If you’re a woman in a Western or Westernized culture in the twenty-first century, chances are good that you have, do or will own, wear, struggle to get into and on occasion hasten to get out of a garment called a brassiere. A bra. A couple of  fabric cups and some elastic which contain, shape and redistribute the weight of two masses of mammary tissue… while also bearing the burden of more than a hundred years of cultural, medical and political debate and opinion. Just off the top of my head here, a bra:

• is an essential device to support, train and protect fragile breast tissue while slowing or preventing their eventual droop earthward;
• is a cancer-causing, lymph-node-squishing, shoulder-aching contraption which has no effect on the actual shape or condition of the breast; Full story »

One of these men will be the next Prime Minister of the UK

We had the last debate yesterday, and according to the pollsters, Cameron won. Whatever that means. Well, we know what it means—more people who were polled thought he won than either Brown or Clegg, although one poll had Cameron and Clegg tied. The important thing is that Brown did nothing to re-establish his status as a serious candidate after his soon-to-become-if-isn’t-already-famous encounter with Gillian Duffy, a lifelong Labour supporter, grandmother, widow, and caregiver to disabled children, whom Brown referred to as a “bigoted woman” because of her concerns about immigration. Full story »

I love the idea of a poem in my pocket.  As I searched for something to post for today’s feature, I found myself moving from poem to poem, nourishing places inside me long neglected amidst the practical rationality of my daily life.  I wonder how different my days might feel if I began each of them with a poem. I couldn’t possibly choose a single favorite, though I can identify many favorite poets. Among them is Pablo Neruda. I love the sensory immediacy of his language, the way his words embody the rich physicality of being. Although his love poems are those that move me most, here’s a delightful paean to what one might think of as an otherwise ordinary object:

Ode To The Lemon
by Pablo Neruda Full story »

Only in the shallowest of senses are the sonnets in Fatal Interview “traditional,” as they are often damned today. They are traditional, in outward form—Millay never went overboard for the epidermal innovations and prosodic gimmicks that tantalized contemporaries like e.e. cummings and Marianne Moore—but jarringly new in substance and sentiment.

Cristina Nehring: Last the Night

Full story »

I’m glad that Chris pointed out that today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, because I think it’s a great idea. But I had a similar problem to Sam – I couldn’t choose just one. Luckily for me, however, my two favorite poems are so embedded in my memory that they travel with me everywhere I go, whether I have pockets or not.

The first poem grabbed me when I first read it in high school, and it struck me because it appealed not just to the creative albeit fatalistic part of me, but also to the engineer I was well on my way to becomming. So without further ado, my first selection for this year’s Poem in Your Pocket Day:

Fire and Ice, by Robert Frost Full story »

As Chris noted earlier this morning, today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. The rules are simple enough, but I may need a bigger pocket. For one thing, I can’t make up my mind as to what my favorite poem is. And second, I have this bad tendency toward long poems.

The wall on my office at work features portraits of four great poets: TS Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Charles Wright. I love writers like Shakespeare (duh) and Blake and Donne and Arnold, to name a few, but these four are my favorites. It follows, then, that one of them is potentially responsible for my favorite poem, right?

Here are the candidates:

Eliot: “The Waste Land”: Many students have had this heavy, dark master work forced upon them, and experience tells me that most didn’t appreciate it. However, the poet in me has never shaken the influence it exerted. Even today, a good 30+ years after my first encounter with the Unreal City, it’s hard for me to write without being powerfully conscious of Eliot’s presence. Full story »

“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket,” John Adams wrote to his son, John Quincy, in May of 1781.

Today, nearly 230 years later, plenty of people are packing poets in their pockets. It’s national “Poem In Your Pocket” Day.

First celebrated in 2003, “Poem In Your Pocket” Day is sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. The basic premise, as you might guess, is for poetry lovers to carry their favorite poem in their pocket for the day. As opportunity presents itself, they can then share those poems with coworkers, friends, family members, and classmates.

Here’s mine: Full story »

When women decide to climb the corporate ladder or enter politics, before entering the fray they are usually forced to gird their loins and emotionally armor themselves like men. However courageous, adopting a command-and-control style of leadership often comes at great personal cost. In her new book, Iron Butterflies: Women Transforming Themselves and the World, developmental psychologist Birute Regine makes clear the extent to which women contort themselves to make it in a man’s world. If they’re not acting like Amazons, they’re becoming what she calls “shape-changers.”

But that’s only the beginning of the story. Ms Regine documents how, at a certain point in their development and often out of necessity, successful women bring traits and values traditionally associated with women to their callings and into the marketplace. In fact, writes Ms. Regine, a female-led revolution in leadership style, however off the radar, is underway. Full story »

Chris Hedges, normally a pretty bright guy, has a puff piece about some nice, thoughtful secessionists over at Truthdig. As always, the comments are entertainment enough in their own right, and are worth a look (although only one commentator seems familiar with the data from the Tax Foundation, which even Hedges doesn’t cite). Like other secessionist pieces we have commented on in the past, there’s an air of unreality here, as if we’ve fallen into some parallel universe where actions don’t have consequences. It’s an interesting piece nonetheless, because it’s unusual among this kind of reporting to actually engage in some of the logical, indeed, unarguable, rationales for secession. But it’s the wrong solution for the problem that the intellectual secessionists like Thomas Naylor and Kirpatrick Sale want to address. And it turns into an attempt to give an intellectual veneer to a very ugly phenomenon, although I suspect that was not Hedges’ intention.
Full story »

The Tea Party was right. Long have they railed against government intrusion of our most basic liberties. They warned us all of the threat of legislative overreach infringing on fundamental rights of Americans. Little did we know how quickly we would morph into the USSR, where the KGB could stop people at any time and ask to see their papers. And those who fail to comply or don’t have the proper forms were thrown in jail. This isn’t some dystopian fantasy; this is Arizona.

