Wednesday evening roundup

Some of those lost to the storm.

So maybe instead of holding colleges to the lower standard of the rest of the justice system, we should call for justice system reform to more effectively address sexual assault? Put the "justice" back in the system, if you will? Rather than saying, 'look, that's just the way it is because that's the nature of the crime' (rarely are there witnesses; perpetrator exploits victim's sense of confusion about events; and especially in the case of students, that confusion leads to delayed reporting and submission of medical evidence), let's create a justice system that deals with this hugely widespread crime. The writer probably doesn't intend it, but her argument reads like 'boys will be boys, women do themselves no favors, and there's only so much college administrations and courts can do.' She does make some useful proposals (education, etc.) but let's take some of the onus off of the victims, which will in turn deter the crime.

Speaking of colleges, if you're going to protest sweatshops, do it intelligently.

It's not easy having a difficult mother.

I don't care what the study says, I'm going to say 'hell no,' and I have plenty of data points.

I love the text of this tweet, which tells us a lot about the pressures of parenting in our society: @HugoLindgren "'How do you raise a prodigy?' Rare parenting story that doesn't make you hate the author, yourself or other parents." My favorite excerpt:

Natasha later said she saw nothing strange in a musician’s ability to express emotions she has not experienced. “Had I experienced them, that wouldn’t necessarily help me to express them better in my music. I’m an actress, not a character; my job is to represent something, not to live it. Chopin wrote a mazurka, Person X in the audience wants to hear the mazurka and so I have to decipher the score and make it apprehensible to Person X, and it’s really hard to do. But it has nothing to do with my life experience.”

And another:

My research on prodigies echoed my study of children with other differences. Sue Petersen compared her experience to having a child with a wooden leg; May Armstrong saw common ground with parents of disabled children; and I realized that parenthood always entails perplexity and that the valence of that perplexity matters less than the spirit with which parents respond to it. Half the prodigies I studied seemed to be under pressure to be even more astonishing than they naturally were, and the other half, to be more ordinary than their talents. Studying their families, I gradually recognized that all parenting is guesswork, and that difference of any kind, positive or negative, makes the guessing harder. 

Amen to raising our standards for dating.