Last autumn 1,070 women won undergraduate places at Oxford University, compared with 1,025 men. The news provoked a snippy article in the New York Times complaining both about how slow Oxford (“the oldest university in the English-speaking world” as they sniffily termed it) had been getting to more than parity of the genders, and about …
“Changes to the climate are being felt in every region of the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned. “A newly published study by the UN body, which assesses the science related to climate change, found that many of these changes “are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years” …
An eight-year-old Hindu boy is being held in protective custody after becoming the youngest person ever to be charged with blasphemy in Pakistan. The child’s “family is in hiding” and many other members of the Hindu community in the deeply conservative Rahim Yar Khan district of Punjab “have fled their homes” amid an outbreak of violence …
Continue reading ‘A distasteful aspect of organized religion’ »
“In other centuries people wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century they only want to be entertained”. Novelist Michael Crichton, quoted in The American Interest
Recently, NYC launched the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, or “B-HEARD” program, to mobilize social workers instead of cops when responding to calls for people struggling with mental health issues. The teams respond to emergencies such as suicide attempts, substance misuse and serious mental illness. The result? More people (95%) accepted help from the …
Continue reading ‘Treating the mentally sick in a civilized manner’ »
