This week’s arrest of Roman Polanski felt weirdly unsurprising. It fit somehow with all the flashbacks to 1969 the media’s treated us to this year — as that TIME cover put it, “From the Moon to Charles Manson.” What will the 1970s reminiscences be like, one wondered? Maybe like this. But who really remembers 1977? [...]

I was thrilled to read Judith Warner’s column in the September 24 New York Times (“The Real Cougar Fans,`” ripping the new cougar ethic). Personally, I am appalled by courgardom – not by its age reversal (who cares about age and gender disparities if they work?), but by its stalker aspect:  Since when does a woman, particularly [...]

A few years back, Oprah Winfrey announced she would be devoting an entire hour to the importance of “girlfriends” in women’s lives. As I groped for the remote control to turn off the TV, the camera panned an audience of smiling faces—as young as 25, as old as 70—and I found myself reaching for the [...]

The baby rabbi, a young man of 26 — fresh from seminary, the most junior of the four in our vast congregation — delivered the sermon on Rosh Hashanah morning. At first, he spoke of creation and destruction, judgment and mercy as the messages of the festival. This day, he said, we are created anew [...]

Let’s be crass at the outset. A half a million dollars. Five hundred thousand bucks,  in quarterly installments of $25,000 for five years. That is enough security to stop a sculptor of stanzas in her tracks, but there is no question that it will most likely just help the iconoclastic poet Heather McHugh to keep [...]

(In honor of the September 29 70th anniversary screening of The Wizard of Oz in Central Park, with a free concert beforehand featuring Jennifer Hudson. — Ed.) Learning that Carey Graeber was a college student before she saw The Wizard of Oz in its entirety isn’t all that strange. “We had a black and white [...]

At 35 years old, I wasn’t expecting a heart attack. Afterward, I had a friend tell me, “If I had to make a list of 10 people least likely to have a heart attack, you would have been at the top of the list.” I  certainly never thought I’d have two, so quietly that they [...]

We are five unlikely friends who have been together for 18 years. We’ve seen one another through three divorces, three marriages, the deaths of four parents, the near-death of one spouse, and the birth of four children and a grandchild. There have also been four big moves, to the point where only one of us [...]

My husband invited me to dinner last week. He made reservations at the finest restaurant in our neck of the woods: a white tablecloth sort of place, with a dining terrace positioned for viewing unobscured sunsets over the Pacific Ocean and designed for lovers anticipating the night. At last! Having the older kids in college [...]

I began to focus on the menopausal transition in 1991, when Gail Sheehy asked me to consult with her on her book The Silent Passage. What an incredible and unique opportunity. This month, known nationally as Menopause Awareness Month, is a good time to reflect on what the New Menopause really means. Back then, I [...]