Remember When Parents Were in Charge?

Negotiating, "empowering the children," and everything wrong with running your family like a corporation.

I just read the second news story in as many weeks about a new trend in parenting: the family as corporation. The idea, according to a couple of new books that are out there, is to bring home the principles that make your company run smoothly and apply them to your spouse and kids. And it is a terrible idea.

“Lean In”? How About Butt Out, Sheryl Sandberg?

I don’t hate Facebook’s COO because she’s successful. I just don’t want a life like hers.

So I get home from work on Friday all ready to do a little relaxing, and what should I find in my mailbox but the latest issue of Time, with a photo on the cover of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, looking simultaneously hot (in the “Hot for Teacher” sense) and cool and collected, hair perfectly coiffed, lips expertly glossed, beneath the headline: “Don’t Hate Her Because She’s Successful: Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and her mission to reboot feminism.” So off and on all weekend, while I did six loads of laundry and mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned the bathrooms and pruned the trumpet vine that’s threatening to take over the garage, I got to read about how Sandberg thinks I am DOING IT WRONG.

I Am Never, Ever, Ever Going to Stop Worrying About Taylor Swift

Love’s hard enough when you’re not trying to write new songs about it all the time.

I’ll say it right out: I was an early Taylor Swift adopter. I liked her from the first song of hers I heard on the radio—on the country station, which is where she started. It was a ballad called “Tim McGraw,” and to me, it captured perfectly the poignancy of love found and then lost. It was hard to believe the writer was only 16 years old.

An Ode to Lena Dunham’s Thighs

I’m mesmerized by them—and by the way she shows them off.

Every woman has a body part she's really not fond of. Some of us have more than one. Lena Dunham, creator, writer, star and director of HBO's hit series Girls, has several body parts that aren't like the usual body parts one sees on TV, which is odd, because we see these body parts all the time on her show. Since she's the one in charge, you have to figure she wants us to see—nay, to dwell on—her pouchy belly and rounded shoulders and sizeable bottom, since the camera lingers on them often enough.

If You Were John Boehner, Your Ass Would Be Fired

The will of the people? Try the won’t of the people.

All hail Presidents Day, known for automobile sales and bearable traffic on the Schuylkill Expressway. It’s not really a day for thinking about politics. Yet here’s what I was mulling over on Monday on my day off from work:

Dispatches From the Blizzard of 2013

So it was probably not such a great idea to drive to Long Island this weekend.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. A quiet weekend in February. A trip with my husband, Doug, to the beaches of the Hamptons, at a time when they’d be deserted. It would be a well-deserved getaway for us both. Sure, a big snowstorm was due to hit New England, but I’d been watching the Weather Channel avidly for days before we left, and it wasn’t supposed to be bad where we were headed. The last thing I did, after we’d already loaded up the car, was recheck what was expected in the town we were driving to: No snow until after 8 p.m. on Friday. We were leaving at noon for the four-hour drive. We’d be fine, right? And if we got snowed in once we were there, well, who cared? It was a luxury resort!

“Generation Light”: The Brave New World of Not Owning Stuff

Kids today live lives of such splendid buoyancy.

One of those ubiquitous articles about the death of print journalism—this one from Editor & Publisher, written by “new media consultant” Alan D. Mutter—has introduced me to a term I’d never heard before: “Generation Light.” According to Mutter, twentysomethings these days, in reaction to parents who have to rent storage units to hold their overflow acquired-due-to-rampant-materialism stuff, have become stripped-down, airy-as-gossamer souls flitting from apartment to apartment, job to job, city to city, unencumbered by all the worldly possessions that weigh their plodding elders down.

Too Much Downton Abbey Is Bad For Your Manhood

It’s true, guys: Those marathon Netflix nights are killing your sperm.

What with the Beyoncé halftime extravaganza and the mysterious third-quarter blackout that lasted for half an hour, Sunday night’s Super Bowl was even longer than Jacoby Jones’s record-tying kickoff runback. In fact, the game clocked in at some four and three-quarters hours, which is way too long to be eating chips-and-dip and wings. Chances are that when the game finally ended, with a clever safety play the 49ers clearly weren’t expecting—but that the announcers had cannily discussed but ruled out—you were thinking about bed. We, though, were worrying about your sperm.

Hey Stupid! Keep Texting While Driving!

Think you’re good at multitasking? You’re not. And you might be a psychopath.

Just last week, my good friend, Philly Mag fact-checker extraordinaire Annie Monjar, wrote an item for the Philly Post poking fun at Vince Fumo’s girlfriend, Carolyn Zinni, for her online petition seeking to provide the Vince of Darkness with more fruits and veggies while he’s occupying a federal prison cell. Annie even quoted Vinni’s cry of anguish: “My Loved one is away in a Federal Prison Camp and has NOT had a piece of fruit or fresh vegetable in almost 4 YEARS !!” Mere hours later, Annie slunk into my office in horror. Vince Fumo had been hospitalized in Kentucky for...