are there any limits to when teen sex isn’t appropriate? Oh, sure, of course, it should be consensual — though there’s a bit of an issue in that, legally, a teen can’t consent to sex, and I don’t know how one reconciles the notion that a teen can’t consent to sex with an older man but is fully capable of consenting with a same-aged peer. But if you’ve openly decided that teens have every bit as much a right to... Read more
OK, I’ll bite: I wrote about the drive to get teenage girls onto LARCs – long-acting, reversible contraception – in the context of the Colorado Family Planning Initiative, in which those methods, and only those methods, were provided to women free of charge at Title X family-planning clinics. Now it’s appeared two more times: an Atlantic article, “IUDs and Implants Are the New Pill; Long-term devices are now the first-line recommendation for women of all ages,” and an Amanda Marcotte... Read more
So I told you the other day that I didn’t like Gone Girl, even though the book was apparently massively popular, and there’s a monologue that’s been given the name “the Cool Girl speech” which its female readers have found deeply meaningful. According to Slate, the speech has been cited and referenced and debated over and over in the two years since the best-seller was published. It is, almost indisputably, the cultural legacy of the book. What is this extraordinary speech? Basically,... Read more
In today’s paper: a white Ohio woman, Jennifer Cramblett, is suing a suburban Chicago sperm bank because, due to a misreading of the handwritten order, she gave birth to a biracial child. Cramblett is suing Midwest Sperm Bank for wrongful birth and breach of warranty, citing the emotional and economic losses she has suffered. She had her lesbian partner say that, while they love the child and are themselves not racist, “[she] lives each day with fears, anxieties and uncertainty about her... Read more
I don’t read fiction — as a general rule, at least, and I haven’t in quite a while. Many years ago, I built up a collection of paperback classics from the used book store, but that was as much about crossing famous books of an imaginary list as it was about enjoying them. Every now and again, I pick something up, from the library or the bookstore. And usually it’s a bust. The characters aren’t sympathetic, they say f*** a... Read more
There’s a worthwhile piece in Slate.com on this topic today (yeah, I know, who’d have thought that they’d have something other than clickbait meant to get you outraged), the gist of which is that the now-popular notion that what makes someone great at a skill is incessant practice, is overblown, and that the largest factor in someone’s success in a field, whether sports, the arts, or an academic endeavor, is genetics. And I can kind of buy that the correlation... Read more
This is a very interesting book, and very timely, too, considering Eric Holder’s resignation announcement. The author is an attorney defending a former Merrill Lynch employee, Jim Brown, caught up in the Enron prosecutions, and she writes both about her experience defending Brown (with lots of dialogue which presumably came from trial transcripts rather than reconstructed storytelling), and the bigger picture of what happened with the government’s prosecution of both the Enron case and the Stevens corruption case. The bottom... Read more
This was interesting: instapundit.com had a link to an article on Canadian immigrants who were a bit peeved that they couldn’t, after a trivial length of time, obtain Canadian citizenship as a fall-back while living and working elsewhere, e.g., in the Gulf states where jobs are plentiful but not permanent residence. And there was a very interesting comment, copied in full below: It’s not the passport per se. It’s the free healthcare and education. Vancouver has many so called satellite... Read more
According to the Tribune (sorry, paywall), the incoming Bishop Blase Cupich identified “immigration reform as chief among the issues to tackle here.” “These people pay taxes, they contribute to the common good … it is a matter of making sure we can give them legal status,” he said. This is a disappointment. Maybe it’s a hot topic in Spokane due to farmworkers. Their local paper paraphrases him as saying, It would help the country better account for people living within its... Read more
I would! I started cooking with the crock-pot when my youngest was a baby, and found out that you generally can’t just “fix it and forget it,” as one popular series likes to say. Sure, a pot roast in the crock pot generally takes the full day, so you can put it in before you leave for work, but chicken or a casserole takes much less time, and the cook times that cookbooks give generally tend to produce overcooked food.... Read more
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