What Are You Reading (Offline, that is)?

We love to hear what our friends are reading when they step away from the computer. Drop us a line and let us know what’s blowing your mind. Amanda Page, Bold Types I’m moving, and just recently put all my books in boxes.  From my bedside table, I removed a short stack that I’d pulled to give me comfort through a fairly stressful time.

Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli On a whim, I asked the Twitterverse to send me reading recommendations.  I think I asked for “fiction that would change my game” or something like that.  One person responded, and this is what they suggested. I couldn’t shake this one for days.  There’s a sequel that I can’t bring myself to read because this one made such an impression.  It changed my game.  It broke my heart.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote Holly Golightly is an old friend.  This is the book I wish I’d written.  I found it in a used bookstore just a month or two before I left for graduate school.  I’d seen the film and wasn’t crazy about it, but something about the small, pale turquoise paperback with the bright yellow stars spoke to me.  I read it in just a couple of hours.  And then I read it again.  I read it sometimes to remind myself of the type of book I aspire to write.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro I saw the movie first.  Then, when asked to teach a novel in a freshman course, this immediately came to mind.  There are just so many layers!  I find the narration so interesting.  Plus, I’m fascinated by the author’s choice to use that particular character as the one who tells the story.  It was on my table because I recently met a man on a plane, a professor, and we talked about this book.  He didn’t like it.  I didn’t understand how anyone couldn’t like it.  When I got home, I pulled it from my shelf and started sifting through it slowly.  It still grips me.  Haunts me.  Maybe some people don’t like to be haunted.

Marni Zarr, Dream Day Musings Daily . . . Journey to the Heart by Melody Beattie Daily mediations that keep me moving forward and provide encouragement when I'm feeling stuck. Reading this book has taught me that pauses are as necessary to the journey as movement. I jot dated notes in the margins when something really speaks to the way I'm feeling at that time. It's interesting to read what I penciled in two years ago and compare it to now. I can see how my thoughts about the events in my life are gradually changing. I'm on my third read through after receiving this book from a dear friend three years ago this past May for my birthday. I love that it's showing its well loved wear with tattered edges and turned down corners.

Midway through . . . The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay My mom loaned this to me after she finished reading it for her book club. It's a story about a boy's journey through some humorous---while at the same time harsh---moments, beginning in the late 1930's growing up in South Africa. I love that the book begins in a young child's voice that brings me to both laughter and tears in it's innocence. A robust tale of how he is influenced through the lessons and words from the adults he meets through his multifarious experiences growing up. He has a quiet, sweet maturity about him that attracts their wisdom and protection. Even if only together for a day, they leave him with potent advice that stays with him for a lifetime. I am enjoying the colorful characters in the story as well as the historical material about life in South Africa as the story unfolds.

Recommended . . . The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman Each of the characters separate lives is intertwined into a cleverly layered story of their overlapping experiences and relationships while working for an English language newspaper in Rome. I loved how the author weaves the emotions and actions of one into all. A great read for the beach. Each chapter is a short story in itself.

Savala Nolan, Detroit Shimmy Cleopatra  by Stacy Schiff A writer taking on Cleopatra is like an actor taking on Jack Kennedy: what can she do that feels real when her audience is drunk on mythology?  I went into this book with neutral expectations, thinking a gifted scholar and an impossible subject would yield a decent book.  But it blew me away.  Schiff’s writing is lean, elegant, and sumptuous, like a ballet.  It ferries you across a familiar story in fresh and vivid vignettes, loaded with juicy tidbits about life in that ancient era, from statecraft to bloodlines to royal feasts to poisons. She acknowledges how much we can’t know about Cleopatra, yet her speculations ring true (maybe because she herself is woman).  And, of course, there’s plenty of lust and love, with Caesar and Mark Antony keeping wind in the sails.

The Good Soldiers  by David Finkel I read a lot about war and military history, and this is one of my favorite books in that genre.  A journalist follows soldiers on a fifteen month tour of Iraq during “the surge.”  The story is bracing, and detailed: the soda soldiers drank, the music playing, the fruit trees in yards of houses they searched, the deaths, the stomach aches, the letters to and from home. Finkel tells it with heart and a mirror’s clarity.  He has a genius for creating intimacy.  In fact, he disappears; you don’t feel you’re reading a reporter’s chronicle.  You feel you’re in your living room with the soldiers, and they are telling you what happened, and you understand.

Gun, with Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem This is a mystery, both futuristic and noir.  It’s years from now on the California coast, and though the cities and ocean are the same, life is not.  Questions are forbidden,  everyone’s hooked on mega-pharmaceuticals, and animals are “evolved,” living, working, and making very-new-school families with people.  There’s murder, sex, and drugs.  Lethem’s protagonist is an acerbic and sly detective.  He’s defunct in some ways, but he’s got a big aching heart and an appetite for life that the future doesn’t abide.  This book is brilliant because its beautifully written and feels unnervingly prescient:  Lethem’s bizarre world is so real, and our real world is so bizarre, that his future seems, at times, only a few status updates away.

Blonde  by Joyce Carol Oates Arthur Schlesinger, Special Assistant in the Kennedy White House, described meeting Marilyn Monroe:  When he said something that pleased her, it created “a warm and spontaneous burst of affection---but then she receded into her own glittering mist.”  Glittering mist!  I love that image; she does seem to’ve been profoundly inviting and yet totally obscured, as if the dress in which she sang the President “Happy Birthday” dissolved and lingered around her body.  Oates’s novel---a sort of imagined Monroe autobiography---captures the glittering mist perfectly.  The sparkle-covered-cotton-candy element of Monroe endures.  You can’t take your eye off the page, just like you can’t take your eyes off her.  But the mist is there, too.  Monroe remains, as she must, in your peripheral vision, even as you read her story in her own (imagined) voice.  It’s a magical read.

Ode to House Hunters

I wouldn’t call myself particularly design-oriented. I appreciate good design and good aesthetics, but I’m not oft-inspired to do anything I would call “design” at my home beyond being sure that I can see my alarm clock from my side of the bed. That said, I love HGTV. That’s Home and Garden Television if you are not familiar. I came to HGTV slowly. As a teen, my mother occasionally watched their shows, but I was resistant to the appeal. I would never make my own headboard---why should I watch someone else do it? Never mind that I will never be a 1960s ad man nor a police detective and I happily watch shows about those enterprises.

At some point in the last decade, it all changed. Was it that I matured, became an adult, and suddenly had an interest in the aesthetics of my abode? Absolutely not. What changed was the introduction of House Hunters to the channel. House Hunters is addictive and infuriating. It has a simple rhythm, not unlike Law and Order, that is soothing and anesthetic.  House Hunters allows me, from the comfort of my couch, to judge the interiors of stranger’s homes.  I find this remarkably relaxing.

Each episode is structured in the exact same way. Viewers accompany potential house buyers on visits to three different potential homes. The prospective buyers walk around the homes, commenting on what they like and don’t like. Sometimes the prospective buyers affect the episode minimally. They want granite countertops and open concepts and are pretty bland. On other occasions the prospective buyers can be absurdly demanding, and it can be fun watching their dreams of finding a four-bedroom house for under two hundred thousand dollars dissolve. Schadenfreude is a key component of watching House Hunters. Aristotle said that good tragedy must have spectacle, and the best episodes include the spectacle of dreams dashed or the buyers being shown a short sale house that was clearly trashed by some combination of frat boys and rabid beavers.

On occasion, the prospective buyers are people I want to root for. They seem friendly and intelligent and just want a place where they can grow some plants or have a baby.  Or, they realize that they will have to pay more for the neighborhood they really want to live in and they accept it and take the plunge. This can be satisfying as well, but not necessarily cathartic for the viewer.

Often there’s a semi-manufactured conflict in the episode. It might be a conflict between spouses, an adult child house hunting with parents who aren’t ready for their child to grow up, or a newly-divorced middle aged woman looking to start over. I accompanied my wife to a professional conference once and we saw a gentleman there whom we recognized. We saw him from afar and couldn’t remember his name and then we realized, “Oh, right, it’s that guy from House Hunters who lived in Knoxville who mocked his wife’s interest in Feng Shui!”

Regardless of the manufactured conflict of the episode, the viewer is led through three homes. Sometimes there are murals. Sometimes there are dolls. Sometimes there are words on the wall (you know what I mean, things like “The food here is seasoned with love” in the kitchen. I loathe words on the wall).  On every third episode, there’s a man demanding space for a “man cave” where he can watch football and not have to interact with his family, and everyone around him treats him like this is appropriate, totally ignoring the fact that “man cave” is just “cave man” backwards. All of these are targets for disdain. I know that when I have stored up disdain from a rough week at work, I can simply spend twenty-two minutes with House Hunters to release it upon unwitting strangers.

