links list: selected shorts

My friend Rachel's coming to town for the weekend, so there will be no extended blogging for the next few days. Instead, I leave you with selected links from Google Reader and elsewhere in my online world.

Via MK, a story about why teenagers are still reading books -- and might even be better readers than us grown up folks.

Nina Totenberg offers a review of the three rulings handed down yesterday from the U.S. Supreme Court (audio).

On a related note, Scott @ Lawyers, Guns and Money asks why some people are upset that the Redding ruling will make it harder for schools to violate the rights of young people.

And Alas, a Blog, offers a video clip of an interview with Savana Redding herself (now a college student), the young woman at the heart of the case.

Monica @ TransGriot offers some reflections on how the push to legalize gay marriage can have negative effects on already-legal trans marriages.

Rachel @ The Feminist Agenda, posts enthusiastically about a Swedish couple who have refused to identify the gender of their toddler. I'm conflicted about this story, because I firmly believe in the responsibility of parents to do what they can to shelter their children from the pressure to socially conform -- while helping them discover their own ability to resist that pressure even while out in the real world. But the way the story has been politicized means the kid will likely feel tremendous pressure to be gender nonconforming to please the parents -- or pressure to conform to a gender identity that is acceptable to the outside world. It seems sad that parenting inevitably becomes freighted with so much political baggage -- and that it's the kids who so often pay the price by having their lives dissected in public spaces. No person, regardless of how young, should have their own life co-opted by others as a political statement.

Finally, pspirro writes in praise of doing less @ her blog, over the wall, suggesting that "productivity" as a moral value -- or even a survival skill -- is over-rated. "Clever as you are, you’ll figure out how to do what needs to be done to obtain what needs to be obtained. All the rest of it be damned."

hope you find some time this weekend to do less and enjoy the last few days of June.