human rights watch are our daughters dumbing down? Photo credit: snapshot from Think on Vimeo When one of my fellow Parentables contributors suggested we write about a new book exposing "how women in America are less knowledgeable about current events and our own government than they are about celebrity details," many attempts to steer my daughter away from the rumor rags towards magazines with more coverage of current political and cultural events encouraged me to take the topic. Is it possible there is a book that can help moms everywhere win this crucial adolescent skirmish? I often wonder if it was hard for my two girls growing up with a chemist mom, all logic and no make-up. The first half of Bloom's Book, Think, Straight Talk for Women to Stay Smart in a Dumbed-Down World, provides ample evidence of the problem. Think suffers from a few inadequacies. This book does make one think. Bloom's reflections on whether the media makes us stupid echo my experience. So what is the solution? Top Articles to Make You Think: I'm So Vain!
northern korea prison camps Shin Dong-Hyuk ... he says the Holocaust is still going on in North Korea. Photo: AFP North Korea's prison camps are a closed-off world of death, torture and forced labour where babies are born slaves, according to two survivors who liken the horrors of the camps to a Holocaust in progress. "People think the Holocaust is in the past, but it is still very much a reality. The birth of a baby is a blessed thing in the outside world, but inside the camp, babies are born to be slaves like their parents. Shin himself spent his first 23 years in a prison camp in the secretive country, where he says he was tortured and subjected to forced labour before making a spectacular escape seven years ago - and giving the outside world a rare first-hand account of life inside the camps. Kang Chol-Hwan ... was imprisoned with his family. The 30-year-old is the only person known to have been born in such a camp to flee and live to tell the tale. Advertisement That has changed since he got out, he told AFP.
sexism in music industry Although we’re all aware of the greed and discrimination in the music industry, it’s still alarming to see specific incidents of undeserved fear and heartache based on gender. In the last few days, two awful accounts of bigotry have surfaced in the news, reminding us that sexism in the music world exists on a massive and global scale. The first story, as you may have heard, made headlines on Feb. 1st after a disturbing YouTube video of J-pop star Minami Minegishi of the group AKB48 went viral and sparked controversy. She explained, “What I have done was such a thoughtless and a lack of self-awareness behavior.” As with many other cultures, Japanese pop stars are expected to look and act sexually, but in a totally virginal and off-limits kind of way; they serve to fulfill the male fantasy –– while raking in millions of dollars for their labels –– but they are completely dehumanized and stripped of their basic rights and needs in the process. Written by Nicole Woszczyna
Grero: The Masculine Gender and Cure for Heterosexuality