There are HGTV purists who decry the fact that the network’s programming consists mainly of real estate-related shows, including many House Hunters copycats. They miss the emphasis on design and home improvement. I’ll admit, the joys of House Hunters are only tangentially related to the concepts of “home and garden.” Not unlike MTV forgoing music videos in favor of teen mothers, and the History Channel forgoing history in favor of pawn shop proprietors, HGTV knows where the ratings lie, and it’s with They Who Love to Judge (while often in pajama pants). I am not necessarily proud of being a part of that demographic, but at least I know I am not alone.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Meg Blocker, Queenie Takes Manhattan, and the brainpower behind The F WordsThe Likeness by Tana French I love an un-put-down-able mystery, but I chafe at cliched genre writing. (Love the cliches of the genre; hate the repetitive phrasing and language.) Enter Tana French, author of the Dublin Murder Squad series. Each novel can be read independently - and they work in any order - and this one is my favorite yet. It's told from the perspective of Cassie Maddox, a former murder and Undercover detective who's been working Domestic Violence cases. Cassie goes back undercover to solve the murder of a woman who adopted her old undercover identity, and winds up living in a house full of eccentric, too-close-for-comfort PhD candidates. Classic Agatha Christie estate-focused crime novel, with a twist. The Perks Of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky I just started this last night, and am already hooked. I love Young Adult fiction with a passion, and seeing the trailer for the movie version of this novel reminded me that I'd never quite gotten around to reading it. So far, so awesome. It's a classic coming-of-age story set in the early 1990s (Hello, awesome music and flannel shirts!), and it's written in an epistolary style, which I just love.

I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith This is one of my all-time favorites. I read it (for the first time) in my mid-20s---and fell deeply in love. I re-read it every summer, and plan to bring it with me to Maine in July. It's about a family whose patriarch wrote one superlative novel, then stopped writing altogether after an altercation involving a cake knife, a hot temper, and a nosy neighbor. As a result, his family is living on next to nothing, but doing it in a drafty, rented castle in the middle of Sussex. Enter the Americans who've inherited the estate to which the castle belongs, and cue the adulthood-making culture clashes, romances and life lessons. The first line? "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." It. Is. So. Deliciously. Good.

Michelle Edgemont, Designer I always wished I was one of those people who loves to read and constantly has great book recommendations. Ever since I launched my company last year, the pile of business books next to my bed has been growing taller and taller. A few I'm done with, a few I'm half way through, and some I'm saving for the beach. Nothing better than a nice big blanket on the sand with a few books to page through.

FINISHED: Launch: How to Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition by Michael Stelzner This was a fast, great read that I actually took notes on. I loved the simple language and easy to understand concepts. It's ideas can be applied to any type of business, especially ones that are online based and have a blog. My to-do list after finishing this book was a little overwhelming, but it gave me a good kick in the butt to get things in gear.

HALF WAY THROUGH: Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath Ok, honestly, this book is too thick to hold my patience level, hence why I'm only half way through, BUT, it's full of great information on why some stories are easy to remember and some are forgettable.

EXCITED TO START: Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields I got to get myself to the beach to start this baby. Being a small business owner, fear and doubt are the #1 and #2 things in my brain at all times. To use those as fuel to be awesome, I would be unstoppable.

MAGAZINE: Runner's World After only being able to run one block (not kidding), I started training in January and ran/walked two half marathons in the past two months. I was way towards the back of the pack during both, but I finished, and that's a big accomplishment. I wouldn't necessarily call myself a runner today, but leafing through an issue of Runner's World makes me feel a little but more legit.

Miya Hirabayashi, You + ME* I do a lot of sitting on the subway. I admit that I often am that girl who is passed out and drooling during her commute (don't judge, I have to sleep sometime), but I love to read magazines because of the short nature of each of the pieces. The three that I read religiously every month are:

The Atlantic I love the shorter snippets in the front that explore a wide range of topics. This month, I loved the piece by James Harkin about gallows humor in Syria. It followed a piece about the reintroduction of beavers into American streams and rivers (by parachute in the 1940's, and probably not by parachute starting shortly thereafter) by ecologists as a conservation effort. I love that these stories present stuff that is really interesting, and that I wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.

Garden and Gun My sister-in-law, Robyn, turned me on to Garden and Gun. I have neither a garden nor a gun, nor am I a southerner, nor do I live anywhere remotely close to the south, but this is a beautiful magazine with a lot of stories that I would never otherwise come across (fly fishing in Guyana, or a father-son barbeque road trip in Tennessee). I really believe in seeking out and letting in influences that don't match perfectly with your exact aesthetic, and Garden and Gun is just that for me (also, see above, the story about beavers). It's enjoyable because it's foreign, and still really beautiful. Plus, I may have purchased a subscription on Fab after having one too many glasses of wine. But who remembers these things, really.

Fast Company Fast Company is great for short, well-written articles that appeal to entrepreneurs. It's business-y and design-y, so it appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities but also makes me feel like I am actively cultivating my business sense. Plus, when I hold it while I'm passed out on the train, I look like a smart, design-y entrepreneur. And isn't that what magazines are for?

From London, England

Dearest Clara,

All the festivities for the Queen’s Jubilee this week have me thinking of London lately, and for as often as I have to go there, I can’t believe this week didn’t coincide with a trip! How grand everything must have been---but then again, sometimes these things are best viewed on TV where you can appreciate all of the details from a distance.

I always delight in a work trip to London---there seems to always be something to discover while preserving the very best of the classics.  It’s a nice mix of being exposed to the newest delights the world as a whole has to offer---I think there is no more global city right now---and being comforted by the tried and true.  Here’s what I’ve picked up over my trips there:

• Look twice before crossing – some might call it driving on the wrong side of the road, but cars and bicycles and busses and who knows what else come at me from any direction in London.  There’s a reason why “Look Left/Look Right” are printed on the road as a reminder.  And always look twice.
• Invest in a really good trench coat – it’s one of the most iconic pieces that is both functional and stylish and you’ll need both in London . . . and Paris . . . and New York . . . and almost everywhere else.  Assuming you don’t leave yours in the airport like your mother does, then a good trench coat will last you for years through jeans and dresses and suits.
• Mind the gap – it’s a little bit like looking twice before crossing in London.  These small perils of surprise always hit you when you’re least expecting it---take care to notice situations in life that need a little extra caution in your step. 
• Make time for the grandest hotels – My grandmother always had a passion for visiting grand hotels.  She would get dressed up and visit the lobby just to soak it all in.  When we were younger, staying in them was out of the question but she still wanted to be part of the experience.  Now that I’m older, I understand why she did that, and I do it too.  Sometimes we splurge and stay at nice hotels around the world, but in London, the grandest hotels offer the grandest settings for a glass of champagne.  Bubbles fit best here.  Take the time to appreciate the institutions that put care into the details that have survived nearly hundreds of years---hopefully you’ll come with me sometimes, and one day, hopefully you’ll come with your own children.  Those hotels will still be there.
• Everyone can use a little pomp and circumstance – If there is a gala or a jubilee or a wedding, no one stands on ceremony quite like the United Kingdom.  There is something to be said for the ability to motivate that many people with unifying occasions.  Sometimes, adding some ceremony and grandeur to an occasion really do make them more memorable---when something is really important, at least to you, it’s okay to enjoy the celebrations around it.

All my love,

Mom

The F Words: Nicole Cliffe

For our first non-navel-gazing edition of the F Words, I knew I needed to give you guys something really, truly, spectacularly great. To that end, I strong-armed my incredibly talented friend Nicole Cliffe into sharing her (always ridiculously entertaining) thoughts about cooking, gender roles, and parenthood. Nicole is one of the smartest, sanest, funniest and most wonderful women I know - and not only because we first bonded over our shared love of Sondheim. Some of you likely know Nicole from her work as the newly-minted Books Editor for The Hairpin---and if you haven't been reading along with her incredible Classic Trash series, posted over at The Awl, you should start catching up immediately. (Her take on Valley Of The Dolls is a personal favorite of mine.) But, before you dig out your copies of Peyton Place and Gone With The Wind - and your mom's copy of Clan Of The Cave Bear (Dirty!), let's hear what Nicole has to say about feminism and food - peach pie, in particular.

Tell us a bit about your day job. I'm the Books Editor for The Hairpin, which is so little effort and so much fun as to be almost embarrassing. I also write a biweekly/monthly column for The Awl, Classic Trash, in which I discuss noted works of gooey literature.

