My friend Ellen has an interesting post up on the limits of sheer effort and the beauty and value of the sort of effort and perseverance that don’t make for viral videos like the Arthur Boorman one that’s making the rounds: I really like what Ellen has to say on this, because I think that very often we (Americans especially? I’m not sure) laud outlier stories like Arthur’s–the person who lost 100 pounds in 6 months and became drastically healthier... Read more
Okay, most important thing first: meet Tintin! Tintin apologizes for appearing on the Internet in a towel, but he’s very small and his blankie helps him feel a little more cozy. Second, and much less cute, I’ve written an expanded version of Tuesday’s post (on outsourcing and regulations and the Triangle fire and the fire in Bangladesh) for RELEVANT magazine. Here’s the punchy part below, and you can read it all here, if you like. Horrific conditions in these factories—and... Read more
Asan, who is six, loves my son Aidan, who he summons daily by standing outside our house and shouting “Ten!”; “Aidan” has morphed in the Chichewa accent into “eh-TEN” and then attenuated, by Asan at least, into, simply “Ten.” Asan likes to draw: the first time we met him, he clutched a small composition book, the kind American college students used to write their essay exams in (do they still do this?) and a pencil sharpened at both ends that... Read more
I have a new post up at Her.meneutics, the Christianity Today women’s blog on the BBC series Call the Midwife, which I LOVED, purchased on DVD, and can’t wait to subject introduce my husband to. He is currently discovering the joys of Downton with me, and he liked the Anne of Green Gables/Avonlea miniseries ‘way back in the days, so I’m thinking he’ll like this one, too. Unfortunately for me his willingness to watch “chick” movies gives him reason to chide... Read more
Maybe it’s a mark of how wolfish and how polarized the American political climate has become that I am seized with something like fear, or, at the least, fear’s relative, anxiety, as I think about how to start this piece. Because whenever I write something that seems, however tangentially or tentatively, to touch upon one or another issue that has, once again, however improbably, divided people neatly along party lines, I receive comments and emails insisting that I am sounding... Read more
How is it that before today I never noticed that Band-Aids are Caucasian-skin colored? Of course, there are Spider-Man bandages and clear bandages and Disney princess bandages, but when you’re buying a basic package of no-frills bandages, such as I did at Costco before coming to Africa, they are Caucasian-colored. (In grad-school terms, Caucasian-colored Band-Aids are the unmarked term.) Of course they don’t match my skin, or my husband’s, or my children’s, perfectly, but it’s close. You can tell that... Read more
This is THE BEST recipe for green bean casserole, which here has been adapted from Cook’s Illustrated. I feel like I have to be boastful and say that I developed a very similar recipe ALL BY MYSELF before I ever saw that the good Test Kitchen had made one. It’s a bit better for you than the canned “cream-of” version of this American classic, if, to you, “healthy” means actual cream and not “cream-of-something.” You can probably swap half-and-half or even... Read more
It seems that every day something else isn’t working: the electricity goes out about once a day, and there have been some water ‘issues,’ too. And now the Internet is acting up. And then the bathroom sink fell off the wall. And so on. I don’t enjoy any of that. I’m an impatient person and I like things to work WELL and ALWAYS. But this is a good lesson: not just to be grateful for the USA where things always... Read more
Sometimes I tell the various sellers of things, who are always coming to my gate to sell me things, that I have to wait and ask my husband, who has the money. Of course this is not the sort of marriage Tim and I have, but it’s a handy and culturally appropriate way to graciously extricate myself from these situations. (Just so you know, we are certainly supporting the local economy in various ways–we’ve hired a carpenter to build various... Read more
Today I’m happy to welcome Tim Fall back to the blog for a guest post! Thank you, Tim! I’ve known for a while that working out can take the edge off my hunger. Now there’s research that explains why. I won’t go into the details, but this short article gives a good explanation of the chemicals released by exercise and what our brains do in response. It also suggests that eating heavily after exercising may be more a function of... Read more
Rachel Marie Stone
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