Posts filed as “Uncategorized”
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 ...Read more.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. ...Read more.Nicest Thing Ever Said About Me
Liza Was Here compared my voice in my recently published essay “The Mean Moms” to that of Anne Lamott. Thank you, fellow Smith College grad! And thanks to the magic of Google alerts, I now know of another great blog worth reading. As for “The Mean Moms,” it’s in the recently published anthology The Maternal is ...Read more.Lasts
Friday marked my final appearance as snack mom at any nursery school, anywhere, ever again. I got very sentimental, even though I had spent the entire year attempting to avoid the job the way a medieval peasant might well have tried to avoid catching the plague. I read Rockabye Crocodile to the assembled masses and sniffed a lot. When school ...Read more.Low Birth Weight and Premature Birth Risk Factors for Autism?
So says the journal Pediatrics, which notes the risk seems higher for girls than boys. I’d be curious to know if they also attempted to sort the data by the age of the children’s parents and whether fertility drugs were used to achieve a pregnancy. Israeli researchers have noted in the past the that the age ...Read more.Quick! The Retired Will Work Cheap Too
I decided to not write about Sue Shellenbarger’s most recent Tuesday column when I first read it. I was sure I was overreacting, my fury was so great. So I waited till today and, guess what? It’s even worse than I thought: Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of ...Read more.Spring is Here
I looked out my back window this morning and could no longer see the Hudson River. The trees now have enough leaves to block my view till late next fall....Read more.It’s Yesterday No More
First things first: It’s 60 degrees here in the Hudson River Valley with occasional bursts of sun through the clouds. There’s definitely an upside to global warming. But on to more important issues. The home in Downey, California formerly owned by the parents of Karen and Richard Carpenter is likely to be torn down and replaced ...Read more.About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
Read More...