13 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married. When it comes to marriage, what you don’t know really can hurt you. Whether because of shyness, lack of interest or a desire to preserve romantic mystery, many couples do not ask each other the difficult questions that can help build the foundation for a stable marriage, according to relationship experts. In addition to wanting someone with whom they can raise children and build a secure life, those considering marriage now expect their spouses to be both best friend and confidant. These romantic-comedy expectations, in part thanks to Hollywood, can be difficult to live up to. Sure, there are plenty of questions couples can ask of each other early in the relationship to help ensure a good fit, but let’s face it: most don’t.
“If you don’t deal with an issue before marriage, you deal with it while you’re married,” said Robert Scuka, the executive director of the National Institute of Relationship Enhancement. Getting Grief Right. By the time Mary came to see me, six months after losing her daughter to sudden infant death syndrome, she had hired and fired two other therapists. She was trying to get her grief right. Mary was a successful accountant, a driven person who was unaccustomed to being weighed down by sorrow. She was also well versed in the so-called stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
To her and so many others in our culture, that meant grief would be temporary and somewhat predictable, even with the enormity of her loss. She expected to be able to put it behind her and get on with her life. To look at her, she already had done so. The mask she wore for the world was carefully constructed and effective. The truth of her life was something else. Photo Was she in denial, she wondered. Earlier in my practice, I would have zeroed in on that depression. But I had begun to operate differently by the time Mary showed up, which was 10 years after my own loss. Doctors Tell All—and It’s Bad. A crop of books by disillusioned physicians reveals a corrosive doctor-patient relationship at the heart of our health-care crisis.
Kevin Van Aelst For someone in her 30s, I’ve spent a lot of time in doctors’ offices and hospitals, shivering on exam tables in my open-to-the-front gown, recording my medical history on multiple forms, having enough blood drawn in little glass tubes to satisfy a thirsty vampire. In my early 20s, I contracted a disease that doctors were unable to identify for years—in fact, for about a decade they thought nothing was wrong with me—but that nonetheless led to multiple complications, requiring a succession of surgeries, emergency-room visits, and ultimately (when tests finally showed something was wrong) trips to specialists for MRIs and lots more testing.
During the time I was ill and undiagnosed, I was also in and out of the hospital with my mother, who was being treated for metastatic cancer and was admitted twice in her final weeks. Streaming Music Has Left Me Adrift. Photo It’s hard to imagine now, but there once was a time when you could not play any song ever recorded, instantly, from your phone. I call this period adolescence. It lasted approximately 30 years, and it was galvanized by conflict. At that time, music had to be melted onto plastic discs and shipped across the country in trucks. In order to keep this system running smoothly, a handful of major labels coordinated with broadcasters and retailers to encourage everyone to like the same thing, e.g. Lest history remember industry versus indie as a distinction without difference, I should point out that mainstream rock was genuinely awful in the two decades before Napster.
Continue reading the main story In a now-famous 1993 essay for The Baffler, the musician and recording engineer Steve Albini described how this system pauperized bands to enrich a series of middlemen. Then a different subset of nerds invented MP3 encoding, and everything changed. Continue reading the main story. The All-or-Nothing Marriage. Inside the Rainbow Gulag: The Technicolor Rise and Fall of Lisa Frank. I recently worked at Lisa Frank (yes, it's still up and running) and was, initially, so excited. I'm young, so getting a job with a "big name company" seemed like a god send. "Rainbow Gulag" couldn't be more true. First, there were three creative staff, two digital librarians, a woman who worked with product, and "the boss" outside of Lisa Frank herself, who was seldom at the studio. That's it. That's all the staff in that entire factory. They work you like a slave.
Lisa Frank has a style, that much is known, but the woman that is her go between now is one of the rudest, most condescending people I've met. I quit after two months. The building is like a ghost town. I probably sound like a brat, but I have never been in such a terrible work environment, and I'm someone who was pretty used to be just another cog in the wheel. And their benefits! Working there was certainly an experience I'll never forget...I wish that woman the best though. In No Regrets, women writers talk about what it was like to read literature's "midcentury misogynists."
Photo by Stokkete/Shutterstock In 2007, the literary magazine n+1 asked a group of writers to engage in a dialog about the formative books in their lives as young readers. The exercise returns this month with the pamphlet No Regrets, which recruited a cast of exclusively female participants to talk about the books they read (or didn’t) early on. “I knew that women speak to one another differently in rooms without men,” moderator Dayna Tortorici writes. “Not better, not more honestly, not more or less intelligently—just differently, and in a way one doesn’t see portrayed as often as one might like.” Amanda Hess is a Slate staff writer. For many of these women, the reading experience begins from a place of seething rage.
