Lauren McBride grew up in suburban Milwaukee, the eldest of three kids of a teacher and a school social worker. They made lots of time for their children. The proverbial “good girl,” McBride says that more than anything she didn’t want to disappoint her parents.

She stumbled into a verbally abusive relationship her senior year of high school. It soon turned violent, but she used lots of makeup to cover the bruises and gave her parents plausible excuses for them.

McBride says she wanted to end the relationship, but the boy threatened to show her parents photos of her in underwear and let them know she’d “taken his virginity.” “I had this terrible fear of letting my parents down—it consumed me,” she recalls. Only a choking incident that felt truly life-threatening compelled the teenager to confide everything to her mom. And it took legal restraining orders to solve the abuse problem, says McBride, now 25.

McBride’s experience is far from rare. In one recent national survey of teenagers who had been in relationships, 29 percent reported experiencing sexual or physical abuse or receiving threats of physical violence from partners. About 10 percent of students in grades nine to 12 consistently say they’ve been physically hurt on purpose by a dating partner during the past year, according to the ongoing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) youth risk surveys.

Kids who witness violence between their parents are at higher-than-average risk to be the abusers—and the abused. Perhaps surprisingly, girls and boys are equally likely to turn violent with dating partners. But girls suffer more severe injuries, says health scientist Andra Tharp of the CDC. Teens who use alcohol or drugs and have trouble managing anger are especially likely to strike out against boyfriends or girlfriends. “But dating violence can affect anyone at any time,” she says.“Nobody is exempt.”

The barrage of digital media—texting, tweeting, instant-messaging, Facebook posting, Skyping—keeps kids on a shorter-than-ever leash to abusive partners. “It keeps them connected 24/7—and controlled,” says Tammy Hall, a recently retired West Chester, Ohio, health teacher who taught dating-abuse prevention.

With awareness growing on many campuses, 11 states since 2007 have passed laws mandating that schools teach teens about partner abuse or at least draw greater attention to the problem. The new laws and increasing availability of curricula have prompted a surge in prevention programs over the past few years, mostly at middle schools and for the youngest high school students.

More than 11,000 schools and agencies (such as the Girl Scouts) have requested the free Love Is Not Abuse curriculum online in the past five years, says a Liz Claiborne Inc. spokesperson. The clothing company partnered with the Education Development Center to create the four-lesson program.

Love Is Not Abuse uses poetry, short stories, videos and student journaling to spark awareness of the differences between healthy and abusive dating. Kids discuss their own experiences of abuse and brainstorm how to help friends who may be in trouble. “It’s very engaging,” says Erin O’Malley, director of guidance at Park View High School in Sterling, Va. Digital abuse provokes the greatest passion—how to deal with girlfriends who text and demand answers at 4 a.m., or boyfriends who threaten to call you a slut on Facebook as a control tactic.

Students read aloud a “was it rape?” date scenario from the girl’s and the boy’s points of view in a different four-day program for ninthgrade students at Milford High School in Milford, Ohio. “Some say she asked for sex because she went back to his house and kissed him!” marvels teacher Kristi McKenney. The postskit discussion sharpens awareness of the other gender’s perspective and ways to avoid sexual abuse, she says.

At the Bronx School of Science Inquiry and Investigation in New York City, games that cue students to move to one part of the room if they think varied behaviors are OK—for example, a boyfriend hitting a girl once in a while—provoke discussion and teachable moments, notes counselor Angelica Ferreras.

Widely publicized celebrity abuse cases also attract avid teen interest, providing the grist for real-life lessons on healthy dating, teachers say.

Gender stereotypes are another way to raise kids’ awareness about dating abuse, says Ann Burke, who taught health to middle schoolers for 29 years and now does free workshops on teen dating violence for Rhode Island schools. She draws two large boxes—labeled male and female—then asks students to blurt out adjectives describing each gender. Adjectives that aren’t stereotypes are listed under “outside the box.” Then a discussion explores how valid the macho guy-passive girl images are. “The kids brainstorm the harmful effects of these aggressor-victim ideas, and it’s an easy transition to teaching about dating violence,” says Burke.

In Austin, Texas, public schools, students seen as high-risk because they’ve already been involved in or exposed to violence—at home or through relationships—meet in small groups for 24 weekly support and education sessions. They create skits, draw cartoons about their feelings and make collages. Students learn how to ask for consent, how to handle jealousy and how to end a relationship.

In a powerful theater game, one student acts as puppeteer, another as puppet. “They learn and discuss what it feels like to have someone leading you around, then what it feels like to be in control, because control is so much at the heart of dating abuse,” says program director Barri Rosenbluth, who manages Expect Respect, a youth project based at the SafePlace agency in Austin.

Dating abuse can shatter a teen’s self-esteem, research suggests. Victims are also more prone to binge drinking, drug use and eating disorders. Harmful effects even reverberate into adulthood: Teens entangled in violent dating relationships are more likely than others to be involved in violent activities later on, notes Tharp of the CDC.