How did you learn to cook? Post-college, definitely. I went the "buy complicated cookbook, treat like a logic puzzle" route. Then, like most people, I relaxed into a little stable of reliable dishes and went from there. If you're not a cook, I recommend throwing a little dinner party for two friends, and cooking Thomas Keller's roast chicken recipe (it's on Epicurious) and making a green salad with a bit of goat cheese and sliced beets from a jar, plus this pie for dessert. When you're just starting out, the perfect formula is a) your main, b) a starter or side that need only be assembled, and c) a make-ahead dessert that can sit on your counter taunting your guests. And, obviously, a fancy vanilla-bean ice cream to serve with it. Keller's chicken is perfect, but deactivate your smoke alarm first.

Do you prefer to cook alone, or with friends or family? ALONE. Get the hell out of the kitchen. I have tremendous amounts of performance anxiety. My father-in-law kept hovering over me when I was making my first Thanksgiving dinner, and once he finally got to "you know you're using that cutting board upside down?" I had to bounce him formally. Of course, that was also the year I made the goose, and was using one of those awful single-use foil roasting pans. It snagged invisibly on the element coil, and about three cups of goose fat settled into the top of the stove. The goose, of course, was delicious, the experience of using a putty knife the day after to scrape congealed goose fat out of the stove, less so.

As long as you don't watch what I'm doing, you're welcome to stay and make me a gin and tonic and talk to me about Mad Men.

What’s your favorite thing to make? I do a two-day plan about once a week, where I bake too much mustard-y salmon for dinner with sauteed peppers and mushrooms or zucchini, then for dinner the next night I nestle my leftover fillets and vegetables in a frittata and liberally coat the whole thing in goat or feta cheese and a dash of cream. It's a little different every time, goofproof, and the frittata makes you look like a pro.

If you had to choose one cuisine to eat for the rest of your life, which would it be? Indian. There's nothing so soothing to me as rice-and-sauce. A jar of ghee survives in my house for about two weeks.

What recipe, cuisine or technique scares the crap out of you? Mandolines. Mandolines. Mandolines. And anything that has to be flipped, poached, or, God-forbid, only gels correctly 80% of the time.

How do you think your relationships with your family have affected your relationship to food and cooking? We're all eaters, and we all start thinking about what we'll have for lunch halfway through breakfast.  We never socialize in the living room, we're always in the kitchen.

Even today, home cooking is strongly associated with women’s traditional place in the family and society. How do you reconcile your own love of the kitchen with your outlook on gender roles? I was extremely lucky, I think, to grow up with a male homemaker and a working mother. My mother is a great cook (the recipe I'm sharing is one of hers), but my father is a genius. He makes his own samosas, he has a clay baker, he makes his own pasta, he's never bought salad dressing. In my marriage, however, I'm the cook, and now I have a baby, so I'm a cook-balancing-a-baby, which is a visual I hadn't really internalized for myself. My husband is older than I am by over ten years, and I do notice a bit of a gender AND generational divide in domestic duties. Which doesn't bother me, mostly, as we have great communication around it, but I think that most women I know have husbands that are far more hands-on than their own fathers were, and, having had a male primary caregiver in my childhood, I'm having the opposite experience.

I think a larger factor is that my husband is fundamentally dis-interested in food, other than as fuel, which, for me, is like being an anthropologist every day. I stand there, making notes, watching him not obsess about food. When they eventually develop a pill you can take with a glass of water thrice daily to provide all of your nutritional needs, he'll be the first one in line.

I'm very ughhhhh about choice feminism, generally, but, like most of us, there are things I get really incensed by (name-changing, Brazilian waxing) and things I just merrily roll along with (doing 100% of the laundry and dishes and cooking). That being said, I think the fact that I choose to shoulder the domestic stuff is not a feminist choice, and doesn't occur in a vacuum. I would say I'm a feminist who, for various reasons, has made some choices I would consider un-feminist. I can make my peace with that, but I don't try to do a juggling game to justify it as furthering the course of equality: it doesn't.  As the mother of a baby daughter, I think I'll have to do more work than my mother did to raise a daughter who doesn't have static notions of gender. My family never looked like the breadwinner-dad, apron-mom pictures, so I never bought into them.

Like a lot of women with kids, I've been reading all the interminable pieces on Badinter and the attachment parenting backlash. There's something real there, of course. I planned to be an Attachment Parent, but gave birth, as some of us do, to a daughter who didn't want to sleep with us, lost weight constantly despite 24/7 nursing until she happily switched to Enfamil, and vastly prefers to sit and observe and play with her toys to being worn in a sling. You have to roll with it. And, of course, it makes you question other parts of the intense-parenting lifestyle. I thought I'd make my own baby food, because I had a "natural" birth (just because I skipped the epidural doesn't mean I like the way we create birthing hierarchies) and am generally an organic-seasonal food person, but I was at the supermarket one day and picked up a thirty-cent jar of Gerber's to glance at the ingredients: peas and water. Or, carrots and water. Who gives a shit, then? I bought about eighty jars. She likes them, and I'm not cleaning orange crud out of my food mill.  And now we give her bits of what we eat, and she loves it. You have to do what works for you, and I think you have to rigorously protect yourself from doing unnecessary things in order to compete with other women. Ask yourself every day: would I still do this if no one besides my baby and I ever knew? Sometimes the answer is yes: I cloth diaper, and I love it. Sometimes the answer is no: hence the little jars.

Tell us a bit about the recipe you’re sharing. When did you first make it, and why? What do you love about it? I will eat anything with peaches. If there was a peach-flavored anthrax, I'd be dead now. This is the pie my mother brings to church suppers, to family reunions, etc. I rarely bake, because I find it more stressful than cooking (it's a formula, not a painting) and because I tend towards a more cult-like primal/paleo diet. Because of that, I subscribe to a go-big-or-go-home attitude towards desserts and starches. 98% of the time, I eat meats and fish and eggs and cream and butter and vegetables and berries. But when I make a dessert, I make a DESSERT. Or, of course, I make mashed potatoes with cream cheese. Don't eat it, or do it right. Sometimes, when I make this pie, I think, oh, I could cut the sugar in half. And I've done it, but then the texture isn't quite right. Don't lie to your baking. Embrace it. On a related note, there's nothing I loathe more than those women's magazine articles on making healthier choices at Thanksgiving. It's one meal. Eat whatever you want. It will make zero different in your life or health to eat a single slice (or two, or three) of a wonderful pecan pie. I'm completely neurotic about maintaining a (for me) artificially low weight (which, again, is an active detriment to my feminism), but I will not go to Eleven Madison Park and ask if they can steam some fish for me. I'm going to eat the foie-gras-chocolate torte. And it's going to be delicious. As an atheist, I feel very strongly about the iniquity of attaching shame to our food desires and our sexual appetites. There are only two things that we actually KNOW we're on this planet to do: eat and fuck. Go forth and be glad.

Creamy Dreamy Peach Pie Nicole Cliffe

For the crust: 1 1/2 cups flour, 1/2 tsp salt, 1/2 cup butter

For the filling: 4 cups sliced fresh peaches, if in season. Canned work "just" as well. 1 cup sugar 2 1/2 tbsp flour 1 egg 1/4 tsp salt 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 cup sour cream (full-fat, please)

For the topping: 1/3 cup sugar 1/3 cup flour 1/4 cup butter

Prepare the crust: Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine flour and salt, cut in butter. Press into a nine-inch pie plate (deep dish is best). Set aside.

Prepare the filling: Place peaches in bowl, sprinkle with 1/4 cup of the sugar, set aside. In another bowl, combine remaining sugar, flour, egg, salt, and vanilla. Fold in the sour cream. Stir the mixture into the peaches.

Prepare the topping: Combine all three ingredients until crumbly.

Finish the pie: Pour the filling into the crust and bake for twenty minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and bake for 30-35 minutes more.Remove the pie from the oven and sprinkle the topping evenly over the filling. Set the oven back to 400 degrees Fahrenheit and bake for ten more minutes.

Allow pie to cool before slicing. Eat!

Makes one nine-inch pie.

Notes on (Not) Unplugging

Until recently, my relationship had been a long distance one. When my boyfriend arrived in California, my Internet suddenly shrunk. A dimension of it disappeared, and so did my longing. I no longer had to sift through a sea of status updates and tweets and ceaseless chatter to reach him, or send a WhatsApp message to greet him when I woke up. And, since my day was his night—as San Francisco and Cairo are nine hours apart—we no longer had to schedule Skype chats in our overlapping waking hours. And so, it has been one month of being together in the same city. Amid all of this change, and being able to talk face-to-face each day, I wonder: are my online habits changing?

* * *

To unplug. To log off. To take a break from technology, to reimmerse ourselves in the real world, to put our phones down and talk to the person sitting in front of us, to connect and experience a moment the old-fashioned way. I read variations of this discussion everywhere, from Pico Iyer's "The Joy of Quiet" " to Sherry Turkle's "The Flight From Conversation" to comments on a recent post on my blog on information overload and my inability to write.

