Whitney

Colbert’s eulogy for his late mother:

Dwyer Gunn explores the challenges facing pregnant, working-class women:

[W]hile the [Americans with Disabilities Act] provides protections for pregnant women suffering from more severe pregnancy-related “disabilities” like preeclampsia, it doesn’t require employers to provide pregnant women with the kind of small modifications they may need to stay on the job, because pregnancy itself isn’t considered a disability. Technically, women like Yvette and B are supposed to be protected by either the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) or the sex and disability protections of the New York Human Rights law. In practice, it doesn’t work out like that for most low-income women. “There’s a gap in protection under the law,” explained Katharine Bodde, Policy Counsel at the NYCLU. “Courts have not interpreted the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act to require employers to provide reasonable accommodations.”

E.J. Graff believes this gap could be closed with “a little bit of bipartisan cooperation” by passing the Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act, which would extend disability protection to pregnant women:

The PWFA doesn’t have any active opposition—not in the Chamber of Commerce or among Republicans; its opponent is inertia and lack of knowledge. [Emily] Martin believes that the PWFA could be like the Americans with Disabilities Act, the beneficiary of a great deal of bipartisan support—if enough people come to understand that this is a problem—today, now—for thousands of women.

A few months, here and there. A stool, a water bottle, a bathroom break, a little help lifting now and then. What’s so hard about that? It’s stunning that we need a law to enforce what is simply considerate: letting people take care of themselves when they don’t feel well. You shouldn’t lose your job for having a family: How simple a rule is that?

A new study suggests that meeting online is eclipsing more traditional matchmaking methods, and it’s even associated with a higher likelihood of staying together:

About 35% [of study participants] reported that they had met their spouse online, more than through introductions by friends, work and school combined. The study revealed that people who used this method to meet their spouses were slightly older, wealthier, more educated and more likely to be employed than those who went with tradition. But only about 45% of these online meetings took place on a dating site; the rest occurred through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, as well as chat rooms, online communities, virtual worlds, multi-player games, blogs and discussion boards. …

About 94% of marriages that had started online lasted at least until the time of the survey in 2012, compared with about 92% of those in the offline group. The difference was still statistically significant after controlling for other demographics such as age, race, religion and income.

And something to consider while choosing an online dating service:

[T[he study examined differences between 18 individual dating sites, including eHarmony, Match, Plenty of Fish and Yahoo Personal. After controlling for demographic factors, they found no significant differences in the number of reported break-ups by people using the various services. But there were notable differences in marital satisfaction between users of different sites. For example, those who married a spouse they met on eHarmony rated their marriages more highly than did those who met on Match, who were in turn more satisfied than those who met their spouse on Yahoo Personals.

Previous Dish on marriages forged online here and here.

Tim Doner is a 17-year-old able to speak 20 languages:

Aka the Flynn effect?

Ann Friedman observes that when women “meet other women who seem happier, more successful, and more confident than we are, it’s all too easy to hate them for it”:

When we hate on women who we perceive to be more “together” than we are, we’re really just expressing the negative feelings we have about our own careers, or bodies, or relationships. Here’s my solution: When you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better.

The benefits of this philosophy:

Approaching and befriending women who I identify as smart and powerful (sometimes actively pursuing them, as with any other crush) has been a major revelation of my adult life. First, there’s the associative property of awesomeness: People know you by the company you keep. I like knowing that my friends are so professionally supportive that when they get a promotion, it’s like a boost for my résumé, too, because we share a network and don’t compete for contacts. Also, it’s just plain tough out there — for all the aforementioned reasons about the economy and the dating scene and body-image pressures. I want the strongest, happiest, smartest women in my corner, pushing me to negotiate for more money, telling me to drop men who make me feel bad about myself, and responding to my outfit selfies from a place of love and stylishness, not competition and body-snarking.