Full story »

Oh. Oh dear. It’s hard to know where to start with this one. You’re just going to have to watch it for yourself. Trust me – it’s worth it. ALERT: This is not a parody.

Full story »

It is three weeks later.

I have read articles that explained how many people who lost their jobs experienced a period of great excitement. The world is open and awash in possibilities. They can go anywhere and do anything! What a great opportunity, the chance to start over. Back to school, change careers, become the cowboy you always wanted to be!

The people who wrote those articles were lying. Except maybe for the cowboy part. Full story »

Christina Hendricks: that’s what real looks like, boys.

Today, women around the interwebs participate in Boobquake. The brainchild of self-described “liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted atheist feminist” blogger Jen McCreight, this Commemoration of Cleavage, Festival of Funbags, Jubilee of Jugs is in actuality a double-mam slap in the face to this jackass, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, whose charmingly magical thinking runs something like this:

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi is Tehran’s acting Friday prayer leader.

Wow. I knew adultery, rape, disease, societal meltdown, bastard children and plagues of locusts were the fault of my dirty pillows, but earthquakes? Damn. Full story »

The Newspaper Association of America is crowing of late over the growth of audiences at online news websites.

Newspaper companies drove record traffic to their websites in the first quarter of 2010, attracting an unprecedented 74.4 million unique visitors per month on average – more than one-third (37 percent) of all Internet users. This new record follows the strong audience newspapers delivered in last year’s fourth quarter, with newspaper websites drawing an average of 72 million unique visitors per month during that period. [emphasis added]

Editor & Publisher points out that these numbers demonstrate continued online growth carried over from the fourth quarter of 2009. The first quarter numbers apparently show visitors showing up and staying on site a while, averaging 44 pages per person during a visit of just more than a half hour.

The NAA is happily tossing confetti and joyfully dropping balloons over this booming Internet traffic. The business model of the future is nigh! Should anyone else celebrate?
Full story »

From poisoning disarmament protocols to thwarting development in India to even threatening corporate profits.

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — “The United States has made new concessions as part of its civilian nuclear agreement with India,” reports Nicholas Kravlev in the Washington Times . . .

. . . while New Delhi has yet to make it possible for U.S. companies to benefit from the unprecedented deal. … Washington agreed to Indian demands to increase the number of plants allowed to reprocess U.S.-supplied nuclear fuel from one to two [in order to] avoid long-distance transportation of dangerous materials. Arms control experts denounced the new deal saying it adds to the “damage” done by the original agreement.

For those unfamiliar with how damaging that was, Kralev reminds us that “the Bush administration went against established norms and allowed a country that has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to use U.S.-supplied fuel to make plutonium, though for strictly civilian purposes.” Full story »

As I write this I am six days removed from the worst day of my professional life. On March 25, after a classroom/lesson evaluation, I was informed by my supervisor, who I always held in high regard until she told me how useless I was, that I would not be rehired to my position as language arts teacher at a charter school in Norwich, Connecticut.

Dang. Full story »

By Jared VanDyke

Part five of a five-part series

I kept watch while John took a leak among Lily Dale’s sacred trees.

“Hey, at least I’m not peeing on The Stump,” said John. “And I’m just doing what’s natural. Isn’t that what (the Spiritualists) want?”

Bladder satisfied, John shuffled back to the path and we crunched our way deeper into the woods. We traveled half a mile into Leolyn Forest, a stretch of woods far older than the community on its border. We traveled to the focus of spiritual energy in Lily Dale—the Inspiration Stump. Full story »

We had our second debate last night, and it went pretty well the way it was expected to—Gordon Brown and David Cameron apparently decided that they didn’t want to be Nick Clegg’s best friend any more. Clegg’s (and the Lib Dem’s) dramatic surge in the polls following the first debate seems to be holding up. Much of the commentary, in fact, has been along the lines of “the gloves are off” kind of thing. Still, though, it was interesting and depressing for an American used to the brain-dead logorrhea that passes for political discourse in the US to listen to three politicians who, frankly, knew their stuff. The only American politician who comes close, in fact, is Obama. What a depressing thought. The mood was more confrontational, of course, since both Cameron and Brown felt pressured by Clegg’s continued improvement in the polls. But Clegg, by common consensus, held his own. (The set was even more bizarre than last week’s, if such a thing is possible.)
Full story »

It was announced yesterday that Louisiana-based CenturyTel is buying Qwest, marking the second major takeover in ten years for the Denver telco. I have some history with the US West iteration of the company, having worked there from 1997 until the ill-fated Qwest “merger” in Summer 2000.

I was fortunate enough to be a part of USW’s PR group, which remains the best large corporate communication division I have ever seen (and in that role I got to do some interesting, groundbreaking work). I’ve continued to watch the company fairly closely through the years, especially as the unfortunate Nacchio affair unfolded (and am proud of the repeated stompings we here at S&R have administered to that amoral cur along the way). I have hoped for the best over at 1801 California for a number of reasons. Full story »

This is a tale of a parent’s love, a lucky cup, a new pick-up truck, and the first ever Take Your Daughter To Work Day. This year, that day fell on April 21, and it’s no longer just for daughters. I should point out that this year also has 364 Leave Your Child At Home Days, and there are good reasons for that. Full story »