Here is a little-known piece of history about Hiroshima: the story of how twenty-five young Japanese women, crippled and disfigured by the effects of the atomic blast, banded together to fight against their despair. They were brought to the United States in 1955 for plastic surgery – lodged in American homes and operated on at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital – in a remarkable humanitarian effort that is itself an epic.
Continue reading... →
The Radium Girls were so contaminated that if you stood over their graves today with a Geiger counter, the radiation levels would still cause the needles to jump more than 80 years later. They were small-town girls from New Jersey who had been hired by a local factory to paint the clock faces of luminous watches, the latest new army gadget used by American soldiers. The women were told that the glow-in-the-dark radioactive paint was harmless, and so they painted 250 dials a day, licking their brushes every few strokes with their lips and tongue to give them a fine point.
Continue reading... →
We as a society have an implicit bias toward extroverts — those who talk the most get the most attention, even though there’s no link between how much we talk and the quality of our insights. And that means we too often dismiss introverts and their ideas — that is, we leave out at least a third of the population, by Susan’s estimate. And that’s costly to everybody, not just introverts.
Continue reading... →
A recent case of toxic shock syndrome, a bacterial infection that can be caused by the use of materials such as tampons, has reignited the debate over tampon use for women’s periods. Twenty-four-year-old model Lauren Wasser was living the high life of a young, up-and-coming Los Angeleno. This all came crashing down when she contracted toxic shock syndrome from wearing a tampon overnight and ultimately had to get one of her legs partially amputated.
Continue reading... →
I’ve been reflecting on some of the key elements necessary for moving your life forward. Here is my start on a list. Take a look and see where you land. Then make a decision to put concentrated effort into making changes in your identified area. Do you notice what you notice? Where do you put your attention? Do you guide your thoughts or do they seem to guide you?
Continue reading... →
Burt Shavitz, a rural beekeeper whose homespun marketing for natural personal care products transformed him from an unknown recluse into the familiar scruffy face of a line of balms that healed a million lips, died on Sunday in Bangor, Me. He was 80. The cause was respiratory problems, said Christina Calbi, a spokeswoman for Burt’s Bees®, the company Mr. Shavitz co-founded in 1984 and which was sold to Clorox in 2007 for about $925 million. The brand still bears his bearded visage, wistful eyes and signature striped locomotive engineer’s cap. Even after the sale, Mr. Shavitz remained a paid spokesman for Burt’s Bees, though he had returned to his hermit’s existence in a 400-square-foot converted turkey coop in Parkman, ME, northwest of Bangor. The abode was equipped with a radio and refrigerator but not a television or running hot water. I realized I had it made because you don’t have to destroy anything to get honey. You can just use the same things over and over again, put it in a quart canning jar, and you’ve got $12. In 1984, Mr. Shavitz picked up a 33-year-old hitchhiker, Roxanne Quimby, who became his business and romantic partner. Ms. Quimby, a former […]
Continue reading... →
It’s a cloudy, gray day along the coast of Virginia, and several people wearing waders are knee-deep in the tide. They peer down at the oyster bed below, while one crew member pokes around with a long That’s actually a GoPro in the water, and the woman running the show isn’t a marine biologist, but a communications guru with the blue-tinted horn-rimmed glasses to match. It so happens that Julia Roberson, with her bleached-blonde, Bieber-swept hair and Southern twang, is conservationists’ secret weapon against ocean acidification. Roberson, 35, is perhaps an unlikely savior of the seas. Yes, she now directs the acidification program at the Ocean Conservancy, a leading environmental nonprofit in D.C., but her CV is pure PR, leaping from an early career in glossy magazines to a key player in an emerging national debate about the health of our seas. Observers say she’s succeeding where so many scientists and activists have failed: taking what is often seen from the public’s perspective as an environmental problem and reframing it as a people problem. In Roberson’s rendering, ocean acidification isn’t about climate change, or ocean health, or even about those bivalves in the seabed. Instead, it’s about farmers, jobs and […]
Continue reading... →
Women are everywhere. No surprise, right? They do, after all, make up 50 percent of the world’s population. Yet, everywhere we look, women are a topic of conversation. Michelle Obama’s outfit choices on a recent tour of Japan are proclaimed to break down female stereotypes. Sweaty, jiggling, and fabulous women exercising on our screens chant “This girl can.” A woman’s mob killing in Afghanistan sparks a global #JusticeForFarkhunda movement. The banning of “India’s Daughter,” a documentary about the gang rape in Delhi, raises hackles across the globe.
Continue reading... →
Every night, Donna Young goes to bed with her pistol, a .45 Taurus Judge with laser attachment. Last fall, she says, someone stole onto her ranch to poison her livestock, or tried to; happily, her son found the d-CON wrapper and dumped all the feed from the troughs. Strangers phoned the house to wish her dead or run out of town on a rail. Local nurses and doctors went them one better, she says, warning pregnant women that Young’s incompetence had killed babies and would surely kill theirs too, if given the chance.
Continue reading... →
Many food items that are produced in the United States are full of additives and chemicals. Unfortunately, Americans are eating lab-created and nutrient-stripped food that somehow got twisted around into being called healthy or normal. Because the food industry is a big business, many probably don’t know the facts about how their food is produced, and what ingredients in that food can do to our bodies.
Continue reading... →