Helaine Olen

Daily Blogging for Babble

I’m blogging once a day for Babble’s Strollerderby blog. Come visit me!

It’s Off to Work We Go

As we end the work week, I’d like to revisit an interview The New York Times interview ran recently with children’s writer Rebecca Stead.

Stead, the author of the wonderful Newbery Medal winning children’s novel “When You Reach Me,” chatted with the Times about for a feature about what her typical Sunday with her husband and [...]

This One’s for George

As many of my friends know, I have a definite thing for the Armageddon types. I suspect I am one of those people who needs to know how much worse things can be before I appreciate what I have in the here and now (Yeah, my health insurance bites! But hey, in five years, [...]

The World, C’est Moi

First, let me say I am terribly sorry to read about Sandra Tsing-Loh’s divorce which, according to her essay in the most recent issue of The Atlantic, apparently occurred after she could not meet a deadline imposed by her [...]

The Hooker Index

“Latvian Hookers Signal No Recovery for the Economy,” blared a recent headline on the front page of Bloomberg. The piece is about a blog post by John Hempton, who runs the popular finance blog Bronte Capital, analyzing the sex trade in the former Soviet Republic of Latvia. Hempton concludes that Europe is in for a [...]

Quote of the Year

The winning entry comes from Jacob Frenkel, top economist for money pit insurer AIG. Speaking at Davos earlier this year about the economy, he proclaimed economic prospects for the second half of 2008 quite good, adding: “When you’re in a stormy sea, the critical question is to ask how strong is my vessel .”

Pity Frenkel didn’t think to run that same [...]

Let’s Party Like It’s 1988

There are many things I can add to my never-ending “Are We in a Recession” tally. There’s the sudden cornucopia of free samples at the Grand Central Market, the five empty taxis that whizzed by me as I waited for the light to change at the intersection of Broadway/Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street at 6:15 [...]

I Don’t Know Whether to Laugh or Cry

I suppose only a parent of two boys would laugh when she read that the first two children abandoned at Nebraska hospitals after the enactment of a law aimed at protecting infants of overwhelmed moms were not babies but instead two boys ages 11 and 15.

I Heart Mary Ann Mason

I must confess I tossed aside the galley of Mothers on the Fast Track by Mary Ann Mason and her daughter Eve Mason Ekman a year ago, barely bothering to read more than the ill chosen title. I was absolutely sure it was yet another book about how those darn moms didn’t know how to [...]

Beach Baby

I’m not one to underestimate all the things that have changed in our society since I was a child due to the influx of mothers into the paid workforce, but I can’t quite bring myself to blame them for the demise of local pool clubs, a la The Washington Post, especially when it seems the [...]