Good Posture Decreases Back and Neck Pain and Improves How You Look
Maintenance of good posture promotes better health and fitness and can improve self-confidence. Ideal posture can be challenging to maintain and the “bad posture” that develops actually requires more energy to maintain during routine tasks (e.g. sitting or standing) and can lead to fatigue and pain.
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Poetry Sunday: “The Way Back,” by Francine Sterle
Francine Sterle’s “The Way Back” enchanted me from the first time I read it. First, her lush lyricism. Then, the poem’s payoff, an ending that is emotional without being the least bit sentimental. What draws me back again and again, though, is the way she controls breath on the page.
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Molly Fisk: Gutter Girl*
Despite not being an expert, I love bowling. When else do we get to play any more? So if someone offers you a million dollars to guess what I’m doing on a Wednesday night, now you know. After you’ve picked up the money, come join us: Bowling is good for the soul.
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Healthy Weight Control: Is it Possible?
Isn't it possible to be on a diet, especially a weight loss diet, without becoming preoccupied in an unhealthy way with restricting your eating, controlling your weight, or, worse, developing a dangerous eating disorder?
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‘Maudie’ — The Gentle Interior Life of an Outsider Artist
There are multiple ways to dramatize Maud Lewis’s life. In the enchanting new film 'Maudie,' Irish director Aisling Walsh and Canadian screenwriter Sherry White center instead on the artist’s unusual, at times abusive, but ultimately loving relationship with her employer-turned-husband Everett.
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Menopause and Eating Disorders
Both hormonal change and the stress of transition into a new life stage may affect women in midlife negatively. Early-onset menopause and its association with depression were discussed last month. Another unexpected mental health problem affecting women in midlife is the spectrum of eating disorders.
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Poetry Sunday: “American Dream with Exit Wound,” by Dawn McGuire
What a beautiful, sad poem. It treats an issue with high contemporary stakes—drug addiction among traumatized combat veterans—and also delivers a subtle and intelligent critique of war.
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Molly Fisk: Act Like A Post
My grandmother, Jonnie Fisk, was a backyard birdwatcher who parlayed her hobby into a calling at the age of 50.
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Visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture: An Emotional Experience
This museum was founded in the belief that a strong nation does not deny truth, even if it is ugly, painful, and shameful. The hopeful lesson that the museum teaches is that history moves forward, and, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
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‘The Beguiled’: Taking Southern Hospitality to a New Level
'The Beguiled' was an interesting choice for Coppola, and I’m so glad she decided to make it. Her sixth feature film, it is an interesting and feminist take on some fairly sexist and exploitative material.
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RO’s Recipes: Picnics on the Fourth of July, Part 2
For the elegant picnic Ro Howe, chef/owner of Barraud Caterers, in New York City has devised to mark the day of our Revolution, she offers these grilling recipes, as well as suggestions for sparking games for both children and grown-ups.
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Poetry Sunday: “The New Colossus,” by Emma Lazarus
An activist who championed Jewish identity and worked tirelessly to improve the lot of the poor, Emma Lazarus valued freedom and social justice and understood the importance of immigrants to this country’s future.
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Molly Fisk: Nine Short Lives
Maybe there’s a symbiotic reason we fall so hard for animals. Maybe it helps to rehearse a few entire life cycles before we’re faced with the end of our own. I don’t know. Today, I just want everything to stay the same forever, and all of it to be kind, and sweet, and easy.
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RO’s Recipes: Picnics on the Fourth of July, Part 1
The French term 'pique-nique' originally described an occasion where each participant contributed a share of the food and wine. But picnic, as we use it today, really came into its own in post–revolutionary France, when newly enfranchised citizens used the recently liberated royal grounds for their own entertainment.
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Fourth of July: Freedom, Fireworks, and Fathers
Summer has always been a time for fathers to spend time with their children, and there is no holiday—other than Father’s Day itself—that is more dominated by Dad than July Fourth.
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‘Beatriz at Dinner’: Standing Up or Minding Manners?
'Beatriz at Dinner' is so topical, dealing as it does with the great division we’re witnessing in this country between haves and have nots, conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats.
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Prevent the Summer Afflictions of Lyme Disease and Acute Sunburn
Summer, unfortunately, brings a hazard into some of our lives in the form of ticks. In addition, frequent sunburns and excessive UV radiation cause direct DNA damage and are the primary causes of skin aging.
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Poetry Sunday: “En Route to Bolinas, A Rose,” by Brenda Hillman
“En Route to Bolinas, A Rose” takes us on a journey that is spiritual as well as physical that leads us to the edge of a precipice, offering a glimpse into the darkness and mystery of the terrible eternal. That it does this by mimicking the action of human thought in a poem that feels light, vivid, and as fresh as a watercolor still on the easel to dry, is its genius.
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Molly Fisk: Rag Dolls
I miss that glorious sense of wealth when I’d look at the seven dolls or 35 sweaters covering my kitchen table. Tangible things I made myself: clean and perfect and in multiples! There’s nothing like it.
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Barbara Corcoran, Positive Thinker—The Secret Sauce of Success
Striving to do your best is a worthwhile goal, but perfection in all things is impossible. Worse, it is a destructive goal.
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‘My Cousin Rachel’ — Black Widow or Frustrated Feminist?
'My Cousin Rachel' offers up a fascinating, if unfinished, portrait of a woman’s attempt to buck a system that affords her less autonomy than her intelligence and sensitivity demand.
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Heat Exhaustion and Heatstroke: Awareness, Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment
Every year on average, extreme heat causes 658 deaths in the United States—more than tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and lightning combined.
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Poetry Sunday: “Nothing Gold,” by Ethna McKiernan
Today’s poem is a sad one, but in it the speaker’s great love for her father shines through, and that makes it beautiful. In telling her story, the speaker shows how well she has been taught by her father, and his great love for literature lives on in her person and writing, a living legacy and a wonderful poem for Father’s Day.
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Molly Fisk: Naked Lady Pearsauce
Until I moved to this house, I didn't know what to do with a plethora of pears, but last fall some friends and I decided if you could make applesauce then you could certainly make pearsauce, and we spent a weekend in a steaming kitchen proving this.
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