The worst way is on haunted “smart” speakers that turn themselves on when whoever was casting drives out of range and you can’t make them stop without unplugging them all individually. 
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There’s always leaving one’s feminist romance novels lying around as an alternative 
. I mean, not on purpose, that’s just what I read. My older one especially is a big reader- I wonder how long before they realize there’s sex in my books. (I still remember in some detail the Ken Follet novel I found on a family vacation when I was 12.)
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Summary
This is how it accidentally happened in my house. Through covid the children did school online, scouts online, and the older (now 14) had cadets online.
And one day I was looking for a website I knew I had been to on my laptop and in trying to find it through my history discovered that the then 13 year old had been ‘educating’ themself.
They had been in cadets, based on the time stamps, in the Guinea Pig room upstairs, which was basically their office through covid. No headphones and I remember I could hear the cadet lessons through the closed door. But I guess they opened a second window and were looking at photos at the same time.
Not something that I would have considered. I’ll say that online school has definitely relaxed my screen policies out of necessity. I simply couldn’t monitor them when they were online in school from 9-3.
Teens gonna teen. We did have a conversation with them that porn isn’t real life, please don’t use mom’s log in on her laptop (at least use incognito mode?) and the most uncomfortable part of the discussion was that the child was looking for naked people their own age, which meant their search terms were searching for child porn.
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Rough. You are a champ for handling that discussion so well. 
It truly is so uncomfortable and tricky thinking about the best way to make learning about sex accessible to kids with the current resources we have.
Also sorry for any parents that felt judged about my comment re unfettered access to the internet. To be clear, i had unfettered access and it was fine but we had lots of conversations in my family about internet safety and also i was a complete prude.
I truly think that it’s almost impossible to give teens no access or even mostly monitored access i just think it’s okay for parents to say "we are gonna have some at least basic effort at looking at this critically and it’s ok.
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I did not feel at all judged by your comment, but did want to give an example of how 
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I’ll also add, my eldest is 25 and her siblings 14 & 11. Technology and expectations around it has changed so so much in the last ten years years since she started high school. Raising the current children, ten years after her, is a completely different experience.
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If you ask Alexa to thank your driver, Amazon will give your most recent delivery driver a $5 tip(no cost to you).
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NY Times is on strike today:
Wordle and Wirecutter are part of The NY Times!
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I think Wirecutter has had HR trouble recently, too, unsure if it was related to the same stuff?
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Wirecutter was on strike last year, but as far as I knew they got a contract.
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Granny got a Grammy.
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That man is a treasure
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He’s also got a podcast called Levar Burton Reads. He reads stories from different authors each episode.
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And if your library has kanopy you can watch reading rainbow
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Really cool article from a scholar MrM recently alerted me to that we really like. You don’t have to be Muslim to find this fascinating. Some highlights below link.
The idea that Muhammad married a child goes back to a report (or set of reports) attributed to Aisha herself, found in the collection of anecdotes known as the hadith — considered by many traditionalist Muslims to be a scriptural source second only to the Quran. In certain texts of the hadith, Aisha was betrothed at 6 years old and married at 9.
Like female circumcision (also called female genital mutilation), there is no simple or direct causal link between child marriage and Islam. The practice is known to occur not just in the Middle East but also in India and sub-Saharan Africa. That it is rooted more in culture than religion per se is indicated by census data showing, for instance, that 84% of child marriages in India take place between Hindus, compared to just 11% for Muslims.
Even so — and whereas child marriage is relatively uncommon across most of the Islamic world — religion interacts with culture in complex ways and, in at least some Muslim-majority regions, Islam is invoked to rationalize the practice.
Little subjects the traditional Islamic sources in general (and the Aisha hadith in particular) to the historical-critical method…In contrast to traditional religious methods, the historical-critical approach involves using the latest techniques from the modern historian’s toolkit to ascertain historical plausibility or lack thereof. For example, scholars scour the text for historical anachronisms, which would alert them to a fabrication. Readers may be familiar with a similar historical-critical approach applied to biblical materials, popularized among the general public by such scholars as Bart Ehrman, who differentiate between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, which are not necessarily the same thing.
Little’s conclusions are far-reaching and will come as welcome news to many Muslims. After analyzing all the various versions of the Aisha marital report, Little concludes the hadith was fabricated “whole cloth” by a narrator named Hisham ibn Urwa, after he relocated to Iraq between the years 754 and 765 CE…As it turns out, the fabrication served distinct sectarian and political ends.
This, of course, begs the question: why? According to Little, the claim about Aisha’s age was part of medieval sectarian propaganda, concocted by a Sunni figure to bolster the image of Aisha against Shiite detractors.
Not only did Aisha’s father compete with Ali for the caliphate, but Aisha herself would also later lead an insurrection against Ali…In addition to Little’s analysis, we might also reason that Aisha’s alleged betrothal and marriage at 6 and 9 years old, respectively, would have placed her in Muhammad’s household at an early age, competing with Ali who, at least according to traditional accounts, also entered Muhammad’s household at a young age.
Though many Muslims will celebrate Little’s conclusions in regard to this particular hadith, others will no doubt be concerned about the wider ramifications…conservative Muslim scholar Yasir Qadhi wrote that such “doubts” were part a wider “attack” on the Sahih Bukhari hadith collection, considered by traditionalist Muslims as second only to the Quran…On the other hand, the hadith — the large and amorphous collection of reports attributed to (and about) Muhammad — has faced withering criticism from historical-critical scholars.
It’s a hefty article, but written accessibly, and its critique of the hadith is so refreshing as practicing Muslim!
cc @GeekyGirl @PAWG @Economista @AllHat @Elle (Maybe G will find fascinating, too!)
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I do find this interesting! Thanks! I find it interesting the way child marriage is viewed throughout history in general. In terms of a sort of unrealistic view in two directions. The first being the idea that in the past all girls were married to old men at like 15 (untrue) and the second that child marriage doesn’t happen at all today (untrue) and certainly not in the United States (untrue). We can’t quite seem to see it.
I’m interested as to why India was chosen as the example country in this. It feels intentional since people practicing Islam are such a minority (13% total population and represent 11% of child marriages) while almost 80% of the country is Hindu (and at 84% of child marriages). I understand the point he was making though, and agree with it, that it’s not only a matter of religion but also culture and economy (although they are so intertwined in many places). I’d love to know the stats on cm for every country so now I have a little project, haha.
Really interesting how he and other scholars have gone about debunking this though! It is a great piece of propaganda because it does instantly create distrust. Like it makes sense to make it up if you’re trying to destroy someone.
Oh and if anyone is interested in getting involved in ending child marriage in the USA:
I’ve been supporting them for a long time and they are very effective. It’s run by an American woman who was married as a child.
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