• Michelle Obama says that the family's new puppy, Bo, is "kind of crazy," and really likes to chew on people's feet. • For the first time since they were donated almost a year ago, Emory University is planning to unveil Alice Walker's literary archives. • The University of California, Davis has launched a new program, titled "One Health", which will help save the world's remaining 740 mountain gorillas by not only caring for the gorillas, but also the people and animals the inhabit the surrounding community. • Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman, made most of his money drawing racy, bondage themed images for an obscure series of magazines called Nights Of Horror. • Philip Markoff, aka the "Craigslist Killer," has been put on suicide watch after corrections officers found shoelace marks on his neck. • The Philippine Court of Appeals has overturned the 2006 rape conviction of a U.S. Marine. The decision is final, and leftist groups are outraged. • The BBC put Google's new Similar Images tool to the test, to find out whether it actually brought back, well, similar images. The verdict: sometimes, but the Renee Zellweger/John Prescott comparison is not very flattering. • A fertility doctor who claims to have implanted cloned human embryos into several woman is being denounced by experts in the field as an "unscrupulous publicity hound." • The Public Health Commission in Wales has changed the national policy on sex change operations, making them more easily available to transgender individuals. • Two frat brothers from a New Hampshire college are facing misdemeanor charges after they branded pledges with a WWII bayonet. • Feministing takes the New York Times to task for its recent review of "17 Again," Zac Efron's new, possibly sexist, movie. • This is the funniest story I've read today: a woman dressed as Princess Leia was pulled over for drunk driving because both she and her husband (dressed as Luke Skywalker, natch) were too embarrassed to walk home in costume. • Henrietta Hughes, the woman who asked Obama for help and a house during one of his town meetings, is now jobless and is may soon be homeless again. • This quirky British couple got married in full-on Shrek costumes. Fairytale wedding indeed. •  Click here to learn about some weird medical mythology, like vagina dentata and sperm gone bad. • In what was probably a very good move, Apple yanked the "Baby Shaker" iPhone app from their store. • In efforts to prevent childhood obesity, ice cream trucks in Britain have been banned from parking outside schools. •  Students in Alaska have been suspended for cruelly taunting and frightening a moose so much that it suffered a fatal injury. • Andrea Wachner hated high school, so instead of attending her 10 year reunion, she sent a stripper in her place. Watch the whole thing on video here. • A new study has found that people who drink a glass of 100% juice each day are more likely to be thin than those who do not. • A 25-year-old woman from San Antonio has plead guilty to arranging the sale of her 5-year-old daughter for sex. She had also planned to sell her 10-month-old daughter into sex slavery, but fortunately, neither child was actually sold. • Massachusetts officials are conducting a DNA search on the body of the "Craigslist Killer" victim to determine whether to add rape to the charges leveled against Philip Markoff. • The women behind the Pink Chadi Campaign have organized another protest, called "One Night Stand". •  Scientists from the University of South Dakota have invented a wall paint that kills germs and bacteria. • Sad news: the Australian government has authorized the killing of thousand baby kangaroos that have been forced by drought into residential areas. •

[Atlanta, April 23. Image via AP]

Alice Walker stands in front of a picture of herself from 1974 as she tours her archives at Emory University, Thursday, April 23, 2009, in Atlanta. Emory University is unveiling the literary archives of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker for the first time since she donated the collection to the Atlanta school a year ago. (AP Photo/John Amis)

Walker, who also gave a reading yesterday in honor of the inauguration, said:

I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance. A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life. To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters. Not to mention your brave and precious grandmother.* And so on. One gathers that your family is large. We are used to seeing men in the White House become juiceless and as white-haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed. They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us of scissors. This is no way to lead. Nor does your family deserve this fate. One way of thinking about all this is: it is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax. From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, but this is because it is not clear to them yet that success is truly an inside job. That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

Whether or not success is an "inside job," we can all agree that nobody wants to see Sasha and Malia sad. [Newsweek]

One note about the choices. Of course there are many, many books by men that "should" be read, but just like Esquire's list, most of the extant rosters of must-read classics are full of old white dudes. So our list is going to be mostly women. Anyway, here goes!

• The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker

Now you go!

75 Books Every Man Should Read [Esquire]

As Phyllis Chesler points out in a Salon essay about the Walkers' war of words, "Rebecca conflates feminist views of motherhood (as she perceives them to be) with her own personal experience of Alice's choice or inability to mother in a traditional way."

While Rebecca reviles her mother, she reveres her father's second wife, a woman named Judy, "who was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on." I agreed with much of what Chesler wrote in her essay, but here's where I must disagree. Chesler says, "Alice did all the things that women like Judy don't want to do and can't do: Write great poems and novels, devote oneself to world work, crusade for human and women's rights. Rebecca: Trust me, a woman really cannot do both. The myth that we can is a dangerous one."

Clearly there are not enough hours in the day for a woman to be both stay at home mom to five and jet-setting writer and activist. But what I gleaned from Chesler's statement about "not doing both" is that finding a balance between ambition and motherhood is impossible. To me, accepting the notion that women can be successful both in the office and at the hearth is one of the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton was talking about. In fact, Hillary herself is a perfect example of a work/motherhood balance. Of course, compromises need to be made; readjustments are constantly occurring; but I've found that most women who "do it all" are too busy actually doing it to whine about how impossible it is.

How My Mother's Fanatical Feminist Views Tore Us Apart [Daily Mail]
The Mother-Daughter Wars [Salon]