Monthly Archives: June 2015

Sesame Street is the gold standard for kids under five. That’s in terms of entertainment and everything else used by toddlers, including diapers, food, and toys. The people at Sesame Workshop and PBS have worked very hard (read: resisted outsourcing everything to China) to ensure that if you see familiar muppet faces on a given product, you can trust that product. Sesame Street matters. We trust it to raise our kids the right way. Now, if you don’t have a […]

Ten years ago today, on June 26, 2005, my mother died. At the time, I asked her old friend Nancy if I would still be grieving in a year and she said kindly, “ten years.” Nancy had a very good point. As recently as a few months ago, I dreamed she was alive, and when I woke up, it was a little like losing her all over again. My mother and I were our nuclear family, single mom plus only […]

Today, June 24, this petition will be sent to California Governor Jerry Brown. It opposes SB277, the bill that would abolish “personal belief exemptions” of parents of California children who would like their unvaccinated kids to attend public schools. The bill permits medical exceptions, but not the religious/personal kind, so if the bill passes and Brown signs it, almost every child in California will be required to receive a prescribed set of vaccinations before enrolling in any public school. If […]

Did Season 3 of Orange is the New Black exude, explore, or deplore white privilege? Upon seeing the recent cover of Rolling Stone, before watching the third season, I thought: oh brother, it’s the third year of OITNB; do we still need pretty white women to serve as the Trojan Horse for a show that’s really about blacks and Latinas? In case you hadn’t heard, two years ago, the show creator, Jenji Kohan, said: In a lot of ways Piper […]

  Yesterday, two catastrophes befell black people living next to the Atlantic Ocean. You may have heard about one of them, the unthinkable slaughter of nine African-Americans in a historically slavery-resisting church in Charleston, South Carolina. This post is instead about the one that will irrevocably change thousands as many lives, on the only island where a slave revolt ever succeeded in toppling a government — Hispaniola, now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Yesterday, the Dominican Republic began […]

AWHHHHHHHH! Would you like to hold your scream? I would not like to, Dad-on-team. I would not like to hold my scream. Would you hold it here or there? I would not hold it here or there. I would not hold it anywhere. I do not like to hold my scream. I do not hold it, Dad-on-team. Could you hold it with your body? Could you hold it on the potty? I cannot hold it with my body. I cannot […]

“I’ve paid my dues, time after time…” The last time the Golden State Warriors won a National Basketball Association championship, that song wasn’t even written yet. “Celebrate good times, come on!” That one either. There are 30 teams in the NBA. Every year, 29 of them go home without winning it all. So even if you’re some kind of karma-supervising socialist, any team that has gone more than 30 years without a title is overdue. Four decades of waiting. Of […]

What’s up with street names? They’re terrible, at least in newer parts of America. If this is a first world problem, it’s the kind where the First World fails to learn from the Third World. Let me explain. In case you haven’t heard, America is still growing, still building towns from scratch, still paving paradise and putting up parking lots. In my little home state of California, I’ve seen at least 100 towns sprout up that didn’t exist when I […]

A few weeks back, I participated in my first silent auction, and if you’re a parent of an over-2-year-old, you’ve already guessed that it was a school fundraiser. I loved it! Felt a lot less stressful than the movie versions of Sotheby’s auctions. (Not that I don’t want to be Cary Grant in North by Northwest, but somehow I doubt I’m pulling that off.) You know, you just walk around the tables, read about the things to bid on, write […]

One does not simply walk into my annual Game of Thrones article. A man surveys all that has been said. A girl tries to make herself useful, in this case by attempting to write what has heretofore remained unwritten. A reader reads on, expecting spoilers and insight. In case you’ve been living under The Wall, this fifth season of Game of Thrones, which concludes Sunday, is the first to make a significant departure from George R.R. Martin’s literary source material, […]