Hanna Rosin has misgivings about aspects of Friedman’s article:

[T]he problem is that this worldview posits a definition of friendship I can’t really relate to as a strategic alliance, a self-improvement project, or maybe just networking, which is a fine and noble pursuit but not the same as actual friendship. I might have a “ranking system” in my mind (although I don’t spend all my time on it), but it involves my colleagues or fellow journalists, not my friends. My friends, even if they are journalists, are largely exempt from this ranking system.

Kevin Bonham criticizes the Union of Concerned Scientists for their opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and genetic engineering (GE) of produce:

I should be clear that I support UCS generally, and their work on agriculture specifically. Their roadmap for healthy farm policy is a wonderful and succinct explanation for what’s wrong with the way we currently grow food, and policy proposals to make it better. But GE is a technology (among others) that can help us make it better. Yes, they should be regulated, but so should new varieties produced by techniques like mutation breeding. Yes, we need to move away from monoculture and industrial farming practices, but that’s true of GE and organic farming alike. Genetic engineering, like any other technology can be used for good and for ill. It can be helpful and it can be dangerous. New regulations and policies should be technology-neutral, and focus on outcomes.

PZ Myers similarly downplays concerns about GMOs:

[T]here is established policy in many countries and states to prohibit use of GMO crops. When a small patch of GMO wheat was found in Oregon, Japan responded by shutting down all wheat imports from Oregon. That’s nothing but fear based in ignorance. All of our crops, everyone’s crops, are heavily modified genetically. Wild strawberries are tiny little things. Corn is a hybrid monster shaped by centuries of selection, twisted from a seedy little grass into this weird elaborate conglomeration. Wheat and barley and rye are the product of thousands of years of genetic reshuffling and selection. Walk into the produce section of your grocery store — do you really think all those fruits and vegetables are unshaped by human hands?

This strange unfounded fear of GMOs is unfortunately most strongly expressed in the political left. It’s embarrassing that political progressives are being made to look bad by raging superstition and unscientific claims. … Sometimes I wonder if the GMO controversy isn’t just a giant red herring thrown into the debate about the future of agriculture just to distract us from what should be real concerns.

(Photo: People hold signs during a demonstration against agribusiness giant Monsanto and genetically modified organisms (GMO) in front of the White House in Washington on May 25, 2013. By Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Derek Thompson flags a new survey that “finds that the wage gap nearly evaporates when you control for occupation and experience among the most common jobs, especially among less experienced workers”:

Comparing men and women job-by-job conceals the fact that men still dominate many of the highest-paying jobs. PayScale studied more than 120 occupation categories, from “machinist” to “dietician.” Nine of the ten lowest-paying jobs (e.g.: child-care worker, library assistant) were disproportionately female. Nine of the ten highest-paying jobs (e.g.: software architect, psychiatrist) were majority male. Nurse anesthetist was the best-paid position held mostly by women; but an estimated 69 percent of better-paid anesthesiologists were male.

Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean, explains why Americans are clean-freaks:

Oddly enough it was the Civil War that got Americans interested in being clean. The army’s initially derided Sanitary Commission, headed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, had proved that simple soap and water could significantly reduce military mortality, and by the end of the war cleanliness was seen as patriotic, progressive and distinctively American. Good hygiene had other virtues: it was a way to mark status and civility in a country without an aristocracy, and it could “Americanize” the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who began arriving in the 1880s.

Those ideas drew 19th-century Americans to cleanliness, but it was advertising that kept them interested. Body soap first became widely available in the late 19th-century, around the birth of modern advertising. Since there was little to distinguish one soap from another, advertising and soap grew up together.

If you’ve been reading this site for awhile, you know that we love Bob’s Red Mill. Any company founded on the idea that Americans should have more good, whole grains available at their table? We like that company. We also love Bob himself. (Whenever we open a new bag of flour, Lu points and says, “There’s Bob!”) We love that Bob sold the company to his employees when he was ready to retire. And Bob’s Red Mill was the first sponsor of this site, quite a few years ago, and they have been with us ever since.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that life as we live it in this house could not exist without Bob’s Red Mill and its gluten-free grains and flours.

