Yahoo:
Fairy tales linked to violent relationships. Depends on what fairy tales you’re reading. There are many more than the two they mention, with dark and mysterious conclusions. It is more a situation of limited exposure; certainly mythical archetypes would help youngsters make *better* choices.
NY Times:
Sendak in All His Wild Glory. Do look at the audio slide show.
Chicago Tribune:
“Lincoln Land.” As Eco said, this ideology wants to “establish reassurance through imitation. But profit defeats ideology.”
Policy Review:
A libertarian looks at marriage. “Advocates of gay marriage are fond of pointing out that civil marriage confers more than 1,049 automatic federal and additional state protections, benefits and responsibilities, according to the federal government’s General Accounting Office. If these governmentally bestowed benefits and responsibilities are indeed the core of marriage, then this package should be equally available to all citizens. It follows that these benefits of marriage should be available to any grouping of individuals, of any size or combination of genders, of any degree of permanence.” As they ask, is the state the ultimate source of social order? I believe Rousseau said politics comes after society. Submission to the state is an act of renouncing our ‘natural freedoms.’ I’ll have to go re-read JJ ...
Washington Post:
SF New Mexican:
Abstinence aimed at grade-schoolers. “In a survey of New Mexico middle-school students, 30 percent of eighth-graders, 20 percent of seventh-graders and 15 percent of sixth-graders reported being sexually active, according to a Youth Risk Behavior Survey now five years old. Most did not use condoms.” My italics.
USA Today:
So much media, so little attention span. When I worked ‘industrial theatre’ in Manhattan, we used to use light comedy or video shorts to break up long speeches, basing our timings on current research into attention spans. In the ‘80’s, it was 18 minutes. I wonder what it is today.
Edge.
The Assortative Mating Theory.
SF New Mexican:
Daughter sues father’s estate over nude photos. A difficult situation. Some of the issues brought up here will, no doubt, come into play.
NY Times Health:
“A new vaccine tested in West Africa could save the lives of thousands of poor rural children who die each year from bacterial infections ...” Very positive news.
LA Weekly:
Get ready for TV censorship. Here I thought all televisions were equipped with on-off switches and removable plugs.
NY Times Letters to the Editor:
Is Evolution too hot for the halls of science?
Telegraph.UK:
Pupils make more progress in 3Rs ‘without aid of computers’. “Pupils tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching.” Via Ed Bilodeau.
CNN:
Embattled professor won’t back down. A surgeon once told me, when I was sick, “Let me open you up. You know what they say, everyone’s got something wrong. It just takes enough digging around to find it.” I demurred; Churchill hasn’t got that option.
Reuters:
Mercury Pollution, Autism Link Found. A US study this time. This may further implicate thimerosal in vaccines, though their use is seemingly deprecated now.
SF New Mexican:
Study says treating youthful offenders as adults makes it more likely they will re-offend. “The study said that in states with large numbers of youths in adult prisons, those youths are more likely to re-offend when they emerge from prison. It said teenagers in adult prisons are more vulnerable to adult criminals and are often mentored by powerful inmates, resulting in them being released as hardened, angry and possessing increased criminal skills.” Anyone surprised?
SF New Mexican:
Doctors still can’t explain size of 7-year-old girl. “Four years after the state took a 3-year-old girl from her parents because she weighed 124 pounds, medical officials remain baffled by her size.”
Reuters:
Won’t Ban Junk-Food Ads for Kids, Official Says. “Let me make clear, this is not the first step toward new government regulations to ban or restrict children’s food advertising and marketing. The FTC tried that approach in the 1970s and it failed.” Failed? Ads are not the only culprit, but I wonder [pdf].
NY Times:
College Expels Student Who Advocated Corporal Punishment. He hasn’t a right to do it, but he has a right to discuss it. When I was a kid, we used to visit a family who had a ‘board of education’ prominently hanging by the front door. I spent most of my time during the visit considering best how to stay on the opposite side of the house from that device. Also, we in public schools often discussed the experience of those attending the local Catholic school, having heard dread stories of ruler-happy nuns. Given the fact that our public school teachers played favorites—including jumping to constant conclusions over ‘favorite’ trouble-makers—we felt it was better nuns had the ruler responsibility and our teachers did not. They were clearly answerable to a higher authority, who might send thunderbolts down to defend the innocent. We felt we had no respite from unfair teachers. Childhood logic.
Reuters:
Buses in Brazil to get metal detectors. As I’ve mentioned before, see “City of God.”
CNN:
The Supreme Court rules that the juvenile death penalty is unconstitutional. We re-enter the world of rationality, if only briefly.
Later: The New Mexico House votes to repeal the death penalty.
Wired:
The web is not the death of language.
SF New Mexican:
Teen takes a solo stand for peace.
NY Times Op-Ed:
Kristof, The Administration’s sex scandal. “The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.”