But these actions of "unplugging" and "logging off" just don't mean much anymore.

At the beginning of last year, when I began writing about my online friendships, my Internet worlds, and place and space in a digital world, I lived in two separate spheres, online and off. I felt my way through both worlds, navigating from one to the other and maintaining two selves, real and virtual.

But these worlds have since merged, and these words—real, virtual, online, offline, plugged, unplugged—have lost their meaning. The distinction between physical and digital has blurred, and I don't think there is a plug to pull to maneuver from one sphere to the other. Now, when I follow discussions on digital dualism—the perspective that our online and offline worlds are separate—I identify instead with views in favor of an augmented reality, where the physical and the digital, and atoms and bits, are enmeshed.

I think about this shift in me—how I confidently wrote last year about living in two distinct spheres, switching my virtual persona on as if putting on a hat, yet today operate freely and fearlessly in an ever-changing space with no such boundaries. And I sense that my relationship, which blossomed over the Internet and was nurtured by GMail and Twitter and WhatsApp and Skype for a year, forced me to acclimate to this fused world.

In our long distance spell, we created a space just for us online, where emailing and @replying felt just as special as holding hands and kissing. Maybe this is an exaggeration, but when we relied solely on the Internet to maintain our relationship, all of our actions, gestures, and conversations—whether by typing or touching, on screen or in the flesh—weighed the same.

Now that the main person with whom I communicated online shares my physical space, my Internet continues to morph. It has become something more than what it has been—more than a portal through which we have connected when geography has divided us, more than an online space of information and ideas and networks to which I connect with various devices. Because now that he is on this side of the world, sitting in the same room as me, I haven't abandoned, nor do I devalue, this online mode we've gotten so used to—I don't treat his texts or emails as less important than our face-to-face conversations.

It seems the Internet has become part of us—a layer that floats in our home. I thought it had disappeared—that I didn't need it anymore—but I sense this dimension of communication and interaction will always be there, whether or not we share the same time zone.

Feminism: A tragedy in 3 acts

By Whitney Ruef Modern feminism has been a point of contention for decades. Some say it’s the reason why women aren’t where we should be: barefoot and pregnant cleaning the homes of our hard-working husbands. Some say it’s helping to break the glass ceiling of women in the workplace. And some say "feminism is something that men invented so women would burn their bras and sleep around." It could be a combination, but who really knows what the hell women are thinking anyway?

Chivalry isn’t dead. It’s brutally maimed and writhing, taking its last, rattling breaths. What we don’t talk about though, is that women are killing it. We decided (or maybe men decided while they were in line at the gas station buying lighters for the bra burning ceremony) that we wanted to be treated as equals in all aspects of life. It was an all-or-nothing declaration of independence and self-sufficiency, and it was glorious. Then, a strange thing happened: for the first and only time in the history of the modern world, men listened to us.

All of the sudden we were working jobs and taking care of children. We were super women. We were making our own money and showing the world that we are just as capable as men in the workplace, kicking ass and taking names if you will. The Nike commercial “Anything you can do, I can do better” came on television and women across the country sat on the couch feeding their newborns, typing emails with their toes and laughing knowingly that we had finally gotten what we wanted, because we’re wily and women always get what we want.

Sure, we were still being objectified, but we were going to put a stop to that. Enter: the pantsuit. The perfect corporate wear to make it absolutely impossible for any male to be attracted to you. We wore the pantsuit like it was the ticket to our next promotion, because if we looked like a man, no doubt we would get treated like one.

Then one day, we had a realization: we weren’t getting asked on dates anymore---we were hooking up. We actually didn’t like juggling a job and taking care of our latchkey kids who hated us. Maybe all of our bra burning and declarations of equality weren’t getting us what we wanted after all. And we were finally able to admit to ourselves that taking it easy every once in awhile is actually kind of fun.

We like having the door opened for us. Dinner dates are enjoyable. And we like being taken care of when we’re sick or hurt. While we were kicking and screaming to get what we thought we wanted, somewhere along the way we mixed up the meaning of equality and respect. Women don’t want to be treated like men - we aren’t men. It’s time to reevaluate the goals of feminism in the world today. But we’re women---the only thing that’s certain is that this opinion might change tomorrow.

Whitney Ruef recently graduated from VCU Brandcenter where she studied advertising copywriting. She is currently living in Richmond, VA and looking for "the job a million girls would kill for" in advertising. She is a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do and thinks some of the best food comes from taquerias located in gas stations. Her portfolio can be found at www.whitneyruef.com.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

We love to hear what our friends are reading when they step away from the computer. Drop us a line and let us know what’s blowing your mind.Shayna Kulik, Pattern Pulp Outliers: the story of success by Malcom Gladwell I just finished Outliers---after putting it down last year. I really enjoyed the second half more than the first and, it coincidently was the perfect lay-up for Tokyo Vice, the book I'm reading now. It's fantastic, and offers a realistic window of Japanese culture through the eyes of an assimilated American journalist. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but it's true. The storytelling is phenomenal and if you have even the mildest interest in Japan you'll find it entertaining and informative.

When I'm tight on time, I stick to magazines, for editorial and design inspiration. It's an ever-changing list, but off the top of my head . . . The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Dazed & Confused, Art Forum, Another Mag, 032, LOVE and The Economist.

Amy Connoly, Creative Soul Spectrum I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb I know I'm well over a decade behind here considering this book made it's debut in Oprah's Book Club in 1998, but the great thing about a good book is it's ability to be timeless. Between my job as a graphic designer and the time I spend working on my own blog and viewing other blogs, the majority of my day is spent in front of a computer. I love being able to come home to a book that I find as captivating as the things I see on my screen. Wally Lamb has certainly captured my attention with this novel about the life and struggles of a man whose identical twin suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.

Miranda Ward, A Literal Girl Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland I've actually just finished this book, but I'm still thinking about it, so I don't think listing it is quite cheating. Coupland's short and unconventional biography of McLuhan, first published a few years ago, feels very timely. "You can't slow down, even once, ever, without becoming irrelevant", Coupland writes of contemporary life, capturing the strange sense of urgency that seems to characterize our era. And the book is peppered with seemingly prophetic quotes from McLuhan. "We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future" is a favorite of mine.

Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You by Alice Munro I was initially resistant to this book. My mother gave it to me years ago, and said I should read it, that maybe everybody should read it. That kind of urgency about books is good but it always makes me reticent: what if I can't feel what you felt? And anyway I struggle with short stories. But it is good. It feels like a book that's okay to read at a slow pace.

Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer I've been re-reading this. It's ostensibly a book about not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence (whilst also being, of course, a book about D.H. Lawrence). Dyer is brilliant (and often laugh-out-loud funny) on subjects like indecision, procrastination, and depression, and this, in my view, is his finest work. I'm trying to learn or absorb something from it.

Flaubert in Egypt by Gustave Flaubert Letters and notes from Flaubert's 1849 visit to Egypt. I've been dipping in and out of this book for a long time now; you feel as if you're going on a journey every time you read a paragraph.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt A sprawling novel---maybe too big, in a way. But the completeness of the world that Byatt has created is extraordinary. One of those novels you eventually fall into and swim joyfully around in, though it took me awhile to commit to it.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

We love to hear what our friends are reading when they step away from the computer. Drop us a line and let us know what’s blowing your mind. Erin Boyle, Reading My Tea Leaves State of Wonder by Ann Patchett This week I finally dug into Ann Patchett's State of Wonder and somehow, miraculously, I've made the adult decision to tend to weekday obligations rather than holing up in my bed for the duration and gobbling each delicious morsel. It's the kind of book I don't mind dog-earing. Or rather, it's the kind of book I can't help dog-earing--there is so much I'd like to return to later. A taste of my favorite passage so far: "Had they not been so hopeful and guileless her birth would have been impossible. Marina reimagined her parents as a couple of practical cynics and suddenly the entire film of her life spooled backwards until at last the small heroine disappeared completely."

Kelly Beall, Design Crush The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice I've been a huge Anne Rice fan since college, and I always eagerly await her next book. Anne's explored so many genres throughout her career that I was thrilled when I heard she was going back to her roots with the supernatural. I think you get the idea behind the book from the title, and so far it has not disappointed. I'm about 75% finished with the book and only started Monday! A great summer read, for sure.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Being not only a design blogger, but a graphic designer, Steve Jobs has played a massive role in my life through his creations at Apple. I was devastated when he passed away last year. This book is an all-revealing look at his life, not only the accomplishments and successes but also the mistakes and defeats. Biographies can tend to be slow-moving and dry, but I literally can't put this one down. A must for anyone who's life relies on the products he brought to life.

