Thursday evening roundup

I'm supposed to be practicing non-judgment, but what kind of shitty person do you have to be to not give up your seat to pregnant or elderly people?

Parent complains that Anne Frank's memoir is too graphic... in terms of anatomy.

Being vegan makes some choices easy.

I'm gonna stay away from the 'innocence can't be proven' and 'white privilege' aspects of this Amanda Knox article, but I want to second the idea--as a white woman who studied in Europe, if it matters--that people should be able to f* around in their youth without that f*ing around impinging their character. Yes, I pulled (minor) $hit that people with darker skin couldn't get away with, like realizing, half-way to France (on the bus to go food shopping), that I didn't have my passport on me and not going back to get it, and I was aware that it was a privilege. Did that change anything? More importantly, I pulled other stupid shit in my 20s (unrelated to race) and was able to live it down, which is the whole point of that article. Or is the suggestion that odds of arrest are greater when one is not white, so getting away with stupid shit in one's 20s is never unrelated to race? I can buy that, but that doesn't detract from the point about slut-shaming. So, turning this into a coherent thought: although it is a true statement that one can't know for sure whether someone is innocent or guilty in the absence of quality physical evidence, youthful behavior is not evidence of guilt, and--a corollary--it's unfortunate that people of color may find that laughable because it's more of a privilege for white people to get away with youthful behavior, shouldn't we remedy that by expanding that privilege to everyone, rather than denying it?

I really love this letter to Carolyn, which gives us so much to talk about, but, together with another of her columns from not too long ago, it makes me think she's missing guys' basic tendencies to stay in relationships in which they're not happy. Didn't Sharon Stone have a brilliant quote about that: "Women might be able to fake orgasms, but men can fake a whole relationship." And why not? They don't have to do anything and presumably they're getting sex out of it, and they lack the anatomy to get out. This is why (as I said in my comments on the earlier post) I (expert in these matters that I am) absolutely discourage women from pursuing men: of course they're going to play along, whether they're interested or not. But if you let the guy do the work at the beginning, that's how you know he's actually into you (at least that's one sign). I also disagree with this:

...“despite my multiple attempts at and encouragement of honest conversations.” That sounds to me as if you were looking for reassurance that he loved you, and people don’t do that unless they sense on some level that the love isn’t there.

Really? Maybe you're just checking in. But let's get back to Carolyn and talk about the stuff that resonates:

...the first thing you can do is become attuned to your insecurities, to a need for affirmation."

Yup. If you're insecure about something, there's nothing anyone else can do to alleviate that, no matter how they tip-toe around you.

We are all revisionist historians to some degree, and minimizing (or exaggerating) past feelings is a specialty.

Yup.

I aced Pew's science test and got just the last question wrong on the religion test, but I had a similar experience: I was less sure of the religion answers (even those I got right).