recent posts
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 2
- Channeling Collective Fury into Fat Justice Is the Transformational Power We Need: Part 1
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 2
- Our Dizzying, Repeating Cycles of Cultural Amnesia Around Sex Ed: Part 1
- We’ll Be Hiding from the Rainfall for These Beacon Beach Reads
about
Category: Children and Family
-
"Near Arctic, Seed Vault Is a Fort Knox of Food", in the New York Times last week, discussed the efforts to create a seed repository as a backup of our seed supply. Claire Hope Cummings, in her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, discusses the "Doomsday Vault" in more depth,…
-
By Chris Mercogliano I am in absolute agreement with Bruce E. Levine: it isn’t ODD at all that our society has stepped up its efforts to pathologize young people with biopsychiatric labels like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), when they either cannot or will not march in step with the majority…
-
A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website. Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in…
-
by Barbara Katz Rothman It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought? I too am a white mother of a Black child. When my Black child, Victoria, was in kindergarten or maybe…
-
by Mark Winne An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.—Plutarch We have in America today a tale of two food systems—one for the poor and one for everyone else. The poor cobble together their week’s groceries from a combination of food stamps, food bank donations, and…
-
Read the Spirit, an ambitious and thoughtful site devoted to issues of spirituality and religion, is devoting a portion of their impressive energies to a month of Interfaith Heroes. Featured so far, brief, illuminating essays on the lives of such disparate voices for tolerance as Moses Maimonides, Jaluddin Muhammed Akbar, and Roger Williams. (Incidentally, we…
-
by Kay Trimberger Singles during the Thanksgiving and Christmas/Hanukkah seasons—quintessential family holidays in the U.S.—are stereotyped as lonely, isolated and pathetic. While popular entertainment is now as likely to depict family conflict as well as joy during the holidays, we have noticeably fewer images for singles. Contrary to stereotypes, my study of long-term, middle-aged single…
-
Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, will be participating in a live chat about the shortcomings of our food bank system today at 1PM ET on the Washington Post website. The discussion is related to his opinion piece from yesterday’s WaPo about the problems of…
-
This week, we’ve been thinking about families, and in particular relationships between generations. Today, Clare Dunsford talks about the specific challenges and rewards of raising a child with special needs and his own special way of looking at the world. by Clare Dunsford “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I ask…
-
Jonathan Silin wrote My Father’s Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents to chronicle his experiences learning to care for his elderly parents when their independence began to slip away. Although his years of intimate daily contact with his parents ended with their deaths, his relationship with and understanding of them…
Beacon Broadside 