Diane Shipley is a freelance writer obsessed with feminism, US TV, memoirs and pizza. She writes about those things and more at her blog, the imaginatively-named Diane Shipley Blogs (http://blog.dianeshipley.com) and is almost always on Twitter (username: @dianeshipley). You’re intelligent, personable, and get good grades. It might look like higher education is a given. But it isn’t. ...

Readers beware! Not every link is a guaranteed trip to a safe space, and the commentary is not necessarily the opinions of myself or others here at FWD/Forward, but have been included to provide you with a variety of reading that is possibly relevant to your interests (or perhaps to mine). The comments in the ...

I think it would be awesome instead of telling me how much they cared, they’d show it. And one way of doing that would be subtitling their ads, so everyone can know what their message is.

The Chief Justice specifically focused on the case of Byron DeBassige, reading from the Toronto Star article I linked above. She went on to state that she believes that the police wouldn’t have shot DeBassige over two lemons and a knife had they known he was ill. In light of the other cases ...

If you haven’t been following my tale of woe on my personal journal, I have a terrible ear infection and can’t hear out of either ear. But now I have antibiotics to treat the middle ear infection, so any day now I should be able to hear something. I hope. (Woe.) Today’s Recommend ...

firecat at Party in my head (DW): How To Be Sick I went to this talk because I have chronic health conditions that affect my mobility and energy levels, and I am a caregiver for my mother, who has Alzheimers. I’m a Buddhist and my study of Buddhism has helped me work through grieving over these ...

I have a little bit of a problem with people being handed down a mandate that insists they behave in a certain way or adhere to a certain set of guidelines for which they are not provided the means to do so. Usually, these rules or mandates are set by people whose lives the rules ...

Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language and ideas of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post and links are provided as topics of interest ...

Chally pointed out to me the other day that I was coming up on 100 posts. If scheduling goes right, this should be it. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I noticed, but I wasn’t sure if I should mention it. She has a knack for making people feel proud of things, no ...

This is the second in a three-part post about a talk given by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, about the interactions between people who are mentally ill (her term) and the justice system of Canada. Part 1 briefly discussed the history of the treatment of ...