And yet, we have found a way to love them more.

Bob’s Red Mill recently launched a new line of products: Grains of Discovery. These ancient grains may seem new to the American market but they have fed people for thousands of years. (Did you know that amaranth was the staple grain of the Aztecs? It seems it was first cultivated around 6000 B.C.) Now, Bob’s wants more Americans to have access to gluten-free whole grains such as millet, quinoa, and teff through this new line of grains.

I’m thrilled to bits they are now selling small bags of the sorghum grain. First grown in Africa, sorghum spread east through the Silk Road trade route. Today, it’s still widely eaten in Africa and India. But in the states? Well, it has been nearly impossible for me to find before this. I adore sorghum flour but I have not been able to play with the grain. Now, it’s time to start playing.

I’ll start first with the curried carrot and sorghum salad on the bag. The recipes on the side of these bags are far more interesting than most packaged foods offer — alegria (a sweet treat made with molasses), Central American quinoa soup with serrano chiles and cilantro, sweet millet congee, and Ethiopian teff stew. These dishes from around the world sound very much like the recipes in our new cookbook, Gluten-Free Girl Every Day: simple to prepare but surprising in taste. We want to share the world with our daughter through our food. The fact that Bob’s Red Mill has made these grains accessible helps us. And you.

Five of the nine ancient grains that Bob’s Red Mill offers — amaranth, millet, quinoa, sorghum, and teff — are made in the dedicated gluten-free facility. I respect the way Bob’s Red Mill has taken care to make sure those of us who are gluten-free can eat such a wide array of foods. Playing with our food just grew easier.

 

Bob’s Red Mill wants to help you discover these grains more easily. They are offering a set of the five grains to five lucky winners. Leave a comment about why you are interested in playing with these grains. Make sure we have your email address! Comments will be closed on Friday, May 31st and winners will be chosen at random. (Open only to residents of the U.S.)  

 

 

 

The post Bob’s Red Mill Grains of Discovery appeared first on Gluten Free Girl and the Chef.

In light of Sara’s passing on October 29, 2016, I’m re-posting a few pertinent items—including this one from May 2013, four months after the cancer moved to her brain.  They say: “You are so strong!” As Sara and I face another recurrence of cancer, now on her brain, we hear this comment from people who care […]

The post Is Faith Strength or Weakness? appeared first on tangible theology.

At one point in The Great Gatsby, Tom – Daisy’s husband – asks how Gatsby “got within a mile of her unless [he] brought groceries to the back door,” implying he was baffled by how two people from such different class backgrounds connected. The novel’s only hint is that Gatsby first met Daisy “with other officers from Camp Taylor.” Keith Gandal claims that raises a further question – how “a poor farm boy from North Dakota and apparently a German-American to boot, got to be an officer in the US Army when Germany was the enemy.” He does the detective work to find the answer:

The World War I American army, which had to build an officers’ corps of 200,000 rapidly and almost from scratch, needed some quick methods for identifying men who might be officer material, and specifically those who might make good captains. It developed a couple of unprecedented programs to do so: a rating system for identifying captains, and an intelligence test that identified potential officers and superior officers. The even more radical move that the army made — shocking to privileged young men, such as Fitzgerald, who expected traditional class and ethnic discrimination — was not to exclude immigrants and ethnic Americans from consideration for officer. (Indeed, the army’s initial plan was to have no racial prejudice and to open up such promotions to blacks as well, but the government under pressure from Southern civilian officials nixed the original idea of a complete meritocracy.) The army designated four training camps at which to pioneer the intelligence tests in late 1917 and Camp Taylor was one of them.

A further detail about Camp Taylor:

The other thing to know about Camp Taylor is that there were a large number of men of German descent there; by end of the war, they numbered nearly 1500. There is no doubt that the American army, though it was fighting Germany, had plenty of German-American officers.

