Weekend Reads 12/2/17

Christmas [stuff]

"Happy Holidays" also serves as a bit of a sheepish apology for retail’s Christmas creep. For every offense-seeking, Fox-addled foot-soldier of the culture wars eager to feign indignation over a retail clerk not wishing them an explicitly sectarian "Merry Christmas," there are dozens of normal people — well-adjusted, decent folks — who find all of our Pre-Week-Before-Black-Friday Christmas Shopping pressure a bit overly aggressive. "Happy Holidays" is, in part, a way of acknowledging that — an unspoken, "Yes, I know, we're barraging you with Christmas decorations and the World Series isn't until next week. Sorry about that."

Is Chief Justice Roberts A Secret Liberal?

But beginning around 2007, Roberts and Alito diverged. Roberts now has a Martin-Quinn score more liberal than Kennedy’s score was five years ago, and more liberal too than that of Souter — a “defector” — at certain points in his career. Alito’s score, meanwhile, is about the same as Justice Antonin Scalia’s was when Scalia died last year.

Not Yeti: scientists say abominable snowman is a bear

The study is not the first to reduce the myth to bear facts, but it does amass an unprecedented wealth of genetic evidence gleaned from bone, tooth, skin, hair and fecal samples previously attributed to the cryptic creatures.

The artefacts – from private collections and museums around the world, including a monastic relic said to come from a Yeti paw – were, in reality, the remains of 23 distinct bears, they found.

Real wish or drunken regret? A “Do Not Resuscitate” tattoo throws doctors

Luckily, at the same time, social workers located his patient information, including a copy of his Florida Department of Health “out-of-hospital” DNR order, which matched the wishes of his tattoo. “We were relieved to find his written DNR request, especially because a review of the literature identified a case report of a person whose DNR tattoo did not reflect his current wishes,” the authors note.