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Here is a funny question in a recent DEAR PRUDIE column. Prudie is right on target. The boyfriend did not simply have a religious awakening.
For the Love of God: My boyfriend won’t have sex with me for religious reasons. Should I leave him?
Dear Prudie, my wonderful boyfriend and I have been dating for nearly three years. This summer, we moved in together. This has brought us closer, and our relationship has flourished. We have discussed marriage, and I hope that it will be only a matter of time before we take that step. I grew up Catholic, while my boyfriend was “saved” (his words) during high school.
Crashing a party that you are not invited to takes guts. Crashing Obama’s first state dinner takes more than nerve. Before you decide to imitate Michaele and Tareq Salahi and crash the next state dinner, wait and see what happens to the couple. DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer, reports:
WASHINGTON - Crashing a state dinner at the White House apparently takes a security breakdown as well as some kind of nerve. The Secret Service is looking into its own security procedures after determining that a Virginia couple, Michaele and Tareq Salahi, managed to slip into Tuesday night’s state dinner at the White House even though they were not on the guest list, agency spokesman Ed Donovan said.
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Jill Lapore reviews in the New Yorker a number of books that try to explain why the US is so violent in international comparison. Historians have shown that the murder rate in America has always been higher than in Western Europe. Why?
Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, who met three years ago in a Hartford drug-treatment center and shared a room in a halfway house in between stints in prison, were both seasoned burglars, though Hayes, a forty-four-year-old crack addict, was quite a bit older than Komisarjevsky, who was twenty-six, and the great-grandson of a Russian princess. In the spring of 2007, both men were paroled.
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David Brooks (NT Times) files this perceptive column in the wake of President Obama’s visit in China.
When European settlers first came to North America, they saw flocks of geese so big that it took them 30 minutes to all take flight and forests that seemed to stretch to infinity. They came to two conclusions: that God’s plans for humanity could be completed here, and that they could get really rich in the process. This moral materialism fomented a certain sort of manic energy. Americans became famous for their energy and workaholism: for moving around, switching jobs, marrying and divorcing, creating new products and going off on righteous crusades.
Now here comes an incredible story. Did you ever know about these fringe benefits of ROTC programs?
Thieves in Milwaukee Show a Patriotic Side, Declining to Rob Army Reservist. By SUSAN SAULNY (NY Times)
Kyle Windorski, a 21-year-old college student in the Army Reserve, was walking home Tuesday morning on the east side of Milwaukee when four men with stocking caps over their faces forced him into an alley at gunpoint and demanded cash. In an account confirmed by the Milwaukee police, Mr. Windorski said the men ordered him to the ground on his stomach, and he was helpless as they fished his wallet out of a pocket. They counted his $16 and by their raging tone, he could tell they were not happy.
The NY Times published today a facinating article on how scientists have developed a new interpretatin what dreams are for.
A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain (By BENEDICT CAREY)
It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the pinata?
Uh-oh. Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations. Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
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