Where older religions promised heaven, the church of yoga promises quicker, more practical, earthly gratification, in the form of better heart rates and well-toned arms.
— Hanna Rosin
NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.
Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.
Ever since viewing screens entered the home, many observers have worried that they put our brains into a stupor. An early strain of research claimed that when we watch television, our brains mostly exhibit slow alpha waves - indicating a low level of arousal, similar to when we are daydreaming.
For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects.
Breast-feeding does not belong in the realm of facts and hard numbers; it is much too intimate and elemental.
To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.
As we get used to women in power, we are likely to discover that they behave much like powerful men - vain, entitled, always looking for more.
The first time someone tried to share the Gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you... This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip.
I deeply believe that men and women need each other.
The general image of a man in an American sitcom is like a complete moron. You'd think the industry was run by a feminist cabal.
Factories not what they used to be - they're all extremely high-tech.
For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy - enforced through the rights of the firstborn son - has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions.
Interestingly, one thing I've found that neither women nor men give up on is the idea of men as protectors. Even in cases where the woman is earning more, they'll often tell me that if there were a fire or something, they would expect the man to be the one to protect them.
For women in, say, Alabama, 'feminism' is a dirty word. They would never march in the streets. But although they don't think of themselves as the beneficiaries of feminism, they are.
Yes, the upper reaches of society are still dominated by men.
Women had a rights movement where they fought for changes. Men... don't band together in quite that way. It happens not in such a public-cascade way as in a house-to-house way.
Studies show that recipients of Section 8 vouchers have tended to choose moderately poor neighborhoods that were already on the decline, not low-poverty neighborhoods.
The launch of a space shuttle can still make you weep with amazement and wonder, if you happen to be watching it.
The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you'd use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.
Previously, young children had to be shown by their parents how to use a mouse or a remote, and the connection between what they were doing with their hand and what was happening on the screen took some time to grasp. But with the iPad, the connection is obvious, even to toddlers.
In China, a lot of the opening up of private entrepreneurship is happening because women are starting businesses, small businesses, faster than men.
There comes a point in nearly every book event I've done when a little feminist revolt stirs inside the crowd.
The classic war movies of the post-Vietnam era have generally taken on grand, philosophical themes: the meaninglessness of war, the grinding down of man by the machine - the machine being war itself, represented by someone like Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in 'Full Metal Jacket,' the sadistic marine who turns his boys into instruments of death.
Every congresswoman surely endures the same strains that drive some of her male colleagues to have affairs: lots of travel, families far away, heady work that makes a domestic routine seem distant and boring. But the stakes are much higher for women, because they are still judged by a different standard.
Although they are unfailingly gracious, evangelicals are not so good at respecting professional boundaries.
Workplaces still operate like it's 1962 and one person is always at home, and they are not very good at adjusting for the fact that a majority of women work and take care of children.
Pop culture is like our subconscious.
Green jobs - those are jobs that feel like new economy jobs; they do require some training.
I think we should all call ourselves feminists.
Because women have been marginalised, they're more likely to behave like immigrants and continue to push themselves forward in order to avoid falling through the cracks, but I don't think a happy ending comes from matriarchy.
With the Jews, the questions are always open; we're always questioning. I love that questioning tradition.
Attachment parenting demands not just certain actions you take with your baby but also certain emotional states to accompany those actions.
You need to prepare the child you have for the world that exists.
Transsexualism is far less common than homosexuality, and the research is in its infancy. Scattered studies have looked at brain activity, finger size, familial recurrence, and birth order.
One way the Tea Party has benefited female candidates - and the conservative movement generally - is by consciously steering clear of social issues.
Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would destroy their morals, TV would wreck their eyesight, video games would make them violent.
On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them.
In American fertility clinics, 75 percent of couples are requesting girls and not boys.
We've heard that the hookup culture is destroying us. We've heard that it's saving us. We've heard that it's racist. We've agonized over which one of these is true.
There are always signs that a reign is ending, and they are usually spotted not in the king himself but in his court. In the inner circle, latent jealousies between advisers spill into open conflict, as they angrily debate who is to blame for the calamity, chewing over each other's past errors and pointing the finger at old and nascent enemies.
Evolutionary psychology tells us that men, especially powerful men, feel invincible and entitled to spread their seed, and that women can't resist the scent of masculine power. Women, by contrast, are said to be more altruistic and collaborative, seeking power so that they can share it with others.
There is no 'natural' order, only the way things are.
If my own current husband was suddenly a stay-at-home dad, it would be emasculating. That would be hard for me.
We're so marriage-obsessed, we think that only married people are families.
If you look at total numbers in the working and middle class, men still on average make more than women.
I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure.
Women have a tendency not to give up realms once they take over new ones. We are still proprietary over the domestic realm even as we take over new professional realms, and that is a real problem.
Maybe there's something about the outsiderness of being Jewish that makes for a fiery feminist type.
I could do a franchise for the end of everything. 'The End of Dogs,' 'The End of Cats.'
