As I understand it, her thinking is that her husband knew that he was going to seek divorce before they had the surrogacy set up - that he continued to pursue the surrogacy with her specifically because he intended to seek child support.

Listen, I'm not saying that famines have literally never happened and no one has ever starved to death. I'm saying that assuming you are in the US, it's unlikely that that's what you're seeing when you walk through a graveyard and see a bunch of under-12s from the same family dying in a short space of time. Take your…

Right, but there's a difference between "lean months" and "We have so little food that we're literally starving to death." The first one leads to micronutrient malnutrition, which is a genuine form of hunger and is very serious but is unlikely to actually kill you unless it is extremely pronounced over a very long…

It's actually unlikely in America that malnutrition would take so many kids in one family so quickly. We have rarely had famines here - and the micronutrient deficiencies that are our brand of malnourishment tend to kill over a long timeframe, and have to be very pronounced to kill at all (although of course they have…

There was a boy in my high school who was born in Guyana and used a walker because he had polio as an infant. I OFTEN wonder how many of us who attended school with him are, in a sense, inoculated from the anti-vax sentiment because we saw the effects the disease had on him (I went to a small private school and he was…

My dad remembers at least one summer when he wasn't allowed to play outside in the neighborhood with the other children. He lived on Long Island and there was a polio epidemic going through New York City. He was born in 1952, so he isn't even particularly old.

I don’t know. Having done some primary-source research into journals, I think the most striking thing is how people really didn’t get over it, and how much they genuinely mourned their children. Which isn't that surprising if you think of people in the past as normal human beings, but it seems to be pretty common to…

I already had a reply downthread, but now half an hour later I nearly came back here to say exactly this myself because the original post is so inane it’s still bothering me. Like, how dense are you to think that the complaint is about the quality of the ingredient? I’m sure in that case that if I serve you a lovely…

I totally forgot about Sizzler, which is weird because it was my birthday restaurant until I was about 12. Can you imagine? The one day all year that I get to choose where we eat, and I chose Sizzler at least 8 times in a row. It was the salad bar, which seems absolutely absurd to me now, but I absolutely fucking…

In cases like this (I’ve never had it happen in a restaurant, but once at a salon where a person gave me the wrong dye job and then argued with me about what I had asked for - and, as in your case, would not let it go) I ask the serviceperson in a very-slightly-louder-than-average voice if they really want to argue…

If you go to any restaurant in America, even a quite good one, they will bring you water that is no longer boiling (and, if it’s really bad, has never been properly boiling at all) and a bag to dunk yourself. This is a shitty way to make tea because it will get you shitty tea, regardless of where the leaves come from,…

For the last decade of his life, my grandfather recieved nearly 100% of his nourishment from a small rotation of restaurants he would frequent for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I am forever grateful to the wait staff of those 5 or 6 restaurants who for at least 10 years would read the same few newspaper clippings he…

When telling a story about being accosted by someone I have no interest in being accosted by, or in circumstances where I feel being accosted is inappropriate, all descriptors of that person get bumped up to the nth degree. “Old” = anyone older than 32, “fat” = 190 pounds and up, “scraggly” = haven’t shaved in the…

Between the spelling of “lasagne” and the fact that the old lady actually had manners, I’m betting she was British, which makes me even happier if such a thing were possible.

The thing that drives me craziest about this story is that shrimp cocktail isn’t even a “meal” by any standard definition - it’s an appetizer, and usually a disappointing one at that. A meal to me is both more food and more preparation work than sticking the little shrimps around the rim of a glass. You can purchase a…

Even more specifically, I am specifically thinking of the people in the Gawker article from 2 or 3 weeks ago who are specifically not willing to conserve water because they are rich. I want to know their specific stances on SB 277. Those are the people. I want to know who they are and if they vaccinated their children.

I was thinking more specifically of the hyper-rich gated-community dwellers, of the kind mentioned in a Gawker article two or three weeks ago, rather than all anti-restriction people as a group.

Right, but being suspicious of medicine as a scientific practice because you as an individual (not you-you, the rhetorical you) suffered due to malpractice is not, at its base, any less crazy than being against vaccines because you think vaccines contain RFID chips. One delusion is, perhaps, more widespread, because…

I wonder what the overlap in California is between those fighting hardest for the right not to vaccinate their children and the people arguing that water use restrictions shouldn’t apply to them because they’re rich. There seems to be something in common - in both cases, people have used the system to become…

There’s a big difference, though, between being personally slighted by a doctor (and that can have serious outcomes - I’m not diminishing the problem of doctors refusing to listen to their patients) and then deciding to ignore the work of the entire medical establishment. You’re not going to get back that the doctor…