The Y Files

USA Today reports that Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books — much of which focuses on the secret book club Nafisi held in her home in Tehran after losing her university job — is planning to launch an international online book discussion group. In a world that [...]

Tuesday’s Boston Globe has an article about women in science dealing with the career/family balance. Highlights: As a graduate student at Harvard University and also a mother, [Deborah] Rud hopes to inspire female undergraduates to pursue both a career in science and a family. The trouble is, she’s still figuring out if she herself can [...]

Hope you all are having a wonderful day. And here, in honor of this day, is a masterpiece of modern folklore: the ultimate politically correct greeting for the season. Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, our best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the winter [...]

Yours truly is one of the nominees for “Conservative Blogress Diva” at GayPatriot.com. Actually, I don’t know about “conservative,” I’ve never fancied myself a diva, and I think “blogress” sound a bit too much like “ogress” … but how ungracious to quibble! It’s an honor to be nominated after only 3 months in the blogosphere, [...]

So, I’m back from my vacation, to more news of political messes as well as the encouraging news that U.S. District Judge John E. Jones has ruled against adding “intelligent design” to the biology curriculum in Dover, Pennsylvania. Judge Jones’s 139-page opinion eviscerates ID’s scientific pretensions, noting that it is “a religious view, a mere [...]

My Boston Globe column today deals with Linda Hirshman’s article in The American Prospect on “the opt-out revolution.” Since it’s fairly short, I’ll give the whole text here. First, there were the ”mommy wars” — the much-ballyhooed antagonism between working mothers and stay-at-home mothers. Then, there was the ”opt-out revolution” — the much-ballyhooed phenomenon of [...]

As a research associate at the Cato Institute, I’ve met Doug Bandow a few times, and it was truly a shock to me to learn that he was taking money from lobbyist extraordinaire Jack Abramoff for writing articles favorable to Abramoff’s clients such as Native American-run casinos. (A second think tanker, Peter Ferrara, is implicated [...]

Some startling results from a Hillsborough County, Florida survey of about 5,000 randomly selected middle-school and high school students: More male high school students – 16 percent – reported being physically hurt by their significant others than female students, at 11.8 percent. More than 9 percent of male and nearly 12 percent of female high [...]

George Will has an interesting op-ed today about the debate on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which Congress may soon allow. Will is for it (the drilling, not the debate). Conservatives and Republicans have a reputation for wanting to cut down the forests, kill the spotted owls, use lakes and rivers for [...]

As election time nears in Iraq, some interesting poll results, via John Cole: Despite the daily violence there, most living conditions are rated positively, seven in 10 Iraqis say their own lives are going well, and nearly two-thirds expect things to improve in the year ahead. Surprisingly, given the insurgents’ attacks on Iraqi civilians, more [...]