Breakup pain! Men and doctors! Mommy medicine! Adolescent specialists! Dangerous dyes! Sleep weight loss! Death rate fluctuations! M.S. marijuana! And eating disorders of the olds! It's your Tuesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—or, like, whatever!
"I often feel obliged to tell people, even if they don't ask, that it was Andover (not Harvard) that taught to me to think and write critically." Alexander Heffner is not waiting for your questions.
Not to be immodest, but our research (reading the newspaper) indicated long ago that going to law school was a sucker move, for suckers. Why go to law school? All it is is racist beer pong and racist emails, and when you graduate your worthless degree won't get you a job, and you get all bitter and eventually find yourself in the comments of a Gawker post about law schools, telling me to fuck off for making fun of lawyers, because do I even appreciate what all the lawyers in history have done for the advancement of human freedom while I just sit around making jokes about something I don't even understand, asshole?
Leading institute of higher learning Tufts has a "cherished tradition" in which lots of students there get roaring drunk one winter night and run naked through the quad. Classic American pastime, for pervs! But not any more.
Remember a few years back how all the people who care about children went on a whole kick about smaller class sizes? They were all, "Smaller class sizes are the key to educational success," blah blah, passing laws.
Regular haircuts not good enough for your toddler? Does your unemployed, penniless, pooping child refuse to enter any salon that does not feature "trendy designer haircuts, hair styling (think spray-on hair color and hair tinsel) and kiddo-friendly beauty services, including funky nail design and glitter tattoos"?
A new CDC survey of Americans and their people-fucking preferences contains at least two valuable pieces of information. First, that kids these days are getting laid less; "the proportion of 15- to 24-year-olds who have had some kind of sex dropped in the past decade from 78 percent to about 72 percent." And second, that ladies love ladies; "Twice as many women reported any same-sex contact in their lifetimes compared with men (13% of women and 5.2% of men)."
When you're a kid, spreading the details of the misdeeds of others far and wide gets you branded a snitch and ruins your social life. But when you grow up, doing the same thing gets you branded a "journalist," and gets you invited to boring parties! So you can see the dilemma faced by the "college journalist:" old enough to be a reporter, young enough to still be hated by everyone, for snitching.
It must suck so bad to go to one of these allegedly prestigious military service academies. Besides being hazed by crewcut goons and receiving a trip to Iraq as a graduation present, you can't even smoke real ganja. So weak.
It's okay for college kids, or white kids, or even rich and famous kids to like rap; or even to rap themselves, if they happen to be blessed with that particular talent. But it's not okay for rich famous white college kids to butcher rap music, for laffs (on purpose, or unintentionally). Not any more, at least. Maybe it was funny the first time someone tried it, oh so many years ago? We doubt it. But maybe. Now, though... we present you with Pussy Breath.
Are you cursed with spoiled children, $25,000 to burn, and a desire to make your already-wealthy kids even more unbearable by marinating them in an all-encompassing sauce of privilege?
Kids these days! Getting smashed is no longer the "cool" thing to do among American collegians—college binge drinking rates (at Purdue, admittedly) have fallen from 48% to 37% in only three years! What are our young people doing rather than downing Colt 45 at racist fraternity sex parties? According to the Wall Street Journal—known as the beating pulse of life on campus—they're doing the following:
The "Good Old Days" in America, when White Sue and Pale Johnny only viewed their nearest city's urban hellscape through the windows of a speeding SUV as they drove back to the suburbs after watching the big ballgame are over. Consider America's ongoing demographic trends: the evolution of suburbs into slums; the migration of black Americans from Northern cities back to the South; every god damn 22 year-old who's ever strummed an acoustic guitar moving to Austin. The writing is on the wall. And now, the data has confirmed what we all feared: America's cities are full of white kids.
In Texas, school districts are so low on money that they're selling ads on school buses, thanks to the "largest cuts to public education since World War II." In New York, many school districts are staring down 14% budget cuts, which educators fear will "widen the funding gap between wealthier and poorer school districts." Federal student aid programs are in for multibillion-dollar cuts of their own. And among the parents of children in Manhattan's most exclusive private elementary schools, a separate, but equally pressing, worry: is Emma beating her peers, enough?
Since the days of the Founding Fathers, the American promise to its students has been: we'll warehouse you in crappy schools for twelve years, and then send you to the local community college, to get an associate's degree in "business services" or some other synonym for secretarial work and/ or air conditioning repair work.
Do you care about children, the education of children, or the future of children, and our system for educating them? Then we have bad news for you. Lots of bad news.
