It’s time again for news and views that you can peruse. It’s another Weekly Reader! Got a hot link? Drop a line in the comments so you can spread the love!
Why You Should Stop Yelling at Your Kids (from the New York Times): “In the 1960s, 94 percent of parents used physical punishment. A poll in 2010 found the number had declined to 22 percent. There are probably many reasons, including the influence of a number of childhood development educators. But surely one reason has to be that the reason to spank your kids evaporates if there’s a more effective way to change their behavior that doesn’t involve violence. Why spank if it doesn’t work? The same applies to yelling: Why are you yelling? It isn’t for the kids’ sake.”
GUEST POST: THE FIRST TIME I WAS SEXUALLY ASSAULTED I WAS SIX YEARS OLD (from Body for Wife): “Such justifications are off-base. Despite this experience being far milder than it had the potential to be, the damage from this event was real. I had been an outgoing kid; fearless. There was no “stranger danger.” I would gladly introduce myself to anyone, old or young. I would tell them that I was most certainly NOT little, that my name was KATE and NOT KATIE, and various other bits of information. I followed on my brothers’ heels everywhere, daring to perform any feat they did, always trying to prove I could do anything they could. But after that day at Daniel’s house, I became withdrawn. I was afraid to talk to anyone I didn’t know, and even to people I did. I became a child who clung to my mother’s skirts when we were anywhere but the safety of our own home.”
Why The #DearDoctor Movement is Horrific for Autism Acceptance (from Without a Crystal Ball via Patheos): “As I have read through this horrific and disgusting letters berating doctors, I feel an utter sense of sadness for the mother and doctor. The mother is living in a place of anger and denial. Instead of dealing with their grief, they are throwing stones at anyone that they can hurt. My therapist always use to tell me, “Hurt people, hurt people.””
I knew Brett Kavanaugh during his years as a Republican operative. Don’t let him sit on the Supreme Court. (from NBC News): “A detailed analysis of Kavanaugh’s own notes from the Starr Investigation reveals he was cherry-picking random bits of information from the Starr investigation — as well as the multiple previous investigations — attempting vainly to legitimize wild right-wing conspiracies. For years he chased down each one of them without regard to the emotional cost to Foster’s family and friends, or even common decency.”
The Forgotten Black Woman Inventor Who Revolutionized Menstrual Pads (from Broadly): “You could say that skill and ingenuity was in Kenner’s blood. Her maternal grandfather had invented a tricolor light signal to guide trains, and her sister, Mildred Davidson Austin Smith, grew up to patent her own family board game and sell it commercially. Her preacher father, Sidney Nathaniel Davidson, even made a go of transforming the family hobby into a full-time career. Around 1914, Sidney patented a clothes presser that would fit in a suitcase and press trousers while a traveller was en route to his destination, but he turned down a New York company’s $20,000 offer in favour of attempting to manufacture and sell it himself. The result was a failure: he produced only a single presser, which he sold for the paltry sum of $14.”
The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too. (from Vox): “For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that dark truth goes something like this: All the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, universal suffrage — that’s all bullshit. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths.”
Teaching High School Journalism In The ‘Fake News’ Era (from the Huffington Post): “All of this isn’t to say that fake news doesn’t exist. It certainly does, but established media outlets aren’t churning it out. There is a big difference between getting a story wrong and purposely deceiving people, which Trump seems not to understand. Neither is acceptable, but one is far, far worse than the other.”
The Jordan Peterson All-Meat Diet (from the Atlantic): “There is so much evidence—abundant, copious evidence acquired over decades of work from scientists around the world—that most people benefit from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. This appears to be largely because fiber in plants is important to the flourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.”
We’re in a constitutional crisis. Only voters can save us now. (from the Washington Post): “After this week, however, it’s clear that we’re already in a constitutional crisis of frightening proportions. The Cabinet will not act. Congress, under GOP control, will not act. The internal “resistance” can only do so much.”
So No One’s Going to Ask Brett Kavanaugh How He Got Into Massive Debt by Allegedly Buying Baseball Tickets? (from Slate): “A ProPublica piece about Kavanaugh’s tickets notes that he’s been seen at Nationals games in seats near first base. Season tickets at the “Dugout Premier” price level in that area would cost about $9,000 a year. The judge, therefore, would have had to have fronted the cost of seven such top-level season tickets just to reach the lower limit of what his debt was said to be.”
10 Weirdly Hot Pinterest Jesus Drawings, Ranked By Weirdness and Hotness (from Medium): “Did you know that if you break beneath the surface of Weird Christian Mom Pinterest, you find another, crunchier sublayer of images? That’s right! I found an entire Pinterest board devoted solely to pictures of Jesus that can be described both as “hot” and “weird as hell”! As someone with no sense of shame and an Art History degree, it’s my duty to turn these images into a bad listicle for you, free of charge, before someone else with no sense of shame and an English degree gets paid to do so first.”
That’s all for now. Stop by again next time, when I post more notes–sharps and flats–for your reading leisure. Until then, happy reading, everyone!
Iacon East 