Lizzie Skurnick's Blog
December 20, 2009
December 12, 2009
Whether Elin simply chose a convenient moment when both matriarchs were already on the premises or had convened them there for that specific purpose, having Tida and Barbro present for the fight was likely neither an inconvenience nor a coincidence. The Swedish model, a former nanny, was just engaging in time-honored strategy known to all caretakers of the young: When a child is misbehaving, sometimes the only way to get them back in line is to utter the ultimate threat:
I'm calling your...
One of the more tedious aspects of the recent spate of alpha males behaving badly has been the experts who've covered, like faint mold, every scandal with their hoary theories about Why Men Cheat. For every skank on speed-dial, it seems, there is a shelf of studies explaining why some primo husband has bent to her appeal. Outsized ego, insecurity, hubris, and a complete disconnection from reality are big—if diametrically opposed—contenders. But the most popular theories take us back to the...
It's not surprising that the callousness with which this decade's publishers have apportioned disembodied female parts across thousands of covers should have spilled over into race, but the "Liar" scandal seems like as good a place as any to ask why girls who've already lost their faces should have now have their ethnicities masked. One would think a publishing industry, constantly fretting that it's on the verge of extinction, would be grateful enough to its massive female readership to not...
December 11, 2009
Yes! That is Vera Farmiga, as surprised as I am to note that I have 9,000 articles up this week on the apparently inexhaustible topics of marriage, child-rearing, discrimination and health care, though I only traffic in one and I pay for it dearly. (Health care.) In brief:
This July, Bloomsbury put a white girl on the cover of Justine Larbalestier's Liar, the story of a black girl, leading to a larger discussion on the paucity of black people on covers, to say nothing of black girls. For this ...
