Family

A Post-Election Note

I had a birthday during the week of the recent presidential election, so as an indulgence, I started writing this post to express my personal view on the election results. It was a bit of a whirlwind, with all but a handful of races decided within a day or two. Full disclosure: I voted for […]

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Back-To-School: Friends, Feelings and…Forms?

This time of year, we all shift gears in many ways, marking the end of Summer with Labor Day weekend. We move from vacations back to work.  Those of you with kids at home have also begun the process of getting everyone ready for a new school year. That first week of school is an […]

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Men, Fathers, and Work: A Note for Father’s Day

I write a lot about women, and their roles – desired or expected – in economic life. I’m a big believer in each of us being able to use our gifts and talents to offer the best of ourselves to the world. Often, that offering is cut short, channeled into something smaller, or rejected entirely. […]

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Witches! AKA Women With Power

Holidays like Halloween may have pagan roots in harvest festivals as well as in the Christian tradition to honor the dead. Today, that history has morphed into Fall symbols like pumpkins, shafts of wheat and bonfires, and the ghoulish and gory like skeletons, ghosts and the undead.  The holiday fits in today’s gender-fluid world, with […]

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Holiday Planning…During a Plague

Stock market watchers often talk about whether “this time it’s different”: Does this bull market reflect the same conditions as the last one? Is this downturn different from the one just before the last recession? This time, is it different? Almost always, circumstances might be different, but business cycles are more or less the same. […]

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Supply, Demand and the Way Through

For about a week now, most of us have been hunkered down in our little COVID caves under a “social isolation” directive. Some of the rest of you are under strict shelter-in-place orders. Here’s the bottom line: We will get through this. And not in a dystopian, I Am Legend kind of way, though if […]

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Welcome to 2020: Hindsight and Vision

This time of year we often look back over the past 12 months, and as we close out 2019, we also close out a decade. Time goes by in the blink of an eye, and the past ten years are only different in that there has been more change than ever before. That will only be exceeded by […]

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A Mother’s Day Wish List

My mother was a strong and resilient woman, creative and resourceful, quick to help and even quicker to laugh. I adored her.  People often commented that she’d had a hard life, and she always countered that it was full of interesting experiences. I loved the stories she told about her life, but I also wished […]

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Valentine’s Day Planning

If all the pink hearts and chocolates you’ve been seeing in stores since just after Christmas weren’t enough of a giveaway, it’s Valentine’s Day. The first conversational candy hearts were crafted by the New England Confectioners Company in 1866.  Yes, that means we’ve been doing this for over 150 years.  And this year you probably […]

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Blind Spots and Seeing the Whole Picture

I’m a huge movie buff. In a different life, I would have been behind a camera, capturing people’s stories on film. One of the best stories I’ve seen on film is a movie making the festival circuit this year, Blindspotting. Daveed Diggs of Hamilton fame, along with longtime friend, poet and fellow actor Rafael Casal, […]

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