| 'Mama, put the phone AWAY!' and When quitting is a smart job move |
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Editor's note: Katia Hetter is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly.I understand your work pays the bills and you only have time to connect to people through Tweeting your mood or reading your cousin's latest Facebook update. I really do get it. My phone is wearing holes in my favorite jeans.As for me, I'm afraid a boss may accuse me of failing utterly in my latest project if I don't respond to her e-mail immediately. I also read the newspaper on my phone when I'm too sleepy to find my shoes to go outside and get the real thing. And I get into the Twitter discussion of the latest natural disaster, of which there are many these days.Still, I know my addiction to my hand-held device is bad. Checking my phone while talking to my kid while cooking dinner is hurting my capacity to stay with a thought for more than 140 characters.And Stanford University researchers back me up. [Read the full article] (Oprah.com) -- "Now my whole family is abusing me!" said Loretta, a client at a women's resource center where I volunteered back in the '90s. "If I leave my husband, it'll just be out of the frying pan and into the fire.""Are you -- " I cut myself off before finishing my thought, which was, "Are you crazy?"Just the week before, I'd participated in an intervention where Loretta's family had urged her to leave her battering husband, Rex. Each person had expressed enormous love for and protectiveness toward Loretta. Now she thought they were all abusers? Huh?"They're just like Rex," she said. "You saw it. They judge me. They criticize me. Nothing I do is enough for them."I opened my mouth, then closed it. Opened then closed it again. I kept that up for about a minute, like a perplexed goldfish, as I groped for the right thing to say. [Read the full article] (Oprah.com) -- Every biologist, botanist, and zoologist will tell you the same thing: Nature loves variety. People may fear it, and some religious or political groups may hate it -- but Nature loves it.The desert grassland whiptail (Aspidoscelis uniparens) forms female pairs. And these female couples reproduce ... successfully.The anglerfish female is spiny, ugly, and so much bigger than the male that most humans don't even see him: the tiny little glob attached to the lady anglerfish by his teeth. She feeds him and after a while, he loses his eyeballs and she takes his sperm. Normal, among anglerfish.And don't get me started on the saddleback tamarins, monkeys whose families are composed of mother, father, offspring, and an "extra father" serving as mother's lover and nursemaid for the baby tamarin. [Read the full article] 
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