“They were over to celebrate our dad’s birthday and my mom told SIL she was sure she was exhausted and to sit down and rest and not help with the dishes.”

“I fake pouted and jokingly asked why she offered the broodmare rest but not her son who’s been helping her all day.”

Wearing a mask is important. For you and those around you. For elected officials? Not so much.

Actually, all the COVID rules are for us, not them. COVID-19, and the accompanying lockdowns, have made it painfully clear: We plebes have to follow the rules; the elites do not.

Start with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last week groveled for forgiveness after being caught attending a large birthday dinner at The French Laundry restaurant in Napa Valley. When pictures from the event surfaced, the hypocrisy was glaring: The governor was seen with his wife at a large table full of maskless lobbyists, all sitting in close proximity.

But, hey: You’re not the governor — so if you want to celebrate Thanksgiving in his state, remember: “No more than three households, including your own,” at the gathering, and keep your distance.

Newsom isn’t the only one to live it up while everyone suffers. Gov. Cuomo, for example, is rarely seen in a mask, yet his Twitter feed never stops harassing you to “mask up.” (And, by the way, he’s just thrilled with himself over his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, even though it resulted in more deaths than any other state and, according to The New York Times, seeded the virus throughout the country.)

As it poured and ground-level apartments filled with water this New Yorker was not phased by the rain as he casually inhaled from the device and exhaled large plumes of smoke.

The science is clear: without drastic action to limit temperature rise below 1.5C, the Earth, and all life on it, including all human beings, will suffer devastating consequences.

Facebook's algorithms sometimes flag this particular word as "violating community standards," apparently referring to a different word, one without an "e" at the end, that is nonetheless often misspelled as the garden tool. Santa Claus' laugh being one exception.

Normally, Facebook's automated systems will flag posts with offending material and delete them. But if a group's members — or worse, administrators — violate the rules too many times, the entire group can get shut down.

The proposal would require stores with 500 or more employees to maintain “undivided areas of its sales floor” for childcare items, kids clothes and toys, “regardless of whether an item has traditionally been marketed for either girls or for boys,” according to the legislation.

The bill, which refers to “unjustified differences in similar products that are traditionally marketed either for girls or for boys,” would also ban signs indicating specific items are for girls or boys.

Online, any California-based businesses selling childcare items, children’s clothing or toys, would have to “dedicate a section of the internet website to the sale of those items and articles that is titled, at the discretion of the retailer, ‘kids,’ ‘unisex,’ or ‘gender neutral.’”, the bill states.

The curriculum, written by Barnor Hesse, an associate professor of African American studies at Northwestern University in Illinois, claims, “There is a regime of whiteness, and there are action-oriented white identities.

“People who identify with whiteness are one of these,’’ Hesse writes above the eight-point list.

“It’s about time we build an ethnography of whiteness, since white people have been the ones writing about and governing Others,’’ Hesse adds.

My husband and I have been together for four years and married for one. I love him immensely and would do just about anything for him—except have kids. We discussed this before getting married, and I was indifferent. I pushed past not wanting to get married, so I thought I’d be able to push past how I felt about raising children.

Then I came up with a solution that may be extremely harmful to us or may be the answer to our prayers. I’ve suggested he co-parents with someone local, with whom he can have shared custody. He would be able to interact with his child every day—nurture, love, and raise them. The child can live with us occasionally, and I could be like an aunt: caring but ultimately not responsible. My husband did not initially like this idea. He saw it as intentionally having an “outside” child and felt he’d be painted the unfaithful partner whose wife was gracious enough to accept his infidelity. He argued that no one would believe that it was my choice. After the nth conversation, I think he realized that what was indifference from me has turned into an actual no. So now he’s come around.

But now a new problem has arisen: Hearing him talk about this potential child and opportunity and how he would spend hours a day away so he could get maximum time with this child has made me … jealous? I’m not even sure what this feeling is, because I can’t identify it. I don’t even recognize myself—I’ve turned into a monster who is threatened by a nonexistent child. I actually feel ashamed. Now I’m stuck. On one hand, if we negotiate a co-parenting situation, he could be satisfied and even happy. Yet this feeling I’m having is starting to get worse. I’m thinking about all the possible ways it could go wrong: custody battles, garnished wages, him leaving me for this woman he will be co-parenting with, and (shamefully) my feelings being hurt. I don’t know if we’d survive, and I feel he’d blame me if it went awry. On the other hand, he wants kids, and there’s a very real possibility he could leave. There’s a part of me that says I could just have his kids and solve this problem, but then I’d be the miserable one. Is there a solution somewhere that I’m not seeing?

—His and Not Hers

A few weeks ago, I was supposed to take my sons to an outdoor activity that ended up getting canceled due to weather. We found out about the cancellation when we were halfway there. Before I turned around, I texted my husband that we would be heading home and never got a text back. This wasn’t unusual, as he usually puts his phone on “do not disturb” while he’s working. When we got home, I opened the door to find my husband and his best friend, “Ryan,” completely naked, and having fairly rough sex on our dining room table. They had music blaring, so they didn’t hear us come in, and my sons and I were all in shock and just stood there for a good 30 to 60 seconds before I was able to shut the music off, and they realized what was going on and could cover up. Obviously, this is a bit of a chaotic situation.

