Worth reading

o Stephanie at Throwing Marshmallows has a terrific post about Feminism and Homeschooling.

o David Harsanyi of The Denver Post writes that Adults, not boys, have changed. Just a sampling:

What makes The Dangerous Book for Boys somewhat contentious, though, is its implicit assertion that boys and girls are very different. That boys and girls are interested in different things and, gulp, excel at different things as well.

And according to Jim Hamilton, a program coordinator with Colorado 4-H, it's the adults who need help, not the boys.

Hamilton contends that in his 20 years of involvement with Colorado youth development, boys haven't changed very much at all. What's changed, he claims, is the reaction adults have to the activities boys tend to engage in.

"What boys do isn't necessarily what I'd call dangerous, anyway," explains the father of four. "But they have a need to push their own limitation. And it hurts them when we won't allow that to happen. Sometimes it forces them to learn and deal with those limitations on a bigger stage - where it's much more difficult. Then people overreact. Boys are often on the edge. And that's basically what adults react to in a poor way."

o The BBC's correspondent in America, Justin Webb, this past Saturday, on America's great faith divide and his visit to the creation museum:

There is nothing remotely convincing about the Creation Museum and frankly if it poses the threat to American science that some American critics claim it does, that seems to me to be as much a commentary on the failings of the scientific establishment as it is on the creationists.

There is a reason, I think, why theocracy will never fly in the United States and it has been touched on, inadvertently, by George Bush himself.

Mr Bush often makes the point that the philosophy of the Islamic radicals, full of hate and oppression, would not be attractive to people who truly had the freedom to choose.

Similarly the philosophy of the Old Testament, so much celebrated by some evangelicals here, has a limited power to enthral free people.

At the Creation Museum, goggle-eyed children watch depictions of the Great Flood in which children and their mums and dads are consumed, because God is cross.

In a nation of kindly moderate people I am not sure this is the future.

I put my faith - in America.