In THE Paper

Here's what's been on my mind this week:

• "My Brief Life as a Woman"--NYTimes writer Dana Jennings continues to explore issues surrounding his fight against aggressive prostate cancer. Here, he experiences the unsettling effects of testosterone suppression: he is like a menopausal woman. And he doesn't like it much at all.
• Sexless Marriages--I think the heart of the article mainly is that it doesn't matter how much sex you have as long as you and your partner are on the same page.
• Healthier Pizzas--with recipe. MMMMmmm, whole wheat pizza dough.
• Kids and Money--I'm trying to teach the kids lessons about money that I'm not sure I have yet learned: budgeting, saving, delayed gratification, doing more with less, simplifying. On Saturday, they each got $5 to spend during an outing (a little more than a dollar for each year they are old, since $4 seemed silly). And we promptly let them spend more, or, more specifically, confused the rules by paying for food and some games. It's going to take more practice.
• More on strawberries--I need these because we're going picking soon, though our own planted strawberry seeds were attacked by squirrels and probably won't grow.
• Photographs of tragic events. Can you picture bodies falling from the WTC? Or starving children in Ethiopia? Or victims at concentration camps of the Holocaust? An exhibition explores photographs of barbaric, grotesque events and our own complicity in those events as we become immune to them through their depiction.
• Movies about food. I loved Tampopo, Babette's Feast, and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, to name a few. But I haven't wanted to see Super Size Me, Fast-Food Nation, or the new Food, Inc. I am completely in favor of food exposes, just like environmental ones (though I haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth. Yes, they've revoked my liberal credentials), but I just can't sit through a film and listen, for instance, to a woman describe the brutal death of her 2 year-old due to an E. Coli-tainted hamburger. But I won't be serving ground beef to the kids or taking them to the golden arches anytime soon.
• Pico Iyer's contemplation of the simpler life.
• The author writes about surviving his own murder and how it affects (and doesn't affect) him
• Ooooohhh, Bitten (but not Bittman) does chocolate cupcakes. From Maida Heatter.