I’m still riding high from last week’s awesome, inspiring conference about the writings of Ellen Willis, co-organized by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz. Nona has put together an anthology of Ellen’s rock criticism, which comes out this month and is a must-read for music lovers and cultural critics (I still can’t get over the brilliance of her Janis Joplin essay, reprinted here by Salon.com). I wrote a short review of Out of the Vinyl Deeps for the May issue of Elle, which just happens to be the music issue.

For those of us who aren’t lucky enough to “just know,” how is a person to decide if he or she wants to have a child?

Over at The Rumpus, a 41-year-old baby-ambivalent man asks the burning question, and receives a really touching and thoughtful answer. The advice columnist’s response echoes a lot of what I heard from psychologists when I was researching baby lust for Elle, but in a more lyrical and heartfelt way. This part really struck me:

You wrote to me because you want clarity about which course to take, but perhaps you should let that go…there will likely be no clarity, at least at the outset; there will only be the choice you make and the sure knowledge that either one will contain some loss.

I suppose it comes down to the acceptance and prioritization of different types of loss…a very daunting concept.

New research finds that measurements of a man’s nether regions really does correlate to his ability to get a woman pregnant, Time reports. The area of interest is located slightly south of where you’re probably thinking: it’s actually the distance between the anus to underneath the scrotum, known as anogenital distance, or AGD. According to a study published in this month’s Environmental Health Perspectives, AGD is associated with semen volume and sperm count. As Time reports:

The median AGD length is about 2 inches; men with a shorter measurement stand a seven-times greater risk of having fertility problems as opposed to men with a longer AGD. They are more likely to be sub-fertile, which generally indicates a sperm count of less than 20 million per milliliter. Men with sperm counts in this range are only half as likely to succeed in getting a partner pregnant as men with more typical sperm counts in the range of 50 to 60 million sperm per milliliter.

The study authors believe the AGD could be a “reliable marker” of potential infertility, especially when combined with additional tests like sperm count analysis.

This month, as we honor influential women of the past and present, we say goodbye to two unique talents: Hazel Rowley, the brilliant biographer of charismatic, complex people and their complicated relationships; and Elizabeth Taylor, the dynamic actress whose complicated relationships were the subject of at least three biographies.

These two women may not have much in common, but they are responsible for two of my favorite cultural works about relationships. In Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Rowley chronicles one of the messiest and most passionate relationships of all time; and in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Taylor brought to fiery life one half of the fiercest, most intense couples we’ve ever seen onscreen. Both women seemed fascinated by the push-pull effect of passion, of its irresistible allure and its terrible destructive power.

Tonight, I’m going to break some wine bottles in their honor.

Everyone loved Tina Fey’s essay for the New Yorker about juggling work and kids, and trying to decide whether she should have a second baby. And there was a lot to love! Fey was her typical hilarious, irreverent, incisive, awesome self. Take these bon mots:

“‘How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.”

“There’s another great movie idea! ‘Baby Versus Work’: A hard-working baby looking for love (Kate Hudson) falls for a handsome pile of papers (Hugh Grant). I would play the ghost of a Victorian poetess who anachronistically tells Kate to ‘go for it.’”

It was full of one-liners that made women want to simultaneously slap our knees and pump our fists. But beyond the jokes, Fey showed us a side of herself she doesn’t usually reveal.

On 30 Rock, Fey pokes wicked fun at the Cathy-cartoon stereotype, and whenever she’s onstage, she drops pro-feminist jokes and comments, but in interviews, Fey has always seemed hesitant to talk about her own experiences as a woman, and as a working mother. Despite being a role model to many ambitious, smart women, Fey’s not exactly what I’d call a girl’s girl; in fact, in a 2003 New Yorker profile, Fey admitted to being a “mean girl.” In an article for Salon.com about the feminist backlash against Tina Fey, Rebecca Traister wrote, “I’ve frankly always been surprised that her fans regarded Fey with such fuzzy affection. I’ve thought her to be famously (and self-avowedly) one of the chilliest, prickliest celebrities around.” Traister goes on to say that she isn’t bothered by this, as she’s “got no problem with women who don’t conform to expectations for cuddliness.” And neither do I.

I’ve come to view Fey as one of those high-profile women who will make dead-on jokes that refer to the difficulties of modern womanhood, but will refrain from talking about them in any personal sense. While she’s happy to let her characters talk, quip, condemn and complain, the real Fey will keep out of the fray.

That’s why I thought this New Yorker essay was so great. Like Fey’s comedy, it was aggressive and arch. Like her portrayal of single workaholic Liz Lemon, it was self-deprecating without being self-pitying. But it was different from most of the other work Fey has done or the things she’s said in that it was honest, highly revealing and utterly relatable. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say that Fey was speaking out for working moms, but she was putting a high-profile, popular face on a dilemma faced by millions of American women. Every working mom I know–heck, every woman I know–read this essay with enormous delight.

