Shop for Yourself

Sonya Zalubowski writes: The first thing that hits you after landing in New Mexico is the vastness of the blue sky, a panorama that surrounds you amid the state’s rough high desert and mountainous landscape. Perhaps that sky with all its limitlessness, including the unrealized possibility of finding more of the gold they found in Mexico, is what first attracted the Spanish to settle this area. Their influence dating all the way to the 16th century plus the large indigenous native American presence color the area’s flavor to this day. more »

In the 1980s and 1990s, when I read women’s history on my own, I realized that there were important and prominent women in every decade, but they disappeared when the history books were written. Women were like sand castles; men were like rocks. The waters of time washed over both and wiped out the women. The Clintons — mother and daughter — are helping to remedy that. By telling the stories of 103 Gutsy women, they want to raise the sand from the beaches and fuse the particles into solid quartz. more »

Rose Madeline Mula writes: I wore frilly, voluminous petticoats that propped up impossibly full dresses. Yes, these may have been ridiculous — but I think far preferable to today’s skirts and dresses that are stretched so tightly across tummies and tushies that they produce a series of unsightly horizontal wrinkles that have somehow become an accepted fashion statement instead of an abomination to be banished by a steam iron. And it’s amazing how women manage to sit while their torsos are bound in those impossibly tight, short frocks. (“Frocks.” Now that’s a word that really dates me.) more »

The authors analyzed data from the Los Angeles County Health Survey with a focus on two specific health behaviors — eating at fast-food restaurants more than once a week and eating five or more servings of fruit and vegetables daily. For the purposes of the survey, an apple is used as a reference point for a serving of fruit, and a handful of broccoli or a cup of cut carrots are used as references for a serving of vegetables. The researchers analyzed 4,244 responses from both immigrants and native-born Americans regarding fast-food consumption. They analyzed 9,166 responses to the fruit-and-vegetable-intake question.   more »