Very heartening on Jezebel to see more people talking basic sense and fewer saying, essentially, “I don’t understand how tact works and have become angry at the idea that people in a society owe each other certain standards of behavior” that are so prevalent on Gawker.

And I would love to come for a dinner party, but I would also urge you to choose the guest list carefully. Some people find this tactic markedly less charming than others.

As far as I’m aware, New Guinea was the last place where people practiced mortuary cannibalism by eating flesh on a fairly wide scale. At least in some places, they kept it up until the 60's, when kuru became a factor. I would conjecture that rituals that involve the grinding of bones or the burning of bodies to…

They cooked it with peppers and tomatoes, and served it on a bed of corn. I don’t know but can conjecture that their neighbors were too busy being subjugated and eaten to be eating other people themselves, although it's an interesting question whether they hated the Aztecs because they had a fundamental problem with…

One of the reasons the Spanish were so effective against the Aztecs was because the Aztec’s neighbors were more than willing to work against them, since their “empire” was a bit more of a farming complex - they would start wars against their already subjugated neighbors, take scores of prisoners, and bring them back…

Any day there's a new History Extra podcast out is a good day, because it means my very long commute will be absolutely painless. I can't recommend it enough. They make even history topics I'm not terribly interested in so great.

To be even more fair, if people didn’t notice, there wouldn’t have been an investigation about it.

Only tell people about your dreams if a) you are super close, like 'our bond is such that sometimes I can annoy you without consequence' close, AND b) they were in it. Those are my rules.

I do! And I agreed with almost all of them (except, as for you, for religion and politics, depending on the company).

My go-to response for boring conversations (or worse, those online conversations that are just endless rounds of “hey, what’re you up to?” “I dunno, what do you want to do?” with Facebook friends who haven’t improved their human interaction game since 2nd grade) is to start talking about cannibalism. I know a LOT…

I may be off-base, but I'm imagining a plastic tool shed/trash bin like the kind th

Ah, I see. In that case, retraining workers to "ring up items correctly" is even more misguided and misplaced blame.

It sounds like they’re claiming that the overpricing actually happened at the register - like how if yellow onions are 99cents a pound and white onions are 95cents, and I brought white onions to the register but the cashier charged me for yellow onions. Which may be what happened, I haven’t been following this story…

I would agree, except that my local Chicken & Waffles joint (Café Rue, if you live in the MD/DC area please do check it out) makes sriracha-glazed fried chicken, which when placed upon a fluffy golden waffle is just about the happiest thing I’ve ever put in my mouth. I just don’t want the sriracha backlash to take…

I don’t know, I’d say even if it wound up saying many of the same things as the playwright/economist, something is added by having the work done by a trained historian.

I do kind of hope this will be a lesson to you about the tone you use to say things (“your precious saint” is, to say the least, needlessly aggressive), especially before you actually do any work to verify your facts.

I’m not saying every possible situation involving an unwilling mother/surrogate/whatever is the same as the classic unwilling father scenario. I'm sure we could sit here and imagine one thousand make-believe situations in which the parallel would be less clear-cut. But that has nothing to do with the situation being…

For anyone interested, the History Extra Podcast, which is always excellent, has a particularly good (and long!) interview with Helen Castor here:

I agree completely - I was only summarizing the argument she’s using, not supporting it in any way, which some commenters seem to have forgotten.

Right? No one's saying she didn't know she was having a baby via surrogate, she's saying she entered the agreement to do so under false pretenses.