Blogging is a great tool, but it simply cannot replace traditional journalism. What happens when blogging becomes the dominant form of newsgathering and publication? Who will be there to investigate the diaper company? Will anyone ever know that the company is dumping chemicals into rivers in China or that it is exploiting workers in plants in Tennessee? (These are theoretical examples.)

Why, bloggers, of course. That's the thing: that question (which is certainly a valid one) presumes that the investigative journalist has the backing of a major newspaper like the New York Times or, hearkening back to the good ol' days of Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post. But journalists at major papers have been known to curry favor with the powerful to get inside access (cf. New York Times) and are compromised in the process...or the newspapers themselves try to get into the business of influence-peddling (like the Washington Post recently got busted for). On the other hand, we have good investigative reporting (mixed in, admittedly, with a lot of red-meat, partisan ranting and raving) at sites like Daily Kos--often, these days, news percolates up through the blogs into the mainstream. Benfer's right: the medium may change, but the (uneven) quality of the content remains the same.

And one thing that's also a constant: the need for critical thinking skills on the part of readers. That doesn't go away, whether you're getting eyestrain at your workstation or newsprint all over your hands.

What kind of a reviewer are you?

People get bored with monogamous marriage and/or sanitize their inability to commit to one person by saying that they must just have bigger hearts than us inherently defective, jealous monogamous types.

It's OK. Men have always had harems. Women have always taken lovers. As long as employment benefits and healthcare for these ever-shifting "family" configurations don't make such things unavailable or unaffordable for the rest of us, I'm OK with whatever floats your boats.

with all you people. It's happened again. Someone posts a story about some decision she made, earth-shattering or trivial, that affects her and her alone, and you turn it into a personal affront. How dare she make a decision I would never have made myself? How dare she make generalizations about another religion of the same sort I want to make about hers, if much, much milder? (Maybe there was a jab in there at Unitarianism, but I'm so used to that by now that it just kind of rolls off my back.)

Grow up. The Catholic Church is big enough for ex-Nazis and Jesuits who chain themselves to the gates of the School of the Americas. It's a huge cultural institution, and it's done a lot of indirect damage through oppression and collaboration with dictators and lack of population controls, but it's also a huge chunk of many cultures, for better or worse, and it's not going away. Focus your high dudgeon on specific appalling practices. Painting the whole church with a broad brush just gets you declared a crank.

You sound like you could be my father-in-law's wife. When my husband and his brother were little--between seven and thirteen--they would go to stay with his father for the summer. His stepmother was not a very child-friendly person, and she was in graduate school at the time, and he freely admits that he seriously disrupted her studying time. She's always been cordial with us, but we don't have a lot in common. Even so, my husband has no hard feelings towards her. He's kind of distant from his father now, but that has very little to do with her...and since then he's really come to commiserate with her as he's realized that he can only handle children in small doses himself. His brother hated her, but he had other, complicating issues at the time.

All that said, they are still, after all this time, more or less happily married (hard to tell, since we see them together only once every several years)--their marriage has outlasted his parents' original marriage by a couple decades, actually. I don't think being a perfect, or even a particularly good stepmother will scar your husband's children for life, even if you're not there a lot of the time. It's probably less of a strain for them than someone might be who is constantly trying to control them or get between them and their father--which, clearly, you're trying your damnedest NOT to do.

And they do grow up, after all. They may actually become interesting, likeable adults whose visits you come to look forward to. Maybe that's a remote possibility, but still, it's a possibility.

that should read: "I don't think NOT being a perfect, or even a particularly good stepmother..."

Rereading my previous letter, I should mention that if my attitude towards my husband's family situation sounds lukewarm, let me just say that his father is one of those former military men whose attempted applications of military discipline to fatherhood go down in flames, and so my husband's somewhat strained relationship with his father really has had very little, if anything, to do with his stepmother. Sounds like your husband is probably better at parenting than my father-in-law was.

And I have to say, I'm appalled at the judgmentalism of some of these people who are superimposing their own dysfunctional family experiences onto the LW's situation without any real understanding. The idea that children should be the center of everyone's universe has probably done more damage than good. Better that these kids learn to coexist peacefully and respectfully with their father's wife. They don't need a second mother; they have their own, for crying out loud. That would just confuse them.