News snacks. Yum.

Post-graduation and pre-employment, the summer has granted me one great thing: a renaissance of newspaper reading, something I've been missing since the Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns newsweek over Spring Break in March.

1. "Sisters" school recruiting: Who wants an all-girls education?
The NYTimes today had an interesting article about the remaining all-female Seven Sisters schools (Vassar, which went Co-Ed in 1969, was once one of their number) sending their admissions deans to international schools in the Middle East to recruit.

I particularly liked Tamar Lewin's description of the sisters schools: "The American colleges, for all their white-glove history and academic prominence, are liberal strongholds where students fiercely debate political action, gender identity and issues like “heteronormativity,” the marginalizing of standards that are other than heterosexual." Oh heteronormativity, I miss discussing you already... Read it here.

2. Let's not return to a pre-Roe world
Waldo L. Fielding, a practicing gynocologist for the past forty-someodd years, contributed an essay about the realities of self-induced abortions to today's Science Times. I think anyone arguing against a woman's right to choose would have a difficult time supporting their viewpoint when faced with the scenarios Fielding describes. His words also made me think about Yale senior Aliza Shvarts miscarriage art project in a different light, too. Not quite for the shttp://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/health/views/03essa.html?ref=sciencequeemish, just fyi.

3. There's a biological reason for the sarcasm that binds us
And I thought that sarcasm was just one of those inexplicable miracles of life. Kind of a dry article, but still cool. A University of California San Fran professor did a study asserting that the ability to detect sarcasm resides in the right parahippocampal gyrus. Sweet, Professor Rankin, good to know. Read it here.