BohoMamma’s Weekly Reading List

Published On October 31, 2012 | By Shannon Kulik | Society and Culture

The articles we are reading and discussing at BohoMamma. It is intelligent water cooler chat.

For Years, Warnings that it Could Happen Here by David W. Chen and Mireya Navarro at The New York Times

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, there have been untold reports over the last several years about the ramifications on New York City’s infrastructure should a hurricane hit. When icecaps melt, sea water rises; when sea waters rise, low lying cities and localities and waterfront towns and cities face a greater risk of higher swells of water rushing into their towns. Look folks, just because some members of government refuse to believe in science, does not mean we have to follow suit.

In For Years, Warnings that it Could Happen Here, Ben Strauss, director of the sea level rise program research group Climate Central says, ““Three of the top 10 highest floods at the Battery since 1900 happened in the last two and a half years. If that’s not a wake-up call to take this seriously, I don’t know what is.”

Richard Mourdock, Mitt Romney and the GOP Defense of Coerced Mating by Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic

Ms. Franke-Ruta’s article is one of the most well thought out and well-written articles on the rights of women and girls to control their bodies (and to have access to abortion following cases of rapes) BohoMamma has come across. The author speaks to the historical nature of rape and the genesis of rape on culture and society. She writes,

“Violating women is a way of subjugating a population — sowing fear among the women, blocking the men from access to the future, and rupturing and weakening all the social bonds that made up the society that fought and lost. But for this to work there must also be children of rape.”

And, ”That rape violates women’s rights is not a universally agreed-on proposition. There are cultures in which women are married off against their will to men they do not chose, and cultures in which women who are raped are salvaged socially only if the rapist marries them, thereby taking their damaged goods out of the sexual marketplace.”

Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Dr. Dennis S. Charney at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine

While not a longread, the following is a good view. Dennis S. Charney, M.D., a Dean at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine has provided a video and written a book on resilience. The book titled, Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, and his YouTube video discusses the characteristics necessary for resilience in the face of adversity in one’s life. After studying a group of Vietnam Veterans, Dr. Charney and his colleagues have determined that resilience can be learned.

As he says, “the kind of optimism that is important is not Pollyanna optimism, optimism that doesn’t fully take into account the challenge that you face…”