This isn’t just about the books. Just by reading the book, the woman reader is forced to grapple with her relationship to being that girl, framed in opposition to the boy whose full story is being told. This experience is not specific to books, obviously. Atheist group demands Oprah apologize. 508058655954703&eid=ASsVhqHqiPPopEBSyuub8c6uql9cVC8k2LV1kkbJN_RIvLaAwuaiAfEffSb-eKUOeD0&inline=1&ext=1379820172&hash=ASuTt7Q_MRpV2a__ Medicine's Search for Meaning. What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions? After S. urinated in a cup, she was led into a small room. She texted one of her sisters, “Do you think God would forgive me if I were to murder my unborn child?” It was the first time anyone in her family knew she was pregnant. “Where are you?” Her sister asked. “Are you O.K.?” “I’m at Planned Parenthood, about to have an abortion.” “God knows your heart, and I understand that you are not ready,” her sister texted back.
The pregnancy had crept up on S. Around Thanksgiving in 2011, S., then 24, took her first pregnancy test — a home kit from Longs Drugs. At the clinic, a counselor comforted S. and asked her why she had come, if anyone had coerced her into making this decision. In the exam room, a technician asked her to lie down. Planned Parenthood gave S. a packet of information, including two pieces of paper — one green, for adoption, and one yellow, for other abortion providers.
S. went to First Resort the day before her appointment in Oakland, unsure what to expect. Narrative based medicine: why study narrative? [BMJ. 1999. Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust. Who's in charge – you or your brain? | Science | The Observer. David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas and bestselling author It is clear at this point that we are irrevocably tied to the 3lb of strange computational material found within our skulls. The brain is utterly alien to us, and yet our personalities, hopes, fears and aspirations all depend on the integrity of this biological tissue. How do we know this? Because when the brain changes, we change. Our personality, decision-making, risk-aversion, the capacity to see colours or name animals – all these can change, in very specific ways, when the brain is altered by tumours, strokes, drugs, disease or trauma. This clarifies some aspects of our existence while deepening the mystery and the awe of others.
For example, take the vast, unconscious, automated processes that run under the hood of conscious awareness. Raymond Tallis, former professor of geriatric medicine at Manchester University and author This is because we are not stand-alone brains. David Eagleman. 22 Maps That Show The Deepest Linguistic Conflicts In America. Why 43% of Women With Children Leave Their Jobs, and How to Get Them Back. Parents could take on freelance, deadline-driven projects for companies. I read Lean In expecting a manifesto for my generation. Instead, I found myself in a statistic on the bottom of page 98.
"43% of highly qualified women with children are leaving careers or off-ramping for a period of time. " This is me. I am the 43 percent. For those of us who left the traditional workforce to raise their kids with full intention of returning to the workplace, Sheryl Sandberg provides no advice or strategies for re-entry. I have a similar background to Sandberg. I was missing out on key moments in my daughter's life and I was an exhausted, nervous wreck. Leaving the workforce was not easy for me. Today, I am the mother of four kids. As a stay-at-home mom, I have struggled with guilt, boredom, and feeling overwhelmed, coupled with moments of intense gratitude for being able to be there for my kids.
My "years off" have not been without accomplishment. Bring back the 43 percent into the workforce. Pinterest, Tumblr and the Trouble With ‘Curation’ What Is Obamacare? - James Hamblin. Only 37 percent of Americans say they're in favor of the 2010 health-care law. When you describe specific changes happening under the law, though, closer to 70 percent are on board with them. That's among data from Kaiser Family Foundation that was highlighted on All Things Considered this weekend. Also of note: 50 percent think the law gives health-care subsidies to undocumented immigrants, 80 percent don't know if their state will expand Medicaid, and 40 percent think the law sets up "death panels. " Even though the law passed three years ago, there's still a lot of misunderstanding out there about the basics of what it is/does.
So hopefully some people will find this of use. I totally relate to situations where everyone is talking about something for a while, and you never really got it, and then before you know it everything you try to read is beyond comprehension because it assumes everyone already knows the basics. Obamacare ... okay to call it that? Yes. What does it do for people? How Nature Resets Our Minds and Bodies - Adam Alter. The research behind an understanding that natural environments refocus our attention, lessening stress and hastening healing Paoli, Pennsylvania, is a small town with a local suburban hospital.
Patients at Paoli Memorial recover in a row of rooms facing a small courtyard. In the early 1980s, a researcher visited the hospital and gathered information about patients who had undergone gallbladder surgery between 1972 and 1981. Gallbladder surgery is routine and generally uncomplicated, but most patients in the 1970s recovered for a week or two before they returned home. People who are exposed to natural scenes aren't just happier or more comfortable; the very building blocks of their physiological well-being also respond positively. When the researcher looked at their recovery charts, he was struck by how much better the patients fared when their rooms looked out onto the trees rather than the brick wall. What is it that sets natural environments apart from others?