I just went back and skimmed this. Almanzo and Cap risk their lives to drive through a blizzard and obtain seed wheat (i.e., wheat that the guy who sells it to them had intended to plant the following year) that the starving townspeople can grind up and use for food during the winter. The whole trip is recounted in hair-raising detail - frostbite, nearly getting lost in the storm, the works. They bring it back to the owner of the local store, who promptly decides to charge $3 per bushel for the wheat he just bought for $1.25. He says "What do you call a fair profit? I buy as low as I can and I sell as high as I can; that's good business."

The townspeople are up in arms at this exorbitant price and threatening to take it by force, but Pa handles the situation by reasonably reminding the shopkeeper that eventually the winter will pass, and his conduct will be remembered come summer. Much is made of the fact that Almanzo and Cap took no pay for their trip, they took on most of the risk (the shopkeeper put up the funds but the money to pay for the wheat "wasn't out of your till more than a day"), they did the hard work of convincing the farmer to sell his seed wheat and they nearly died on the way back - and neither of them was starving; Almanzo took none of the wheat for himself.

Pa never says there will be a boycott, in fact he says he is not making threats, just stating a fact - "your business depends on our good will." This doesn't invalidate my earlier point that ordinary people are presented as having in their own hands the means of handling their problems. The market provides a natural corrective for price-gouging: people will take their business elsewhere when the market recovers. No need for violence; no need for laws or courts.

Pa says the shopkeeper is entitled to a fair profit, but the shopkeeper says they can just have the wheat at cost. It is rationed out according to need and everyone survives. Really an amazing story.

Can a pedophile change his sexual orientation? If not, should psychology just give up on that and focus on helping the pedophile adjust to a life of celibacy?

In general, how good are psychologists at changing any aspect of a person's psyche? I suspect the answer is, not very, but they aren't about to put themselves out of business by admitting it.

When I first heard the story of the crash, I was horrified. The best explanation I could come up with was that the mom was severely dehydrated - that can lead to nausea and disorientation. I actually drank more water the next few days, and my husband and I discussed that if either of us every feels too woozy to drive for any mysterious reason, we will pull over and call for a family member to come to the rescue.

Didn't even occur to me that the mom was stoned.

Had it been a Jeep full of teenage boys at midnight rather than a minivan full of mom and kids at noon, I would have assumed that alcohol and/or drugs were involved.

Articles like the one Ms. Harding is reacting to are necessary correctives to the bias I just admitted. What's sexist and anti-mom is somehow thinking that women are exempt from bad conduct because they are caretakers of young children, that there is some kind of intrinsic morality that comes from being a mommy. That's what creates standards that are impossible to fulfill. Do you really think pointing out that this woman did an awful thing somehow puts pressure on the millions of responsible moms who wouldn't dream of driving in her condition? If anything, stories like this make me feel that I might actually be a halfway decent mother.

Women, even moms, can be just as bad as anyone else. They do heinous things, often to their own children. We should condemn conduct that harms innocent people, regardless of the gender, age or parental status of the bad actor. We should acknowledge the biases that tell us that certain kinds of people do or don't do certain kinds of things. Maybe if people were more willing to think beyond the stereotypes, someone would have noticed she was impaired before she got into the car with all those kids.

Ms. Harding has an odd ax to grind. It's one thing to disagree with someone politically but respect their arguments, but her take on most things strikes me as so wrongheaded that I can't see too many people of any political persuasion agreeing with her.

How can any of us be colorblind when we are pushed to self-identify as a particular race on college applications, census forms, and the like? Some years ago I thought it through and decided that none of the racial categories listed applied to me so now I either leave the question blank, or if there's a box labeled "decline to answer" or "other" I check that. Why isn't there a "don't know" box?

Seriously, I advise everyone who cares about living in a society where race is irrelevant to reject self-categorization. Race is a social construct and society can reject those classifications just as it imposed them in the first place.

How is race determined? By what your parents were, and theirs before them, and so on into the mists of time. By this thinking you are born your race, whatever it may be. If a person born one sex can decide (or maybe feels compelled to) belong to the other sex, that person's gender identity is considered by most to be the (non-birth) sex. Can the same happen with race? Can a person be transracial? Why not?