Shani Gilchrist, Camille Maurice Lately I find that the only way to plow through the books I want is to keep a few on my nightstand at a time. With work, kid,s and life it’s the best way to keep my reading momentum moving forward.

Birds of a Lesser Paradise by Megan Mayhew Bergman I connected with Megan via Twitter through another writer who was giving me advice about returning to school for my MFA (I haven’t applied yet, but it’s still in my mind). It turned out that we both attended the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts in the 1990s, and then I was delighted to find her piece, “Housewifely Arts” in the latest edition of Best American Short Stories, so I couldn’t wait to read her collection. Megan is a teacher and mother with an uncanny ability to understand the varied conditions life stages-- from loneliness to amusement with one’s own state of affairs. I’ve been taking my time reading this collection because I find myself needing to process the emotions of each main character.

Guide To South Carolina Vegetable Gardening by Walter Reeves & Felder Rushing I’m a South Carolinian with a decent sized yard and an irrigation system. Therefore I try to grow stuff. Last fall we had a storm with downdraft winds so strong that they left us trapped on our block with a pulsing and swollen creek on one side and fallen trees blocking street. The good news—the despised 100-foot pine behind our koi pond had to be removed as a result, leaving room for what will be a vegetable garden. The book is a great guide to when and how to plant various herbs, fruits and vegetables in our temperamental climate.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman I developed a huge girl crush on Elif Batuman when I read her New Yorker piece about traveling through eastern Turkey to observe a mysteriously intense orinthologist. A neighbor who is a friend from high school borrowed (stole) the book while housesitting for us a few months ago. I just got it back and am as smothered with the book’s fascination with Russian culture and literature as I am by the topics on their own. It is a fantastic testament to the timelessness of Russian storytelling and the lives of people who love books.

Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means To Be Black Now by Touré The introduction to this book is captivatingly true. We live in an age where people deprive themselves of experiences because of their racial identity, yet we live in an age where we believe that the election of the first president of color is supposed to liberate us from such behavior. Both attitudes are extreme in their own way, and Touré provides an unflinching look at the most recent complexities of race and culture.

Hometown, Homesick Heroes: Albert Pujols

After several years playing in a Fantasy league, I’ve learned why baseball lends itself so well to metaphor. We may strike out at the bar or hit it out of the ballpark in the boardroom, but we can’t escape the game. These are my love letters to the sport. Dear Albert,

I sort of feel like being the best baseball player of the last decade entitles you to a Mr. before your name, but to me you’re just a Missouri boy who has found himself a little lost, too far from home and aching for the comfort of family and a hefty plate of barbecued burnt ends.  Or maybe I’m just projecting.

You and I both said goodbye to the Midwest last fall. You set out for one coast, I for the other.  You had a katrillion-dollar contract awaiting you with the Los Angeles Angels. I had a couple of months unemployment and a glossy-eyed dream for something bigger.

Are you happy Albert?  I sincerely hope so because you seem like the nicest guy. Of course, we like to do that in Missouri. We project kind and wholesome images on those we embrace as our hometown heroes¹.  For all I really know, you shish kabob puppies while using dollar bills as kindling.

I remember you from high school. Local sports fans started talking almost as soon as you arrived, 16 years old, barely speaking English, and already hitting 400 ft home runs. In our neighboring towns just outside Kansas City, MO, simply being a kid from another country would have been enough to make you stand out².

You took Ft. Osage High School to the state championship your first year there and probably would have done it your second too, if pitchers hadn’t just refused to throw the ball to you.

When you left Kansas City, you didn’t go far. Like thousands of Missouri kids also shooting for the stars, you didn’t even make it out of the state.  Only you ended up at 1^st base as a rookie standout for the St. Louis Cardinals, turned multi-year MVP and two-time World Series Champion.  Most of those others seem to have ended up tending bar in their college town or getting pregnant in the back of a Sonic parking lot.

While other high-profile sports figures would swoop in for their football or baseball season, reality-star girlfriends in tow, and party it up before returning to California or Miami or wherever they had rooted their McMansion—this was your home. You married a single mother, adopted her daughter, and proceeded to build a life, a family, a charitable foundation, even a restaurant in St. Louis.

And in return, you were loved. Not just idolized, but really loved. Kansas City and St. Louis have a long rivalry³ but fans on both sides of the state could agree that your story was pretty magical.

Real life movies never end when they should though. More often than not there is another chapter at best and an awkward postscript at worst.

You are one year older than me⁴. I’d like to think that head start is responsible for your paycheck of 12 million per year and my paycheck of…not 12 million.

Would I rather be you right now? The money would be nice, sure, but I don’t know. At 31, my career is only just beginning. I moved to New York eight months ago because I had an opportunity to work in film and things have been roller-coastering, but moving in a generally upward trajectory ever since.  I miss my friends and my family. I miss living someplace where being kind and neighborly is a central tenet of life. But in New York I’m doing things I spent my life dreaming about and I have no idea what’s coming next. I like that.

Your career definitely has several years left to it, but it’s hard to deny that your pinnacle is probably behind you. You left St. Louis in a blaze of glory, winning the 2011 World Series and then signing a giant $250 million contract to move to the Los Angeles Angels. Unfortunately, 2012 is a different year and a different story.

You’ve been on my fantasy team for two seasons now—my first choice each time. This year, though, things are looking rough. A slow start has turned into a painful first half. Not only are you not hitting home runs, you’re not hitting much else either. When you do, your new team doesn’t have the ability to get you home.

When do I give up on you?  At one point do you stop being THE Albert Pujols and just become another player who isn’t delivering the fantasy points I need?

Maybe let’s just pretend for a minute. It’s just you and me, back in those Missouri towns where the city just gives way to the country. We’re taking my dad’s old stick shift out to that field in Grain Valley. You know the one, it’s not far from either of our high schools and all the kids go there on clear, starry nights. You bring some snacks from the 7/11. I’ll bring the cherry limeades. You’ll still be the jock, practicing your English, and I’ll still be the nerd who’s obsessed with show tunes and pie. But we can talk baseball and barbecue and all the good things that come out of the state we love.

Always,

Anna

^1. We even tried that tactic with Rush Limbaugh, but some things are just beyond hope and optimism.

^2. The demographics of small towns in the Midwest have changed dramatically in the last 20 years, as immigrants have moved in, often stabilizing towns that were previously losing industry and population.  This has predictably generated both increased conflict and greater understanding. I am not qualified to really talk at length on the subject, but it would be interesting to learn more about how local sports and sports fans are impacted by, and are perhaps an impact on, this change.

^3. ahem, 1985.

^4. Because of your size and strength as a teenager, many folks believed your birth certificate was a fake and you are actually several years older. I think your accomplishments are extraordinary whatever your age.

On Culling Tweets and Curating My Own Universe

My online world is composed of sub-worlds—primarily the universes of Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, and Tumblr. Twitter is my favorite of these worlds, and the most carefully and heavily curated of all of them. For the past few years, I've followed less than 100 accounts, and my Following list is ever-changing, week to week—a flow of information, ideas, and chatter that mirrors my interests. Indeed, I could be less rigid about it all, follow more handles, and use Twitter lists to filter my feed. But I don't want to. And that's the wonderful but also odd and fascinating thing about Twitter, or really anything else on my Internet: I am the creator of this world.

On Twitter, I talk to friends, and also strangers who have become friends, as well as strangers who remain strangers—avatars kept at a distance because, well, that's how the Internet works. I use Twitter less as a social space and more as a network built on ideas, but there's a stream within Twitter, my Favorites, that I use in a specific way. While liking on Facebook, Instagram, and WordPress; favoriting on YouTube and Flickr; and clicking the ♥ on Tumblr are generally actions for someone else, favoriting tweets is a different process. I compile and save juicy, intriguing mental bits primarily from people I don't know, and personas whose identities are a mystery:

https://twitter.com/#!/TheBosha/status/176337455639830529

https://twitter.com/#!/DamienFahey/status/202211279191023616

https://twitter.com/#!/dreamersawake/status/201502841272143872

We all have different reasons for favoriting a tweet. It may be practical (saving a link to an article to read later), or swift and silent acknowledgement: you have nothing left to say to someone, but still want to nod.

For me, favoriting tweets is less about someone else and more about me. I don't view this list of favorites as a stagnant archive or Twitter backwater, but rather an active, evolving place that reveals my headspace. While some tweets I favorite are clear, complete thoughts, I notice most favorited tweets are fragmented and ambiguous, and I wonder if the people who write these tweets ponder why I favorited them, especially inside jokes and ones not meant to be understood. But that's the beauty of it: I sift through these mental bits, interpreting and appropriating them as I please. Plucking from this mind and that one, creating meaning and context, compiling a public list that only makes sense to me.

