live the questions now

If you were to ask that question immediately after looking at the time span between my last post here and this one, you might be wondering, “what will it take for Emily to get around to blogging again?” Alas, that is not the “it” to which I am referring. In the time since my last post in — gasp — June, much has happened to get in the way of my writing here. Which is not to say that I have not written since June. However, most of my writing has not been about learning of the social change and technology variety, but instead the blenderrific learning process that came from joyous discoveries and bumbling mistakes made in the kitchen while recovering from a broken jaw last year.

There was one other writing project for which I deserve very little credit but am very proud: my sister’s new book, Notes from the Cracked Ceiling: Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, and What it Will Take for a Woman to Win. My love of learning leads to a strong affinity for research and I have often said that the best thing about graduate school was having the full time job of reading interesting and provocative things about the world all day and then writing about them. Well, for a short time last year, it was my job again, as I researched and annotated a global perspective of women in presidential and executive politics. It was fascinating to dive deep into the case studies of “Iron Ladies” like Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Angela Merckel, and Michelle Bachelet, as well as less well known politicians like Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir of Iceland and Laura Chinchilla, who recently was elected Costa Rica’s first woman president. The truly interesting stuff in the final product are the myriad insights on American politics and gender. Yes, of course, I’m doubly biased in recommending this book. But, as an avid non-fiction reader with a 21st century attention span, let me just state that, if the place at which many books on my shelves are dog-eared counts as evidence, about 95% percent of the books I read are one-third longer than they need to be. Notes was the rare book that I read cover-to-cover, and seriously…not just because I worked on it. With the midterm elections later this year and 2012 already on the horizon, we have lessons to learn.