In reality, a strong man is tolerant, flexible, generous, faithful, and competent without believing he's omnipotent, and more interested in being close than being worshipped. Women may fall and fall hard for a bad boy with a big ego, but are then devastated when that man is not protective and reliable, fun and funny, kind and accessible. What women really want is a "Caring Caveman," a man like Denzel Washington Read More

Attachment theory, as originally proposed by John Bowlby, describes a number of stages by which an individual progresses from early relationships to adult connections and attitudes toward his or her own children. Read More

Gatherings of the so-called ‘parasite singles' - dinners out, travel adventures, shopping trips - really were communal. Whole groups of women participated as equals. No one woman, and no pair, was singled out as special and above all the rest. The bonds they cherished as lasting were with each of the other women. These women were not narrowly linking themselves to just one other person.  Read More

Parental envy of their adolescent is often founded in loss -- the adult missing what youth has been given that aging has taken away. Read More

     This post is about "entertainment," and in writing it I feel like a salmon trying to talk to other salmon about water. Not only is entertainment all around us, but various factors conspire to make it difficult to assess, even difficult to notice.      For example, what we mean by entertainment is diversion, that which takes us away from serious pursuits. Read More

As a social culture, we can't seem to find a healthy balance when it comes to weight. On one hand, we're an increasingly obese nation with all of the added weight of health complications. On the other hand, we're either heralding or demonizing celebrities for drastic shifts in body weight.Given our perpetual fascination with and raging envy of thinness, the prevalence of eating disorders should come as no surprise. Communities have emerged in celebration of Pro-Ana or Pro-Mia lifestyles, promoting "thinsporation" and advice. But eating disorders are not fashionable and glamorous. They are not lifestyle choices or spiritual experiences. They are devastating illnesses with severe consequences. Read More

 Are men assertive and women aggressive? Read More

Drama is the serious genre. It casts the action in a more serious light. When heterosexuals are not laughing many are likely also to be less forgiving of gay "kiss, kiss, bang, bang, bad behavior," unless, maybe, your film is about two likable cowboys... and one of them dies. Read More

As the Roman poet Horace put it, "Nothing is beautiful from every point of view." Believe me, outraged fellow-citizens, this applies to you, too. And nothing drains the beauty more effectively than one of these airport scanners.So please, just emply your pockets, raise your arms, and shut up already. I've got a plane to catch! Read More

 Darling, if you not are merely sexually attracted to me, but are profoundly in love with me, please do not tolerate me, as tolerance is often associated with being neutral. Just love me the way I am. Read More

Sometimes real life is better than Hollywood endings.  Read More

As a member of the Board of the New Jersey Association for Infant Mental Health, I recently received an e-mail urging me to distribute some material about an intervention that was described as "evidence-based". Although the intervention seemed to be a sensible one and by no means potentially harmful, nevertheless I was intrigued by the sender's stress on the term "evidence-based". Read More

In the first post in this Wedding Season series, I took on the caricatures of single people as selfish by comparing them to the top-this extravaganzas that many contemporary weddings have become. Here, I share something that really grabbed me about some of the ceremonies of the past: They were more likely to underscore the links between the couple and the other people in their lives than the specialness of the couple apart from everyone else. Read More

Politicians have famously poor memories for their mistakes and misdeeds. During Reagan's presidency, testified that he could not remember any involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. President Clinton frequently claimed that could not remember information when deposed about the Paula Jones case. Read More

When hurtling into mania our skills to determine degrees of recklessness and discern safety are at the best impaired, at worse vanished. The upside of this (sort of?) is our enhanced ability to enjoy said reckless and risky behaviour. This of course is the problem. Read More

Wonder why credit cards became the center of your life?  Ask Wimpy. Read More

Prof. Helene Guldberg, author of the groundbreaking book, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, explains in this interview why there is so much support for the failing anti-bully movement and why people are so quick to attack its critics. Read More

Throughout cinematic history the con-artist genre has owned a richly entertaining history, in which colorful and carefree men of the street outfox unlikable rich people in Robin Hood-esque capers. These clever protagonists possess an idealized sense of certainty and competence, never stumbling and always one step ahead. Read More

 Let me ask you a question—tomorrow you have to go to war with New Zealand. I know, Kiwis are lovely people, but still, there's no getting out of it. But you have a choice-you get to have one ally. You can have a) Bulgaria or b) Microsoft. Country or corporation-take your pick.Let me put it to you this way. Read More

A reader of this blog recently asked me to comment on the ideas discussed in the book "The nurture assumption", by Judith Rich Harris. Harris's basic message is that the power of parenting to shape personality is mythical. Read More

It's not enough, after robbing a man of almost a decade of his life, to open the door and say, "Sorry about that, pal. Good luck." Read More

Roughly matching the one billion people living in extreme poverty, there are about a billion living at a level of affluence never previously known except in the courts of kings and nobles. Read More

I've been doing a ton of media interviews lately for my new book, You'd Be So Pretty If...: Teaching Our Daughters to Love Their Bodies -- Even When We Don't Love Our Own, and one of the questions I'm often asked is, "How can I help my daughter feel good about her body?" It's a tricky question, mainly because the key word in that sentence is "help." As moms, we so want to wave our magic wand and Read More

Do you think that singles are selfish and self-centered? It's wedding season. Let's consider today's newlyweds. This is the first in a series of Living Single posts on Wedding Season.  Read More

 Sometimes I wonder the same thing. As I proceeded to pack up my things after class, a few of my students stopped to speak about their projects. At first, a smile slowly crossed my face as I responded to their inquiries. That smile led to a low chuckle as I finished with them. Considering the scene, my thoughts drifted to the last few days as a research and grant assistant at my undergraduate institution. While cleaning my office in preparation of my return to New York for graduate school, my former boss and mentor stopped in and passed on these inspirational words..... Read More

Think of the tech-saavy younger generation as another country with a different language. Their lives are inseparable from technology and they are connected to each other and to information flows in ways many of us will never understand. We can learn to speak their language or we can look ridiculous and irrelevant. Read More

Some leadership scholars have argued that the majority of bosses are bad, ranging from merely incompetent to patently evil. It is these sorts of bosses that can make our working life a living hell. Do you work for one of these? Read More

A friend of mine has been undergoing aggressive chemotherapy for an aggressive form of cancer, and so the subject of dying has been popping up frequently at my house. Among the many insights I've been gathering, the following six help me, an atheist, think about dying and death in ways I can live with, for now...  Read More

These last few months, far from her London home, the enormously talented musician has been on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Universal Records hopes she'll dry out, write, and record. Instead, she drinks. At resorts, paparazzi snap her crawling across bar floors, begging tourists for sips after bartenders refuse to serve her. The record company has spent nearly $1 million on Winehouse's idyll thus far, but she has neither written nor recorded anything of note. She has cancelled concert dates. For all its tragedy, this is a captivating glimpse into the drama of addiction -- captivating because it's larger-than-life, illuminating the question of incentive, i.e.: What would it take to quit? Read More

I've been working lately on a ludic theory of human nature. In case you haven't studied Latin in a while, I hereby inform you that ludic means playful. I'm calling it a ludic theory because if I called it a playful theory you wouldn't take it seriously. ... My theory--which I outline here--is that play is the germ we inherited from our ... Read More