I do not pretend for a minute that his new piece in this weekend's Washington Post Magazine does -- indeed, nothing seems further from our whimsy and trivial pursuits than this. "There may be no act of human failing that more fundamentally challenges our society's views about crime, punishment, justice and mercy," he writes, his subjects being thirteen parents whose children died of hyperthermia from being accidentally left in the car on warm days. He calls these cases "failures of memory, not of love," and employs all of his empathy and considerable multidisciplinary research to explain how this happened to them and how the risk can be reduced. He asks, what kind of person forgets a baby?, and answers:
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.We don't have to talk about it at all; I just feel like I know y'all well enough to say read the article and leave it at that. You'll get something out of it. [Between this and what's below, sorry to be a downer; just the way the articles are happening. We'll be back to normal tomorrow.]
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