Women In Art video - A survey of 500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art - lacking in women of color, but otherwise a celebration of feminine beauty.
Related book: Seeing Ourselves : Women’s Self-Portraits, by Frances Borzello - “…self-portraits across eight centuries, deftly weaving together art and social history, the biographies [...]

“American Idol” finalist Katharine McPhee has acknowledged that she fought a five-year battle with bulimia, and had childhood reading problems that sabotaged her self-esteem and made her turn to food for comfort.
“Low self-esteem was huge for me,” McPhee said. “I was always the pretty little girl who was stupid. That was really difficult… I was [...]

“Drawing is sort of therapy for me. I draw in between film shooting sessions, I draw while flying on airplanes, and sometimes when I have days off.”
Actor Jane Seymour [from the page Painting 2]
Actively making a life of meaning beyond work can help keep us emotionally healthy and creatively dynamic.
Gabriel Byrne notes in an interview [...]

One study has shown that as young as the fifth grade, Asian-American girls have the highest rate of depression… “Model minority” pressure — the pressure some Asian-American families put on children to be high achievers at school and professionally — helps explain the problem.
Professor Eliza Noh says, “In my study, the model minority pressure is [...]

Elisabeth Shue has been inspired by her new film “Gracie,” based on her own early life, which included playing soccer, to pursue her ambition to play tennis professionally.
A recent LA Times article [Whose life is it anyway?, By Gina Piccalo, May 27] notes, “After months of intense training, the 43-year-old aspires to be ranked by [...]

Harvard Professor Ellen Langer and colleague Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel workers and told one group that “the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle.”
Langer and Crum told the control group nothing. Four weeks later, the control group hadn’t [...]

“I really don’t know how to be anyone else, and whenever I try to be anyone else, I fail miserably. Or I disappoint myself. It doesn’t build my self-esteem, and it doesn’t help me grow me at all.”
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“It was a very vulnerable time going from being insecure about my body and who I am [...]

Much of this site is about thinking, about exploring perspectives and ideas that can help us make more sense of how we operate, and be more fully conscious and creative.
But in his stimulating book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell writes about “rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in [...]