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Quoted in the New York Times about the hateful Skinny Bitch vegan "health" book phenom. Cheers to reporter Julia Moskin for including Debbie's critical viewpoint—that skinny and healthy are not the same, and vegan junk food is still junk, that these books stop short of the challenge to our industrialized food system that a more politicized vegan analysis would provide.

Because it's...

Not long ago, homeschooling was thought of as the domain of hippie earth mothers letting their kids "do their own thing" or creationist Christians shielding their kids from monkey science and premarital sex. As recently as 1980, homeschooling was illegal in 30 states. Despite the fact that such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Margaret Atwood, Sandra Day O'Connor, and, um, Jennifer Love Hewitt were...

In an era when it's possible to turn on the television on any given night and see a clutch of bikini-clad women crawling over their male prey (ABC's The Bachelor), a sex-toy demonstration (HBO's Real Sex), or a 9-year-old showing off her moves on her parents' personal stripper pole (E!'s Keeping Up with the Kardashians), Wendy Shalit's assertion that modesty has made...

Every year, I'm one of the many critics invited to select their top 10 albums and singles for the Village Voice's venerable (if interesting largely only to other music critics) Pazz & Jop poll. I stopped writing about music for a (fractional) living seven years ago, and most music criticism gives me hives now, but I still love music itself, and the nice thing about Pazz & Jop is that...