Rowan Jacobsen raises concern about lost apple varieties:

In the mid-1800s, there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States, some of the most astounding diversity ever developed in a food crop. Then industrial agriculture crushed that world. The apple industry settled on a handful of varieties to promote worldwide, and the rest were forgotten. They became commercially extinct—but not quite biologically extinct.

Alex Tabarrok pushes back:

The innovative Paul Heald and co-author Sussanah Chapman (pdf) show that the diversity of the commercial apple has increased over time not decreased (pdf).

It is true, that in 1905 W.H. Ragan published a catalog of apples with some 7000 varieties. Varieties of apples come and go, however, like rose varieties or fashions and Ragan’s catalog listed any apple that had ever been grown during the entire 19th century. (Moreover, most varieties are neither especially good nor especially unique). At the time Ragan wrote, Heald and Chapman estimate that the commercially available stock was not 7000 but around 420 varieties. What about today?

The Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory for 2000 lists 1469 different varieties of apples, a massive gain in terms of what growers can easily find for sale. The Plant Genetic Resources Unit of the USDA, in Geneva, New York, maintains orchards containing an additional 980 apple varieties that are not currently being offered in commercial catalogs. Scions from these trees are typically available to anyone who wishes to propagate their variety. The USDA numbers bring the total varieties of apples available to 2450.

In fact, there are more than 500 varieties of apples from the 19th century commercially available today–thus there are more 19th century apples available today than probably at any time in the 19th century!

(Photo by Jeff Kubina)

friends,

with our lives feeling busier and busier, i'm finding that i need to simplify.  yesterday, i cleaned out my cookbook shelf and pitched anything that felt like clutter (old magazines, random printed-off recipes, scraps).  ultimately, in this season of my life, it's better if i just stick to what works.  here are 31 meals that work in our house.  a month of them!  if the recipe and/or product is available online, it's linked.  if not, i've tried to include the shorthand.  i'm anticipating that i'll be returning to this post often, as i prepare our family's meals: another move toward simplifying.  (and yes, clearly we count hot dogs and fries as a formal meal :)

1. corn chowder, french bread.
2. fancy sloppy joes, tater tots.
3. tuna and white bean salad (a real simple recipe not online? crazy! 2 cans tuna + 1 can cannellini, 1 jar roasted red peppers, chopped + 2 tbs. capers + zest of 1 lemon + 3 tbs. lemon juice + 1 tbs. olive oil, 1/2 tsp. each of pepper and salt: mix solids; mix liquids; fold together).
4. chicken souvlaki, cucumber salad.
5. pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage.
6. quinoa soup.
7. burgers and parmesan-parsley potato wedges.
8. grilled veggies and chx.
9. hot dogs, sweet potato tots (no pic, but 365 just released an amazing sweet potato tot: find at whole foods), fruit salad.
10. breaded fish sandwiches and steak fries.
11. trader joe's meatball subs, chips, salad.
12. sally's hot red pepper pasta (saute 1 lb. hot italian chicken sausage, squeezed from casings and crumbled; add 5 cloves garlic + 3 sliced red peppers, soften; add: 1/2 jar basil marina and 1/2 jar vodka sauce; add: pinch of red pepper flakes, huge handful of chopped basil; serve over pasta), salad.
13. chicken curry salad (i add more raisins and a chopped apple), kettle chips.
14. classic beef stew, french bread.
15. lemony herb pasta (i always add whatever herbs we have growing), salad.
16. postickers and soy slaw.
17. ham and cheese turnovers, simple salad.
18. kielbasa and kale slow-cooker soup (use any sausage), bread sticks.
19. grilled chx, white bean and mint salad.
20. trader joe's falafel in pitas, couscous.
21. thai red curry chicken.
22. meatloaf (i add carrots + parsley), baked potatoes, steamed asparagus. 
23. whole foods 365 frozen five-cheese ravioli with grape tomatoes and wine, salad.
24. chicken ceasar wraps (3 heads of chopped romaine; 3 oz. grated parm, croutons; this amazing dressing; 3 chx breasts from the prepared food section, sliced; and spinach wraps), chips.
25. turkey blts, fries.
26. roasted pork chops and peaches, couscous.
27. modern chicken paprikash.
28. four-bean slow-cooker chili.
29. bean burritos, or tacos, or fajitas.
30. trader joe's orange chicken, broccoli, rice.
31. grilled chx, corn salad.

