What do you know about the surprisingly short history of heterosexuality? Hanne Blank talks with Salon about her soon-to-be-published book, Straight.

Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn’t mean that it’s not enormously meaningful.  It doesn’t mean that we haven’t built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn’t mean that we don’t live our daily lives on it, doesn’t mean that we don’t use it all the time every time we’re walking down the street.  This is real.  It’s stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic. 

The Provincetown Banner reviews the memoir Remembering the Music, Forgetting the Words: Travels with Mom in the Land of Dementia by Kate Whouley.

Kate, with delicate skill, tells the story of her mother’s progression through Alzheimer’s and mixes it with insight, humor and equal measures of acceptance and hope. In the course of the book she goes from the daughter who loves her mother but has a complicated and sometimes stressful relationship with her to the sole caregiver who must put all the old patterns away. There are no siblings, no husband to help. This is something Kate must do on her own though she finds support from close friends and a group of caring professionals.

In the New York Post, Sam Skolnik explains why governors and legislators shouldn't look to gambling as the quick fix for budget woes, a topic he explores in his book High Stakes.

What we gain in state revenues we lose in increased bankruptcy filings, divorces and gambling-related crimes such as robberies, domestic violence and, in the worst cases, suicides.

In a study, Earl Grinols, an economist at Baylor University, said that when a casino is introduced into a region that didn’t before have one, the long-term cost-benefit ratio is more than three to one because of things like rising crime, unemployment, addiction treatment costs.

States also lose economically, Grinols says, because gamblers aren’t using as much of their money to help local economies by buying normal amounts of consumer goods such as food, cars, clothing and the like.

Anita Hill offers advice to women lawyers.  

Cynthia Barnett explains why the green movement should include blue.

Kaitlin Bell Barnett wonders what the term "serious mental illness" means.

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