Today one of my good friends will stand before a judge in the company of her husband and dissolve her marriage. It is in one respect a common act, though rarely uneventful: it happens thousands of times a day in courtrooms across the country. But more and more, it seems to be the initiative of women who have been wives and mothers for years – in this case, 26 years, a figure I can relate to, on the brink of observing my own 26th anniversary later this month.

My friend, like me, married young – at least by today’s standards. We are in our late forties. And our generation seems to be one in which women are making this decision in droves, turning the old stereotype of the male midlife crisis on its head, leaving behind hurt and often clueless husbands who are incredulous that this is happening to them.

It didn’t strike me till recently that eight of the ten divorces I’ve been aware of among my circle of friends and colleagues in the last five years have been initiated by women. In every case, these have been women with children who have been devoted to their families for years. None is wealthy, none is leaving on a caprice after which they reinvent themselves with cosmetic surgery and a convertible. And none is a pop-culture cougar, pursuing her own youth via a younger man in a new version of the classic life upheaval. Full Story »

They say money can’t buy happiness. The same also goes for celebrity, and even the status that accompanies being among the best in the world at your profession. We’ve had ample demonstration of this in recent days.

Robert Enke, the goaltender for Hannover 96 (who currently hover in the middle of the German Bundesliga standings) and a potential member of next year’s German World Cup team, died the other day. His death was apparently a suicide.

“At 1825 (1725GMT) he was run over by a regional express train running between Hamburg and Bremen,” said police spokesman Stefan Wittke. “The train was travelling at the speed of 160-kph.”The player’s friend and consultant Joerg Neblung told reporters: “I can confirm this is a case of suicide. He took his own life just before six (pm).

Enke lost a child in 2006 and has left behind a wife and eight month-old daughter. Full Story »

You’re honey child to a swarm of bees
Gonna blow right through you like a breeze
Give me one last dance
Well slide down the surface of things

You’re the real thing
Yeah the real thing
You’re the real thing
Even better than the real thing

- U2

Fantasy stories, myths, legends, tall tales, fairy tales, horror, all these have been with us for a very long time. Science fiction, as well, has been with us since Mary Shelley found herself in a bet with Lord Byron about the possibility of writing a new kind of horror, one not grounded in the gothic.* So the presence in our popular culture of stories based in unreality of one form or another is certainly nothing new.

It seems to me that there’s been a lot more of it lately, though. Full Story »

Well, I didn’t expect my return to Scroguedom after six months would be in the form of a personal screed, and on domestic topics no less (as in “household”). However, as the feminist mantra of the 1970s claimed, “the personal is political,” a statement as salient today as it was then.

I’d like to be writing about clean energy or debating health care policy. I wish I could add something astute to the discussion about the future of democracy in Iran. But to do so would mean investing the time to follow these issues closely enough to have something worthwhile to add. And then there’s the time needed to actually write something. I’ve already got four or five unfinished posts languishing on my laptop.

Yet, in the words of my 14-year-old son this morning, who is angry at my asking him to pitch in around the house prior to the arrival of weekend guests, and who can’t understand why I won’t just drop everything to pick him up from the lake with his friends later today, I don’t have a “real job” — so why can’t I be like a good stay-at-home mom and craft my life exclusively around his? Full Story »

By Jennifer Angliss

When I was a kid, I listened to the “Free to Be… You and Me” album incessantly. We had it on vinyl (not 8-track!) and I probably came close to wearing it out. At the time, I didn’t really care for the track “William’s Doll”. The chorus of “A doll! A doll! William wants a doll!” grated on my nerves–actually, it still does. But the song tells a story that I think is really important. William is a 5 year old boy who wants a doll. Unfortunately, everyone seems to think that this is a terrible thing for a little boy to want. His dad gets him all sorts of sports equipment instead, which he also enjoys, but he still craves that doll. Finally, Grandma hears about this and gives him a doll. Full Story »

In Colorado, you are allowed to enroll your children in school without them having had all their supposedly required vaccines. Instead, Colorado parents are allowed to sign a waiver and then enroll their children. According to a KCFR/Colorado Public Radio interview with a medical researcher working for Kaiser Permanente, this fact partly explains why Colorado has about 800 cases of pertussis (aka whooping cough) a year, one of the highest rates in the country.

Kaiser Permanente (KP) is a large HMO that maintains its patient records in electronic form, a fact that makes the records very useful for researching disease. A new study performed by researcher Jason Glanz of KP finds that children who have never received a pertussis vaccine are 23x more likely to catch the disease than children who have been vaccinated. Of the approximately 800 cases of pertussis per year, that works out to 767 children who might not have caught pertussis if they’d been vaccinated, while only 33 children would have caught pertussis even after receiving the vaccine. Full Story »

Part two in a series

How did it happen? Why did it happen? There’s simply no way to measure how many hours have devoted to these questions in the ten years and four days since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire at Columbine High School, and while we don’t (and never will) have all the answers, we do have some of them. Obviously a good bit of the discussion focuses on the individuals themselves, and other analyses cast a broader net, examining the social factors that shaped the individuals. In a way, the question we’re still debating perhaps boils down to nature vs. nurture. Were Harris and Klebold Natural Born Killers? Or are they better understood as by-products of deeper social trends and dynamics?

The answer is probably “All of the above,” but we can’t simply check C and be on our merry, uncritical way. Full Story »

Like text messages often do, this one spread like wildfire. What it said, exactly, doesn’t matter, but it went something like this:

“He has a hit list posted on his website! School won’t be safe on Monday!”

Many parents were so busy forwarding and reforwarding the text— they were “aggressively promoting the rumors about this danger to our children,” one school official told me—that they apparently didn’t take the time to actually check the Web site.

Police did check it, though: No hit list. No threats. Nothing inappropriate.

So, when Monday came, nothing happened.

At least, nothing violent. Full Story »

Following the Columbine High School shootings of April 20, 1999, an Illinois carpenter by the name of Greg Zanis constructed a number of crosses and erected them atop the hill in Clement Park across the street from Columbine. He created one for every victim of the school shooting: Cassie Bernall, Steve Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matt Kechter, Dan Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez, and Coach Dave Sanders.

And Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

Full Story »