It’s Halloween, and that means that by the Frankly Curious Terms of Service, I am required to say: Halloween is my favorite holiday. But the truth is that I am being let down by our society. Halloween could be so much better!
When I was a kid, it was so much better. I remember being on the street with my parents and there being kids everywhere. And then, starting in the late 1960s, every year the local news reported on how dangerous the holiday supposedly was. People gave out candy with poison and razor blades! Most of this was folklore.
What’s more, in as much as it was true, it was based on the folklore. For example, most of the razor blade stories seem to be children putting razor blades in apples and then showing what they “found” in their apples to their parents. And the cases of poisonings have been people murdering children and trying to make it look like some random act. Sick, but hardly the fault of Halloween or, more to the point, society.
Social Decay and the End of Halloween
And that’s the problem with the holiday: we’ve lost the necessary social cohesion to make the holiday great.
For the last several years, the only trick-or-treat child I get is the little boy who lives across the street. And I have been giving out regular-sized bars for a couple of decades. Kids really should want to come to my house!
I understand the fear of parents. Just the same, so much is lost. What’s more, those parents could protect their children by getting to know their neighbors. That’s part of the same thing. It’s all about fear of these unknown people.
Now, I understand that this is hard to do. And our economic situation is a big part of it. We now live in a nation that requires both parents to work. A large fraction of the nation is far too busy just getting by to spend time getting to know the neighbors. And income inequality puts barriers between people. So my disappointment is not focused on how individuals act but on how our society forces them to act.
Still, it sucks. Some of my best memories of my second marriage are our Halloween events. We loved decorating the place. I was always big on creating ghosts — probably because they are the most friendly of scary things. And now, I find I can’t even bother. It was easier with a partner. Even if no kids showed up, at least we had fun with it.
There’s a price to pay for our lack of trust in each other. It’s about more than a holiday — even one as gloriously silly as Halloween.
Good morning everyone! It seems I have gotten back my evil will to live — others call it their “groove.” And just in time because it is the best holiday of the year: Halloween! And I thought I would share with you a few wonderful clips from my favorite Halloween movies.
I thought that I should check in, what with my last post being all about death. Not that one should mistake me thinking of death as a bad thing. Death is our victory over the evil will. But many people do think of it in negative terms. That post wasn’t really about death anyway. It was about pain, which I do think the ultimate evil. That’s why the will is so awful: it makes us continue to accept pain. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about growing old.
The last 48 hours have been very difficult and it’s got me thinking about death. We had a serious medical issue in the family. (I don’t want to go into detail because this is one of those rare cases where I have some sense of decorum.) Everything is fine now. But I still feel like I’m shell-shocked. I can’t seem to grab hold of my usual view of the world. Everything seems distant, and I just want to go to bed even though I’m not tired.
Is there anything that shows the bias and prejudice in our current criminal justice system than, on the same day, seeing the acquittal of an all-white group of men who illegally took over a federal facility and actively encouraged the potential use of violence while peaceful protesters who are defending sacred Indian land that is theirs by treaty get shot and arrested in order to allow big business to build a pipeline through their land?
The big news yesterday was that the FBI is going to further investigate Hillary Clinton about her email server. The Washington Post was typical of the angle of the coverage, 
The spectacle of Republicans coming up with a new reason for not allowing the late Justice Scalia’s seat to be filled is funny in its way. Greg Sargent summed it up in an article yesterday, 
Economist Gregory Mankiw is very pleased to have been gouged by a scalper, he informs us in a recent New York Times column. Mankiw recently went to see the Broadway musical Hamilton, and paid the going rate for a ticket: $2,500. Yet he was far from dismayed at having paid this extraordinary sum. In fact, he describes those who object to price-gouging as “pernicious.”
When I was in Mexico, I was forced to take a long walk in heavy humidity in order to have lunch with a group of humans I didn’t know. Not exactly my idea of a good time. On the way back, we stopped at a hotel gift shop. It was air conditioned. (Fun fact: I know only three phrases in Chinese and one of them is for “air conditioning.”) But to my delight, I found a pack of playing cards. This being Mexico, it was not a new pack of cards. And it wasn’t from Mexico. It was the 
At first I wondered why it was focused on Aboriginal sex workers. Then it hit me: because they are poor. That’s not to say that there aren’t other reasons for it. But most people end up in the sex trade because they don’t have better options. And it makes me despair for humanity. Those peoples who were invaded centuries ago still suffer from those acts of war. Socially, we might have grown so that we see that such plundering was wrong. But we refuse to do anything that would set things right. Our focus on property and the myth of meritocracy make us think that it would somehow be wrong to make restitution for our bloody history.
In its 144-year history, The Yale Record has never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. In fact, we have never endorsed any candidate for president. This is, in part, due to our strong commitment to being a tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization, which mandates that we are “absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”
I hope you will forgive me for writing about math today. Last night, I was lying in bed thinking about the numbers 7 and 11. I had been listening to 
Research shows that people in the South are 84 percent less likely than their counterparts in other parts of the country to learn about evolution, or to learn about it in a way that is accurate. Similarly, studies such as my quant study in preservice teachers and Laura Rissler’s study of undergrads in Alabama show that religiosity is a strong negative factor that impacts acceptance of evolution.