But as I peruse these favorited tweets, I notice many are negative, even contemptuous. And I wonder: Am I really the mean-spirited, pessimistic person reflected in these tweets? Where are the tweets about rainbows and unicorns, about love and hope, about the good in this world?

I *am* drawn to positive tweets, too:

https://twitter.com/#!/MosesHawk/status/191723185606107137

https://twitter.com/#!/forces2/status/202993566367227904

But a fair amount of my favorites are cynical or arrogant in tone, and ultimately depressing: bursts of bleakness, reminders of how harsh this world is. I'm not quite sure what this says about me, or the universe I have created by enmeshing the ideas, hopes, and flaws of others. Curating these tweets into one stream also feels like I'm molding a single being—each click of my mouse a divine action, a step further in shaping an übermind.

And this is why I have grown to love Twitter. In the beginning I ★ed  tweets, simply because I liked them, but the process has evolved into something personal, meaningful, and telling of something bigger—how I see the world, how I want it to be, what I accept about myself. I identify with a stranger's struggle, I accept his or her flaws, and in turn I embrace my own.

In a way, my favorited tweets reveal my own ups and downs and struggle to be a" better" person, whatever that may be: a list that somehow captures all of my successes and imperfections—a record of fleeting moments of empathy, of what it means to be human in a big, impersonal world.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

We love to hear what our friends are reading when they step away from the computer. Drop us a line and let us know what’s blowing your mind. Robyn Virball, Jackalope Brewery I'm a person who always has to be reading something. I cannot go to sleep without reading for about 20 minutes first. This constant need for material sometimes means I pick some really terrible books, but luckily I've had a string of good ones lately.

The Journal of Popular Culture---People Magazine This publication has to top the list; I read it every week. Now before you start putting your judgey pants on, People is very different then US Weekly (not that there's anything wrong with US Weekly). They're pretty reliable with their celebrity gossip and they have inspiring stories like about people who teach homeless children to play soccer and dogs that save their owners from being hit by on-coming trains. Other magazines that are must reads, Martha Stewart Living and Garden and Gun (seriously, go buy one, it's one of the most beautiful magazines you've seen, and there aren't really any guns).

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach I bought this book in the airport in London a few weeks ago, I picked it because Jonathan Franzen had a quote on the front saying that is was amazing.  It follows a mid-western kid who's a baseball phenom as he goes to college, along with five other central characters whose lives he directly impacts.  All the characters so far are interesting and well rounded.  As far as I can tell, Franzen hasn't led me astray.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling Do yourself a favor and read this book.  Kalin's memoir---following her from growing up in Cambridge to Dartmouth to Off Broadway to The Office---is hilarious and left me thinking we should be best friends. It was another airport purchase for me and I ended up being that awkward person on the plane that was laughing out loud for the entire flight.  Mindy is smart, witty, and honest and I promise that you will not regret reading this, unless you hate fun and laughter.

All The Presidents Men by Robert Penn Warren I read this in high school and loved it and now my book club just picked it so I'm reading it again.   It follows a southern politician in the 1930s, watching as he goes from an idealistic politician to a dirty one.  It's just an impressive, really fantastic book, and reading it during an election season is particularly enlightening... and depressing.

What I want to read next---Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead Full disclosure, my friend wrote this.  It comes out on June 12th and I while I haven't read it yet, I highly recommend that you buy it.  It's a social satire set on an island similar to Nantucket, where a family is preparing for the daughter's wedding.  Richard Russo calls it "by turns hilarious and deeply moving". Now you know what you're reading June 12th!

Zoe Rooney, Web Developer Like most people I know, I don't have a lot of time for reading actual books, but I have a couple I'm particularly excited about lined up right now.

Distance, Issue 01 I jumped on this journal series when I first heard about it via their Kickstarter project - it's a series of long, for-serious essays about design. It's text-heavy and theoretical and amazing.

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self by Danielle Evans My mom just bought this for me from my Amazon wish list, which I thought was a fascinating choice on her part. It's a collection of short stories told in the first person that explore the experiences of young non-white people, which I can totally identify with. I'm pretty sure my mom didn't pick it because of the cover, but that is pretty awesome as well.

Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace Sometimes when I just need a mental break I like to reread books from my childhood, and the Betsy Tacy series is one of my absolute favorites. This particular book in the series introduces the archetypically dreamy character of Tony Markham and also makes me feel like I should probably throw a fudge party one of these days.

Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford And because I'm at heart a humongous nerd, I've started reading Javascript: The Good Parts to try and expand my knowledge of that particular programming language.

Jora Vess, Domestic Reflections Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne I recently re-read Simplicity Parenting, which is becoming my go-to parenting book (I have read so many over the past 7 years it is somewhat embarrassing).  I love the less is more approach with most things in life, but it can by challenging for me when it comes to parenting.  This book helps keep me on track.

Bloom by Kelle Hampton I also just pored through Bloom in about a night and a half.  I have always felt so uplifted and inspired by Kelle's blog after I read her (now famous) birth story of her daughter Nella a couple of years ago.  Her book really delivered . . . lots of raw emotion and insight into how she sees the world.  Highly recommend (stock up on tissues and plan to not see your family for awhile since you won't be able to put it down).

This Life Is in Your Hands by Melissa Coleman I am about halfway through This Life Is in Your Hands.  I read an excerpt of it awhile back and knew I had to read the book.  It is a memoir by a woman whose family bought a piece of rural property in Maine in the 1970s and went "off the grid" (which is almost an understatement).  It reminds me very much of the upbringing my parents gave me (at least in my first few years).  It is also a great read for anyone interested in homesteading or rural farm life.

Happy Mother's Day (to the whole damn village)

The conversation might begin with concerns about whether motherhood and feminism are incompatible (I mean if the newspaper of record positions motherhood and feminism on opposite ends of a spectrum, where does that leave all the mothers who happen to think women are full human beings). Maybe it turns to a question about what the “Mommy Wars” actually entail.  We’re all busy, is it that we missed the latest reality show? Are there actual weapons involved? Other than the condescension and self-righteousness we’re told we wield like daggers, of course. There may even be some mutterings about whether it's healthy for motherhood to be elevated to such an exalted status. After all, not everyone dragged into the conversation is in fact a mother and no one wants to be left out of a debate that makes the cover of Time. The problem is this is a fictional debate that serves no one well. When parenting is a battlefield, it’s difficult to use each other as resources and learn from one another’s stories. When we’re told to be on the lookout for other mothers who are judging us, it’s easy to miss all the people who are supporting us in our endeavors to strengthen our families and our communities. And when mothers are put into a special box, we lose the other parts of our identity that make us complete and well-rounded individuals.

It’s not a matter of mothers versus other mothers (this Babble piece rocks that point). We’re all doing our best with the resources and opportunities at our disposal. And it’s also not a matter of mothers versus non-mothers. In a thoughtful essay on why she hates mother’s day, Anne Lamott takes issue with the idea that mothers are somehow superior beings.  Mothering isn’t an individual experience; it isn’t even a purely female experience.

The mothering that helps my children thrive on a daily basis comes from their father, their aunt who lives next door, a phenomenal nanny, a family friend who is practically a part of our family, my dear friend and business partner, and numerous grandparents, not to mention the various teachers, doctors, etc who play significant roles in my children’s health and development. That list would grow exponentially if my husband and I added all the individuals who mothered us throughout a lifetime of experiences.

On this coming Mother’s Day, I’m going to spend less time thinking about mothers and more time thinking about mothering. I’ll still write thoughtful notes to my mom, my stepmom, my mother-in-law, and my grandmas, but I’ll also do my best to thank the other mothers in my life—the best friends, the family members, and the mentors—who mothered me into the person I am today.

There’s no war here; there are enough thank yous, kind words, and lessons to spread around.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

We love to hear what our friends are reading when they step away from the computer.  Drop us a line and let us know what's blowing your mind. Erin Loechner, Design for Mankind: I loooove reading offline - it's a ritual that I don't often get to indulge in. But when I do? I feel relaxed, invigorated and inspired all in one fell swoop. Right now I've been engrossed in an old copy of Elephant Magazine, a fantastic art publication. I've also got copies of Anthology, It's Nice That and Artichoke in regular rotation on my nightstand!

Joslyn Taylor, Simple Lovely: Blood, Bones & Butter by Garbrielle Hamilton I just finished Gabrielle Hamilton's brilliant account of her journey to becoming a chef and owning her own restaurant, and I can't get it out of my head. I'm love  a good food memoir (Ruth Reichl's books are among my favorites), and I think Hamilton's is one of the very best I've read. Her writing is lyrical, beautiful, honest. It is perfection.

