That’s the headline in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune, discussing a lawsuit by the Illinois attorney general against a California for-profit adoption agency, Adoption Network Law Center, which has been marketing to prospective adoptive parents and expectant mothers considering adoption, in Illinois, via ads that pop up in Google searches, specifically targeting Illinois (e.g., “click here if you’re interested in adoption in Illinois”).  Prospective adopters are enticed with the promise of a faster process; the mothers are promised financial benefits. According to... Read more

Just for fun (having watched two more episodes last night while folding laundry. . .)! Read more

As often seems to be the case, the comments section in this Slate article are more interesting than the article itself, about poor mothers who reuse diapers because they can’t afford new ones.  Specifically, the dump the poop out and rediaper the child until it’s full of pee.  Now, the article has a few holes — the author says that cloth diapers aren’t an option because the daycare won’t accept them, but clearly the diaper re-using is happening at home,... Read more

So I was thinking about this the other day — comments are great because you know that a live person is reading what you’ve written and engaging with your ideas, but I hardly ever comment back. This is why: 1) For reasons that I’m not clear on, but I think may have to do with cookies, even though I’ve told blogger not to count my own pageviews in its pageview totals, it does so anyway, at least sometimes. And, since... Read more

So I’m going to summarize this book by memory rather than paging through it for details. Here goes: When we think of adoption, we think of infertile couples, waiting to welcome a newborn home from a years-long waiting list for American children, or going abroad to a dingy, desparate orphanage. But there’s a new kind of adopting family: evangelical Christians, for whom adopting as many Third-World (generally African) children as possible has become a sort of Biblical mandate. The great... Read more

OK, so I was late to watching the show, just because there are so few shows that I watch, but TBS is now airing the reruns nightly, and the first-run episodes are good for a 1/2 hour of exercising while watching on the CBS iPad app. And a while ago, all my friends were posting links to articles about why The Big Bang Theory is bad, bad, bad, because it makes fun of nerds, and, secondarily, discourages women from entering... Read more

This is how things work in Illinois: all the little people pay their taxes, as do all the small businesses. But if you’re big and powerful, just make a few demands. Not just for reductions of their taxes owed, but for cash back, in the form of being able to hold onto the state tax withholdings from their employees. ADM made that play in its “threat” to move its headquarters outside of Illinois (even though no other location makes as... Read more

These are the fragments of the piece that I’m planning to write for the Chicago Tribune’s Plan of Chicago project (yeah, I know, their call for submissions from the general public means the people who head up civic organizations or hold public office or have an academic position get published, and the peons get letters to the editor published, or get their submissions “published” in an online format, but it’s still something more purposeful than blogging, at least): There was... Read more

Dear Amy: I have been married to the love of my life now for almost five years. When we were dating, we both expressed a desire to have children. After we got married, we got two dogs that fulfill my needs. I no longer want children. I am content with our life. My wife still wants children. Should I agree to have children to satisfy her need for motherhood and fulfill an unspoken promise? She got married with the understanding... Read more

So this is an older book, published in 2010, which I happened upon in the main nonfiction section rather than the new books section.  I’ll just give a brief summary here: Boys are falling behind.  Anecdotally, there are valedictorian and top-honors groups in high school which are all-female, or nearly so.  Statistically, boys at every level, from poor to middle-class, of all races and ages, are falling behind girls in test scores, grades, and intention to attend college.  The conventional... Read more