Debbie says: It’s climate change! It’s junk science! It’s fatphobia! It’s all three at once! “New Theory: CO2 makes you fat: It all started with a Danish scientist, Lars-Georg Hersoug, who made an astonishing discovery: “both fat and thin people taking part in the studies over a 22-year period had put on weight – and [...]

Laurie says: My daughter Cid Pearlman is currently in Estonia.  We had a good visit before she left in the early AM last week. … I am back in Tallinn, Estonia, and it’s a bright, clear day in Old Town. I’m here with funding from the U.S. Embassy/Estonia to create a new work for next [...]

Lynne Murray says: My friends are among the treasures of my life. Debbie posted here about friendships in January: “We don’t write about these friendships enough, we don’t talk about them enough. But we live them every day and–speaking just for myself–I couldn’t live without my friends” It took a while before I could read [...]

Laurie says: I saw a group of images by Iranian photographers in an article from In Focus by Alan Taylor in the Atlantic.  I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while but other things kept coming up. Iran has appeared in numerous headlines around the world in recent months, usually attached to stories [...]

Debbie says: The first time I encountered a black person offended by being served watermelon, I was about 14, which means it was about 1965. We ate watermelon all the time in my house, and I could not understand why our guest took it so personally. It was one of my first encounters with the [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: The Nude Revolutionary Calendar is a project undertaken in support of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, a young Egyptian woman who posted nude portraits of herself on Twitter last November, tagged #NudePhotoRevolutionary. Here’s a nude portrait of Elmahdy. According to writer Saskia Vogel, Elmahdy and her boyfriend were criminally charged with “violating morals, [...]

Laurie says: I usually put up a blog about my friend photographer Tee Corinne near the anniversary of her death. (She died in August of 2006.) This year International Women’s Day seems liked the right time. .. She was a lesbian artist, writer, activist, and historian with a passionate artistic nature and a very sharp [...]

Lynne Murray says I always ask “who benefits” from any given “social problem.” The $60 billion diet industry or, as Dr. Deb Burgard has called it, “The Weight Cycling Industry” is in the business of cashing in on a problem of its own creation. Any truly efficient method of changing body size would put them [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: The Crunk Feminist Collective (new to us, and extremely interesting) takes on this “Battle of the Complexions” contest which pits light-skinned, caramel (brown) and dark-skinned women against each other for a prize: There seems to be a not-so-invisible scale that insinuates that black beauty is either light or dark, always one [...]