Letters to the Editor
smallfox
Published Letters: 111 Editor's Choice: 8
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This book seems to miss the point -
[Read the article: Blood and bile and phlegm, oh my!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]- that "modern" medicine is still very heavily steeped in psuedoscience, at least for the layperson. One need not look further than the local chiropractic or homeopathic clinic to find voodoo non-scientific "medicine" being actively practiced. In fact my insurance covers both of these placebo-effect treatments. For as far as real modern medicine has come, scientific illiteracy, fear of the medical establishment, hokey throwback philosophy ("nature can heal anything"), and the dogged, wrong-headed belief that "holistic" medicine is safer/healthier/more efficacious means we stay mired in a medieval view of health with only a facade of modernism.
A better book would be one that explores why we seem so resistant to let ancient psuedoscience go, rather than a book that seems to embrace its adoption into modern medicine.
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snarlingcoyote's right
[Read the article: Baby branding]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]as far as I know. Many "black" names are also based on sounds/words/names from African languages (or meant to be evocative of that). Likewise some "weird" spellings are legitimate spellings in foreign languages - Vicktoriya, for instance. Otherwise I agree -- absolutely no "unique" spellings. And no Dakotas or Madisons while we're at it. The only thing worse than being a Madison is being a Madyssonn.
Personal favorites I've encountered are Chardonnay (good rule of thumb: never name your child after alcohol), Jester (that's sure to impress on a resume) and Legolas. I also went to school with a Merlin who was a beefy football-player type with a buzz cut.
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re: anonymous
[Read the article: Fishing for boys, pedicures for girls]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How stupid do you have to be to make the fallacious claim that there's any connection between equal camping opportunities for pre-teens and the male-only draft? For starters, 10-year-olds don't run the risk of being taken prisoner of war and raped at day camp. I'm anti-draft, anti-war, but in the event of an unavoidable conflict, I'm all for drafting women into civilian service but the fact remains that you can't put a woman on the front lines and male soldier definitely do not want them there. It's similarly not sexist to deny a woman a job as a firefighter if she's not strong enough to carry a fire house. There are some things that some people just can't do. (Epileptics and the obese can't be firefighters either. Sorry.)
But that has nothing to do with the fact that a girl wants to go hiking at a publically-funded day camp and can't because she has a vagina. They need to offer gender-neutral camps; two if they want -- one outdoors, one crafts-based. Odds are they'd have boys and girls in both if they didn't gender-tag them.
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re: Janice
[Read the article: Too young to be a supermodel?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Not that I'm nitpicking your point, but there's a huge difference between that 15 year old model and JonBenet Ramsey. The 15 year old is post-puberty and has the sexualized body of a young adult. There's nothing inherently wrong with finding a teenager sexually attractive (or that teenager knowing she's attractive), but in our society, obviously, a teenager is not emotionally or mentally anywhere near an adult no matter how much they look like one (in other words, there's nothing hypocritical about the "appreciate but don't touch (unless you're also 16)" mentality). JonBenet, on the other hand, was a tarted up pre-pubescent lolita.
Sexuality isn't so scary or offensive that we need to prevent it at all costs in teenagers, but 16-ish (the age of consent) is a good place to draw the line. Anything beyond that depends too much on the individual model's maturity/emotional stability/etc and the circumstances. And for what it's worth, I don't think the teenaged fashion models are what's ruining it for everyone else. Obviously 30-, 40-, 50+- something super models don't look like the rest of us, either. They're still prettier.
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somegirls -
[Read the article: Fishing for boys, pedicures for girls]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Same experience here :) It waned a bit as we got older (I stayed in until graudation at 18), but we did plenty of camping and horseback riding in Girl Scouts. Meanwhile my brother's Boy Scout troop was doing much more intense mountaineering (week-long vertical ice-camping and the like), but I was perfectly happy with weekend backpacking trips and Girl Scout canoe camp.
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Jeanette
[Read the article: Test-tube nation]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They don't get asked because people know at least the basics of adoption (cost, wait, background checks, horror stories about birth parents after the birth or prenatally, etc etc) and when people ask "did you consider adoption?" it's often NOT because they're passing judgement but because IVF can be emotionally and physically damaging and cost as much as adoption per treatment. Obviously not the case with natural conception. And c'mon - it's not as if there are boxes of infants being given away in front of grocery stores. There aren't THAT many children for adoption, especially if you take out the non-babies. Adopting older or special-needs kids is a very noble act, but should only be attempted by people who really want to do it. Wanting a baby doesn't make you a horrible person.
At any rate, the moralizing about IVF is misguided, but I agree that if you can afford to have more than two kids, you can afford to adopt #3, 4, 5... on up. Actually I'd be much happier if insurance covered adoption to the normal cost of delivering a healthy baby ($20,000) which would allow many more middleclass couples to adopt who may not be able to due to cost.