Amanda, I agree with you that cooking can be a great pleasure. It's messy, it's creative, and there are few things more empowering than the realization that, if the can opener has disappeared, you can get into a can of tomato sauce with an ice pick and a hammer.

But like Margaret, I'm fed up with the legions of foodies who don't just enjoy their time in the kitchen but feel the need to order everyone else to get in there with them. There's a sense among some urbanites that it's virtually impossible to live the good life if your body isn't fueled at all times by organic food carefully selected at the local farmers' market and lovingly prepared in a kitchen stocked with only the best extra-virgin olive oil Whole Foods has to offer.

Thanks to the abundance of cheap, easy-to-prepare food, cooking—at least the kind that requires kneading or julienning or salting eggplant—is a hobby, not a prerequisite for survivial. And it's a great hobby for those who enjoy it. But its practitioners hold forth about its inherent goodness in a way that few other hobbyists do. When was the last time you heard a scrapbooker earnestly telling a colleague that if she didn't get herself to the local scrapbook-supply store right away, she was condemning herself and her progeny to a lifetime of ill health, low energy, and inusfficient appreciation for the finer things in life? How many comic book fans work to turn nonreaders into disciples of their favorite series? They don't. They hang out with other people who share their passions, but they don't lay claim to the moral high ground just by virtue of their preferred leisure activities.

I don't think there's a moral difference between spending a free hour curled up with a good book and a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and spending that hour slicing and dicing your way through dinner preparations. Yet, thanks to Michael Pollan, Morgan Spurlock, and Jonathan Safran Foer, food choices have become freighted with so much judgmentalism, self-righteousness, and guilt-tripping that what to have for lunch can feel less like a culinary dilemma than an ethical one. But the purpose of food is to fuel our bodies, not save our souls, and I think a stop at Five Guys should be followed by a long walk or a light dinner, not confession and absolution.

Photograph of Mark Bittman by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: cooking, guilt

In Slate today, Jonah Weiner asks whether singer Joanna Newsom is talking about her regret over an abortion in her new song "Baby Birch," which Jonah calls "a nine-and-a-half-minute ache." Newsom can't be pinned into any single meaning. But there is mourning for the loss of a child in her opening stanza: "This is a song for Baby Birch/ though I will never know you./ And at the back of what we've done/ there is the knowledge of you." Is this a child born or stillborn or unborn? Well, this child has green eyes and gold hair, then blue eyes and black hair. Also, "a barber who [is] sitting and cutting away at my only joy." It's a disturbing image, and if Newsom has abortion in mind, "barber" is angry and aggressive. And yet the song, as she unspools, it conveys only haunting sadness. One of my (male) colleagues reports that he choked up when he heard it.  And so I hope that the song lands in that often-empty spot where women look for comfort when they have lost or given up pregnancies, and feel sorrow for whatever reason. There are so many nuances to the emotions that go along with this territory, and too few expressions of them.

Photograph of Joanna Newsom by Mike Flokis/Getty Images Entertainment.

Tags: abortion, baby birch, joanna newsom

Margaret, I'm usually the first to get my back up against the wall when mostly male foodie-writers implore already overworked women to get back into kitchen and save the health of the nation by doing more cooking from scratch. For instance, Michael Pollan has teed me off on this front before, since he clearly thinks women are easier to bully on this front, and so bully women he shall do. But I don't feel intimidated by a few articles here and there aimed at foodies about how to make your own bread from scratch, particularly when you're talking about Mark Bittman, whose recipes often are about minimizing the number of steps from A to Z. They're speaking to hobbyists; I never get the impression that Bittman thinks time-consuming recipes are some mandate on his readers.

