Sex

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Life behind closed academic doors

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Semester after semester, I tell my students at the Washington Journalism Center that some of the hardest news stories to cover — period — are personnel disputes inside private colleges and universities. The simple fact of the matter is that the administrations on these campuses do not have to talk about the proceedings in these cases and, often, they cannot talk about the facts of these cases because of valid legal concerns about privacy.


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Buoying the American Jewish population

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Good luck piecing this family tree together. That’s the first thing I thought when I saw this story in The New York Times about Yitta Schwartz, who died last month and left as many as 2,000 living descendants. The next thing I thought was that this story seemed like quite the one-upping of Rachel Krishevsky, who when she died in September was said to have 1,400 descendants.


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Covering conception complexities

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My husband and I have been blessed with two wonderful children and we hope to have more. Sometimes I reflect on how grateful I am that we were able to conceive these children without any trouble. I have more than a few friends that have been unable to procreate and I know it has been terribly difficult for them.


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Don't ask silly questions

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According to various journalists who cover the White House, the Dalai Lama told the media who covered his visit there this week not to ask silly questions. That, and the throwing of snow at the gathered press, put a smile on my face.


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Tiger's apology: In Buddha's name ...

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The big news before I even walked out the door this morning was Tiger Woods’ public apology, in fact the first public appearance he had made since that cataclysmic collapse on Thanksgiving weekend. This was no press conference, and everything Woods said this morning felt painfully processed. It was also already common knowledge thanks to the reporting that took place during his two-and-a-half-month Houdini act.


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Turkey is secular, but really now...

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I am not an expert on Turkey and I know that. However, I have been to Istanbul twice and, on one occasion, had a chance to talk to some pretty well informed people — Muslims and Christians — about the situation there.


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Want to reproduce? Check your DNA

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You can make fun of me, but I do, on occasion, watch Private Practice, where attractive doctors magically fix people and cheesy romance abounds. Compared to its sister show Grey’s Anatomy, it appears to be one of the only prime time television shows that consistently deals with serious medical ethics. In one recent show, for example, a Catholic doctor’s 15-year-old daughter gets pregnant. (Spoiler alert: the doctor wants her to have an abortion, but the girl chooses to keep it). Writers use such ethical scenarios for television drama, but people are faced with these kinds of decisions more often than we might think.


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Got news? LATimes forsakes Catholics

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So this is what big religion news in the Los Angeles Times has come to: 281 words buried on AA5. In a glorified brief with a photo, in eight paragraphs stuck in the second section of the paper, came the news that the Vatican was seeking a replacement for Cardinal Roger Mahony:


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