Laurie says: I’ve been meaning to write about my yoga class for a while. It’s one of the joys of my life. I love the atmosphere, the relaxed precise movement, the balance between chanting, body movement and breathing. I’ve had different physical practices at different times in my life; fencing, floor bar and always some [...]

Debbie and Laurie say: Apparently, this ad was the source of hilarity in the BlogHer offices yesterday; we also got some good laughs and thought we’d share our amusement with you. Here’s the device itself: Using stainless steel with running water is a recognized method of eliminating the volatile sulfur compounds (VSC) that cause odor. [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We join people around the world in mourning the death of Del Martin, who along with her wife Phyllis Lyon was one of the premier lesbian-rights activists of the 20th century. Martin and Lyon were together for over 50 years, starting in a period where it was extraordinarily brave to be [...]

Laurie says: On Friday, I went to tea with Becky (Rebecca) Jennison, Mika Kobayashi and Debbie in San Francisco. Becky is here visiting from Japan. Mika is here for 3 months at MOMA working on their Japanese photograph collection. I’ve written about both of them and their involvement in Women of Japan before. We had [...]

Debbie says: I haven’t read Freakonomics, but I understand that the basic point is that economic thinking will lead to new ways of viewing existing data. Seems harmless enough, but recently the authors seem to be moving into new and controversial areas. I have to wonder if they’re planning a book on applying economic thinking [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: It’s good to be blogging together again. This month, the Olympics are an inevitable focus for conversations about bodies. We want to make sure you don’t miss Rebecca Solnit’s important take on the topic. The elegant sinewiness of a sprinter, the coiled power of a diver, has little to do with [...]

Debbie says: From the department of we-weren’t-surprised-were-you, comes this story. The article at the link has the familiar half-disturbed, half-smug tone. (“Oh, no! You don’t mean that fat people aren’t all killing themselves?” “Oh, no! We’ll find another way to spin this tale so that fat is still bad for you.”) The story itself, however, [...]

Debbie says: This story, in which the Beijing Olympics showed one little girl lip-synching to another’s voice, because the singer “wasn’t cute enough” is all over the news and the blogosphere. And the tone is the same all over: the Chinese wanted a perfect ceremony, they care about flawlessness, etc., etc. You can almost hear [...]

Debbie says: I don’t want to put any of the topics on my mind in a links list, so I’m going to break Body Impolitic tradition and do three or four separate posts in short succession. Delux Vivens put together a superb Women of Color and Beauty Carnival. The links are excellent, but the intro [...]

Lynne Murray says: Make someone happy . . . isolated, anxious, desperate. It’s a car commercial so of course it’s Auto-erotic, but it caught my attention because of the sound track. The camera tracks a luxury automobile (power, sex) traveling a serpentine road (control, dominance). There’s never any traffic on the road in a car [...]