The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

I can't think of a single downside to motherhood now.

The Cairo conferenceis about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.

Reading has always been life unwrapped to me, a way of understanding the world and understanding myself through both the unknown and the everyday. If being a parent consists often of passing along chunks of ourselves to unwitting-often unwilling-recipients, then books are, for me, one of the simplest and most sure-fire ways of doing that.

But while ignorance can make you insensitive, familiarity can also numb. Entering the second half-century of an information age, our cumulative knowledge has changed the level of what appalls, what stuns, what shocks.

part of the problem with a war on poverty today is that many Americans have decided that being poor is a character defect, not an economic condition.

That's what makes life so hard for women, that instead of thinking that this is the way things are, we always think it's the way we are.