Life by Keith Richards My husband and I never (ever) read the same thing, so I thought it would be fun to try it once so we could talk about books more often. We agonized over which book to kick things off with and ended up settled on Keith Richard's memoir Life, as it satisfies our mutual passion for music and our fascination with the rock and roll lifestyle (which we so do not live). I'm completely digging it so far.

Vogue Sometimes it takes me two months to get through a full issue, but I read every single article, religiously. It's just really smart...so much more than fashion. There's brilliant food and culture writing and excellent political interview. If I had to pick my dessert island reading material, it would be this.

Kathleen Shannon, Jeremy & Kathleen: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine I always had the idea that stoics were cold. Emotionally unavailable. Perhaps even a little asshole-ish. But reading this book has redefined what it is to be a stoic and has me as gung-ho for the philosophy of life as Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead had me on juicing. Though, I've yet to buy a juicer. Fortunately, no materials are required to practice being a stoic. Irvine takes a modern approach to sharing the history of stoicism (from back in the good ol' days), stoic psychological techniques (such as negative visualization - it's fascinating!), stoic advice on fame and money (a good kick in the pants for many of us blogging types), and finally ways to practically bring stoic way of living into our modern lives. If you're a fan of Leo Babauta's Zen Habits and Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project you might enjoy this book.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho This book was gifted to me from a dear friend years and years ago. I only finally recently read it while on a long flight so I could look intellectual and deep to my fellow passengers. I had no idea what kind of metaphysical trip I was in for. This book follows a boy's fantastic journey through Spain and the Egyptian deserts as he finds the meaning of life. It's the kind of story fit for a Disney cartoon circa 1964 that you have to properly view with a joint in hand. Then just this past weekend I overheard a hipster with a beard (in Brooklyn, go figure) talking to a girl about reading The Alchemist. So clearly it's impressive and cool. But it might also change your life. So there's that.

The Writings of Florence Scovel Shinn including: The Game of Life and Your Word is Your Wand by Florence Scovel Shinn I almost left this off the list because ol' Florence gets a little too Jesus-y in her writings for my "atheist" tendencies but all that God talk aside this book was kind of a game-changer for me. Florence Scovel Shinn was a metaphysical feminist in the 1930s and spouts off some really radical stuff about universal laws, being meticulous with your words and the whole concept that everything (good and bad) starts with a single thought. And all in the 1930s! Which makes the whole book that much more intriguing to me.

Playing the Field: From Fan to Fanatic

After several years playing in a fantasy league, I’ve learned why baseball lends itself so well to metaphor. We may strike out at the bar or hit it out of the ballpark in the boardroom, but we can’t escape the game. These are my love letters to the sport.  

Dear Curtis Granderson,

Our love was never meant to be.

You became one of my Wayward Soldiers by chance, the result of a poorly-timed and unfortunately-long bathroom break during the second round of my fantasy baseball league’s 2012 online draft.

I took too long making my selection because of aforementioned indelicacies.  When my time ran out, the auto-draft function kicked in and you were, according to ESPN, the highest ranked player still available. Your offensive output for the next six months now belonged to me, whether I wanted it or not.

You’re talented, to be sure. But you’re a New York Yankee.

The boys in my league might scoff at my hesitation. They are all very good at choosing players that statistically offer them the greatest chance of success. They have spreadsheets and long lists of statistics and analysis. Of course, I do too. And they would never mock my fantasy transactions or blame my gender for poor decisions. They’re good people—better people than that.

Actually, in practice, I think I do make more choices based on emotion than they do. Maybe it really is a girl thing, or maybe it is just my personality or my relatively limited experience playing fantasy baseball, or maybe it just means I am a better, more loyal, and all-round superior baseball fan than they are (go Royals!).

There are simple truths you learn early in this life and one of the simplest is this—the New York Yankees exist so people can hate them.  People who don’t are Deluded, Fools, Assholes, or All Three.

I have some beloved, deluded friends and some un-beloved, asshole acquaintances—all of whom have regurgitated long-winded justifications for being Yankee fanatics. Good god, I don’t care.

Simply, it’s just way more fun to hate on the Yankees than it is to love them.  They make it easy.

Actually, you aren’t the first Yankee to be a Wayward Soldier. I had a passing fling with Javier Vasquez two years ago that very nearly ended in tears¹.  Brett Gardner lasted a little longer last summer. His offensive numbers were steady, if a little lackluster.  But those guys were nobodies- insignificant blips that I picked up to fill holes in my roster when one of my trusted men went down².

You—you’re different.

There are plenty of bloated metaphors to be made here about you and I. From the star-crossed, six-day, child-love of Romeo and Juliet to Elizabeth Bennett overcoming her stubborn prejudice—this last month has certainly changed the way I look at you.

Through Wednesday, April 18^th, things were just ‘eh’.  But it’s been a season for slow starts in the league and as long as you were hitting better than Pujols³ I figured I might as well hold on until something more promising came along.

Apparently that something promising was Thursday. It was April 19^th, exactly 237 years after a different set of Yankees fired “the shot heard round the world” on Lexington Common, starting the Revolutionary War⁴.

You made history during that game, becoming the first Yankee to go 5 for 5, while blasting 3 home runs in your first three at-bats.

You made little kids become baseball fans for life that night.

I can sort of imagine what was going through your mind when you first stepped up to the plate. But the time after that, and the time after that, and the time after that—when history was suddenly on the line and every person in that roaring stadium was looking to you to step up and be the star.

They wanted you to be their baseball story, the story they pull out in bars to explain to non-fans why the game can be so magical, so heart-stopping.

And even I, who stubbornly rails against the Yankees at every opportunity, who lives in the Bronx 20 blocks away from your stadium and yet refuses to acknowledge its presence, who didn’t even want to draft you because of the team you played for—even I was on the edge of my seat, wishing and hoping that your last at bat wouldn’t let me down.

I didn’t want to just look at my fantasy stats the next day and be happy that you had a great game. I wanted to obnoxiously brag⁵ about how you had the game of your life and that I was watching.

I’m still not going to be a Yankees fan, and you’re probably not going to be the offensive powerhouse that propels me to win my league this season. But for one night, you and I managed to work past our differences⁶.

Unfortunately for you, I’ve moved on. I literally, physically⁷ ran into Jude Law at work on Friday and now I’m pretty sure we’re in love⁸.

Until next time,

Anna

--

^1. Unfortunately, not exaggeration nor hyperbole.

^2. Insert inappropriate joke about filling holes here.

^3. That’s not saying much. Albert’s batting average is currently .263 with NO home runs.  I’m sure that will change soon enough, although the Cardinal fans in my family will enjoy watching him struggle in the meantime.

^4. Also, coincidentally, the same day in 1946 that the NY Yankees honored their most famous slugger, Babe Ruth, with a plaque showing the world that he was, in fact, as awesome as he always thought himself to be.  Also, randomly, the same day that something called "4 Baboons Adoring the Sun" closed at the Beaumont Theatre in NYC after only 38 performances. I wonder why.

^5. Obnoxiously bragging is a critical component of fantasy baseball.

^6. I love footnotes almost as much as I love you, Curtis.

^7. Read: awkwardly and kind of uncomfortably.

^8. No we’re not.

Welcome!

It was a dark and stormy night—no really, it was.  Our boutique creative agency YOU + ME* was in need of a retreat/vision quest/mini sabbatical/whatever you want to call it and we decided the perfect location was Salt Lake City in January.  We weren’t there to seek inspiration at Sundance or on the slopes (though that would have been a solid plan following the storm that blew through town).  Instead, we flew three quarters of the way across the country to attend the Altitude Summit, lovingly referred to as Alt, a design and social media conference that attracts creative powerhouses from all over the country. If you think boondoggle when you hear conference, it might not be obvious why we expected to forge a bold new path for our business from the lobby of the Grand America Hotel.  But forge we did.  It was time to step away from the glare of our computer screens and into the warm glow of shiny notebooks and neon pencils.   We wanted to liberate our brains from practical matters like business taxes and invoicing systems and let our minds wander toward our biggest dreams and grandest plans.  Most importantly, we needed to meaningfully connect—with old pals, new friends, and each other.

Over the course of our four-day trip, we had a blast (um, as you can see), extended our wheelhouse with a few new tricks, and figured out the next step on our never-ending quest to create a business that reflects our values and leads to fulfilling personal and professional lives. We stayed up late into the night discussing the fact that our internet circles are closing, rather than widening, comparing our experiences of the world, and chatting about our desire to connect women to each other in ways that extend beyond what our houses and weddings look like, what we cook for our families, and how we conceive of and present our outer selves. We downed coffee after coffee contemplating the fact that the online world has been one in which women have been framed as tearing each other down rather than building each other up. We lamented the dearth of online content for women that acknowledges that we are more than our outfits, our homes, and our consumption habits.

