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"Coinciding with the news of Don Newman's retirement there's a fascinating essay in the current issue of Newsweek, written by veteran columnist Anna Quindlen. She's stepping aside from her column, and she was moved to do it after reading the submissions for a journalism award that goes to journalists under the age of 35. Quindlen suggests that people in her age-group - the baby boomers - have created a bottleneck in American journalism and it's time for some of the older generation to step out of the spotlight.
She also notes the wider context. 'Watching a black man born in the 1960s, who likes to say his father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas, barnstorm across America, I began to have inconvenient thoughts about myself. Barack Obama hopscotched over an entire generation of politicians to reach the White House; he had not waited his turn because a majority of the American people decided that he ought not to do so. They agreed that the country needed change.'"
- John Doyle. "Our political coverage lacks punch. Time to shake it up." The Globe and Mail. Toronto, Ont.: May 5, 2009, R.3. | |
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"Dream big and then make a logical plan to make that dream come true.... Have sympathy and compassion for those people who will tell you that what you want to do can't be done. Instead of arguing with them, smile and ask them what they have always wanted to do. Then encourage them to do it and turn your attention back to manifesting your dream." - Your Life's Work: A Guide to Creating a Spiritual and Successful Work Life, by Tami Coyne, p. 209 ( Read more ) | |
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As quoted in NB Women's NewsBarack Obama is a female candidate for president in the same way that Bill Clinton was the first black president. It was Toni Morrison who first had the insight… she described Clinton as the first black president, commenting on his saxophone playing and his displaying "almost every trope of blackness." Obama is pushing against conventional… wisdom with approaches that are usually thought of as qualities & values that women bring… inclusiveness in problem solving… modesty about knowing the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on the work alone, willingness to air dirty linen. Hillary Clinton (was) taking a more traditional (male?) authoritarian approach. Obama is advocating collaboration - talking with everybody, incl. those with whom he has disagreements. Hillary Clinton's campaign (was) centered on the idea that she is experienced - understands the rules in this man's game … knows how to play by them and win... Obama's argument is that he understands the rules and knows how to play by them but he wants to change them because they embody values with which he does not agree. Hillary Clinton proposes policy solutions to every problem… Obama often proposes process plans, without specific solutions... Obama is willing to acknowledge his indiscretions and not apologize... Hillary Clinton seems to think that admitting mistakes is a sign of weakness… She feels constrained to portray herself as tough, competitive, willing to take on the bad guys. She has to be more male than men, in the same way that women are reluctant to leave early to pick up children at day care because they fear they will not be thought of as serious about their careers, while men are applauded for doing so. Obama can raise possibilities that are off the table for Clinton... - Excerpts, The First Woman President?, Martin Linsky, Harvard's School of Government, Feb 26, 2008, Newsweek. www.newsweek.com/id/115397 ( More from NB Women's News: Brazil made the best of the 15-year boom ) | |
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I'm going through the old posts on my main LJ, and found this private post from 2005 with quotes I liked from the wonderful self-help book I'm OK, You're OK. Posting these here where I can access them later and others can enjoy. :) "This permanent recording [of NOT OK] is the residue of having been a child. Any child. Even the child of kind, loving, well-meaning parents. It is the situation of childhood and not the intention of the parents which produces the problem.... When the children of "good" parents carry the NOT OK burden, one can begin to appreciate the load carried by children whose parents are guilty of gross neglect, abuse and cruelty." (p. 49) "Personal or social storms are not going to subside immediately when we assume a new position. The Child wants immediate results.... The Adult can comprehend that patience and faith are required. We cannot guarantee instant OK feelings by the assuming of the I'M OK - YOU'RE OK position. We have to be sensitive to the presence of old recordings; but we can choose to turn them off when they replay in a way that undermines the faith we have in a new way to live, which, in time, will bring forth new results and new happiness in our living. The Adult also can recognize the Child responses in others and choose not to respond in kind." (p. 76-77) ( Read more ) | |
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Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"USDA figures show a decline in the nutrient content of the forty-three crops it has tracked since the 1950s. In one recent analysis, vitamin C declined by 20 percent, iron by 15 percent, riboflavin by 38 percent, calcium by 16 percent.... [Y]ou now have to eat three apples to get the same amount of iron as you would have gotten from a single 1940 apple, and you'd have to eat several more slices of bread to get your recommended daily allowance of zinc than you would have a century ago." - p. 118 "Omega-6s ... [counteract] most of the positive effects of mega-3 throughout the body. Merely adding omega-3 to the diet ... may not do much good unless we also reduce the high levels of omega-6s that have entered the Western diet with the advent of processed foods, seed oils, and foods from animals raised on grain. Nine percent of the calories in the American diet today come from a single omega-6 fatty acid: linoleic acid, most of it from soybean oil.... [One expert] says that the billions we spend on antiinflammatory drugs such as aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen is money spend to undo the effects of too much omega-6 in the diet." - p. 131 "[I]n our time cooking from scratch and growing any of your own food qualify as subversive acts." - p. 200 | |
