When her second son was born, six weeks premature, Emily Guillermo recalled thinking, “You’re not supposed to be mine. You were not supposed to be made.”
Postpartum depression isn’t always postpartum. It isn’t even always depression. A fast-growing body of research is changing the very definition of maternal mental illness, showing that it is more common and varied than previously thought.
At the end of April, an execution in Oklahoma that went horribly wrong — leaving inmate Clayton Lockett writhing in apparent pain before he eventually died of a massive heart attack — sparked a national debate about the ethics of the death penalty. The media attention has largely been focused on the fact that Oklahoma used a secret combination of untested drugs in its lethal injections. But according to an independent autopsy report commissioned by Lockett’s attorneys, an ineffective cocktail of lethal drugs wasn’t necessarily the biggest problem that night.
In fact, the IV pumping the drugs into Lockett’s body was improperly placed by individuals who may not have been trained about how to insert it correctly.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
NEW YORK – Citizens in the world’s richest countries have come to think of their economies as being based on innovation. But innovation has been part of the developed world’s economy for more than two centuries. Indeed, for thousands of years, until the Industrial Revolution, incomes stagnated. Then per capita income soared, increasing year after year, interrupted only by the occasional effects of cyclical fluctuations.
The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow noted some 60 years ago that rising incomes should largely be attributed not to capital accumulation, but to technological progress – to learning how to do things better. While some of the productivity increase reflects the impact of dramatic discoveries, much of it has been due to small, incremental changes. And, if that is the case, it makes sense to focus attention on how societies learn, and what can be done to promote learning – including learning how to learn. Continue reading @JosephEStiglitz: Creating a Learning Society – Project Syndicate→
Several times in recent weeks I’ve found myself in conversations with liberals who shake their heads sadly and express their disappointment with President Obama. Why? I suspect that they’re being influenced, often without realizing it, by the prevailing media narrative.
The truth is that these days much of the commentary you see on the Obama administration — and a lot of the reporting too — emphasizes the negative: the contrast between the extravagant hopes of 2008 and the prosaic realities of political trench warfare, the troubles at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the mess in Iraq, and so on. The accepted thing, it seems, is to portray Mr. Obama as floundering, his presidency as troubled if not failed. Continue reading Paul Krugman: Health Care and Climate: President Obama’s Big Deals – NYTimes.com→
Whole Foods Market (WFM) is often jokingly referred to as “Whole Paycheck” because this natural-foods chain sells higher-priced organic fare and specialty items. Check out with a cart of grass-fed, hormone-free ground beef, organic heirloom tomatoes and artisan-crafted cheese, and you could easily pay twice as much as you would spend for similar conventional items at a grocery store. But is the ritzy reputation always warranted?
Surprisingly, there are deals to be had at Whole Foods. You heard right: Even bargain-conscious shoppers can find well-priced goods at this high-end grocer. That’s great news for those of us who are in the habit of making one trip to Whole Foods for splurge items and a second trip to the grocery store for staples such as milk and pasta. Continue reading Best Things to Buy at @WholeFoods – DailyFinance→
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently published new data on the role that American fathers play in parenting their children. Most of the CDC’s previous research on family life — which the agency explores as an important contributor to public health and child development — has focused exclusively on mothers. But the latest data finds that the stereotypical gender imbalance in this area doesn’t hold true, and dads are just as hands-on when it comes to raising their kids.
In fact, in its coverage of the study, the Los Angeles Times noted that the results “defy stereotypes about black fatherhood” because the CDC found that black dads are more involved with their kids on a daily basis than dads from other racial groups: Continue reading .@ThinkProgress: The #Myth Of The Absent #BlackFather→
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. His blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting.
Efforts to alleviate poverty are often seen as being separate from the debate on overall economic policy, with the former involving a distinct set of issues that only marginally overlap with the latter. This is unfortunate, since the health of the economy and specifically the level of unemployment, has an enormous impact on the prospects of the poor. In fact, there are few policies that are likely to have as much effect on improving the plight of the poor or near poor as a genuine commitment to full employment economic policies.
There are three separate channels through which a reduction in the unemployment rate is likely to benefit low-income people. The first is simply by increasing their probability of finding jobs. Unemployment is not evenly distributed throughout the workforce; the less-educated and disadvantaged see the sharpest rises in unemployment when the economy goes into a downturn. Continue reading @BillMoyersHQ: The Full #Employment Route to #Poverty Reduction→
THE Yale applicant had terrific test scores. She had fantastic grades. As one of Yale’s admissions officers, Michael Motto, leafed through her application, he found himself more and more impressed.
Then he got to her essay. As he remembers it, she mentioned a French teacher she greatly admired. She described their one-on-one conversation at the end of a school day. And then, this detail: During their talk, when an urge to go to the bathroom could no longer be denied, she decided not to interrupt the teacher or exit the room. She simply urinated on herself. Continue reading @FrankBruni: Oversharing in Admissions Essays – NYTimes→
Charlie R. Braxton is a poet, playwright and essayists from McComb Mississippi. He is the author of two volumes of verse, Ascension from the Ashes (Blackwood Press 1991) and Cinder’s Rekindled (Jawara Press 2013). His poetry has been published in various literary publications such as African American Review, The Minnesota Review, The Black Nation, Specter Magazine, Sepia Poetry Review and The San Fernando Poetry Journal Continue reading #Poetry: Two poems by @CharlieBraxton – Shout Out UK→
In a remarkable legal filing on Friday afternoon, the NSA told a federal court that its spying operations are too massive and technically complex to comply with an order to preserve evidence. The NSA, in other words, now says that it cannot comply with the rules that apply to any other party before a court — the very rules that ensure legal accountability — because it is too big.
The filing came in a long-running lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging the NSA’s warrantless collection of Americans’ private data. Recently, the plaintiffs in that case have fought to ensure that the NSA is preserving relevant evidence — a standard obligation in any lawsuit — and not destroying the very data that would show the agency spied on the plaintiffs’ communications. Yet, as in so many other instances, the NSA appears to believe it is exempt from the normal rules.
In its filing on Friday, the NSA told the court:
[A]ttempts to fully comply with the Court’s June 5 Order would be a massive and uncertain endeavor because the NSA may have to shut down all databases and systems that contain Section 702 information in an effort to comply.