if i discover any new go-to meals, i'll let you know...in five years ;)

do you have any staples around your house?

xoxo,
c :)

Tony Woodlief defends the democratization of art, calling it “a striving to express the Godlikeness within oneself, which means that it is the fruit of searching and calling and finding something divine”:

The fact that wide swaths of people endeavor to create something—a poem, a photo collage, yes, even another teen paranormal sci-fi thriller novel—ought then hearten us. In these imperfect endeavors we have proof that the spark of divinity has not flickered out.

Yes, much of what we make is dreck; yes, it’s often driven by narcissism and psychosis and all manner of dysfunction. It’s twisted because we are twisted, but it still pours forth from children of God who are striving to imitate the Father, even those of us who have stopped believing in him.

Imagine that. Millions of people, many of them knowing not the first words of orthodox praise, harboring scant knowledge of theology, yet all of them whispering back to the whisper within their spirits, imitating the God they may only know, many of them, as the urge to arrange words in verse, the craving to strum a power chord with the amp cranked up high, the yearning to dance because sunlight has come pouring through the windows in a slant that overwhelms our adult insistence on having a reason for joy.

A reader’s response:

No, we should not kill cursive.  My children attend a Montessori school where it’s still taught and I see many benefits.  First of all, building the muscles and eye/hand coordination necessary to use a pen or pencil is important and takes practice.  For many it’s as close as we get to drawing.  You can’t just magically expect to be able to write when you need to without practice.  Second, there is still a need to write by hand quickly and legibly, regardless of any technical revolution.  I have taken many classes where anything other than a regular notebook would not have worked, and was glad to know how to write legibly and quickly.

And lastly, sometimes the medium is as important as the message.  My husband wrote me hundreds of emails from Iraq when he was deployed there, and two handwritten letters.  Can you guess which of those notes I still read?  To know he held that paper in his hands and wrote that he loved me while so far away meant more than an electronic message that looked like I could have written it to myself.  Why would we rob children of the chance to learn a skill that is both beautiful and practical?  I’m glad my kids can write in cursive.

Another reader:

I suppose that we should also kill signatures while we’re at it (though they are, albeit very slowly, suffering a collective death-by-technology in their own right). I would venture to guess that the majority of adult signatures evolve from a very basic, teen-aged cursive exercise.

Another:

My mother’s cursive writing was magnificent, and I spent years trying unsuccessfully to copy it.  I have never been able to master her “W.” My signature is the closest I ever came to emulating her writing:

I know why cursive is dying, but allow me to mourn.

It would be so much easier if we just stayed put on Sunday mornings.

Take yesterday as an example.

Even though our kids wake up a good four hours before the service starts, somehow we scramble to get everyone showered and dressed and out the door. There’s a fight over who drives (not between Peter and me, but between our children who for some reason have strong opinions about which one of us should serve as their chauffeur). We arrive, a few minutes late. Marilee heads downstairs to the nursery, and I sneak in the side door with the older two. But our entrance becomes more conspicuous as William insists upon taking up the first pew so he can watch the choir director play the piano and the organ.

Penny and William wriggle and squirm. I try to make my whisper both very quiet and very forceful as I ask William to color lightly instead of bearing down with his pencil and scribbling as hard as he can. I put my hand over Penny’s mouth as she holds open the hymnal and sings in the midst of the Prayer of Confession. Irritation feels like it has weight, like it is tracing a line up my spine that will soon extend to my shoulders and seep down my arms.

