Here is what happened to her in Kabul—and it’s essential to remember this occurred decades before the Taliban made life for women completely intolerable. Chesler’s American passport was confiscated at the airport: she never saw it again. Her young “bohemian” husband became, as she notes, “another person”: cold and distant, a sometime defender of polygamy (his father, to Chesler’s surprise, had three wives) and champion of the veil. Chesler quickly discovered that “Afghans mistrusted foreign wives”—and her walks around the city, invariably barefaced and without the long coat or gloves urged on her by her in-laws, made her the target of lewd advances and crude insults. When she fled to the American embassy, “the Marines would bring me back home every time,” she recalls. “I was the wife of a foreign national. I had lost my citizenship.”Twice Branded: Western Women in Muslim Land
Her in-laws were deeply unhappy with their son’s decision to bring home an American bride. She lived in perpetual fear that she might become, as her husband intended her to be, pregnant. That would have been the end of the narrative, for, as Chesler points out: “You’re then going to be trapped in the country you’re in forever because you’re carrying Muslim property. The child.”
When her mother-in-law quietly stopped boiling her drinking water, Chesler developed hepatitis. She weighed 90 pounds on her arrival back in New York City. Her father-in-law, delighted to be rid of her, paid for her ticket home. Because of her experience, the occasional young American woman who is thinking of marrying a Muslim with an urge to return to his own country visits Chesler for advice. And she tells them what she knows: “This man you love will change overnight before your eyes. You will live but you will wish you were dead.”
Lonesome George (Spanish: Solitario Jorge) is the last known individual of the Pinta Island Tortoise, subspecies Geochelone nigra abingdoni, one of eleven subspecies of Galápagos tortoise native to the Galápagos Islands. He has been labelled the rarest creature in the world, and is a potent symbol for conservation efforts in the Galápagos and internationally. It is thought that he was named after a character played by American actor George Gobel.Lonesome George
George was first seen on the island of Pinta on 1 December 1971 by American snail biologist Joseph Vagvolgyi. The island's vegetation had been decimated by introduced feral goats, and the indigenous G. n. abingdoni population had been reduced to a single individual. Relocated for his safety to the Charles Darwin Research Station, George was penned with two females of a different subspecies, Geochelone nigra becki from Wolf Island, in the hope that his genotype would be retained in the resulting progeny. Any offspring successfully hatched from George and his consorts would be intergrades, not purebreds of the Pinta subspecies.
George is estimated to be 60–90 years of age, and is in good health. A prolonged effort to exterminate goats introduced to Pinta is now complete and the vegetation of the island is starting to return to its former state.
I’m a businessman, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the persistence of bad industry practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to astonishing numbers of preventable deaths—seems beyond all normal logic, and must have an underlying cause. There needs to be a business reason why an industry, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor customer service, unaffordable prices, and uneven results—a reason my father and so many others are unnecessarily killed.How American Health Care Killed My Father
Like every grieving family member, I looked for someone to blame for my father’s death. But my dad’s doctors weren’t incompetent—on the contrary, his hospital physicians were smart, thoughtful, and hard-working. Nor is he dead because of indifferent nursing—without exception, his nurses were dedicated and compassionate. Nor from financial limitations—he was a Medicare patient, and the issue of expense was never once raised. There were no greedy pharmaceutical companies, evil health insurers, or other popular villains in his particular tragedy.
Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains—for someone to blame—has distracted us and our political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation’s health-care crisis. All of the actors in health care—from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies—work in a heavily regulated, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions. They all want to serve patients well. But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives those distortions create. Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health care over any other aspect of health and well-being. That emphasize treatment over prevention. That disguise true costs. That favor complexity, and discourage transparent competition based on price or quality. That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing. And that—most important—remove consumers from our irreplaceable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.
1. James Maybe on art 
I am glad there is finally a website dedicated to this issue, although I'm afraid that most of the people who cause traffic problems like this won't read that site. I like this, in reference to the animated image you see there: "Remember that milliseconds can add up to gridlock."
Gopnik's own view is a clever and counterintuitive twist on James. She argues that babies are more conscious than adults. Her conclusion is based on the study of how attention and inhibition—the capacity to block out distractions—evolve over the course of development. Adult attention is willful and endogenous. Although it can be captured by external events—we will turn if we hear a loud noise—we also have control over what to think about and what to attend to. By sheer will, we can choose to focus on our left foot, then think about what we had for breakfast, then focus on ... whatever we want. Adults are also blessed, to varying degrees, with the power to ignore distractions, both external and internal, and to stay focused on a single task.The Philosophical Baby
This is all harder for babies and young children. They are largely at the mercy of the environment. Simple experiments demonstrate that babies are, for the most part, trapped in the here and now, a conclusion supported by the finding that the part of the brain responsible for inhibition and control, the prefrontal cortex, is among the last to develop. Gopnik uses the example of an adult being dumped into the middle of a foreign city, knowing nothing about what's going on, with no goals and plans, constantly turning to see new things, and struggling to make sense of it all. This is what it's like to be a baby—only more so, since even the most stressed adult has countless ways of controlling attention: We can look forward to lunch, imagine how we would describe this trip to friends, and so on. The baby just is. It sounds exhausting, which might explain why infants spend so much of their time sleeping or (like some travelers) fussing.