The domesticity trend definitely has its anti-feminist side, especially when you see articles like the infamous Lisa Belkin-penned one on the (statistically insignificant) "opt-out revolution." And should anyone try to sell me on the joys of housework, I'm going to laugh in his or her face. But on the whole, I can't be upset at this trend, because at its heart, the promotion of cooking and other domestic arts seems aimed at an audience that wants to have relaxing hobbies that produce things they can be proud of. I want to hate Martha Stewart but I can't. Half the time I watch her show out of the corner of my eye at the gym, I can't help but think that the project she's working on seems like fun.

You ask if spending seven hours making bread is a good use of a young professional's time. Well, I guess part of me has to ask why all our time has to be accounted for as maximized productivity. As someone who enjoys puttering, cooking is an excellent way to unwind after a day spent doing real, career-advancing, political-goal-advancing work. I slap a record on the record player and chop by hand and take a moment away from the latest technological craze to enjoy a little Luddite sensuality.

My potential feminist objections to the cooking craze have been mollified by the number of couples in aforementioned urban professional careers who spend their down time together in the kitchen. Turning it into a hobbyist craze has done more for pushing men into the kitchen than any amount of feminist guilt-tripping could ever do, and for that, I'm grateful to writers who push elaborate recipes as mountains to be conquered instead of just dirty work done to feed a family, thereby making it more appealing to men.

Tags: bread, cooking, foodies, mark bittman

—Two toddlers left without adult supervision died in a North Carolina fire this weekend. Their mother, who left her four children home alone, is being charged with murder. [Associated Press]

—A study from the United Kingdom found that children left with grandparents while their parents are at work are far more likely to be overweight than kids sent to day care. The study hypothesizes that the cause lies in grandparents' tendency to overindulge. [New York Times]

—In the midst of the scandal surrounding New York Governor David Paterson, a top cabinet member has resigned. Denise E. O'Donnell, the deputy secretary for Public Safety, announced her resignation, stating that the governor's actions were "unacceptable regardless of their intent." [Huffington Post]

—Time Magazine has compiled the top 10 most memorable moments of this year's Winter Olympics. From the tragic to the triumphant, the list covers all of the Games' most exciting memories. [Time Magazine]

—Octomom has a new body and now a new social life. The mom of 14 left her kids at home to make the most of her recent trip to New York City with shots and club-hopping. [Shine]

Photograph of Nadya Suleman by Robyn Beck/AFP.

Tags: what we're talking about

In yesterday’s New York Times, Sam Tanenhaus posits a very provocative theory about Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama professor accused of shooting her colleagues. Bishop, he proposes, represents the modern, feminist-era killer. “For all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st century America,” he writes. In literature and film, female killers often grow out of some feminist dilemma: battered wives who kill abusive husbands, psychotic mothers overwhelmed by infants, prostitutes turned vengeful. They are, he writes of his examples,

Essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excess by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them.

Now, he argues, this version of lady killer anchored in feminist ideology does not really make sense. Domestic abuse and sexual violence are widely acknowledged. A working woman is not a lonely harridan haunted by the image of someone else’s perfect family (Glenn Close). Instead, it’s Amy Bishop who represents the next frontier of female anxiety: a scientist in a field dominated by men in a world in which women are increasingly the primary breadwinners in their families. Bishop exists in a world in which women’s empowerment has turned into actual power and, as writer Patricia Cornwell tells Tanenhaus, “the more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.”

Tags: Amy Bishop, feminist killer

KJ, speaking of justice in the Paterson scandal, I wanted to call attention to the morality of Denise O'Donnell, Paterson's deputy secretary for public safety. When O'Donnell heard that Paterson might have some role in covering up the domestic violence of his aide, David W. Johnson, she resigned immediately. On Thursday afternoon, according to the New York Times, O'Donnell released the following written statement: "The behavior alleged here is the antithesis of what many of us have spent our entire careers working to build ... a legal system that protects victims of domestic violence and brings offenders to justice. "

O'Donnell's principled resignation seems to have been a bit lost in discussion of this mess, but her commendable action deserves to be called out.

Photograph of David Paterson by Mandel Ngan/AFP.

Tags: david johnson, david paterson, denise o'donnell