Mandolin Orange, the duo of Emily Frantz and Andrew Marlin, offers a gem with the release of their latest album. They have been touring regularly over the last few years, but this album whispers of the desire to be home. The last cut, “Of Which There Is No Like,” ends with: The fiddle, guitar, and mandolin blend with the voices surrounding you like a comfy blanket in the chill so you can settle back into your rocking chair or porch swing and enjoy life as the sun sets over the horizon. Hold me tight tonight my darling Out of the […]

My husband and I recently moved into the home we purchased a few months ago. We can envision living here for decades. Once all of the boxes are unpacked and the furniture put in place, we’ll need some time to relax. One of my hopes for our home is to show hospitality through sharing guest bedrooms and meals. But I am also keeping an eye toward developing practices in our new home to help us continue to live simply. As I packed up our boxes, I reflected that I felt we had the right amount of stuff (not a precise […]

An interesting email came my way today, encouraging youthful summer job seekers to “look outside the box.” The story pitch noted that the most traditional jobs for teenagers are retail, recreation, and food service. Done, done, and done—between me and my children, at least, we covered those bases. How nice for kids to use summers to experience a bevy of different kinds of jobs! But it made me think of some of the more unusual jobs I held during those magical summers when I wasn’t yet employed full time year-round. How nice for kids to use summers to experience a […]

Two weeks ago, an antifeminist blogger received way too much media attention when he suggested that men shouldn’t see Mad Max: Fury Road because it was feminist propaganda disguised as an action flick (even though he hadn’t actually watched the film). That non-story gained a lot of traction among media outlets, but it really just gave a lot of press to a site that should have just been left to wallow in its own hatred. The question remains, however: is Mad Max: Fury Road really a shift in action film philosophy regarding gender roles? Well, not quite. The women are […]

By Charles Kwuelum In a recent conversation with some friends, we got into an argument about the relationship between extreme poverty and hunger. “There is malnutrition and hunger because of extreme poverty,” argued one friend. Another retorted, “Even if extreme poverty is eradicated, over 800 million people will remain malnourished and hungry.” The argument points out the need to address both the accessibility and the availability of food. In the end, extreme poverty and hunger are inseparable. People need to have the resources necessary to buy food for their families. At the same time, food production needs to keep up […]

Traditional power dynamics get the inside-out treatment in Thomas Vinterberg’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a historical film drama based on the 1874 novel by Thomas Hardy. The English author (most famous for Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) was about a hundred years ahead of his time as a feminist thinker. This sweeping rural opera makes an unforgettable case for giving Tess a break from the high school English class spotlight and letting Bathsheba Everdene, the heroine in Madding Crowd, have the reins for a change. As romance-heavy as all that sounds, this isn’t your usual dances-and-horses […]

My head was pounding. My eyes hurt. My stomach didn’t feel so hot either. I marvel at the creativity of human beings and how—even in our off hours—we tackle difficult challenges. There were still gobbledygook lines showing very prominently on the site of “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,” which looked very much like Latin. But I’m told it is actually nonsense, used as fill-in lines that a designer uses to illustrate a typestyle, or “font,” until a writer writes the real thing. A writer like me, not a Web guru. So what was a 60-something woman, a […]

By Joshua Russell A recent article in the Washington Post showed a map of “the most racist parts” of the United States. This map was determined by data from Google, who had tracked the frequency of searches for a particular racial slur in media markets across the country. Markets that had a higher search rate were classified as more racist than those that had a lower search rate. The map classified Baltimore as less racist than average. If this methodology is taken at face value, then apparently the recent protests over the death of Freddie Gray were mistaken. In reality, […]