Someone is in the pulpit reading from 1 John. It is something about love, about God’s love for us and how we should love one another. But I am shushing my children and can’t pay attention to the words I am hearing. I want to give up on church as a family.

Later on, the day gets better. We go to the lake, and all three kids spend an hour filling cups with water and pouring them in the sand and digging and creating sand castles and stomping on them. Back and forth and up and down, building, smoothing, discovering. We go to dinner in a restaurant and they order by themselves and they sit in their seats and they even eat their broccoli without a complaint.

It’s easy for me to think that our time on the beach was the more spiritual one, the one with beauty and goodness and laughter all emerging naturally, without any effort other than a stack of plastic Mardi Gras cups for entertainment. It’s easy for me to think that we could abandon church altogether. We could sing our own songs and read our own Scripture and say our own prayers and not even bother to get out of our pajamas. And then we could go outside and praise God along with the created order.

On our drive home from the beach, we pass our church, and one of the kids yells, “Look! It’s our church!” and they all erupt in laughter. It is a place that holds joy for them, somehow. Joy, and I suspect, comfort.

It is a place where they are known, a little bit, by everyone from the youngest children to the oldest grandmothers. It is a place where everyone assumes that God is present and deserves to be worshiped. It is a place where prayer and Scripture and singing hymns are expected. But it is also a place that asks something of them–sitting still, paying attention, subjecting their desires to those of the community. It is a place that gives to them but also asks of them. A place that gives to and asks of me, too.

So we will go back, next week and the week after that and the week after that. And we will trust that even amidst my short-tempered words and their inability to sit still and their refusal to go up front for the children’s message, we will trust that they are learning something about what it means to be a part of the Body of Christ, something about God’s presence in the midst of a very ordinary place in a very ordinary town, something about God’s grace and love, something about singing Alleluia, praise the Lord.

According to Joseph Bennington-Castro, “we don’t just eat foods because we like them, we like them because we eat them”:

After birth, your preferences continue shaping for the next two years. “Up until the age of 2 you will eat anything,” [psychologist Elizabeth Phillips] says. But then you become neophobic — that is, you don’t like new food. So if you hadn’t already been exposed to a certain flavor by the time you hit your terrible twos — whether through amniotic fluid, breast milk or solid food — chances are you won’t like it. At this point, most parents make a big mistake. “They think, ‘Oh my child doesn’t like this,’ but it’s actually anything new that they don’t like,” Philip says. So parents typically stop trying to feed their child that food and the kid ends up apparently hating it for years to come. “They don’t know that if they just keep giving it to their child, they’ll eventually like it.”

The key, then, is to make the food not new. Basically, you’ll like a new or previously hated flavor if you’re repeatedly exposed to it — studies suggest that it takes 10 to 15 exposures. “So if there’s something you don’t like, just eat it over and over and over again,” Philip says.

MISSING: Sister says this is Morris Bridges, father of 3. His car is still at firehouse – @rayvilleda#WestExplosion twitter.com/RayVilleda/sta…

— NewsBreaker (@NewsBreaker) April 18, 2013

Dreher is watching coverage of the fertilizer plant disaster:

West is a town of 2,500 people, which makes it about the same size as my own town. Here’s an interesting thing: Piers Morgan asked the woman he was interviewing by phone if her husband, Marty, is a professional firefighter. No, she said, he’s a volunteer. Everybody in the West Fire Department is. Marty is an air-conditioning and heating installer. The plant was on fire, and he ran to help put it out. And even though there’s still a great deal of danger there — toxic fumes, chance of second explosion — and his house is destroyed, and some of his friends and colleagues have been killed, Marty still won’t come home. Because he’s needed. 

Earlier tweet reax on West here.