Last September, the CDC launched a $7 million prevention program in Baltimore; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Chicago; and the Oakland-Hayward, Calif., metropolitan area. The fiveyear project includes teacher training and the testing of school curricula on dating violence. The CDC is also testing the value of a bystander“helper” curriculum called Green Dot in 13 Kentucky high schools.

“There’s increased awareness that teen dating violence is a public-health issue,” says Tharp. “We want to learn more about what works in prevention, and the CDC wants to see schools doing prevention work, so that youth are safer.”

Origin of Religion -The Human Brain as “Belief Engine”

The Daily Galaxy -Great Discoveries Channel is an eclectic text and video presentation of news and original insights on science, space, and the environment.

WASHINGTON

BARACK OBAMA must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out.

Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

“Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.”

“When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” he told an audience at a Chicago fund-raiser on Wednesday. “Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

True enough, but not F.D.R.-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in United States history.

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn’t use it. He wanted to be a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan’s strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

And now, just when the high school principal in the Oval has been browbeating Congress to help create jobs, he is once more distracted from that task as he tries to save his own.

He goes to fund-raisers to tell people to stick with him, but he seems to be trying to reassure himself.

“I have to admit,” the president said in Chicago, “I didn’t know how steep the climb was going to be.”

At the large fund-raiser in his hometown, he tried to reassure disillusioned liberals about “unfinished business” to help those in need. Later, at a smaller $35,800-a-head dinner, he defended the unpopular debt package like a proud fiscal conservative.

The president talks fondly of George Bush the elder, just as Bush the elder does of him. Obama thinks Bush is a poignant figure because he did the right thing, breaking his tax pledge to fix the deficit, even though he got punished for it with one term.

It is clear that the once cocky Obama is feeling that same poignancy about his own presidency. Left in a giant pickle by the hot-dogging Bush the younger, the president who gloriously made history is now stuck in Sisyphus mode.

He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly.

The one clear-cut, chesty victory that Obama has had may have come too late for beleaguered Americans to much care.

When the president is asked what it felt like to kill Osama, he’s low-key and modest, even though he personally refocused the mission to capture the 9/11 architect after W. dropped the ball.

He has told people what a thrill it was to meet Seal Team 6 — and the dog Cairo — which pulled off the hit, noting that the men looked less young and fearsome than he expected, and more like guys working at Home Depot.

But while Obama takes the high road, his aides have made sure there are proxies to exuberantly brag on him.

The White House clearly blessed the dramatic reconstruction of the mission by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker — so vividly descriptive of the Seals’ looks, quotes and thoughts that Schmidle had to clarify after the piece was published that he had not actually talked to any of them.

“I’ll just say that the 23 Seals on the mission that evening were not the only ones who were listening to their radio communications,” Schmidle said, answering readers’ questions in a live chat, after taking flak for leaving some with the impression that he had interviewed the heroes when he wrote in his account that it was based on “some of their recollections.”

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished” glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.

TWE Remembers: The Gettysburg Address

Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2011

byJames M. Lindsay

A newspaper reproduction of Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address (courtesy Library of Congress)

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four months earlier Union forces had repelled the Confederate army at the Battle of Gettysburg. The three-day battle, which marked a turning point in the Civil War, remains one of the bloodiest in U.S. history. As Lincoln spoke, more than half of the Union dead remained buried in hastily dug field graves nearby.

Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the dedication. That honor fell to the famed orator Edward Everett, who spoke for two hours. Once Everett finished, Lincoln spoke for just two minutes. Initial reactions to the speech were mixed. The Springfield (Mass.) Republican called it a “perfect gem.” However, Lincoln’s home state paper, the Chicago Times, declared that the “cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.”

The verdict of history has sided firmly with the Springfield paper. What is widely considered one of the greatest speeches ever delivered has spawned thousands of books and articles. Some analyze the five written copies of the speech and debate which wording is most accurate. Some examine the history of the speech’s writing and its legacy in U.S. history. Some look at the sources, from Pericles to the Bible, that inspired Lincoln.

None of these analyses compare with the words Lincoln spoke that blustery November day:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Reading that speech nearly a century-and-a-half later, it is easy to see why Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was moved to write that the “battle [of Gettysburg] itself was less important than the speech” that Lincoln gave.

Origin of Religion -The Human Brain as “Belief Engine”

The Daily Galaxy -Great Discoveries Channel is an eclectic text and video presentation of news and original insights on science, space, and the environment.

WASHINGTON

BARACK OBAMA must wonder sometimes if his luck has run out.

Maybe he used it all up in 2008.

“Yes, we can!” has devolved into “Hey, we might.”