But here’s the big question: after Fey’s fans (myself included) have tweeted and Facebooked and blogged about the essay, what will we do next? Where will we take this from here? Will we do anything to address any of the frustrating issues that Fey brings up, like the fact that her “last five minutes of being famous is timing out to be simultaneous with my last five minutes of being able to have a baby”? Fey suggests that one solution to the ubiquity of unflattering film portrayals of older women as “crazy” is to have more female filmmakers — like herself. But how can she balance both making movies and television shows with raising a child in our completely unsupportive, anti-family country (that’s my description; not Fey’s)? Will we just laugh, post, “like” and passively return to our own crazy-making work-family dilemmas? I hope that Tina Fey’s humorous essay will make Americans start take working mothers seriously.

This one’s for the (other) men in my life! I wrote a fun feature for the March 2011 issue of Women’s Health magazine about the joys of having guys as friends.

For a more in-depth exploration of this topic, check out Juliet Lapidos’ fantastic series on platonic friendships for Slate. Inspired by her own close, platonic friendship with a childhood pal named Jeff, Lapidos set out to find out what qualities define opposite-sex friendships, and to find role models. She notes that despite the prevalence of guy-girl friends in contemporary life, they seem to be lacking from the media, as well as from academic research. Psychologists and scholars are obsessed with romantic pairs, but a platonic friendship between a man and a woman seems to leave them cold. (My own research also proved this to be true. One sociologist, agreeing that there was a dearth of studies about opposite-sex friendships, joked that maybe researchers “get older, get married, and lose interest in studying their guy friends!”). Lapidos does a great job of looking at opposite-sex friendships from different angles.

My article about baby lust (and how women know when it’s time to have baby) is up at Elle.com. At the very end of the article, there’s a place where readers can share stories of their own experiences with baby lust. I’m really curious to hear what people have to say. Some might wonder why Elle has chosen to collect responses via a special form, as opposed to using the standard mechanism of  a comments section. Here’s the deal: one of the sociologists I interviewed for the article has been researching baby lust for years. She’s already partnered with newspapers and mags in Finland and England to collect anecdotes, and now she’s interested in hearing from American women. We’ll share responses with her, and may incorporate others into future stories on this topic. Elle.com may also post the comments in the future. This is a topic worth discussing. If you’ve ever experienced baby lust, or if your partner or friends have, please consider sharing your story. Thanks!

(UPDATE! The link to Clock Watcher is up.)

In 2008, I wrote a piece for ELLE magazine about the financial costs of having a child. I admitted that the USDA’s 17-year estimate of $204,060 (it’s even higher now!) seemed so daunting that it was forcing my husband and I to put off parenthood — possibly indefinitely. We just didn’t see how we’d ever make enough money to raise a child without sacrificing our career ambitions, our hard-won happiness and our relationship harmony. I became obsessed with this quote from economist Elizabeth Warren, “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.”

The response to my article was mostly sympathetic, and many young couples admitted to sharing my terror over child-raising costs. However, I also heard from women–and it was always women–who dismissed my financial panic as unnecessary. When I was ready to have a baby, they assured me, maternal desire would trump most practical concerns. The cost of diapers and day care would become irrelevant as I focused on bringing life into the world. My money worries certainly wouldn’t disappear, but they would become more of a consideration than an obstacle to motherhood. And if they didn’t? Well, if I could let something as mundane as money prevent me from having a baby, that must mean that I didn’t want to become a mother badly enough.

Most of this feedback was honest and well-meaning, and it got me thinking: many of my girlfriends had openly worried about the effect that a baby would have on their careers, their finances, their relationships and their sense of self, but that hadn’t stopped them from (eventually) taking the plunge into parenthood. Some had given in to a chronic desire to have kids, but others described an impossible-to-ignore urge to have a baby, despite the sacrifices.

My article opened up a new set of questions for me. Everyone now knows how expensive it is to have children, and we’re all more aware of how difficult it is to have kids in the United States, which is now globally infamous for its lack of parental support. However, those facts haven’t had a significant impact on America’s women: they’re having children later, but the nation’s fertility rates have barely budged (especially compared to Japan, Korea and most of Europe).

I started to wonder what it would take to get me over my financial fears — aside from a new career and a new husband, that is (those are non-negotiable). I thought about the way some women talked about their urge to get pregnant as if it were their destiny, as if Cupid had misfired and sent his arrow into their womb instead of their heart. Would this happen to me, if only I waited long enough? If I were receptive enough? Was there a biological explanation behind sudden-onset baby lust? I’d heard so much about the biological clock, but not much about the alarm mechanism that is supposed to let us know that this thing is working. I’m older and most likely less fertile than I’d been when I wrote my cost-of-kids piece, but I’m still undecided about babies, and still fixated on the financial aspect of parenthood.

I decided to explore this further, and I wrote about my findings in a follow-up article for ELLE called “Clock Watcher.” It’s in the February 2011 issue, out now.

Brilliant idea: Katie Holmes reenacting paparazzo Ron Galella‘s iconic shot of Jackie O. crossing the street. Katie looks (dare I say it?) even more gorgeous than the original, and it’s a great way to usher in Fall Fashion.