Brain food

The future of restaurant food: Silicon Valley cafeterias?

9 May 2013 Brain food
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What would restaurant food look like if chefs actually cared about your long-term health? The restaurant standard of today, in which chefs don’t think twice about melting a stick of butter over your steak, worked in a time when dining out was reserved for special occasions. But in today’s world, where many eat out daily, [...]

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Healthy new year

14 January 2013 Brain food
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Good news for food lovers from 2012: starving yourself will not make you live longer. All those calorie-restrictive diets that increased life expectancy of lab rats by 30 to 40 percent? It turns out the concept doesn’t extend to primates. I’m sure some people (the intentionally-starving ones) might have found this news disappointing. But to [...]

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Two years old

20 July 2012 Thoughts
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Funny as it sounds, Chinese Grandma is two years old. This time last year I was really excited that I’d logged 100 posts during my first year, sharing my go-to recipes, favorite gift ideas and the chinese grandma philosophy of communal life wisdom. Last year was a tough one for me personally, and as a [...]

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Discovery Saturday

26 May 2012 Brain food
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I almost didn’t go to the wedding of my best friend from high school last Sunday. I’d just returned with my family from my dad’s funeral in California. The wedding in Maui was 11 hours of flight time from Ohio. I wanted to give my third child a real 6th birthday party to make up [...]

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My dad

10 May 2012 Brain food
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Seven months after my dad’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, he is gone, after the kind of week for which the word anguish exists. I flew out to California last Monday with my two girls for a weeklong visit, and he was fine. Chemotherapy had failed him, but he was feeling better without its toxic effects. Suddenly [...]

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40

25 January 2012 Getting older
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My friends and I turn 40 this year. I’m ok with this. We have lost some exuberance of youth, but we have also shed the anxiety of beginners. Volatile years finding our way with careers, relationships and new parenthood have given way to a more relaxed confidence. We’ve learned who we are. We’ve become real [...]

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My friend Faith

13 October 2011 Columbus, OH
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It’s been a strange, volatile week, starting high, plunging low and ending with the realization that most everything is a high compared to the lows that could be. The week began last Thursday with a rare and exciting treat: lunch with a new friend, the lovely, curious Faith Durand, Managing Editor extraordinaire of my favorite [...]

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Apologies to Connecticut

5 October 2011 Getting older
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I owe Conecticut an apology. For six long months in my mid-20s I reverse-commuted from New York City to the suburbs of Connecticut for a job, and every day I wondered at the strangeness of such a nearby but utterly alien land. At lunchtime I struggled to feign interest in foreign conversation topics. “I installed [...]

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The perils of marrying too well

16 September 2011 Marriage
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When I married the perfect man a dozen years ago, I felt pretty smart for not messing up the biggest decision of my life. He was and is intelligent, interesting, kind and funny. What I didn’t foresee was one small drawback: he kind of makes me look bad.

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What makes BlogHer different

9 August 2011 Conferences
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I’ve been to three women-targeted conferences, and the first two – Maria Shriver’s Women’s Conference in 2007 and TEDWomen in 2010 – were so impressive I tempered my expectations for the third, a conference for women bloggers called BlogHer 2011. But BlogHer 2011, which took place last weekend in San Diego, was a special experience, [...]

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