Globalization and Human Rights – Nicholas D. Kristof Blog – NYTimes.com

August 29, 2009, 10:33 pmYour Comments on my Sunday Health ColumnBy Nicholas KristofMy Sunday Column argues that our existing health system erodes family values — by causing the divorce of the woman who was the spine of my column — and costs far more lives than an army of “death panels” ever could. I’m quite [...]

Magic and Romance

Tonight the wind was hard, cleansing and freeing. The rain was brilliant. I was dripping onto my plate as I ate. It was two ears of corn from a basket a customer/friend had dropped by on his way home from the garden. I threw 2 (in the husk) on a fire of coals and mesquite [...]

The Perfect Crime (1) « elizabeth wong

Paroxysm: The Perfect Crime
Jean Baudrillard
If not for appearances, the world would be a perfect crime, which is to say, without criminal, without victim, and without motive. Wherein the truth is forever withdrawn, and where the secret is never exposed, for want of traces. But, precisely, the crime is never perfect, because the world gives itself [...]

Ten Tips for Eating Local and Staying Healthy While Traveling Around the World

The first person to utter “shit happens” must have been a traveler.
As I emptied myself from both ends for the better part of 36 hours in the hills of northern Ecuador recently (a bad batch of cevichochos, I suspect), I was reminded that we owe our readers an accounting of how we usually manage to [...]

Ethics of American Youth Survey

More than one in four (26 percent) confessed they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey.

Hitching A Ride

My father was released from the hospital today and we admitted him to a rehabilitation center. Without a miracle recovery we know the next move will probably be to a nursing home, and this disturbs us as if it is a descent.
For some reason tonight I remembered a morning 42 years ago when I first [...]

Gov. Sanford’s Revealing Comment About Faith and Fear

As Gov. Sanford confessed his affair during a press conference yesterday, he made a comment I found very revealing.  He said that “God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself.”
This approach–the idea that faith can be based on fear, that religion means repression of self–obviously doesn’t always work. It didn’t work for [...]

Values and Responsibility

In a study reported by LiveScience.com and originally published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the researchers asked a group of people if they considered themselves moral, and if they would cheat on a test.
The people who said they would never cheat described themselves as very moral—no surprise. But the people who said they would [...]

Disappointed consumer: Cap’n Crunch “Crunchberries” not real berries

Disappointed consumer: Cap’n Crunch “Crunchberries” not real berries
by Walter Olson on June 3, 2009
A judge has tossed a California woman’s would-be class action lawsuit, however, finding that a reasonable consumer would not expect the brightly colored balls to be actual berries. Per Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar: “Plaintiff did not explain why she could not [...]

The Least Of These

I have not seen Demetrius for over a month now. I thought of him briefly when the TV  announced that an unidentified male was struck and killed while crossing Versailles Road. Oddly they added, ” No one knows why he was crossing the road.”
He always comes to visit me on the 15th and the 30th, [...]