User-submitted comments in websites are frequently ill-tempered, intolerant, misogynistic, or utterly ill-informed. As a result, a number of media enterprises have chosen to get rid of comment components entirely. Some other sites have started intensively regulating what users submit as well as restricting when they may do so.
The conundrum between consuming more resources to alleviate dire poverty and the need to stop growth to save the planet, is going to need all our combined wisdom and efforts. This article from Reason outlines the issues at stake.
In what has become a seasonal rite nearly as reliable as the solstice, US News and World Report has issued its rankings of best diets to coincide with the turn of the calendar. Once again, I was privileged to serve as one of the judges.
Sugar seems to be everywhere these days, and I don’t just mean in the copiously over-sweetened standard American diet (“SAD”). I mean in the news about diet, too.
Which is more likely to happen? You get assaulted in a mall parking lot and someone comes to your aid, helps ward off the attacker and calls the police? Or, you get assaulted in a mall parking lot and someone holds up a cell phone and records it all the while providing commentary like, “Damn, she’s getting her ass beaten; someone should call the police?”
Christmas in the modern era has something in common with singer Miley Cyrus; they both come in rather like a wrecking ball. The bizarre amalgam of biblical birth, Nordic folklore, and vast commercial exploitation is a dizzying onslaught of the senses and sensibilities alike, devastating everything in its path.
I find my frustration and distress rising daily as I read about ever more cases of sexual harassment. I presume I am in the expansive company of ethical people in general, fellow parents of sons and daughters alike. Perhaps as a preventive medicine specialist accustomed to looking for patterns of human vulnerability and finding means of preventing the next crisis before it recurs, the endless cycle of revelation and reactive repugnance is particularly intolerable (quite like the cycle of futile thoughts and prayers that follows each episode of mass casualty carnage).