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There is an old saying in journalism that goes like this: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” This is amusing to journalists because it is precisely what we are trained to do—be skeptical and double check everything. We’re supposed to look with a jaundiced eye at every story we have been…

For half a century, U.S. policymakers ignored child care. Families (read: women) were essentially on our own as we struggled to maneuver both home and work responsibilities, with virtually no help from government or our employers. Your child was sent home from school/day care because she had a fever? Figure it out. The nanny suddenly…

Last week I went to a birthday party.   It was a glorious spring day at Boyd Plaza in downtown Columbia, where South Carolina Women in Leadership (SC WIL) was celebrating its second birthday. Two years earlier, a diverse group of 12 women had come together and “defined a multi-partisan strategy for encouraging women to lead,”…

I don’t know about you, but I have had trouble concentrating during this pandemic. I used to be able to sit down and read or write for hours at a time. No longer. Now I’m up and down, checking my phone too often, doing things in short bursts, and, occasionally, forgetting why I walked into…

“…would smell as sweet,” remarks Juliet Capulet in William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” I imagine Juliet is correct but, actually, I have no idea because I suffer from anosmia, the clinical term for the inability to smell. I’m not sure if I was born this way—a condition called congenital anosmia— or whether the allergies I…

So now, in this new year, it’s a waiting game. As COVID-19 has killed close to 400,000 Americans, we wait to receive the vaccines that cutting-edge technology has given us in record time to help stanch this awful pandemic. Several million lucky folks – mostly health care workers and residents/staff of long-term nursing facilities –…

Yuletide is supposed to be a time of joy, peace, and goodwill. Christmas 2020, however, will be a Christmas like none we’ve seen in more than a century.  Medical experts warn that we are facing a frigid, dark, brutal winter as the Coronavirus expands its frightful death march across the country. More than 300,000 American…

In 1971, I interviewed a young doctor in Michigan who had been working as an ER physician but wanted to open her own medical practice. She applied for a bank loan, and was duly informed she needed her husband’s signature in order to get the loan. Mind you, the doctor was earning a substantial salary…