Emily B, I agree with you that it’s really unfortunate that the conclusion that we don’t need to routinely do mammograms until 50, instead of aparking a national, rational discussion about the advisability of “screening and prevention,” has become the harbinger that we’re all going to live under British health care rationing. The debate over whether we benefit from searching for early cancers is not new, and no wonder the public is so confused. This is like the “no fat” to “no carbs” pendulum swings on official diet recommendation.

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All I can say about the following piece by Emily Piacenza is that if it doesn't make you want to race out and get fitted for a bra, I don't know what will. Have a great weekend, everyone.

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I've been trying to understand the flap this week over the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Task Force—a group ill-prepared to handle the controversy—to delay routine mammograms to age 50 for most women.

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DoubleX is starting a new partnership with the Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: Thanksgiving togetherness—love it or dread it?

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Time magazine's "Can These Parents Be Saved?" story offers a glorious rundown of the rampant possibilities for overparenting that have become available in recent years. From kid leashes ("Kinderkords") to fears about kindergarden "pencil-holding-deficiency," the opportunities for parental self-congratulation are plentiful—almost anyone can think "I may have hovered once in a while, but I was never that bad."

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Yoga is a meditative practice sometimes thought to help liberate the soul from all worldly suffering. The Olympics are a tribalistic sporting event in which nation states battle to produce impressive feats of human athleticism. Bikram Choudhury—a man who teaches yoga in a speedo and a diamond-studded Rolex, guards his trademarked pose sequences like a Rottweiler on meth, and likes to compare his balls to “atom bombs”—says its high time to combine the two.

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Oprah Winfrey is going to announce today that she will be leaving her eponymous talk show in 2011. The New York Times believes Winfrey is resigning from network TV in order to focus on the cable network she's working on, called OWN, which will feature shows from all of her favorite cronies, like Dr. Oz, Rachael Ray, and Dr. Phil.

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Toni Schlesinger, the author of Five Flights Up, has spent the last year visiting and photographing the homes of people who have been hit by the economic crash—people who lost their money, their savings, their terrors, their dream-lives, and their pluck. Step inside their lives with "House Calls."

Before she went rogue, Sarah Palin got lost. She was stalking "majestic dall sheep with their thick curled horns," she writes in her new book, in Mount McKinley National Park.

I had forgotten that Hot Topic existed. The last time I ventured into that dark and gloomy corner of the mall was to secretly purchase incense and Marilyn Manson CDs in high school, which already dates me. I had relinquished my velvet chokers and leather cuffs for the perky, bright lights of Forever 21. I threw away my plaid flannel shirts.

On a recent Thursday, I decided to get two families together with ours in an attempt at some platonic matchmaking—something I’d been meaning to do on Tuesday nights, but have shied away from in practice. So many dishes! So much facilitating! To further complicate matters, I encouraged my friend K. to bring her mother, since my own maternal unit was in town for the week.

Tracy Hahn-Burkett has an essay in Babble today about her rarely clean house. Reading it, I felt as though I could have written it myself. I hate clearning. Last Sunday, after I spent an hour doing dishes (I think they multiply like rabbits if you let them sit overnight) and then cleaned the master bath and master bedroom, I marched up to my husband and asked him, “Are we going to dinner, or is it coming to us?” Mostly because there was no way I was going to make another mess that had to be cleaned up.

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Aside from all the swell Alaska trivia (salmonberries, moose eyeballs, baleen etchings), Sarah Palin’s new memoir has enlightened me about one important thing. For at least a decade, I have puzzled over this new type that showed up on the political scene in the mid-'90s—the Republican “mom” politician. Here was a creature who could work fiendishly, have many children, and still smugly call herself traditional and anti-feminist. Honestly, it makes no sense. It’s like when my kid says he didn’t eat the Oreos but the crumbs are right there on his face.

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Defenders of high fashion's promotion of impossible bodies and anorexic attitudes usually hide behind the argument that high fashion is "aspirational." Because of this, it's all the more comical how high fashion greedily co-opts street fashion, particularly from freewheeling rock and hip-hop subcultures.

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With Thanksgiving looming on the horizon we are headed into what might be one of the most fraught times of the year—the holiday season. With its heavy and sentimental emphasis on family, this can be a tough period for those whose relations don’t necessarily come bearing damp-eyed hugs. Not everyone will be gathering around the piano for a lusty singalong during the last six weeks of 2009. I wonder how many of you are dreading seeing one or more person at dinner next Thursday?

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I'm too hardened against the oft-written-about abstinence message of the Twilight series to allow myself to easily bask in the generally enjoyable gushiness of the movies (gushiness here of course being emotional, not blood-based). New Moon was no exception.

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I'm no Protestant, but where I grew up, the work ethic was firmly instilled, religion or not. If you could stand, you got out of bed. If you could walk, you walked yourself right into the bathroom, put your clothes on, and went to school. In my family, only actual, active vomiting really constituted an excuse, and even then, under certain circumstances (big test, a team commitment), you might just be handed a bucket.

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In the latest edition of the DoubleX Gabfest, Emily Bazelon and Hanna Rosin and New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot discuss Sarah Palin's new book Going Rogue, The Stupak Amendment and the movie Precious.

This Friday, James Franco begins appearing on General Hospital, a casting stunt that’s attracted more attention to the long-running soap opera than anything since Elizabeth Taylor slapped on a turban and cursed Luke and Laura’s nuptials in 1981.

Megan McArdle and I don't agree on a great deal about what the world should look like. But we do agree that we don't like Sarah Palin—mainly because she doesn't like us. Dropping her name in a (virtual) room of city-bred eggheads with ovaries is like aiming one nuclear warhead at another. We can't coexist with Palin because we are full of contempt for the choices she is making or has made. Not a great stimulus for insightful debate.

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