A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

This article is so interesting to me, and seems to touch on so many different aspects of our current culture, both secular and non. I have no objection to cosmetic surgery. I've had both lasik eye surgery and liposuction over the years -- the former an equal measure of laziness and vanity, the latter pure vanity. I'd hated that little spare tire since I was 6 years old and so one day I had it delightfully sucked right out of me! But the stories over the years about the enormous amount of plastic surgery -- particularly breast augmentations -- performed in Utah have been eye-catching (not the least of which because the Church frowns so heavily on other much-less-invasive violations of the body-is-a-temple principle, like tattoos and multiple ear-piercings in an earlobe). When we were still friends, the husband of my old roommate continually pushed her to get a 'boob job' because everyone else in their ward had gotten one and he wanted her to have bigger breasts....

Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Hello! Two teenagers tried to explain Snapchat to me this week. It turns out it's not just for sexting . It's for sexting AND sending your friends pictures that aren't worthy of being kept. Frankly, that sounds even worse. I enjoy Facebook's feed of baby pictures and trip updates, but if you're going to interrupt my day with a picture I can only view for 10 seconds, at least make it worth my while and show some leg. Lord knows I don't need to keep up with what you're eating for lunch today. But I digress. My chief question at the end of the lesson was, "But how do you post articles and essays and have conversations about philosophical questions that are interesting to you but don't involve pictures?" The answer is, you don't. Apparently teenagers are not that big into sharing news articles. What. Ever. On that note, here's an interesting Atlantic article I stumbled across while looking up Cory Booker...

I almost always enjoy finding out that someone reads my posts. We are social creatures and it's not enough to just call out into the darkness; part of the pleasure comes in knowing someone out there has understood and answered back. I write about my experiences with anxiety and mental health care -- including medication -- because I am living them. But also because I believe strongly that we can't de-stigmatize mental health issues if no one who has them is ever willing to out herself.  I write about my experiences as a parent -- and a child. I write about my experiences with race, gender, economic class, status, religion, hierarchy, and social norms because it is only through thinking and writing about the world that I ever understand even a small slice of it -- and my relationship to it. I write about politics and policy because these are the intellectual pursuits that fire me. If there's one moment to sum up my adult life it's of my 21-year-old self wandering...

The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down. The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo , “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.” But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly. And here’s a test case: If you hear that s...