So every year Megan McArdle tells us the best in kitchen gadgetry, and instapundit.com features items at Amazon which he thinks his readers might like, and Ann Althouse just reminds us that if we use her Amazon portal we support her blogging which entertains us so well. I’m not going to do that. But I am going to tell you this: if you don’t already have one, but yourself a jump-starter for your car. I bought mine at Aldi for... Read more

So apparently this article on poverty has now gone viral — appearing on friends’ facebook feeds, at the Atlantic and at Huffington Post.  The basic gist of it is that poor people are so beaten down by their circumstances that they simply can’t be expected to make efforts on their own to get out of poverty.  And the author, Linda Tirado, fills it with illustrations from her own life.  I wasn’t going to comment on this because it seemed too personal... Read more

So there was a thread over at the Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn’s blog, on marriage, which got me to thinking. In a response to the question of whether upper-middle-class, or more often poor women, are single mothers, a commenter said, in discussing upper-middle-class single-moms-by-choice who never get married but still want a child, “Many women these days are much pickier than they used to be in terms of finding a mate (which is a whole different discussion as to... Read more

I suspect I may have written about this before (yeah, I make periodic attempts to label my posts but don’t have enough follow-through), but this is my pet theory on sex ed: Right now, as far as I can tell, there are two schools of thought: either you tell kids not to have sex, and give them all the reasons why and try to equip them with no-saying skills; or you give them a menu of choices: abstainence or “safe... Read more

This Brookings Study is linked to by instapundit.com: “New Evidence Raises Doubts on Obama’s Preschool for All.”  It’s a study of the impact of providing free preschool for 4 year olds, based on a randomized study in Tennessee, following the outcomes of low-income children who “won” the lottery to participate in a full-day preschool program and those who did not.  On nearly all measures, the “winners” did not see measurable improvements in academic, social or behavioral skills when evaluated in... Read more

So I was thinking about this whole marriage thing again . . . here’s the thing: maybe, instead of pushing for people to value marriage more, we should do the opposite. A couple weeks ago, I was playing around with the idea that “marriage” as it exists in law isn’t really marriage as it’s historically been defined, at least in Catholicism and, in the past, in Protestantism. Permanence? Nope. Openness to children? Not if Ask Amy and Dear Prudence are... Read more

As a bit of follow-up on yesterday’s post on introverts:  First observation After finding that the recent book on introverts was unavailable, I settled on The Introvert Advantage:  How to Thrive in an Extrovert World, by Marti Olsen Laney, which is older (2002) and fluffier and not, in the end, meaty enough. But here’s her list of qualities of extroverts and introverts: Extroverts Like to be in the thick of thingsRelish variety, bored with samenessKnow lots of people, consider them friendsEnjoy... Read more

Yesterday the Tribune featured, as it often does, an article from the Los Angeles Times, titled “Sexism a problem in Silicon Valley, critics say,” which describes instances of sexism/misogyny in the tech industry in Silicon Valley and the crass so-called “brogrammer” culture, and said that, Sheryl Sandberg’s prominent position as Facebook COO and Marissa Mayer’s position at Yahoo notwithstanding, women are held back by the sexism and sexual harassment. The Tribune then featured smaller articles with voices from the Chicago... Read more

So I was in a funk earlier today and decided that I would reread that book on introverts that appeared a year or so ago as a bit of a boost, and went onto the library’s online catalog. This is what I found: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain, 8 holds on 5 copies. The Introvert’s Way: Living a Quiet Life in a Noisy World, by Sophia Dembling, 2 holds on... Read more

Yeah, once again, Althouse has found an interesting link and I’m playing copycat. According to a NYT report, there’s a group in Switzerland promoting a guaranteed minimum income. Everyone in the NYT comment section loves it (they promise that they’ll do great things to benefit the world if only they didn’t have to earn a living); Althouse commenters are skeptical. A minimum income would fix a lot of what’s troubling about the social welfare system — the fact that there... Read more