Reading stuff regularly

A friendship like theirs, which has spanned nearly their entire adulthood and functioned as the nucleus of their support system, raises a fundamental question about how we recognize relationships: On what basis do we decide that a partnership is “real”?

The Hungarian government has launched a public campaign to encourage couples to have more children. What’s humorous is the choice of stock photo: whoever was responsible for the giant billboards chose the same couple that appears in the well-known “Distracted Boyfriend” photo meme.

The stock photo giant checked the model release and lo! The guy in the image wasn't even the same dude who was complaining. "He'd misidentified himself," Lichfield said.

The message was followed by a picture of the interior of a Moleskine sketchbook of mine. The first page of a Moleskine has a place for you to write your name, address, phone number and a designated reward ''in case of loss.'' I have about two dozen Moleskines from the past 13 years, and in them I have offered various rewards -- a painting, $20 plus a painting plus a kiss, a hot-air balloon and, in this particular book, a pecan pie.

In the so-called sharing economy, even when love is no longer mutual, bills for entertainment and communication often are.

Ed and I commiserated over the confusion that reigns between the Greek for “yes” and “no.” The German ja and nein have a clear resemblance to “yes” and “no.” The French oui and the Italian sì and the Spanish sí come easily enough, and all the Romance languages—even Portuguese—rely on the basic sound of no: no, non, não. But the Greek for “yes” is nai (ναι), which sounds like “no” or “nah,” a negative, while the word for “no” is όχι, which sounds like “O.K.” Why must life be so cruel? Sometimes when I’m travelling I can’t seem to get out the right word for “yes” in the country I’m in and I cycle through the whole litany: ja, oui, sì, nai, yes. 

Caution as a solo female traveler is healthy; blind fear is not. I find that for me the best system is to always remember that I am a tourist. It’s good to know what people who live in a place have to say about safety, but also realize that the rules that apply to them, who know where they are going, and can blend in, don’t apply to me.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act is the only federal law aimed at protecting expecting mothers at work. It is four paragraphs long and 40 years old. It says that a company has to accommodate pregnant workers’ requests only if it is already doing so for other employees who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.”

The camera was “very dirty but appears to still work,” Vorster says. “There are two huge teeth marks on the rubber focus rings of the lens and small teeth marks on the plastic lens hood, both of which I decided not to replace.”

He was on a camping trip with his wife and three sons in the early 70s and was enjoying "whatever food it is you eat on camping trips" when they heard the radio message: "Will the Thompson family, believed to be travelling somewhere in Surrey contact Chesterfield Hospital as Mrs Thompson's mother is dangerously ill." The words are burnt into his memory.

She has very fond memories of Volos, a beautiful port city that sits midway between Athens and Salonika/Thessaloniki. Before World War II, about 2,000 Jews lived comfortably there. At Rosh Hashanah, neighbors gave each other baskets of pomegranates from their yards with wishes for “chronia polla, kai kali chronia,” or “many years and good years.” The first taste at the start of the holiday — and to break the fast for Yom Kippur 10 days later — was of honey sprinkled with pomegranate seeds, symbolic of wishes for a sweet year of abundance.

They have a donation page here with a number of different donation methods, including Paypal. 

The fixation on straws is weird. There's definitely way too much plastic in our oceans, so getting rid of any plastic can be a persuasive idea. I have been unable to find any evidence, though, that straws are a particularly big problem when it comes to the complex systems of use and waste that pour plastic into our seas, as opposed to plastic bags and micro-plastics, for example. Advocates of straw bans, including campaigners in Vancouver, frequently cite a study asserting that consumers in the United States throw away 500 million straws every day. When ban advocates in California cited the 500 million number back in January, Reason writer Christian Britschgi did some research and discovered that the figure had been guesstimated by a nine-year-old boy based on his phone calls to three straw companies.

It’s a tall order, given that pharmaceutical companies largely shifted away from herbs and trees as a fount of new medications decades ago, turning instead to synthetic chemicals. Even Joseph Chappell, whose plant chemistry lab at the University of Kentucky is leading the project, calls it “a harebrained idea.”

In 1932, Willard Waller’s classic work on the sociology of teaching pronounced parents and educators to be “natural enemies”: Parents are concerned for their own children, while educators look to the success of all students. ... All parents want the best for their children, but a key goal of public education is to create citizens with a vision of a common good. Upper-middle-class parents are understandably anxious about the futures of their children in an increasingly competitive global economy, but not every issue is worthy of a fight. Parents should think about what matters in the long run and reflect on whether their actions might be contributing to greater inequality. Affluent parents bring powerful resources to schools. They should also model thoughtful civic engagement that considers collective, rather than simply individual, benefits.