Boy Reportedly Killed by Mother

Computer Composite and Photograph of Camden Hughes

Sometimes we are reminded of the utter depravity that human beings are capable of.  Most of us shake our heads with disbelief at the atrocities of your Ted Bundys, your Manson families, your wannabe actors that kill their mothers.

While all murder is reprehensible, it is my hope that there is a special place in hell for mothers that kill their children.  Susan Smith, Casey Anthony, Andrea Yates … you can claim depression or a past plagued by abuse or that the devil made you do it or whatever, but the idea of a child being slaughtered by the very hand that brought it into the world …

It gives me the shivers.

And it pisses me off.

On May 14th, a Maine resident found the body of a young boy on the side of the road.  The little boy, whose death was considered a homicide from the get-go, was unidentified for days as police followed tips from all over the country with the help of a computer-generated reconstruction based on … well, you know.

The town of South Berwick, where he was found, rallied around this nameless child, creating makeshift memorials and holding …

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The New York Times Doesn’t Write Obituaries For Women

black and white photograph of a man and woman reading the newspaper

The NYT Picker, a blog devoted to goings-on in and about the New York Times, published an interesting piece this week regarding obituaries in the NYT. The NYT Picker reports that, in the month of August 2010, the NYT published 78 obituaries – and only six of them were for women. For the year to date, 698 obituaries had been published in the NYT thus far– 606 of them for men, 92 for women.

This is a totally bizarre statistic, considering that there are more women than men in the US population, and that population numbers of women and men are pretty much equal worldwide. But this extraordinary disparity between genders in newspaper obituary coverage has gone on for years – which is also bizarre, considering that the US granted full equality to women decades ago, and has seen women take more prominent roles in society ever since.

Obituaries go first and foremost to the famous – that’s a given. But the fact that the life stories of more famous men are being published in the NYT makes it clear that Western society is still dominated by a power structure that is, predominantly, male. This is also a bit of a given really– but women have been making valuable …

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