Do television shows like "Sex and the City" and "Gossip Girl" encourage teen girls to get pregnant?  Well that's the finding of a Rand Health study published last week in the November issue of Pediatrics.  According to a New York Daily news article by Jane H. Furse about the study: Rand Corp. behavioral scientist Anita Chandra found teens who watched the sexiest shows were twice as likely to become pregnant over the next three years as those who watched few such programs.

Throughout my life, I've had some great role models.  I attribute my getting through some of life's toughest times to those people I looked up to.  One of them was my grandmother.  Gram was in midlife when I was born -- just a few years younger than I am now.  So I got to know her when she was showing up in the world as the person she really wanted to be.

The week of May 26, I'll be podcast interviewing Olympic Gold Medalist Dominique Dawes on behalf of BlogHer! Dominique, 31, was the first African-American woman to win an individual medal in gymnastics, having won bronze in the floor exercise at the ’96 Games, the second of her third Olympics. She was recently named – along with her teammates on the “Magnificent Seven” from 1996 – to the United States Olympic Committee’s Hall of Fame and will be inducted in June.