I sensed this out on the distant horizon several months ago, but not even in my wildest imagination the exact form it would take. (I catch myself vacillating between laughter at the bizarre and tears of frustration.) Something was in the air, like a foreboding atmospheric change signaling a storm. When the weather report warns people to evacuate or run for cover from a hurricane or tornado, that’s exactly what you are expected to do. Yet, in stark contrast, when a crisis in the family tree begins to brew we race headlong into the storm, understanding fully the emotional trauma at risk.

People from wealthy and powerful countries often express their opinions as if they are the absolute truth. Such preaching invites anger and resentment. We suggest tempering conversations with phrases like "I believe," or "My view is," rather than, "Everybody knows ...."

"Across 400 top-grossing G, PG, PG-13 and R rated films released between 1990 and 2006, only 27 percent of over 15,000 speaking characters were female."

"The second marriage, she alleged, had been based on fraud — a false representation that he would soon be dead."

Ped - A San Francisco-based site that offers shoes, jewelry,handbags and ... treasures. We fell for the Pepita jewelry pieces, which are made of such ingredients as lace, fabric beads, flea market finds, haberdashery stocks

To write about her students, her colleagues and herself without violating their privacy, she gives them names reflecting a notable characteristic. Moncur of course, is Ms. Teacher. Some of her students are Got to Blurt Out, Mr. Playful, Anger, Apathy, Missing Skills, The Intellect and A Really Nice Child. Teaching math to this varied group of sixth graders is, to say the least, challenging.

"Instruments are illustrated in use where conflict is imminent or already begun, and the coolness of the practitioners who apply their geometry in the heat of battle can seem improbable."

As Ewert journeys through Switzerland and is wheeled into the Zurich apartment rented by Dignitas where he will drink the lethal sedative that will end his life, his wife, Mary, stands by his side. She is there to kiss him goodbye and wish him a “safe journey” as the medication takes hold and his eyes close for the final time.

Lady Jane Grey was Queen of England for just 9 days until she was driven from the throne and sent to the Tower of London to be executed. Painter Paul Delaroche found many of the doomed to be his subjects - Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette - or did he especially seek them out?

Besides the sobering lessons in Edwards's book is that sad reality that most of the time the American press and public prefers a dumbed-down version of the political spouse. The media wants not even sound bites from our political spouses, but 'picture bites' usually of Barbie-doll like perfection, demure, uncomplicated and ultimately quiet.

If your credit card company is going to make changes to the terms of your card, it must give you the option to cancel the card before certain fee increases take effect. If you take that option, however, your credit card company may close your account and increase your monthly payment, subject to certain limitations.

"The more hostile and anti-social behavior exhibited by husbands, the more depressed their wives were after three years. These findings suggest that husbands’ treatment of their wives significantly impacts their psychological well-being and that hostile behavior has a lasting effect on couples that continues throughout their marriages. "

It is the movement's "social issues" which often divide libertarians from other conservatives. At the 2010 CPAC that divide was most apparent around the presence of the newest gay organization, GOPROUD. GOPROUD broke off from the Log Cabin Republicans before its national conference last April. CPAC didn’t blink at taking the $4,000 fee GOPROUD paid to be a full co-sponsor, despite some threats from other conservative organizations to stay away.

"If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration."

"The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas."

"This morning’s attack by Joseph Andrew Stack against an IRS office building in Austin, Tex., is a reminder again of how extreme hatred of government can morph into violence. Since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has documented 75 domestic terrorist plots, most of which involved individuals with extreme antigovernment views. One of the plots, if carried out, would have resulted in the deaths of some 30,000 people."

Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale published by Vintage is an early non-fiction work by the noted Indian novelist (whose work The Glass Palace is a favorite of mine). Ghosh wrote In an Antique Land after living in 1980 as a graduate student in an Egyptian farming village. He excavates a little known aspect of Middle Eastern history in a book that moves back and forth from the 12th century to the 20th, detecting and describing the interactions, real and imagined, of an Indian slave and local Egyptian merchants, holy men, and sorcerers.Gardeners and lovers of mysteries will be pleased to learn that several of the books of British born (John) Beverley Nichols have been re-issued by Timber Press. In Down the Garden Path, I chortled at lines such as "I would rather be made bankrupt by a bulb merchant than by a chorus girl." I expect the same witty, high-spirited writing in Merry Hall. And if I wish my flowers served up with a bit of murder and sleuthing, Nichols' detective novel, *The Moonflower, praised by novelists Somerset Maugham and Elizabeth Bowen, also rests on my to-read pile. 

"We ask that medical equipment manufacturers of deadly machines develop failsafe interactive expert systems that can interact with human technicians to reduce, or eliminate human errors. It is further recommended that such dangerous equipment never be operated by anyone not fully trained and qualified. Oncologists and supervising physicists must learn to micromanage every aspect of the Radiology Department. It is outrageous that any untrained and unskilled personnel can get anywhere near such dangerous equipment."

Mr. Thomas Jefferson was a clever man. He recognized that what makes one person happy may not be the same as what makes another person happy. All that his declaration advocated was allowing citizens to pursue whatever they thought might make them happy. Even then, there are obvious limits on how we may pursue our happiness. Murdering your mother-in-law might make you happy, but if you pursue it to completion you won’t be happy when the cops show up.

when women ate in mixed-gender groups their food choices were at the lower end of the caloric scale; the more men in the group the fewer the calories.

A touch watch for Hellen Keller; a microscope that can early detect protein signatures of a tumor; "C leg" prosthetic foot; the Servais Stradivari cello of 1701; Multibladed Folding Knife ... all favorites from the Capitol's National Museum.

Ian kissed me often and seriously after that first [kiss]. I was thrilled every time. I had fantasies of what it would be like to be his wife. I knew the 'facts of life' in a strictly text-book sense, and I longed to try sleeping with him. Maybe it was a childhood spent reading The Morte d'Arthur and teen years immersed in Tolstoy and Dickens, familiarity with Bible stories and conventional churchly morality, as well as a father who might have been living in the previous century when it came to his attitude about his daughter. Whatever it was, I was determined to be a virgin bride.

I see I really had great legs and a nice figure. But all that changed before I had a chance to fully appreciate these attributes — and before I had the opportunity to display them to the world at large since bikinis had not yet made their appearance on American beaches. I saw my first one in 1960 in Nice during my first jaunt to Europe. I couldn’t believe how daring its young wearer was — parading around in public, practically naked! I still have the picture I sneakily took of her with my telephoto lens, and I can’t imagine why I was so shocked. Her suit looks practically puritanical, compared to today’s shoe-string thongs and barely-there tops, often worn by many who should be following my example and covering up unsightly body parts.