Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.
The Forbidden Island via @KenKaminsky. As curious as I am to learn how this tribe has fared over the last 65,000 years, I sincerely hope they never make contact with the rest of us.
A Day In the Life of Dr. Oz. I’m not a fan of Dr. Oz. Maybe that’s why I found this so amusing?
Song Title Stories. What kind of short story could you make out of song titles? I don’t think I’d be very good at this game, but it sure looks like fun.
Trayvon Martin and I Ain’t Shit. A powerful essay about how racism tears down the author’s self-worth.
Disclaimer. My high school freshman English teacher gave us a lecture on this at the beginning of the school year. <Mumble> years I still remember her stressing that it was up to us to decide what we wanted to focus on – a high-powered career, becoming mothers, exploring the world, etc. We could pick anything, she said, but we couldn’t pick everything at once. Now I wonder if she’d say the same thing to her students if she hasn’t retired yet. In retrospect it was odd that she thought motherhood was a bigger commitment than fatherhood. It might have been true for her generation, but most of the couples I know who are having kids these days split childcare fairly evenly.
From Shyness Cannot Be “Cured“:
Yet shyness remains a part of being human, and the world would be a more insipid, less creative place without it. As Cain argues, we live in a culture that values dialogue as an ultimate ideal, an end in itself, unburdening ourselves to each other in ever louder voices without necessarily communicating any better. Shyness reminds us that all human interaction is fraught with ambiguity, and that insecurity and self-doubt are natural, because we are all ultimately inaccessible to one another
From Another Childhood Memory:
One time in a supermarket, someone yelled at him. As I said, he looked like a caricature of a Nazi. Think Otto Preminger but taller. A man spotted him, heard the accent I suppose, and begin screaming at him, calling him a “Nazi bastard” and a war criminal and other such labels. Mr. Stern did not yell back. He merely reached over, unbuttoned his shirt cuff, rolled up his sleeve and showed the man the tattoo he’d been given, I believe, at Ravensbruck.
This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor wasn’t a lighthearted read, but I’m glad I listened to what the author has to say. Susan Wicklund and her family were threatened, stalked, and harassed for years because of her work at women’s health clinics.
A hundred years ago, Susan’s grandmother saw firsthand what happens to women who try to self-abort when they don’t have any medical training. The awful repercussions of that day trickled down from one generation to the next and spurred Susan to go to medical school so she could give other young women a much safer way to end their pregnancies.
What have you been reading?