Elissa Strauss has written for the Forward over a number of years. She is a regular contributor to CNN, whose work has been published in a number of publications including The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and Longreads.
Elissa Strauss
By Elissa Strauss
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Life Happy Equal Pay Day!
Thinkstock Happy Equal Pay Day Ladies! Today marks how long into this year women must work in order to make how much men made last year when you adjust for how much money we lose because of the 23% gender wage gap. Feels good, right? Equal Pay Day was started by the National Committee on…
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Opinion Why Nate Silver Should Listen to Abraham Joshua Heschel
Nate Silver has pissed a lot of people off lately. In an interview with New York Magazine about the then upcoming launch of the new FiveThirtyEight site, the data-journalism enthusiast took a jab at traditional opinion journalism. He told the interviewer that pundits might “have really high IQs, but they don’t have any discipline in…
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Life Lean In and Pay More Taxes
Getty Images You can add the IRS to the long list of institutions, including public schools and corporations, that still haven’t caught up with the reality that women work now too. As Think Progress reports, married women who earn about the same as their husbands are hit with a big tax bill. And the more…
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Life Feminism Is Better Than Therapy
Vivian Gornick On the website of the Believer there is an excellent interview by Madeleine Schwartz with Vivian Gornick, who is a journalist, feminist, critic, memoirist and just all-around woman you should know and read. Gornick, who was born in the Bronx in 1935 to a couple of Jewish lefties, “grew up torn between the…
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Life Why Are Strong Female Characters So Thin?
Lionsgate Publicity // Jennifer Lawrence as “The Hunger Games’” Katniss Everdeen Over at the Atlantic, Julianne Ross has a piece about the predominance of scrawny women in young-adult fiction. From “The Hunger Games” to “Divergent,” a new wave of popular books features skinny girls acting tough. “It seems literature only goes so far in its…
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Opinion ‘Parenthood’ Reveals Enduring Value of Brotherly (or Sisterly) Love
If you don’t watch the NBC show “Parenthood,” you should. It can make a grown man cry. Or maybe I just know especially sensitive men. Either way, it is the most poignant and sincere portrayal of family life I have seen in a very long time. The show follows the goings-on of the three generations…
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Life Has Gwyneth Paltrow Found Better Path to Splitsville?
I’m of two minds about Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s announcement that they are going through a “conscious uncoupling.” Part of me cringes over the fact that Paltrow felt the need to process something as intimate as her separation in the life-perfecting GOOP mill. What she gave us is a sanitized, sunny, and even chic…
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Life Menstrual Taboos
There is a heartbreaking story by journalist Rose George in Mosaic Science (h/t to Jezebel, who republished it) about menstrual taboos in Nepal and Bangladesh. Among families who observe chhaupadi, a tradition among some Hindus in the region which prohibits any contact with a menstruating woman, daughters and wives are sent to sleep in sheds…
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