From that, the Equals Project was born.

And it looks like others have been thinking along the same lines. From the growing "Things I'm Afraid to Tell You" movement among bloggers, to the focus on meaningful gatherings in Kinfolk magazine, to people sharing incredibly thoughtful stories online with the sole intention of helping other people achieve happiness, it's clear that the internet is evolving from a place where we store and showcase our (often-unattainable) goals into a place where we can be real, multi-dimensional people. As we slow down and think about what we are really consuming on the internet, it seems as if we as a society are aching for meaning and process, rather than destinations and results. We hope you will find here a collection of stories, discussions, and art from women across the country (and across the world) that compels you to think, contribute your own stories and thoughts, and most of all, to act.

We are more than what we can cook, we are more than what we can create, more than our makeup, our jewelry, our aesthetic tastes. We are people with complex ideas, and conflicting thoughts, who read, travel, discuss, do, and make. We are people who are influenced and inspired by the women who came before us, and we aspire to create something greater than the sum of our parts.

After many months of work, tellingly accompanied by more grins than swear words, it’s finally time for us to make the Equals Project a reality.  We still have to pinch ourselves a little bit when we think of the talent, the stories, and the passion found among this amazing group of contributors and collaborators.  And we only get more excited when we think of how the Equals Project will be interpreted in print early next year.  We've also taken to jumping up and cheering on an hourly basis when we think about kicking off Equals Does, our philanthropic call to action--money is not the only tool for making a difference in the world.  In a short while, we’ll be announcing our first project representing Equals Does and featuring a series of inspiring projects that share a similar spirit. If you’re interested in supporting the Equals Project, you’re in luck:

• Follow us on facebook and twitter for regular updates
• Share The Equals Project with your friends, family, and every nice person you meet
• Contribute your writing, photography, or video (see submission guidelines)
• Send us a story of how you’ve used your skills, talents, or sheer gumption as a force for good in the world

Let's continue this conversation and get to know each other better, shall we?

Warmly,

Elisabeth & Miya

Filed Away: On Pinterest and Dreams

I am a careful curator of my own digital life, a user and lover of many websites on the Internet. But my Pinterest account was short-lived. One evening, I found myself pining for Bogotá—for its lively, colorful streets—as I scrolled through a photo essay on a travel blog. I made up my mind. This place is next. And since I had recently joined Pinterest, all I had to do was click the “Pin It” button in my browser bookmarks bar—and voilà. My dream destination was pinned. Filed away. Captured. Done.

For a moment, I felt productive.

* * * * *

I had joined Pinterest to see what I was missing. Naturally, I created boards for my interests, from my own photographs of street art to deliciously decrepit abandoned buildings (a board I called “Elegant Ruination”).

But these images were largely ignored by other users: no repins, no likes, no comments.

From the beginning, I saw what people liked: Party ideas. Hairdos. Photographs of luxury bungalows along the sea. Yes, people liked other things too, but when I perused Pinterest in the weeks I had an account, I saw more images from gourmet cupcake recipes and wedding planning blogs than I’d ever seen. And there’s nothing wrong with cupcakes and weddings—I happen to love both—but from the start this visual paradise just didn’t seem like my thing.

But I wanted to enjoy it.

So, giving in to Pinterest’s aspirational world, and my own desires, I added a board of industrial-chic lofts and a complementary board of pretty designer things to put inside my imaginary million-dollar space: Overpriced honeycomb-shaped bookcases at CB2. Lamps and rugs from Room and Board. What the hell, I thought. Let the drooling consumer in me go wild.

Suddenly, I found myself searching interior design blogs for airy spaces with high ceilings, brick walls, and wooden beams; and indoor swings, hammock beds, and hanging egg chairs to pin. While my own photographs of gritty art and urban ruins got little to no attention, these images of my dream domicile were repinned and liked and commented on like crazy.

And so, I observed this process for several weeks.

* * * * *

On my blog, Facebook, and Twitter, I’ve constructed a persona primarily from my own writing and photography. From my creations. Yet Pinterest was different: it encouraged me to shape my digital identity by curating content that was not mine: Marketable representations of goods. Other people’s dreams. Things I will never have. Pixelated perfection, I suppose. And so I swirled in a community of repinners and dreamers, in a Stepford-wifesque reality.

I noticed many users creating travel bucket lists, and at a glance, their boards were shiny and tidy and vibrant. So one evening, I tried the same: I created another board for places I wanted to visit. But the more I pinned images of Colombia and Cuba and Morocco, the more I felt as if I was bottling up experiences that had yet to happen—and may not happen—shaping my hopes and uncertainties into concrete, clickable images and then filing them away.

I once read a piece about bookmarking articles to read later, with the help of tools like Instapaper. It talked about bookmarking as a form of anti-engagement—a moment of fake action, of swift satisfaction: “It provides just enough of a rush of endorphins to give me a little jolt of accomplishment, sans the need for the accomplishment itself.”

I thought about this as I organized stunning images on my boards, some of which were snapshots of cities I had longed to explore. The process was entertaining, but time-consuming and, ultimately, inert. Or, it felt as if I was moving backward—foraging and favoriting, then labeling and archiving. In a way, I was doing something. And yet the more I pinned, the more I felt further disconnected from doing itself—a step in the opposite direction from the image, the idea, the what-if I had pinned.

When I realized I had been sitting upright in bed, pinning and accumulating “things” for three hours, I deleted my account.

Sure, I was collecting things in an online space. But it still felt like clutter, fit for shoe boxes under my bed. And with Pinterest, my aspirations no longer floated in my head. They were right there: discoverable, pinnable, and recyclable by others.

Aren’t my dreams supposed to be elusive? Unable to be bookmarked?

I don’t doubt Pinterest is fun and effective if you use it in a way that works for you. But it felt strange, even meaningless, to compartmentalize and file away my dreams. Yes, I am a planner and organizer—and an active curator of my digital life.

But at some point, I just had to stop.

Being "Camera-ready"

I had just gotten braces when I went to Europe for the first time with my family. There’s an entire photo album---with acetate sticky pages and all---of me looking awkwardly lanky and oddly unhappy in four weeks’ worth of posed shots: beside the Grand Canal, in front of the Coliseum, atop the Eiffel Tower, and below ground in salt mines of Austria. I didn’t want to smile and reveal a mouth full of metal and I hadn’t yet seen Tyra Banks preach the value of the “smise” (smiling with one’s eyes) on reality TV. And this was at a time when only a handful of people would see the glossy prints we had to wait two days for and pick up from the drugstore. I sometimes wonder what fourteen-year-old me would have done if there were the promise (or threat) of family photos on Facebook.

To bemoan the pressure young people must increasingly feel to be “camera-ready” for social media risks falling in the category of “good ol’ days” nostalgia. And as an adult with a personal blog as well as my own array of social media accounts (and a compulsion to document life), it also risks condescension.  In other words, feeling self-conscious and controlling one’s public image is not a new phenomenon. And getting over that feeling or letting go of control are not challenges reserved for the young.

Even now, I look at photos of my beautiful mother with me as a baby, images so fondly ingrained in my mind, and catch myself trying to compose myself for family shots with my son---hoping that he too will one day look back and think "look at me and my beautiful mother." If I look at a photo of myself holding the baby, fresh from sleep, with bed-head and pillow wrinkles still pressed into my cheek, I am apt to cringe and tempted to say "delete"---always seeing the images through the eyes of an imagined audience. But with the passage of time (even days), I find that my vanity fades and I see how valuable these candid captured moments are.

What feels new is that these challenges of being "camera-ready" must be (or at least now tend to be) met so often, even hourly. With blogs and social media, everything is documented and shared. The playground and the cafeteria extend into the living room; and if you're not the one telling your story, somebody else probably will be.

The cynic points to the unsavory image of pre-teens vamping in Facebook profile pictures, hoping to get more “likes,” or the attention (or envy) of others; the optimist talks about things like community, memory, and hobby (and maybe mumbles something about phases and trends).

At its most benign, the hundreds of photos we take with our phones test the limits of our hard-drives, but there are other more troubling consequences as the reach and the size of one's imagined audience grows.

French theorist Michel Foucault talks about the Panoptican effect whereby the threat of being observed at any given time leads us to self-police (control, inhibit, regulate) our behaviors to fit social norms. Essentially he argues that we internalize the expectations (or desires) of others, with dangerous results for those who fall outside the norm.

There's no resolution to this. There's no "outside" from social pressure. So I suppose the only goal can be mitigation. I wonder sometimes what I might say to a daughter. How does one advise someone to put down the camera phone for a while and just enjoy the moment? To stop waiting for that imaginary audience's approval? It’s something I could be better at, too.

[image by Brooke Fitts]