Soccer Seasons as a Yardstick for Maturity

Measuring height and weight is easy. Marking off your child’s changing maturity is a lot trickier. The developmental leaps between fall and spring soccer seasons might be as good a yardstick as any.
Last fall, the Tiger’s first season, he was a standout on the kindergarten field. And I mean he really stood there, out on [...]

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Factory Farm Flu

There’s a long tradition of naming flu pandemics after their presumptive geographical ground zero. The Hong Kong flu. Asian flu. Fujian flu. And the dreadful Spanish flu (which almost certainly didn’t start in Spain).
So why not the Mexico flu? Because – as Renee at Womanist Musings and nojojojo at Alas amply show – you can’t [...]

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A New Way to Spice up Your Marriage …

… or other long-term relationship (inertia is an equal-opportunity affliction, after all).
Some weeks ago, the New York Times ran a short piece by Tara Parker-Pope, “Reinventing Date Night,” that made the following point:
Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts and dining with the same old friends, couples need to tailor their date nights around new [...]

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Swine Flu: The Approaching Cytokine Storm

Update 4/30/09, 2 p.m.: This post is getting a lot of hits; I’d like to suggest that your next stop be Effect Measure at Science Blogs, which I’ve found to have the most valuable current analysis of the public health ramifications of the swine flu threat. Also, in the post below I criticize WHO for [...]

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Universities are Not Corporations; Here’s How Not to Reform Them

Today’s New York Times has an op-ed piece by Mark Taylor, chair of Columbia’s religion department, that attempts to offer a blueprint for reforming universities. Some of his ideas are decent, but they’re not necessarily new. Some of them are – well, less bright that I’d have expected from a guy who’s obviously climbed far [...]

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My Friend Henry Is Famous

Just when I was about to close down my computer for the night, I saw that my friend Henry of Henry’s Travels has just gained her 15 minutes of fame! Well, for kittehs it might be more like 15 seconds. There’s that attention span thing, you know. Anyway, Henry has made the front page of [...]

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The Militarization of Kidfest

Every year my little town holds an event that my kids eagerly await, and I just as avidly dread: Kidfest. It’s all very well meant. Various community groups take over the university’s basketball arena, offering informational materials for the grow-mutts and cheap craft projects and cheaper trinkets for the kids. The groups are mostly in [...]

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This Is Vulnerability

You’re on a table, eight acupuncture needles pinning you in place, three of them attached to mild electrical pulses …
… and the table moves. It sways, briefly, for maybe three seconds. And the Californian in you realizes: We’re having an earthquake. I should be sprinting to the nearest doorframe.
Then you think, nah! This is Ohio. [...]

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Why the Principal Has More Power than the Police

Following up on yesterday’s post on the strip-searches-in-the-schools case before the Supreme Court, I have to admit I’m shocked at just how much power schools have. I spent virtually all of the 1990s overseas, so I guess I’m still playing catch-up.
The transcript for the oral arguments in Safford Unified School District v. Redding (.pdf – [...]

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Strip Searches in Schools: Not Just for Girls!

Is it ever okay to strip-search a student? The SCOTUS is hearing arguments on this, and if so, under what limitations. Justice Stephen Breyer – normally a good ally to liberals – managed to trivialize the issue in a dudely way, and both Historiann and Amanda Marcotte are taking him to task for it. Historiann [...]

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One Reason for Erf Day

I’m not going to pontificate on what we all need to do to preserve our Earth. Others can do that far more intelligently. I’ll just offer one very personal reason why we can’t continue to wreck it. Today’s guest artist, the Tiger, requires a habitat. So does his brother, the Bear. So do all the [...]

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Our Old Tired Ethics

Moralists are ever ready to sacrifice one-half of the human race for the sake of some miserable institution which they can not outgrow. As a matter of fact, prostitution is no more a safeguard for the purity of the home than rigid laws are a safeguard against prostitution. … Yet society has not a word [...]

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Tuesday Recipe: Rhubarb Dessert

Rhubarb dessert is one of my favorites from my mom’s cookbook. Yes, she has authored her very own cookbook, composed 80% of yummy sweet things, mostly from North Dakota. This dessert is about as North Dakotan as it gets, and I mean that in the best way possible: It’s tart-sweet comfort food with meringue on [...]

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My Mad Wish for an Anti-Violence Cloak

And I mean “mad” in both senses. I realize I’m a little crazy. And I’m deeply, frothingly angry.
The very first quarter I taught women’s studies, several students wrote about experiences with sexual assault. My heart hurt for them, and all I could do was hope that the class helped them make sense of their [...]

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Getting Smart about Virtue?

Since I’m always a sucker for a silly quiz, I took this one via Blue Gal. I have to admit it’s a pretty bogus result. Not that I’m a dummy, but is intelligence really a virtue?
I get that discipline is a virtue, or compassion. But intelligence is just something you’re mostly born with; you can’t [...]

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Digging Aggression

Following up on my last post about my run-in with a raucous proponent of ev psych, I should clarify one thing: I do believe humans are naturally aggressive. We don’t learn aggression as kids. We learn how to channel it, sure. But the impulse is with us from the beginning – possibly from the first [...]

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My Real-Life Clash with Ev Psych

So it’s one thing to tangle with evolutionary psychology as a blogger. It’s quite another to butt heads with it in person. Or, as in my case, to get verbally head-butted by it. And I’m feeling a little distressed, because a student got traumatized in the process and I didn’t manage to stop it.
Though I [...]

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Acupuncture, Masochism, and Endorphins

I’m starting to feel a lot less skeptical about acupuncture. This morning I had my third treatment, and ever since, I’ve felt like I’m on a mix of an anti-anxiety drug and an opioid. Except that I’m a little more clear-headed than that sounds – or so I hope, since I spent much of the [...]

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Watching the University Crumble – Literally

A few days back, when I posted on my university’s duplicitous way of dealing with layoffs, commenter Jake expanded the discussion in a direction that’s really crucial. While my original post dealt with the university’s obfuscation of the impact of cuts on teaching staff, it’s important to note that the announced layoffs will hit facilities [...]

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Where the Grammar Police Live

The scene at dinner tonight, over an elegant repast of tofu dogs with lots of ketchup:
“It needs to have a comma,” says the Bear.
“What needs a comma?” I ask.
“The ketchup bottle. Where it says ‘Grown not made,’ there should be a comma.”
Is there any better proof that grammar isn’t just innate, as Noam Chomsky famously [...]

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