As we gear up to elect or not elect a woman to be our next President and Commander in Chief, our deepest cultural anxieties bubble to the surface.
Those trust funds of New York's finest families are fraying, as author Wednesday Martin describes Manhattan’s ever-shifting hierarchy of status.
My essay The Captivity of Motherhood was recently one of the most popular articles on The Atlantic. Hope you will have a read and leave a comment.
My piece for the Huffington Post. Read it here.
When our family moved from the West Village to the Upper East Side in 2004, seeking proximity to Central Park, my in-laws and a good public school, I thought it unlikely that the neighborhood would hold any big surprises. For many years I had immersed myself — through interviews, reviews of the anthropological literature and participant-observation — in the lives of women from the Amazon basin to sororities at a Big Ten school. I thought I knew from foreign.
Peaches Geldof died, possibly of starvation. Maybe something else was going on, too. But her death, which leaves her family bereft and two little boys motherless, is a springboard for thinking about high pressure, glamorous motherhood and the standards that stress women with kids and even put them in danger. Messing up your electrolytes can give you a heart attack. Did you know that?
The annual Playground Partners Luncheon took place at the Boathouse in Central Park recently. It was a snowy day, but that did not reduce turnout at this popular event. Like grooming behaviors among female papio cynocephalus (savannah baboons), attending events is an affiliative, pro-social behavior that promotes group and dyadic cohesion. We're weren't picking bugs off each other, but we may as well have been. In attending these events, talking to one another and eating and drinking together, asking about outfits and kids and work, we are essentially reassuring, connecting with and touching one another.
What does giving up drinking have to do with billionaires who pledge to give away half their wealth? Or the Kwaikiutl potlatch ceremony in which chiefs set their most prized possessions on fire or give them away for show?
Louise Mensch, the former Tory MP, is something of a lightning rod for controversy in Britain. But in New York, where Mensch lives under the radar, she talks to author Dr Wednesday Martin about her forthcoming book, Beauty, which naturally leads to a discussion about beauty overseas and here, ambition, power and playground politics.
Developmentalist Jean Piaget famously observed that "play is the work of children." But in some places, work is the work of children. And that's not a bad thing.