A Handyman On Male Insecurity

The Article: What Being a Handyman Has Taught Me About Male Insecurity by Andy Hinds in The Atlantic.

The Text: When I was five years old, my two sisters, my parents, and I lived in a canvas tent on the side of a mountain in Western Montana for a month and a half. During that time, and with the help of our extended family, we built most of the cabin that would become our family vacation home. One of my jobs, which I took to with great enthusiasm, was to pound every nail that held the plywood flooring to the log beams on the second story. We barely got the cabin roofed-in in time for my dad to report to his new Army post, and, as I like to say, 40 years later we’re still putting the finishing touches on it.

In the course of his career, my dad was an infantry officer, a military attaché, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, and an arms-reduction negotiator. At home, he was a wrench. Dude could fix anything.

Up until the time my parents were approaching retirement age, I can hardly recall a “professional” ever working on any of the houses they owned over the years. Dad built walls and sidewalks, installed woodstoves, laid tile, added electrical circuits and plumbing fixtures, fixed furnaces such as this furnace repair in Snohomish, WA, and, at the cabin, ten years after it was first built, contrived an indoor plumbing system featuring an elaborate pump rig that sent the waste up the mountain to a septic tank, which you can get at expert services like this plumbing installation in Sunnyvale, CA. His only training in construction and mechanical work had been summer jobs on the railroad and growing up in a time and place where men didn’t own things they couldn’t fix. (My mom, a Montana farm kid, is no slouch with a hammer and saw, either.)

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To Boston From Kabul With Love

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Following a horrendous insurgent attack last week, Afghani civilians offer their condolences to grieving Bostonians and Americans alike. All life is meaningful, and its premature loss is a tragedy understood by everyone regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. For more about the series, head here.

Gabby Giffords Responds To The Senate’s Gun Control Failure

The Article: A Senate In The Gun Lobby’s Grip by Gabrielle Giffords in The New York Times.

The Text: SENATORS say they fear the N.R.A. and the gun lobby. But I think that fear must be nothing compared to the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended in a hail of bullets. The fear that those children who survived the massacre must feel every time they remember their teachers stacking them into closets and bathrooms, whispering that they loved them, so that love would be the last thing the students heard if the gunman found them.

On Wednesday, a minority of senators gave into fear and blocked common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms — a bill that could prevent future tragedies like those in Newtown, Conn., Aurora, Colo., Blacksburg, Va., and too many communities to count.

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents — who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

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Oceans On The Brink Of Catastrophic Collapse

The Article: Overfished and under-protected: Oceans on the brink of catastrophic collapse by Tom Levitt in CNN.

The Text: As the human footprint has spread, the remaining wildernesses on our planet have retreated. However, dive just a few meters below the ocean surface and you will enter a world where humans very rarely venture.

In many ways, it is the forgotten world on Earth. A ridiculous thought when you consider that oceans make up 90% of the living volume of the planet and are home to more than one million species, ranging from the largest animal on the planet — the blue whale — to one of the weirdest — the blobfish.

Remoteness, however, has not left the oceans and their inhabitants unaffected by humans, with overfishing, climate change and pollution destabilizing marine environments across the world.
Many marine scientists consider overfishing to be the greatest of these threats. The Census of Marine Life, a decade-long international survey of ocean life completed in 2010, estimated that 90% of the big fish had disappeared from the world’s oceans, victims primarily of overfishing.

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Noam Chomsky On The Corporate Attack On Education

The acclaimed linguist and critic discusses the longstanding hostility of the rich to truly educating the public so they don’t realize they are victims of an economic system they need to replace with one that truly serves the public.