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On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser
"I have no problems calling 'Mr. Hunter's Grace' nonfiction. Although Mitchell altered the truth about elapsed time, he used a dramatist's prerogative to compress and focus his story, thereby giving the reader a manageable framework. If he had told the story in real time, strung across all the day and months he did spend on Staten Island, he would have achieved the numbing truth of Andy Warhol's eight-hour film of a man having an eight-hour sleep. By careful manipulation he raised the craft of nonfiction to art. But he never manipulated Mr. Hunter's truth; there has been no 'inferring,' no 'fabricating.' He has played fair." - p. 114
"To write a good memoir you must become editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth." - p. 137
"About 98 percent of people who hold a doctorate in physics can't write their way out of a petri dish, but that's not because they can't. It's because they won't. They won't deign to learn to use the simple tools of the English language - precision instruments as refined as any that are used in a physics lab." - p. 160
"[P]lain talk will not be easily achieved in corporate America. Too much vanity is on the line. Managers at every level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his thoughts." - p. 175
(p. 109 - Good information on journalism and permissible changes to quotes.) | |
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I like paying taxes. Taxes ... greatly enrich the quality of life for the average Canadian family ... public schools … low tuition at world class universities, freedom from fear of crippling health bills and excellent medical services, public parks and libraries, liveable cities. …Taxes assist us in spreading our incomes over our lifetimes to maximize our well being - transferring income from our high-income years to retirement years, from when we are supporting children to times when we are not... Taxes ... enable us to establish … public institutions that attempt to prevent exploitation in market exchanges and family relations… to compensate those who are harmed by the operation of a market economy that we all benefit from; to ensure a more acceptable distribution of income than that which results from market forces alone; to strive for gender and racial equality. ...
Promises of tax cuts are often a potent political ploy... There is a good deal of public misunderstanding about the role of taxes - fostered by business interests and others ... Part of their strategy has been to ... make it appear self-evident that while citizens can afford more private goods and services, ... they are deluding themselves if they think they can afford more public goods and services. ... Many public goods financed by taxes health and education services - are necessities. Reducing the government supply of these services ... will mean that (people) are paying for them to private providers... When people say we cannot afford to pay taxes to provide child and elderly care, they are not saying we can no longer afford to look after children or the elderly. What they must mean is that instead of spreading the cost equitably, through the tax system ... we should leave them to be borne by women, by and large… They want to shift the cost of providing them from … high-income individuals to low-income families and women working in their homes at tasks that we all benefit from but for which they are not
paid.
The government transfers over 65% of taxes to families in the form of pensions, child allowances, social assistance and compensation for work-related injuries or unemployment. Taxes generally increase freedom - to travel (roads and transportation), to learn, …freedom from concerns over crippling heath bills. As a famous U.S. jurist noted, taxes are the price we pay for civilization. ...
Who will exercise power in our society? ...Business interests ...keep warning about the terrible legacy we are leaving our children (a national debt and a bloated public sector). The worse legacy we are in danger of leaving if we decrease taxes and diminish the government role, is a divided society without a sense of collective responsibility in which the elite is ever more able to defend itself politically.
- Taxes and Human Purpose, Prof. Neil Brooks, Osgoode Hall Law School. www.policyalternatives.ca. As quoted in NB Women's News.
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"....[F]ailure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. ....Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way....Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned...."
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"The somewhat disturbing message from these synchrony studies [showing that not only do women in close proximity develop similar period cycles, but that some females dominate these cycles] is that feeling subordinate, like a second-class citizen, as a result of being put upon, stressed, unhappy in your environment or cowed by your social group, can delay or halt ovulation. Such ovulation suppression triggers, and not just those arising from female cohorts, are believed to underlie many cases of human fertility in the twenty-first century's generation of overworked, underpaid and unappreciated women. Tellingly, stress-related in fertility is reckoned to be responsible for 80 per cent of cases of female infertility."
- p. 241, The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge, Great Britain: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003. (A great book that I highly recommend!) | |
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