New Domesticity

The always-smart Annie Murphy Paul gives a fairly scathing review to Jennifer Margulis’s new book “The Business of Baby” in the New York Times this week. The book aims to root out what’s wrong with the American way of pregnancy and birth: too many C-sections, too many drugs, condescending OBs, a money-hungry medical system. [...]

image via brooklyn homesteader

In Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg writes about Homeward Bound, lifestyle bloggers and crafty hipsters:

It’s easy to mock the twee, hyperlocal, handmade aesthetic that dominates fashionable enclaves in places like Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon. But in her new book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, [...]

“The brilliance of Emily Matchar’s new book is that it exhaustively describes what disillusioned workers are opting into: a slower, more sustainable, and more self-sufficient lifestyle that’s focused on the home. Matchar synthesizes dozens of trend stories … into a single, compelling narrative about the resurgence of domesticity….Refreshing.”  -The New Republic “Matchar researches the trend of [...]

image via Oxford American

While we’re on the topic of over-romanticizing food and cooking, here’s a brilliant piece from Courtney Balestier in the Oxford American, on the pleasures and perils of our current foodie nostalgia:

Perhaps the appeal, to us twenty- and thirty-somethings going about life like it’s one long home-ec [...]

In Salon today, an excerpt from Homeward Bound, from the chapter titled “Cupcake Feminists, Hipster Jam Canners, and “Femivores”: The New DIY Food Culture.”

In this excerpt, I talk about the sudden rise of interest in stuff like jam-canning and chicken-keeping among young, educated people, look at the perils of foodie nostalgia (was [...]

Interesting read of the day: Noah Berlatsky’s defense of quitting your job in The Atlantic. Berlatsky, himself a grad school dropout turned writer, suggests that perhaps we need to stop talking about women leaving the workplace as a “failure,” and instead embrace everyone’s right to put family over work. As he writes:

I [...]

In today’s New York Times, foodie guru Michael Pollan waxes poetic on why we all must cook.  You guys already know this topic annoys me, as I argued last week in The Atlantic that not everyone likes to cook, and that healthy fast food would be a perfectly valid option for them.

As Pollan (quoted [...]

Hi guys. I’ve got big news, and a very special request:

If you’re thinking about buying a copy of Homeward Bound, I would love it if you could pre-order it on Amazon or IndieBound by May 7 (the book’s release date).

Why? Because, for every copy sold by May 7, we will [...]

At The Atlantic, I’ve written about why healthy fast food should be a goal for food reformers. So much progressive food culture centers around promoting home cooking as a solution to obesity and other social woes – Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move, every other Mark Bittman column in the New York [...]

A really smart, really insightful review of Homeward Bound by Ann Friedman (I’m a huge fan of her hilarious pie charts) in The New Republic.

An excerpt:

The brilliance of Emily Matchar’s new book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity, is that it exhaustively describes what disillusioned workers are opting into: [...]