Blogs

"The Desire Lab" is a place to safely explore your own passions, lusts, longings, and ideas. Moderated by Daniel Bergner, who is writing a book about female desire, the blog is intended to be one part confession, one part research. Daniel will flag interesting topics and controversies in sex research. Send in your responses, and he will share them (anonymously) on the blog.

Marine biologist Miriam Goldstein writes about the slimy and salacious side of ocean science.

The On-Ramp was Double X's guide to navigating work, life, and the recession.

Your Comeback is Double X's blog for women whose lives are on the move. We are here to help you keep a sense of perspective—and a sense of humor!—as you try to manage a balanced life, or are facing some kind of personal change. Our community will be a source of advice, tips, resources, and first-person accounts for anyone wondering what the next day might bring.

With "Nick's Dream House," our decorating boy on a budget scours the major retail chains, secret sources and local hardware store to create his luxe-life fantasy abode for pennies on the dollar. A crafting hen at heart, Nick offers up do-it-yourself tricks to keep inexpensive stuff from looking just plain cheap.

Julie & Julia author Julie Powell blogs about butchery, relationships and her new memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession.

I agree with Jack Shafer about that the ritual self-criticism Rahm Emanual was forced to engage in for using the word “retarded” is ultimately counter-productive,  even if it makes sense to retire the word as a medical description. But I have my own case to make for retiring a commonly misuded medical term. In a recent piece on whether Barack Obama is the next Jimmy Carter (dear God, please, no), Walter Russell Mead describes Obama’s “split personality” on foreign policy and then writes, “Afghanistan is a case study in presidential schizophrenia.” I often see the word “schizophrenia” used to describe conflicting impulses in mentally healthy people, but this misdescribes schizophrenia and does a disservice to our understanding of this devastating disease. Schizophrenia is characterized by delusions, and social withdrawal and malfunction. It’s just wrong to use it to describe a person who has rational but incompatable impulses. If Mead felt Obama was delusional about foreign affairs, the label might have fit. But saying someone has “schizophrenia” rarely works as a figure of speech.

Launched in November 2007, the XX Factor blog is a conversation among Slate’s women writers and friends about politics, culture, and anything else that strikes our fancy.