hellobeautifulcreatures

And if you were a nine-year-old girl at any point during the last 30 years, you are almost certainly familiar with American Girl. It very well may have been an essential part of your nine-year-old girldom. From the beginning, from the time it was a mere kernel of an idea scrawled on a postcard, American Girl was engineered for nine-year-old girls. It all began when Pleasant Rowland, who was working for an educational publishing company at the time, took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Rowland had had a varied career; she'd been an elementary school teacher , a TV news reporter , a textbook writer. History and education were her passions, and while she was in Virginia, inspiration struck. She sent a postcard detailing her plan to her friend Valerie Tripp , a children's author. As she recalled at American Girl's 25th anniversary celebration , it went something like this: "I've been down in Williamsburg this week and had an idea. What do you think of it? A series of...

How Many of These 20 Pioneering Female Inventors Did You Know? Around the world and across history, innovative women have imagined, developed, tested, and perfected their creations, and yet most of us would be hard pressed to name even a single woman inventor . In fact, women inventors are behind many of the products and technologies used every day! From life rafts to disposable diapers to rocket fuel, women have invented amazing things — but they're also responsible for some of the things we use for day to day life. In fact, if you use GPS on your cell phone, turn on windshield wipers when you drive in the rain, or eat a chocolate chip cookie , you can thank the woman behind them! In honor of the remarkable women whose breakthroughs have advanced technology and the ease of our day to day lives, we're sharing the stories of twenty ingenious women whose inventions have changed the world. Whether they were scribbling designs two centuries ago or are still working today, these ...

Elaine Margolin Contributor In addition to writing book reviews for Truthdig, Elaine is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle , Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, and several literary journals. She has been reviewing… “Sour Heart: Stories” A book by Jenny Zhang It’s easy to see why Lena Dunham chose to publish Jenny Zhang ’s compelling and wildly original debut book of loosely connected short stories at her new Lenny Books imprint at Random House. At first glance, Dunham and Zhang seem to be from different worlds, but there is much that binds them. Dunham grew up a rich kid, the daughter of artists, and attended private school in Manhattan. Zhang grew up the resilient daughter of impoverished and traumatized Chinese -American immigrants who came to America with high hopes that were quickly demolished. Yet the women seem similar in temperament: They are irreverent, defiant and drawn to the hipsters and outlaws who linger at the fringes of our society. Both see...