Another venerable institution risks irrelevance by failing to adequatetely deal with the fact that its membership is just too old and too white:
INDIANAPOLIS - The National Organization for Women has elected a 56-year-old Maryland woman as its next president in a narrow victory over a candidate who had been endorsed by the group's current president.
My other favorite TV experience of the last two days was the clip, showed over and over again, of President Obama's one-handed fly kill, followed by the exclamation, "I got the sucka." Naturally, PETA can't let something like this go by -- the wanton cruelty followed by such pride in the kill:
What I learned on Tuesday and Wednesday while collapsed on the couch with a summer cold:
It's been quite a while since I featured some "Stop the presses!" research from one of our outstanding academics, so here's some good stuff:
In places where young women outnumber young men, research shows the hemlines rise but the marriage rates don't because the young men feel less pressure to settle down as more women compete for their affections.
At least once a year, the nerds have their moment in the spotlight:
An intense, oddly compelling spectacle of smart kids, the Scripps National Spelling Bee pitted 293 fourth through eighth graders against one another in a tense three-day competition.
Kavya Shivashankar of Olathe won it all on Laodicean, which means halfhearted in respect to religion or politics.
Usually I try to catch a few minutes of "Good Morning America" before coming to work -- it's about the least annoying of the morning "news" shows. The downside is that the program frequently gets caught up in breathlessly reporting some gushy nonsense about people behaving strangely. Today was one of those shows.
Well, aren't we all just stunned and amazed. With nearly 100 million votes case, underdog Kris Allen has won the eight season of "American Idol"! Phhht.
It's not just the rich and famous who are saddling their kids with dumb names:
Apple, Suri and Shiloh may be household names because their parents are stars, but a new study of millions of babies finds it's not just celebrities who seek out distinctive names for their kids.
Regular folks do, too, driving down the percentages of those who pick popular names.
Not to date myself or anything, but I remember when kids were reluctant to go to summer camp because they didn't want to give up TVs and their record players. So this is my favorite story today, about how much more reluctant modern kids are, for the obvious reason:
President Obama said at Notre Dame that, since the views of the two camps in the abortion debare are "irreconcilable," we need to at least stop demonizing one another and reducing those with differing views to caricature. I was with him on that, but then he said:
"Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It's a way of life that always has been the Notre Dame tradition."
