I read the newspaper comments so you don't have to

-A woman who doesn't live in Park Slope, doesn't even live in NY or CA wakes at 3:30am, panicked, asking herself, "Am I green enough?'" Amazing.

Like I said, like I know others have said, like I wish more would say, the so-very-now ideal of buying only pure/clean/local/seasonal/sustainable/organic is a modern-day version of the expectation that surfaces require dusting. It's about giving women busy-work. If all the truly offensive crap were removed from the shelves, if lotions didn't need to be checked for parabens, if broccoli didn't have to be checked for place of origin (but also be sure to feed your family lots of fresh produce! no canned/frozen! remember that cans have BPA!) what would women do?

Oh, and because I do love online-newspaper comments, I will note that one commenter to the Mommy Insomnia story wins smug-of-the-year.

-Because I can't stay away from newspaper comments (even my dissertation is in part on the 19th C version thereof), dear Roger Cohen commenters: Wow, you [OK, there are more, but I'm tiring of the exercise] really are dreamers, you who ask why no one-state solution. If only everyone in the world were as tolerant and wonderful as you!

What you're missing, however, is that the problem isn't that there's so much hate in the region, or that The Jews are such a stubborn bunch. It's not because for all eternity, The Jews and The Arabs have been mortal enemies, and these two swarthiest of peoples fail to behave like Scandinavians and make nice. It's not that such a state couldn't function. It's that there's an awfully strong ethical case to be made for there to be a Jewish state in Palestine. There's not a particularly strong case to be made for it having any particular borders. And there's also, at this point, one heck of a case for there being a Palestinian state as well. I, from the relative comfort of the NJ woods, want there to keep on being a Jewish state, not because I think Israeli Jews should be spared the horror that would be living alongside an Other, not because I think both peoples are simply incapable of getting along, but because I find the case for Jewish national self-determination convincing.