For Gopnik, this lack of inhibition and control is a gift. It makes babies and children ideally suited for the task of acquiring information about physical and social reality. When it comes to imagination and learning, their openness to experience makes them "superadults"—not just smart but smarter than we are. She's particularly interested in the power to think about alternate realities, other possible worlds. In several fascinating chapters, she explores how this power is manifested in children's play and in their creation of imaginary companions, plausibly arguing that the capacity to reason about worlds that do not exist is crucial to children's rapid learning about everything from cause-and-effect relationships to human behavior. Gopnik suggests that their neural immaturity gives them greater imaginative powers than adults have: She proclaims, "Children are the R&D department of the human species—the blue-sky guys, the brainstormers. Adults are production and marketing. They [children] think up a million new ideas, mostly useless, and we take the three or four good one and make them real."
1959: Billy Cannon (LSU) - Orthodontist in Baton Rouge, LA (age 72)"Where Are They Now?" Heisman Trophy Edition
1965: Mike Garrett (USC) – USC athletic director under fire for possible NCAA violations by football and basketball programs (age 65)
1968: O.J. Simpson (USC) - Serving at least 9 years in Lovelock, NV prison (age 62)
1969: Steve Owens (Oklahoma) - CEO of real estate company, Steve Owens & Associates, in Norman (age 61)
1978: Billy Sims (Oklahoma) – Owns chain of Billy Sims BBQ restaurants in Oklahoma, most recently apologized in December for screaming "Boomer!" 11 times after Sam Bradford won Heisman (age 53)
1987: Tim Brown (Notre Dame) – Owns Tim Brown Racing LLC in NASCAR and lives in DeSoto, TX (age 43)
His biographer, Billy Reed, says Hornung “led the Packers, and maybe the NFL, in chasing women, hanging out in bars and nightclubs, and generally trying to circumvent the strict rules of Vince Lombardi.” And famed sportswriter Dick Schaap, who spent a week with Hornung leading up to a game vs. Cleveland, summed up an average Hornung day: “At three (after practice) he’d come home, mix a pitcher of martinis, and drink martinis with Ron Kramer and the others. Then they’d go out an have dinner, a group of players. Scotch before dinner. Wine with dinner. Brandy after dinner. Then back on scotch. Every day. I lost count by the time it had reached more than 60. Also, he never went to bed before four in the morning and he never went to bed alone.”
Two logical fallacies that we must avoid: The naturalistic fallacy (what is natural is good) and the moralistic fallacy (what is good is natural).
The English language makes a distinction between blue and green but some languages do not. Of these, quite a number, mostly in Africa, do not distinguish blue from black either, whilst there are a handful of languages that do not distinguish blue from black but have a separate term for green. Also, some languages treat light (often greenish) blue and dark blue as separate colors, rather than different variations of blue, while English does not.
Even "pure" or "filtered" honey contains tiny amounts of bacteria that can lead to botulism if fed to infants, although the bacteria is usually harmless to older children and adults.
Salt contains two elements, sodium and chloride, crucial to existence. Excessive avoidance of salt, especially in hot weather, can be damaging to the body and drain energy.
CHICKEN MCNUGGET PASTE
We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.Problem: has their been a major southern politician since WWII that this works less well for than it does for Jim Folsom? The man became successful, after all, for his willing embrace of ultra-populist causes. They didn't call him the little man's big friend for nothing. Folsom didn't attack the poor as trashy; he urged them to demand more from their government.
The argument over race had risen to such a pitch that it could no longer be alleviated by gesture and symbolism—by separate but equal inaugural balls and hearty handshakes—and he [Folsom] was lost.So, gesture and symbolism had no value in challenging Jim Crow? That's wrong, obviously so when one considers how much of Jim Crow was dedicated to symbolism and appearance.
Finch will stand up to racists. He’ll use his moral authority to shame them into silence. He will leave the judge standing on the sidewalk while he shakes hands with Negroes. What he will not do is look at the problem of racism outside the immediate context of Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Levy, and the island community of Maycomb, Alabama.That's a fairly tall order, Mr. Gladwell, for someone living in Alabama in 1959. Risking life and livelihood alone is, apparently, not enough. Gladwell is not just saying that Finch's approach fails to advance civil rights; he seems to be saying that it's actively harmful. I don't know what to make of that.
That her father and the Sheriff have decided to obstruct justice in the name of saving their beloved neighbor the burden of angel-food cake? Atticus Finch is faced with jurors who have one set of standards for white people like the Ewells and another set for black folk like Tom Robinson. His response is to adopt one set of standards for respectable whites like Boo Radley and another for white trash like Bob Ewell.Boo Radley saved the life of a small child and, in doing so, killed her attacker. Should it come to court, it is obvious what the outcome of a trial would be. He also has some sort of social disorder that makes it difficult for him to leave his home or interact with people (which he rather courageously overcomes to save the life of a young girl who has never been particularly nice to him). Assuming that a prosecutor would even take action against a man who killed an attacker while saving two children (and one wouldn't), in light of Radley's mental problems, the sheriff decides to falsify his report. This is unfortunate, not to be taken as an example. But it's only obstruction of the law, not obstruction of justice.
