This Band Won’t Change Your Life

I went to see Vampire Weekend at the Ambassador last week. They were great, in their inoffensive, poppy way, but two things struck me about the crowd. One: girls no longer have to wear sensible shoes to gigs these days. Some day I will write a post about the difference in dressing for gigs when [...]

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Feminists I’m Calling You, Please Report to the Front Desk

The first Feminist Open Forum takes place in Wynn’s Hotel on Abbey Street tomorrow (Thursday the 30th) at 7.30, with speakers including Ivana Bacik. And if you need a reminder why such things are still necessary, read Fiona’s excellent piece in Saturday’s Times. A few years ago some of my friends and I wanted to [...]

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Goodbye Mad Men, hello Dead Set

TV rarely gets me all excited, but I’ve just downloaded the Season 2 Finale of Mad Men and will be glued to it later. Spoiled for choice, this will be followed by Charlie Brooker’s Big Brother Zombie piss-take Dead Set, which kicks off tonight on E4. But back to Mad Men. This series has been [...]

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How The Other 90% Live

If, like me, you are tired of all the recent magazine and newspaper articles telling rich people about “fun” ways to survive the recession, you’ll enjoy Sadie Stein’s deliciously snarky riposte over at Jezebel.
Don’t Be A Moron:Basically, all of these tips can fit under this heading. “Live the way most of us do already” would [...]

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Reasons to be Cheerful

I’ve been doing a lot of ranting here recently. Actually, I do a lot of ranting in real life, too. But I am also capable of feeling joy! No, really. Here are some things that are currently making me happy.
1. Dear Science by TV on the Radio. This is the best album I’ve heard in [...]

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Heat Rash

What would we ladies do without Heat Magazine? If it weren’t there to inform and educate us, we might forget to subject other women’s bodies to the sort of scrutiny once reserved for crime scene investigations. We might not be aware that cellulite is shameful but clavicles are even worse. And I’m pretty sure we [...]

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Keeping up with bewk prizes

I’d like to consider myself a well-read gal who keeps up with goings on in the literary world… until this week when a chap called Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Who’s that now? I thought Philip Roth was a shoo-in? Turns out I’m not alone in not having a [...]

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The Wedding March

Gender stereotypes are always annoying, but few are more annoying than the idea that all women are desperate to get married and all men are terrified of the prospect. Strangely enough, not all women are marriage-crazed and not all men are marriage-phobic (and some women wouldn’t want to marry men anyway)! But you wouldn’t know [...]

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All Hail The Queen

I’m really in the mood for late ’80s/early ’90s hip hop at the moment, and I’ve been listening to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul all the time, so I was delighted to see this excellent interview in the New York Times with one of that era’s most important performers – the one [...]

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On book covers and guilty reads

I’m reading Jackie Collins’ latest novel Married Lovers and I don’t know what it is but I adore Jackie Collins. It’s hugely escapist fiction that is great fun to read, and there’s always plenty of sport guessing which Hollywood star she is describing, such as which 40-year-old actress is mixing Vicodin with Xanax and falling asleep [...]

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