Ryan is like an uncle to my kids, has dinner at our house several times a week, has occasionally lived with us, and he and my husband actually work together. My husband and I are planning on staying together and are still trying to figure a lot of things out. Here’s the problem: My younger son (6) is pretty oblivious and thought Uncle Ryan was wrestling with his dad. My middle son (9) is very confused about the mechanics of what we saw (we’ve had the sex talk with him, but in hindsight, we made the mistake of only talking about heterosexual sex). My older son (12) is having a very difficult time. My middle son has a lot of questions that I’m not really sure how to answer, and I’m not sure how much detail I should be going into, and who should be leading this conversation (me? my husband? a doctor?). I’ve been getting phone calls home from my older son’s school. Ever since the incident, he has apparently been making derogatory remarks about gay people, using slurs, and is also refusing to speak to his father (they were previously pretty close). The school is threatening to expel him. We’re on the waitlist for individual and family therapy, but I was wondering if you guys had any advice about what to do with my two older sons?

—What Now?

I’m a professional chef, and up until three years ago, I had no idea what barbacoa really meant.

I thought I did. I’d eaten my fair share of “barbacoa” at Chipotle, where its shredded-beef burrito was my splurge order. But on a tour of Xochimilco, a tapestry of canals and artificial islands that was once a major source of local produce for Mexico City, Paco, my tour guide, took me to his favorite barbacoa stall, where we were greeted with three juicy tacos and a bowl of lamb broth to wash it all down. When I mentioned that I’d thought barbacoa was only beef, he gave me a quizzical look: “Oh yeah? Where have you been eating barbacoa?”

As a chef, I was a little embarrassed by my lack of knowledge. But as someone deeply convinced that food is an extension of identity, who has experienced first-hand the harmful impacts of stereotypes seeping into cultural norms and is now actively working toward changing them, I was horrified at how easily I accepted something completely stripped of cultural context sold to me by a chain.

Let’s imagine we were giving an award for the worst social problem in the world today. Do you have any nominations?

Did I hear someone say international conflict? Racial prejudice maybe? Environmental destruction anyone? Millions of homeless refugees? Exploitation of women? Turns out there’s one problem that connects all of those, and it’s one you hardly ever hear politicians talk about.

Overpopulation may not be root of all evil, but it is indeed at the root of many of the world’s other miseries.

Just do the math.

The Twin Peaks chain has been hit with a federal lawsuit by 34 former 'breastaurant' employees claiming sexual harassment, multiple forms of discrimination and the 'sexual exploitation of young women'.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the US District Court for Northern District of Illinois, seeks a jury trial while also claiming that the restaurant chain is 'run very much like a commercial sex ring, torn from a pimp's playbook.'

Twin Peaks is a sports bar and restaurant chain which promises eats, drinks and 'scenic views', served up by scantily-clad women. The restaurant beckons patrons with the slogan: 'Welcome to the lodge, MANTALITY.'

Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely dismissed as meaningless, hypocritical, opportunistic, or all three. But there’s reason to believe that such vocal calls for change from corporations could actually be worse than meaningless—and in fact damage the chances that corporations will follow through on meaningful change in the months and years ahead.

Why? Less than a year ago, nearly 200 CEOs signed a solemn pledge, issued by the Business Roundtable, to stop caring primarily about their shareholders and to serve the needs of their workers, communities, and country too. The Wharton management professor Tyler Wry has been compiling data on the signatories’ behavior since. “We were interested in whether these statements were worth the paper they were printed on, or just symbolic,” he told me recently. “When COVID hit, it was a natural experiment and a chance to see if companies were living up to their word.”

The results have startled him. As COVID-19 spread in March and April, did signers give less of their capital to shareholders (via dividends and stock buybacks)? No. On average, signers actually paid out 20 percent more of their capital than similar companies that did not sign the statement. Then, as the coronavirus swept the country, did they lay off fewer workers? On the contrary, in the first four weeks of the crisis, Wry found, signers were almost 20 percent more prone to announce layoffs or furloughs. Signers were less likely to donate to relief efforts, less likely to offer customer discounts, and less likely to shift production to pandemic-related goods. “Signing this statement had zero positive effect,” said Wry. Why, though, would it produce a negative effect?

If you’ve ever gone through a difficult time (a breakup, a job loss), you’ve probably heard some of these phrases ad nauseam from friends and family. People who say them no doubt have good intentions; they’re simply trying to put a rosy filter on the tough time you’re having. “It gets better, stay optimistic,” they assure you.

But if statements like this are all you’re hearing from your friends and family, that excess of positivity can be, well, negative.

This kind of encouragement and self-talk is so common that mental health experts have a name for it: toxic positivity.

“Toxic positivity is the idea that we should focus only on positive emotions and the positive aspects of life,” said Heather Monroe, a clinical social worker and director of program development at Newport Institute. “It’s the belief that if we ignore difficult emotions and the parts of our life that aren’t working as well, we’ll be much happier.”

The problem is, toxic positivity oversimplifies the human brain and how we process emotions, and it can actually be detrimental to our mental health, Monroe said.