-income households.

#Poor Myth
#Takeda
Economic Analysis of Poverty in Transitional Russia: A Microeconometric Approach

"The studies are clear," says Dr. Walter Willlett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It’s a myth that it’s just the fat in your diet that makes you fat. ... It doesn’t make any difference where your calories come from."

| Dr. Walter Willlett
Harvard School of Public Health

Fat of the Land

What kind of sanity is it that cheers the mining of ever dirtier and more polluting petroleum in a world climate fast changing to conditions where those claiming their sanity can no longer live?

This week, the world marked the passage, upward, of the benchmark 400 ppm atmospheric CO2, the highest it's been since the dinosaurs. We are fast heading toward a climate only dinosaurs can live in, and you claim this sanity?

| In Response to Pipelines :: Enbridge’s (ENB) Northern Gateway pipeline project

There are so many gains from fat talk. It signals submissiveness -- to one's conversational partner, to society. It fishes for compliments (oh, no, not you!) and in a wierd way, it exonerates with a half-hearted helplessness that often gets masqueraded as "self-acceptance.

First friend: “I can’t believe I ate that brownie. I am so fat!”

Second friend: “You must be joking — you are so not fat. Just look at my thighs.”

The second friend’s reply, an “empathetic” self-deprecating retort to maintain the friendship on equal standing, includes reflexive praise of the first friend’s body, supposedly feeding the first friend’s hungry cry for affirmation, Dr. Corning said. But to do so, the second friend has eviscerated herself, a toxic tear-down by comparison.

| NYT

And who said women are the greater sex !?



Rob Poh |

As a graduate student, I had the dubious pleasure of watching primates in social troops behave as primates do. Undoubtedly the experience of those years has shaped my perception of humans-as-primates. Monkeys certainly, and it seems to me humans, interfere with each other's socio-sexual lives. Doing well? Here, let us fix that for you. Fat-talk looks to me an awful lot like the incessant low-level harassment primates employ to keep one another in check while jockeying for social advantage. To some that will sound critical or even cynical, but it seems to me that fat-talk is just one expression of social behavior that tries to balance cooperation and competition.

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Both sexes do a certain amount of 'our gender only' behavior regulation. Men, a little less, I contend, because they're not nearly as dependent on being liked by members of their own sex, as women are. Guys instead tell larger than life stories about themselves to one another. There's an understanding that the stories are hyperbolic. The dance carries its own limitations. Men don't beat up on one another much once they mature because that's just a stage in their lives. Also, they avoid judging one another once they mature because they've learned from experience its not healthy to judge. There is pressure to succeed by a male standard but usually not enough to create neurosis. I think it comes down to emotional support. Rightly or wrongly, men often try to get along without it. Women seem to have a whole series of emotional needs that have been nurtured during socialization stages of their early lives. I have had women tell me they feel sometimes the need to escape this. That its a relief to have men to work with because the world of women is so constantly challenging.