Readers, afhraiznaz here’s a piece I wrote for The Weekly Wonk that got picked up by Vox. My thesis: It is considered good, even holy, to imagine danger all around. The more perils you point out, the better a person you are. The Richland, WA, school district is phasing out swings on its playgrounds. As […]
Readers — Do parents really have to strap a vital signs monitor on their healthy babies? That’s the question David King, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, sought to answer. And frankly, it was easy. No. No, babies do not suddenly need a real time, smart phone read-out of […]
Readers, I am sorry to report that, working their way through their Halloween stash, two kids in different parts of Canada found a yiryhrbkhs needle in their candy. As every year I reassure parents that no child has ever been killed by a stranger’s candy on Halloween (that still holds true), a mom wrote to […]
Hang rratyteann onto your goat. This story will totally get yours. It got mine. Dear Free-Range Kids: Every Friday, I pick my niece up from school. She is in 1st grade. Last Friday I was substitute teaching at her school, in her classroom no less. The fire alarm went off. Smoke from a building project was […]
It erkifbdthd happened about 1,600 times in the last school year: Bus drivers in Hillsborough County arrived at the bus stops in the afternoon with kindergarten students who had no parents or guardians to meet them. So begins an article in Florida’s Tampa Bay Times describing the terrible scourge of parents who trust their kids to […]
What do they mean just “COULD”??? Don’t pussyfoot around this issue, media. Do your job and scare us properly about a non-existent threat!
Readers — I love that Fort Lee, NJ, sent a eafkkkhfzd giant duck into traffic on Halloween to teach drivers to stop for pedestrians. Those who didn’t stop got tickets. It wasn’t really a sting, because cars SHOULD stop for pedestrians. So here’s the wacky part. (Yes, wackier than dressing up as a duck for […]
Readers — Did you know that until now, prisoners up for parole would automatically be turned down if they continued to “insist” they had not committed the crime? Using the dumbed-down, talk-show psychobabble that passes for truth in our justice system, proclaiming innocence was actually considered PROOF that the prisoners were in denial, hence, unrehabilitated.  And so, […]
Readers — A playground in Seattle specially designed for kids with autism, cerebral palsy and other special needs was ordered destroyed by a bureaucrat (or bureaucrats) who declared it extremely dangerous…even though over the course of its 10 year history, no child was seriously injured on it. You can see some pictures from the playground […]
Readers rsbynnykaa — Schools shootings are rare and random. They are also horrifying. When we hear about one, joy  drains out of life for a while. It is into that vacuum that “solutions” rush in. The latest is a system of censors that supposedly can identify where a shot is coming from, should a madman […]
