Cord Jefferson’s piece about his mom is so beautiful and sad and moving and joyous I literally do not know what to do:
I thought about that woman and the people mocking her for the rest of the night, and during a post-dinner walk, I told my mother what was bothering me. “They were so mean to her,” I said when I got to the end of the story. “I just don’t know why they were being so mean to her.” My mother stopped walking and turned to face me, her lips pursed and her brow furrowed the way they always were when she was unsure of exactly how to put something. “The world is a mean place,” she said at last. “Sometimes people are mean, and sometimes things will be hard. One of your jobs is to try and make sure that that never makes you mean and hard, too.” She kissed my hand and we continued on our walk, and we never spoke of that woman or that day again.
prepping doctors for anti-vax patients:
The salt-and-pepper-haired Offit slipped straight into character and zeroed in on one young doctor.
“I know you doctors keep telling me that vaccines don’t cause autism. If that’s true, then why is it on this package insert?” he asked, playing the role of a parent who had read the blogs and heard the celebrities who connect the two.
Shifting in her seat, the designated victim shot Offit an unsure look.
Then she began citing studies and said that drug packaging inserts include many “temporally associated symptoms” that weren’t necessarily caused by the vaccine.
“Why?” Offit pressed. “Why would they put that there — just to scare me?”
The doctor kept trying. “They’re required by law,” she said. “I actually didn’t know the answer.”
yep, you talked to Mallory, I have not yet had a Business Skype with her in which she was fully dressed:
I spoke to Ortberg twice. The first time was on the phone over the summer. The second time was early on a Monday morning over Skype. She was in her house in the Bay Area, dressed in a white bathrobe and sipping tea.
On a father’s attempt to bring light to molestation in the Hasidic community, and the roadblocks he encountered:
In the fall of 2009, Kellner was notified of a summons issued by Rabbi Makevetzky to participate in what was described as the “case of Mr. Shloma Aron Kellner, may his light shine, and the Lebovits family in the matter of injury of the son.” Kellner assumed that the hearing was a trap, designed to force his son out of criminal court. He told the rabbi that he would coöperate only if someone else paid for the hearing—the rabbi charged a hundred and fifty dollars an hour—and for the cost of being represented by a secular lawyer. An acquaintance of one of Lebovits’s sons paid Kellner’s expenses. Then, Kellner said, the man came back with an offer: Kellner should accept two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to drop the criminal case. (Lebovits’s oldest son, Chaim, denied that this happened. He added that Kellner was always looking for money.)
Michelle Tea on confronting her stepfather, the Peeping Tom:
My family crumbled into the gap between what I knew happened — sexual abuse, a strange covert kind that messed with my mind for years, twisting my interior — and what they insisted happened — the poor judgment of a sad alcoholic who had since gotten sober and apologized and why was I so punishing, so full of hate that I couldn’t forgive this kindly, trembling man who now wanted to die — literally die because I would not forgive him and go back to calling him “Dad.” This information was delivered to me via my crying mother who also now wanted to die, because the family was shattered and the fault lay not in her husband’s actions, but in the refusal of her daughter to forgive, her insistence on naming this thing sexual abuse when no hand was ever put upon her.
Today in Ontario Townships Named by a Maudlin Irishman That Would Become Unintentionally Hilarious a Century Later: Township of Emo.
— Kath Halloran (@lifeonqueen) November 3, 2014
