On October 16, 1934, Ruth Maier wrote in her diary: “I want to be famous. I don’t want to fall or die like a cog in the machine. I can’t imagine myself in the gloom of anonymity, as it were. People disappear. I want to live! To leave something behind, a document that I was here. Some big, beautiful enterprise.”

Maier was only 14 at the time − a Viennese girl from a bourgeois, intellectual, assimilated Jewish family. Like many girls her age, she envisioned great plans for the life that awaited her. Over the next eight years, her diaries filled up 1,100 pages. In addition to these she wrote some 300 letters. Her notebooks overflowed with philosophical debates, literary musings, poems and the experiences of an adolescent girl living in the shadow of the Nazi regime − unrequited love, first sexual experiences, confusion, fear, despair − as well as with evidence of a full, rich and cultured life.

	From the book

Processing and editing the material took more than a decade, and the work was completed after the subsequent discovery of Maier’s letters, which her family had saved. “Ruth Maier’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life Under Nazism” was published four years ago in Norway; the English edition, by Random House, came out in 2009. Now the diaries of “the Norwegian Anne Frank” − as she was dubbed in Europe − have been published in Hebrew ‏as “Yomana shel Ruth Maier” (Schocken Books; translated from German by Arno Baehr‏).

"Malls are empty right now and it's not simply because retail hasn't returned, it's because destination shopping is dying out," he says. "Five or ten years from now you're going to see more brand-based stores that operate as showrooms, along the lines of Apple, for individual designers show their wares."

terror struck rush-hour Mumbai today. Very sad and so ugly. I love India and the shattering of the 17-month lull since the German Bakery blast in Pune, made me feel a need to help the injured and pray for the families of the deceased.

Even as police teams were gathering vital forensic evidence from the three blast sites in Mumbai tonight, investigators revealed that the needle of suspicion pointed towards the Indian Mujahideen (IM), a terror outfit that has claimed responsibility for previous blasts in Pune, Delhi and Jaipur.

Mumbai Police Commissioner Arup Patnaik, however, was not willing to speculate about the perpetrators involved. “It definitely appears that it is a terrorist attack. However, at this stage we do not know who is responsible. I do not want to speculate further,” said Patnaik.

The Indian Bloggers Directory is an ongoing effort by Amit Agarwal to showcase some of the best Indian blogs and bloggers from India.

Seen through the lens of economics, the picture of gender equality looks a lot rosier than it once did. Women still earn less than men do, but barely. Once you control for factors like age, education, and experience, the pay gap is just a few percentage points. 

But as economics writer David Leonhardt points out, the picture is gloomier outside that carefully controlled frame. Female MBA students start out making roughly the same as their male counterparts, but after 15 years, they earn 75 percent less. Scanning the list of Fortune 500 CEOs, it's clear that only 15 are women. When a woman does make it to the top -- and stay there -- the chances are high that she has no children. 

Leonhardt has a name for this problem: "momism." And in this video, he proposes a solution.

More video from the 2011 Aspen Ideas Festival

Stephen Savage

Though the recession has blunted overall demand for cosmetic surgeries, one subcategory appears to be entering a growth phase, at least judging from the fifth annual Congress on Aesthetic Vaginal Surgery, held late last year in a luxury resort outside Tucson. There, about 60 doctors, most of them OB-GYNs, converged to discuss the expanding field of “cosmetic-gyn”—elective surgeries for women seeking to “rejuvenate” and/or “beautify” their vaginas. Attendance at the conference has been increasing by about 20 percent each year—one doctor there explained that his services are in such demand, he has multiple operating rooms so he can move quickly from one surgery to the next—and last year a competing conference was held at the Venetian in Las Vegas.

They say that you should get your eyes checked every two years but if haven’t had the chance to see a doctor all this time, you can test your vision on your computer as well.

Of course these self eye tests are no substitute for visiting your doctor but if you follow the steps well, you may get some idea about how good (or bad) your vision is.

The Snellen Eye Chart

Most of us are familiar with the Snellen Chart that is made of rows of alphabets of different sizes – you read these letters from a distance, usually twenty feet, and the smallest row that you can recognize accurately indicates whether you have normal vision or not.

The various eye testing tools that are available online make use of the same Snellen chart.

The years leading up to the declaration of war between the Axis and Allied powers in 1939 were tumultuous times for people across the globe. The Great Depression had started a decade before, leaving much of the world unemployed and desperate. Nationalism was sweeping through Germany, and it chafed against the punitive measures of the Versailles Treaty that had ended World War I. China and the Empire of Japan had been at war since Japanese troops invaded Manchuria in 1931. Germany, Italy, and Japan were testing the newly founded League of Nations with multiple invasions and occupations of nearby countries, and felt emboldened when they encountered no meaningful consequences. The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, becoming a rehearsal of sorts for the upcoming World War -- Germany and Italy supported the nationalist rebels led by General Francisco Franco, and some 40,000 foreign nationals traveled to Spain to fight in what they saw as the larger war against fascism. In the last few pre-war years, Nazi Germany blazed the path to conflict -- rearming, signing a non-aggression treaty with the USSR, annexing Austria, and invading Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the United States passed several Neutrality Acts, trying to avoid foreign entanglements as it reeled from the Depression and the Dust Bowl years. Below is a glimpse of just some of these events leading up to World War II

This entry is Part 1 of a weekly 20-part retrospective of World War II [45 photos]
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/ww2.html

With Biblion, you can jump from stack to stack, story to story, as you move through the infoscape of the World's Fair, created directly from NYPL's Manuscripts and Archives Division. The Fair — like the Library — has something for everyone, with topics ranging from technological innovation to pop culture to a world dealing with the crises of war and economic hardship.