“When I said, ‘Change we can believe in,’ I didn’t say, ‘Change we can believe in tomorrow,’ ” he told an audience at a Chicago fund-raiser on Wednesday. “Not, ‘Change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

True enough, but not F.D.R.-inspiring to a deflated and desperate nation that may face higher borrowing rates after the shock of the first credit downgrade in United States history.

Barack Obama blazed like Luke Skywalker in 2008, but he never learned to channel the Force. And now the Tea Party has run off with his light saber.

The dissonance of his promise and his reality is jarring.

When he had power, he didn’t use it. He wanted to be a “transformational” president like Ronald Reagan, but failed to understand that Reagan’s strategic shows of strength allowed him to keep the whip hand without raising his voice.

And now, just when the high school principal in the Oval has been browbeating Congress to help create jobs, he is once more distracted from that task as he tries to save his own.

He goes to fund-raisers to tell people to stick with him, but he seems to be trying to reassure himself.

“I have to admit,” the president said in Chicago, “I didn’t know how steep the climb was going to be.”

At the large fund-raiser in his hometown, he tried to reassure disillusioned liberals about “unfinished business” to help those in need. Later, at a smaller $35,800-a-head dinner, he defended the unpopular debt package like a proud fiscal conservative.

The president talks fondly of George Bush the elder, just as Bush the elder does of him. Obama thinks Bush is a poignant figure because he did the right thing, breaking his tax pledge to fix the deficit, even though he got punished for it with one term.

It is clear that the once cocky Obama is feeling that same poignancy about his own presidency. Left in a giant pickle by the hot-dogging Bush the younger, the president who gloriously made history is now stuck in Sisyphus mode.

He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly.

The one clear-cut, chesty victory that Obama has had may have come too late for beleaguered Americans to much care.

When the president is asked what it felt like to kill Osama, he’s low-key and modest, even though he personally refocused the mission to capture the 9/11 architect after W. dropped the ball.

He has told people what a thrill it was to meet Seal Team 6 — and the dog Cairo — which pulled off the hit, noting that the men looked less young and fearsome than he expected, and more like guys working at Home Depot.

But while Obama takes the high road, his aides have made sure there are proxies to exuberantly brag on him.

The White House clearly blessed the dramatic reconstruction of the mission by Nicholas Schmidle in The New Yorker — so vividly descriptive of the Seals’ looks, quotes and thoughts that Schmidle had to clarify after the piece was published that he had not actually talked to any of them.

“I’ll just say that the 23 Seals on the mission that evening were not the only ones who were listening to their radio communications,” Schmidle said, answering readers’ questions in a live chat, after taking flak for leaving some with the impression that he had interviewed the heroes when he wrote in his account that it was based on “some of their recollections.”

The White House is also counting on the Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal big-screen version of the killing of Bin Laden to counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual. The Sony film by the Oscar-winning pair who made “The Hurt Locker” will no doubt reflect the president’s cool, gutsy decision against shaky odds. Just as Obamaland was hoping, the movie is scheduled to open on Oct. 12, 2012 — perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher.

The moviemakers are getting top-level access to the most classified mission in history from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration.

It was clear that the White House had outsourced the job of manning up the president’s image to Hollywood when Boal got welcomed to the upper echelons of the White House and the Pentagon and showed up recently — to the surprise of some military officers — at a C.I.A. ceremony celebrating the hero Seals.

Just like W., Obama is going for that “Mission Accomplished” glow (without the suggestive harness). At least in this president’s case, though, something has been accomplished.

TWE Remembers: The Gettysburg Address

Posted on Saturday, November 19, 2011

byJames M. Lindsay

A newspaper reproduction of Lincoln at the Gettysburg Address (courtesy Library of Congress)

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Four months earlier Union forces had repelled the Confederate army at the Battle of Gettysburg. The three-day battle, which marked a turning point in the Civil War, remains one of the bloodiest in U.S. history. As Lincoln spoke, more than half of the Union dead remained buried in hastily dug field graves nearby.

Lincoln was not the featured speaker at the dedication. That honor fell to the famed orator Edward Everett, who spoke for two hours. Once Everett finished, Lincoln spoke for just two minutes. Initial reactions to the speech were mixed. The Springfield (Mass.) Republican called it a “perfect gem.” However, Lincoln’s home state paper, the Chicago Times, declared that the “cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances.”

The verdict of history has sided firmly with the Springfield paper. What is widely considered one of the greatest speeches ever delivered has spawned thousands of books and articles. Some analyze the five written copies of the speech and debate which wording is most accurate. Some examine the history of the speech’s writing and its legacy in U.S. history. Some look at the sources, from Pericles to the Bible, that inspired Lincoln.

None of these analyses compare with the words Lincoln spoke that blustery November day:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Reading that speech nearly a century-and-a-half later, it is easy to see why Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was moved to write that the “battle [of Gettysburg] itself was less important than the speech” that Lincoln gave.