Blog Posts by Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

Former governor Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama shake hands before the debate in Denver on Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2012. (Photo: Getty Images)Former governor Mitt Romney's advisers were feeling positive last night after their candidate faced President Barack Obama in the first of three presidential debates before the November election.

"If this debate had been a boxing match, it would have been called in the first hour," senior Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told reporters in Denver. "I would imagine the heels on the president's shoes are worn down after having leaned back on them for 90 minutes."

Related: More Presidential Debate Coverage on Yahoo! News

"I think you had millions of Americans watching Gov. Romney, seeing him, many of them for the first time, and a chance to look at him without 30-second attack ads and 12-second snippets on the news," Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said on NBC's "Today" show. "We didn't hear much, frankly, from President Obama about any second-term agenda, and he didn't have a very credible defense of his first term agenda. And I think the American people saw that last night."

New Jersey

News anchor Jennifer Livingston addresses her bully on air. (Photo: Screengrab from WKBT-TV)Kenneth W. Krause of La Crosse, Wisconsin, has come forward as the man who sent a fat-shaming email to WKBT-TV morning news anchor Jennifer Livingston last week. And he says he stands by his original email.

"Given this country's present epidemic of obesity and the many truly horrible diseases related thereto, and considering Jennifer Livingston's fortuitous position in the community, I hope she will finally take advantage of a rare and golden opportunity to influence the health and psychological well-being of Coulee Region children by transforming herself for all of her viewers to see over the next year," he said in a statement. "And, to that end, I would be absolutely pleased to offer Jennifer any advice or support she would be willing to accept."

It's unlikely that Livingston will be turning to Krause for advice any time soon.

"I don't take a lot of crap from people," she told Al Tompkins at the Poytner Institute on Tuesday night. She said she had emailed back and forth with

In the magical world of Disney, the princesses are always pretty and good always triumphs over evil. But what if the villains were the ones whose dreams came true? "I wanted to do a little series of Disney Villains in a much happier ending for them, rather than the story line in the films," artist Justin Turrentine writes in his portfolio at DeviantArt.com. His five-part series offers some creepy alternate endings to some Disney treasures. -- Lylah M. Alphonse, Senior Editor, Yahoo! Shine

A new study finds that Botox injections may help fight severe depression. (Photo: Thinkstock)We all know that forcing yourself to smile can make you feel better. Now there's proof that not being able to frown can do the same thing. Researches have found an additional benefit of Botox for some wrinkle-rejecting users: The cosmetic injection may also alleviate symptoms of severe depression.

Related: Tricks for Staying Positive

In the first-ever controlled study, Dr. M. Axel Wollmer and other researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland found that paralyzing the glabellar frown region -- that space between your eyebrows where vertical creases develop -- reduced symptoms of depression in some severe cases.

In the study, which was published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, Wollmer described finding "positive effects on mood" after subjects had their frown lines treated with five injections of botulinum toxin, also known as cosmetic Botox.

Related: Kelly Ripa Gets Botox. Why Can't Women Age on TV?

Depressive symptoms in 15 patients who had not responded to

When Jennifer Livingston, the morning news anchor for WKBT-TV in La Crosse, Wisconsin, got the email last week, she was stunned.

"Now those of us in the media get a healthy dose of critiques from our viewers throughout the year, and we realize that it comes with having a job in the public eye," she said. "But this email was more than that."

Related: Sikh Woman Balpreet Kaur turns Cyber-Bullying Incident into Inspiration

It was from a local man who took issue with the fact that Livingston is overweight, trying to make her feel ashamed about how she looked. Her husband, the station's evening news anchor, Mike Thompson, was so upset by the email that he posted it on his official WKTB Facebook page.

"I've posted about negative emails the station has received in the past, but this one delivered specifically to my wife, morning anchor Jennifer Livingston, has just infuriated me," Thompson wrote. "Seriously, the fact that there are people out there like this (and I understand this person is

Michelle Obama's multi-chocolate chip cookies (left) narrowly beat out Ann Romney's M&M cookies. (Photos: David Prince/Family Circle)The results are in, and the winner of Family Circle magazine's Presidential Cookie Bake-Off is: First Lady Michelle Obama. But just barely.

Related: How to make cookies on your stove top

Only 287 votes separated the two recipes -- the smallest margin ever, according to the magazine's editors. Out of the more than 9,000 readers who weighted in, 51.5 percent chose the first lady's White and Dark Chocolate Chip cookies over Ann Romney's M&M's cookies, which won 48.5 percent of the vote.

"If we want to splurge, these White and Dark Chocolate Chip cookies, created by the girls' godmother, are the perfect special treat," Obama said when she submitted her recipe in June.

But readers -- who baked, tasted, and voted from June 27 through August 15 -- also loved Romney's recipe, which she said is a family favorite.

"They smell delicious coming out of the oven," Romney told Family Circle. "Our grandkids can't resist them!"

Related: Amazing guilt-free cookies

The magazine has held the contest

Retailers use all kinds of tricks to make you spend more than you planned.We try to stick to our shopping lists. We keep an eye out for sales, clip coupons, study the store circulars, and even go so far as to leave the credit cards at home in order to avoid impulse buying. And yet, most shoppers end up buying more than they bargained for—and that's exactly what retailers want them to do.

Related: How to save money at Target

"Every single detail of your shopping experience—the placement of every shelf, box, sign, and restroom; the background music; color of paint on the wall; words the staff use to greet you—is a precisely orchestrated merchant-customer dance designed to achieve maximum sales results," writes Dayana Yochim at the finance and investing site The Motley Fool.

Related: 5 retail mind games that make you spend more

Customers have figured out the end-cap trick—the one where stores feature higher-priced goods on the ends of the aisles, where they're easy to see, and fill the back and center of the store with the everyday items people really went

Is this what feminism is really all about?It's easy to forget that, originally, being a feminist simply meant supporting legal, political, social, and economic opportunities for women. It wasn't about putting down domestic pursuits. It wasn't about trying to "have it all." And it certainly wasn't about bashing men.

Related: What Do Men Think About Feminism?

"Feminism insists on women's right to make choices -- about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other," Stephanie Coontz wrote at CNN. "It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting care-giving work."

Related: Why Are We Blaming Feminism for Our Inability to Have It All?

In an interview with The Daily Beast last year, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann said that she wouldn't call herself a feminist; instead, she said, "I'm a woman comfortable in her own skin. I grew up with three brothers. My parents didn't