Christina Hurtado

A few weeks ago, some kids in New Jersey were removed from their home by Child Protective Services because their parents named them after Nazis. When the story got out, their dad told reporters that he didn’t think there was anything wrong with naming a kid Adolf Hitler Campbell. The media coverage around this story created an interesting new controversy. Is giving your child a bad name really a form of abuse?

In a recent study from UC Berkeley, scientists revealed significant physical differences in the brain development of children from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The first gamers were not the trendy young teens of today. Bad skin and thick rimmed glasses were practically mandatory for anyone intent on owning an Atari 2600. Perhaps it was the lack of real women in their lives, or maybe the rise of porn videos and lad mags in an increasingly hypersexualized media landscape, that led early programmers to quickly create female video game characters as roughly pixelated, highly sensualized sex objects. Whatever it was, that was only the beginning...

I love nerds. I loved nerds even when it wasn’t cool, so it’s nice to see them coming into their own on network TV. I remember a time when I was hard pressed to find one real nerd on prime time, never mind a quartet of physics-spouting, Klingon Boggle-playing super brains. Let’s face it: Charlie Epps has nothing on the characters of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, a show full of loveable (albeit incredibly awkward) nerds. The show glorifies those of us who remember old school Ataris, the Flash, and know exactly how we roll in the Shire.