Lizzie Skurnick's Blog, page 6

What Tiger's Mom Saw

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...

Rise of the Alpha Female

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...

I'm Team Tsing Loh: Whither Germaine Greer, Indeed?

I sometimes wonder if the rise of the Professional Parent — scouter of nursery schools, researcher of fashionable slingwear, proselytizer of low -VOC paint — is a backlash against the one, brief era in which women began to officially consider themselves outside the roles of wives and mothers. Because while the antics of the Professional Parent can be dreadfully humorous — witness the baby consultant — there is something disturbingly regressive, and positively fear-mongering, in this idea...

Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers

I, female, longtime book critic, longtime lover of males, writers, and male writers, must nonetheless point out an inconvenient truth: It has been a very strong two years for female writers and a weak two years for male ones, and the fact that the latter have garnered unseemly armfuls of praise and prizes for their tepid output is a scandal.

– Politics Daily

Sometimes, a Doll is Just a Doll

Some of you may remember the "Bewitched" episode in which Darren's white clients visit on Christmas and give Tabitha a white doll, her black friend a black doll, and a baby whose parentage they cannnot quite discern a stuffed panda. Darren and Samantha gently rebuke the couple for their racial absolutism, and as the show closes, the baby clutches the black doll, Tabitha plays with the panda and the black girl with the white doll. (Or does the black girl get the panda? This is why I would...

'Liar' — and publishers' values

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...

Book covers and race: A writers private collection – latimes.com

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...

Solicited

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 ...

Dad Men and other works of note

It's happened — the writers who brought down the media by sitting around in our pajamas crafting brittle insights next to a cup of cold coffee have now become too lazy even to blog. Which is to say, I keep updating here and here instead of HERE…even though here updates to there! I'm sure someone could craft an ontological exploration of how various media migrate to "realness" in the minds of the user, but you might be better off just friending me there until my brittle psyche thrusts me...

Same Old Story: Best-Books Lists Snub Women Writers

It is the conventional wisdom that women's writing gets overlooked in the prize department because it doesn't get enough attention at the outset, or because women writers aren't respected. I don't think either is true…Alice Munro, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood are North American institutions. (Thanks, Canada.) Kay Ryan is our poet laureate. The latest Nobel was given to a German lady. The ladies, they write good! We know it. So why are we so bad about showing it?

I got a glimmer of an...