How much formula have you mixed up, exactly? You have to use bottled or boiled, cooled water for it. You can’t just use stuff from the tap. So if she always puts the prepared water in a specific container, why shouldn’t she expect that container to be full of the water she put in it hours before? Second, the way you…

Formula smell covers everything.

I just want to say, Dog bless this anonymous Kenosha mom. May the forces of the universe shine down upon her. I can remember having a month old baby, the way POWs remember being in prison camps. You’re completely responsible for this tiny, bewildering person, your hormones are completely fucked up so you sweat and cry…

Spinner rings are also awesome. You can spin any kind of ring, actually, but the ones designed for spinning work exceptionally well. The fact that such things exist suggests that fidgeting with your hands is fairly common human behavior.

This is obviously a well-intentioned thought, but the Yazidi (who make up many of ISIS’s sex slaves) have their own beliefs and rituals about death. They’ve been enslaved precisely because members of the dominant faith don’t respect their right to practice their own religion. So if we really want to honor this…

Unitarians, Episcopalians and Methodists don’t view divorce as a sin. Divorced people are able to participate fully in the life of the church. In addition, many other denominations would not fault the wife for getting a divorce under these circumstances.

Yes. Thank you. My daughter’s therapist shared an office with an ED program and those girls could be SO MEAN. As I’m trying to convince Miss E that she needed to keep taking her psych meds, even if they did cause weight gain, she had to run a gauntlet of whispering and giggles at every visit.

As I mentioned, when we can talk in a measured, rational way about providing treatment for people because it is the humane thing to do for them and their families. Any discussion about treating mental illness as a way to reduce violent crime is probably going to fail because mentally ill people don’t commit the…

Yeah, my response about empathy wasn’t TO YOU. It was to Jane, who said I needed to show you some. You can tell because right after my name there’s an arrow and then “Jane *is* the pony”. But thanks for demonstrating the point that, at the end of the day, it is all really about you. I mean, people are being SO MEAN.…

So do you carry nuts or peanut butter crackers or something to keep yourself from becoming a total bitch? Because seriously, when did it become ok to put your medical problems off on restaurant staff? So many people think it’s cute to confess this kind of thing, but would you feel I was equally cute for screaming or…

Yes, this. My brother and SIL are managing to raise the pickiest kids known to man, thanks in part to my SIL’s untreated eating disorder. It is always ok to refuse any food that’s not perfectly up to one’s standards at their house. Interestingly, at my house, they’ll eat. They see their cousins eating and realize…

I have plenty of empathy for Beets. She had a thought, she shared it, people said “whoa, this is not about you”, and Beets has kind of worked herself into a corner by simultaneously claiming that she didn’t mean to make it about her but also that her experience is relevant to the situation. Beets is getting important…

No. Not unless I had something relevant to add.

The way we deal with the problem of mental illness in our country is by destigmatizing and treating it. We stop only talking about mental illness in the context of violence — because the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent. We stop believing that anytime someone does something terrible “they must be…

That is a reasonable question to raise. If she is, I guess I owe her an apology and a cookie.

Assuming for the sake of argument that your premise about hardwiring is true, how is it not attention-seeking to realize that tenuous connection and immediately run off to post it on a message board? The OP says she literally realized the connection SECONDS before she posted. So her first instinct is to tell a bunch…

Actually, I don’t think your premise is true for most people. It’s probably true for children and for adults who struggle with empathy, which is really just emotional imagination. This story would be the same amount of depressing for me regardless of my acquaintances. If E’Dena had been my friend, obviously THAT would…

The fact that the story became even more depressing because you knew someone who is tangentially related to it is problematic for a lot of people. What difference does it make in terms of the empathy you have for this brutally murdered child? And why do you feel the need to share that tenuous connection with us? It’d…

THANK YOU for calling this story jacking out. I get so tired of these “OMG, this happened in my state/I know someone who knows someone who met this person/I have some other tenuous connection” attempts to be important and interject oneself into a situation. Nobody cares! If you’re so lacking in empathy that you can…

Right. At what point are we going to acknowledge that designers make clothes for teenage boys with breasts? And actually object to it, instead of body shaming ourselves for not being teenage boys with breasts.