Gossip Girl Is Going To Corrupt Someone
please let it be me, please let it be me The Parents Television Council does not like threesomes on TV.  This is what they wrote in a letter to the network about the upcoming threesome episode of Gossip Girl:Will you now be complicit in establishing a precedent and expectation that teenagers should engage in behaviors heretofore associated primarily wi

50% of American Kids Receive Food Stamps
Marx was right.  America is finished. I saw the news article late last night, then read the study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, and was blown away.  The data were solid: simple enough, just ask people if they'd ever been on food stamps, and count them.  30 years of household interviews, 1968-1997.By age 20, 50% of all kids will have used food stamps at one time. For black kids, the figure is 90%.40% of kids in married households will have touched food stamps; it's 91% of kids in unmarried households.

You Want To Be Don Draper? You Already Are
Part 2 in a series only for those for whom it is written.  You know who you are. (Part 1 here.)I.Some say that the desire to be Don Draper is really the desire to live in a simpler time with established gender roles, a romanticizing the past.  That's a girl talking.  When a guy fantasizes about living in the Middle Ages or a different planet of Don Draper's America, they're not wishing for a different environment, they're wishing for a different movie.  It's not the setting, it's the plot.  No one wants to live in 500 AD; they want to be i

The New York Yankees: Mission Accomplished
The House that George built. Sure, now that the Yankees are in the World Series I want them to succeed, I'm a New Yorker after all, and I certainly don't want to see them lose, humiliated, or suffer injuries.  But in all honesty, we have no right to be there.  We have no business going to the Series-- we got there on a series of false pretenses and bullying, facilitated by an impotent League that allowed us to get away with all kinds of manipulations and distortions.  The reality is t

Shouting vs. Spanking
Fake, fake, fake, fake... From the NYT:"I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking... As parents understand that it's not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that