September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness
Are There Early Warning Signs?
Ovarian cancer accounts for only 4% of cancer in women, but due to its lethal nature, it is the 5th leading cause of cancer death in women. Since screening for ovarian cancer is currently inadequate, it's important for women to be aware of the signs and symptoms--and listen to their bodies.
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Poetry Sunday: “The Path,” by Anna Yin
A poem can be powerful and remain elusive and mysterious at the same time. In fact, many would argue that less accessible poems are more powerful than transparent ones. In this case, “The Path” is a mysterious poem, but one that also tells a clear story.
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Molly Fisk: The View from Here
Our culture takes so much pride in showing off women's body parts day in and day out, it's refreshing to see something else for once.
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Grace Visits: Artist Sandra Payne
I have never experienced an apartment where every inch of space was conceived as a beautifully composed art installation.
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Read All About It: The Danger of Getting It Wrong
If there is no generally agreed upon consensus about basic facts, what good is information that is presented as truth? How do we determine what is true and who can be trusted?
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Karen Allen Learns about Life, Love and Clamming in Year by the Sea
"Year by the Sea" is a fairly quiet movie, as it should be. Joan finds herself because she slows down and listens, really listens, to her own needs and wants, to nature and the day-to-day rhythms of the village she’s become a temporary part of.
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September is Atrial Fibrillation Month
More than 750,000 hospitalizations occur each year because of atrial fibrillation. This condition contributes to an estimated 130,000 deaths each year.
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Poetry Sunday: “When the World as We Knew It Ended,” by Joy Harjo
This poem was written in response to the events of September 11, 2001, whose anniversary our nation will commemorate and mourn tomorrow. In today’s political climate, we hear a lot of talk about being “woke,” but for many of us, the first flutter of the eyelids occurred on that dark day 16 years ago.
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Molly Fisk: Deadwood
For the first time since I was in high school, I have fallen in love with a television show.
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Harvey and Beyond: Coping with Disaster
What can we do, when faced with trauma, to increase our chances of bouncing back?
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Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Forty Years Later
Watching "Close Encounters" after forty years, it’s remarkable how well the plot, effects and cinematography hold up. Today, the model of the alien mother ship resides in DC at the Air & Space Museum of the Smithsonian.
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Hitting the Fall Job Market: Make Yourself Memorable
You have to rise above the typical noise that the throngs of job hunters make to get noticed.
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Poetry Sunday: “The Role of Elegy,” by Mary Jo Bang
As with most successful poems about personal grief, this one dwells less on the particulars of this speaker’s loss than on something more universal: the nature of suffering and the utter inability of our carefully compiled rituals to dispel it. And also of the inevitable human impulse still to try.
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Molly Fisk: Folklore & Mythology
The gods of heat waves, climate change, and road-widening projects are turning, as usual, a deaf ear. If they exist at all.
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Mobs, Bullying, and American Values
Bullies are usually insecure and scared. By targeting others who are perceived weaker than they are, they imagine themselves stronger and tougher, able to fend off feelings of insecurity.
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Fall’s New Series Line Up: But, Where Are the Women?
According to IndieWire, last season there were 41 new shows, of which 20 had female leads. This year there are 36 new shows and only 11 have women in the leading role.
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Anxiety In America’s New Political Climate
The American Psychological Association found that more than half of all Americans cited the political climate as a very or somewhat significant source of stress.
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Poetry Sunday: “Woodcutter’s Wife,” by Kristina Bicher
“Woodcutter’s Wife” speaks truth to the power of abusive relationships and casts light on the liminal space between genuine ignorance and willful not-knowing, the place codependents find themselves in day after day waiting for the worst to happen, and then it sometimes does.
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Molly Fisk: Because August
There's a joke that says in August people all over the midwest lock their car doors, while the rest of the time they don't bother. . . It's not about theft, it's about generosity. The doors are locked so your neighbors don't sneak in and leave you bags of enormous unsightly zucchini.
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How to Understand Hate
The origins of hatred and its ability to spread as if the Devil had tossed a cigarette into dried underbrush is a subject that has preoccupied psychologists, sociologists, and historians for much of the last 70 years.
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Vintage TV Review: Small Screens, Glass Ceilings
Fifty years ago, television viewers were getting glimpses into the lives of a strange new breed: career girls. Often played for laughs, but also presented with compassion and sympathy, these determined characters broke through the small screen — if not the glass ceiling — on a weekly basis.
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Opioids and the Slippery Slope of Addiction
Opioids—like Percocet, Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Vicodin, and morphine—are powerful pain relievers. When the patient is suffering acute pain, opioids can offer much-needed relief. However, in cases of chronic pain, using these medications for an extended period of time can lead to problems.
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“Sunday Morning at the Caffe Mediterraneum,” by Wendy Sloan
I read today's poem as a postmodern "carpe diem" poem, one that dispenses with sexual politics and goes to the heart of the matter for human beings of all genders: Life does not last, and we would do well to learn to enjoy it as it is while we are still in it.
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Molly Fisk: Heat Wave
Even if you don't believe in global warming, you can't deny there's a whole lot of contiguous local warming going on.
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