Hobby Lobby is suing to be exempted from certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case . . . The question at the heart of this is, should a company be forced to pay for things with which it has a moral objection? [More . . . ]
This is a worthy seven-point article from Forbes. The topic is 7 parenting behaviors that stunt their children's growth. Here are the titles to the sections: 1. We don’t let our children experience risk 2. We rescue too quickly 3. We rave too easily 4. We let guilt get in the way of leading well 5. We don’t share our past mistakes 6. We mistake intelligence, giftedness and influence for maturity 7. We don’t practice what we preach. Immediately after reading this Forbes article, I stumbled upon this parenting article from The Atlantic: "How to Land Your Kid in Therapy." Lots of common ground between the two articles.
[U]nderlying all this parental angst is the hopeful belief that if we just make the right choices, that if we just do things a certain way, our kids will turn out to be not just happy adults, but adults that make us happy. This is a misguided notion, because while nurture certainly matters, it doesn’t completely trump nature, and different kinds of nurture work for different kinds of kids (which explains why siblings can have very different experiences of their childhoods under the same roof). We can expose our kids to art, but we can’t teach them creativity. We can try to protect them from nasty classmates and bad grades and all kinds of rejection and their own limitations, but eventually they will bump up against these things anyway. In fact, by trying so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up. Maybe we parents are the ones who have some growing up to do—and some letting go.
This is what it's like to never have enough. It's the autobiography of a Wall Street hedge fund trader, published in the NYT:
I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out. I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.
In this 1988 interview, Bill Moyers discusses religion with Isaac Asimov. Can religion be "reconciled" with science? Asimov says yes, as long as the players are reasonable and as long as religion is not confused as science.
You can really eat a light bulb. I saw this done at a fair a few years ago. Fascinating. The instructor says, "Don't try this at home."