from On Being a Cripple / Nancy Mairs

First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even now, I’m not sure what those motives are, but I recognize that they are complex and not entirely flattering. People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.

from Last Child in the Woods / Richard Louv

Researchers at the State University of New York at Buffalo are experimenting with a genetic technology through which they can choose the colors that appear on butterfly wings. The announcement of this in 2002 led writer Matt Richtel to conjure a brave new advertising medium: “There are countless possibilities for moving ads out of the virtual world and into the real one. Sponsorship-wise, it’s time for nature to carry its weight.” Advertisers already stamp their messages into the wet sands of public beaches. Cashstrapped municipalities hope corporations agree to affix their company logo on parks in exchange for dollars to keep the public spaces maintained. “The sheer popularity” of simulating nature or using nature as ad space “demands that we acknowledge, even respect, their cultural importance,” suggests Richtel. Culturally important, yes. But the logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of “true” nature — the certainty that it’s not even worth looking at.

The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage / New York Times Editorial
  Board

The political posturing over raising the minimum wage sometimes obscures the huge and growing number of low-wage workers it would affect. An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job. Their average age is 35; most work full time; more than one-fourth are parents; and, on average, they earn half of their families’ total income.

None of that, however, has softened the hearts of opponents, including congressional Republicans and low-wage employers, notably restaurant owners and executives.

This is not a new debate. The minimum wage is a battlefield in a larger political fight between Democrats and Republicans — dating back to the New Deal legislation that instituted the first minimum wage in 1938 — over government’s role in the economy, over raw versus regulated capitalism, over corporate power versus public needs.

But the results of the wage debate are clear. Decades of research, facts and evidence show that increasing the minimum wage is vital to the economic security of tens of millions of Americans, and would be good for the weak economy.