I am a 38-year-old woman having a hidden affair with my ex-husband of 10 years ago. To be completely honest, we're just having sex, no seduction involved. Old feelings are welling up for me, some good but mostly bad, all with a huge side order of guilt and shame. I don't think my ex has feelings for anyone except himself and our children. He's the most selfish person I know while extolling himself any chance he gets as a model of generosity. Yes, he's free with money and he's pleasant and jocular with strangers, acquaintances and friends, but he's stingy with his feelings. I'm realizing (again) that he doesn't seem to have any. He seems to exist on a completely superficial plane and when someone pisses him off he tells them how he feels and is done with them. He doesn't give anyone a chance to reply, just cuts them off. To him any discussion is an argument. He avoids confrontation unless he's the one instigating it. I should mention that he smokes pot daily, several times a day, and has since he was a teenager.

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“Henry,” I said brightly. “Do you want to go to school?” Henry loves school. Although I was seething with frustration, I had read the parenting manuals that encourage a person in my situation to redirect a recalcitrant child by focusing on future rewards.

Henry nodded without much enthusiasm.

“You have to walk up the stairs to get to school,” I reminded him, firmly grasping his hand.

Reluctantly, he got to his feet and slowly climbed to the street, stopping emphatically on each step. At the top, he sat down again. An icy rain was starting to fall.

“Henry, we’re going to school! Remember?”

He shook his head, pulling his hand away. I pulled back more energetically, thinking about everything I had to do once I got to work. Henry lay down on the wet sidewalk.

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The table next to my waiting room chair was littered with pamphlets—Botox, chemical peels, implants, liposuction, procedures that would either suck matter out or pump matter in. I picked up one entitled “The New You” and flipped through glossy pages detailing breast implants. I dropped it, face down on the table, disgusted with myself.

I was called back by a nurse named Linda, a middle-aged woman whose facelift had left her eyes pulled into an expression of wonderment, as though she held permanent interest in nearly everything I said. She asked me a few questions and then popped in a DVD.

“Just watch this, jot down any questions, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

Buxom blondes rode bicycles with—by the looks on their faces—orgasmic delight. Women played tennis in short skirts and bulging sweater-vest tops. They all confided how happy they were, how confident they felt, now that they were “fixed.”

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This is just one scene from several YouTube videos of Stenzel, the same speaker behind a recent controversy over abstinence-only education. After Stenzel gave a lecture at George Washington High School, 17-year-old Katelyn Campbell took to the national media to complain about being subjected to the activist's "slut-shaming" message. Campbell's bravery didn't stop there: As a result of exercising her right to free speech, her principal allegedly threatened to contact Wellesley College, where she had already been accepted, to complain about her "bad character" -- so, Campbell quickly lawyered up and filed an injunction against him. (Wellesley's official Twitter account soon sent out the following tweet: "Katelyn Campbell, #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall" -- and the Internet rejoiced at perhaps the only bit of sunny news this week.)

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I am a single parent looking to get back into dating, and perhaps even to meet someone that I fall madly in love with. As I have not had much luck out there in the real world I have decided to try out online dating websites.

I have an ethical dilemma. My child has a mild intellectual disability. Obviously there are men out there who would be willing to date a woman who already has a child, but when should I mention that my child is not what they may expect (in many wonderful ways, I think). If I mention this upfront, I doubt anyone will ever want to get to know me at all, but if I don't mention it up front I feel like I am being misleading.

Thank you for any insight you may offer,

Single For Nine Years and Counting

Dear Single,

I don't think you are being misleading if, in talking with someone you have just met, you don't immediately mention that your child has a mild intellectual disability.

When should you mention it? You should mention it when you know someone well enough that you feel comfortable mentioning it. As to how to present yourself in this online dating forum, I would avoid wherever possible the tendency to list your attributes and deficiencies, as though you could be reduced to  a checklist.

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She hated it. As Aldrich recounts in her new memoir, "The Astor Orphan," "I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV and functional cars." She might also have added "regular meals," since the pantry in her family's section of Rokeby, the ancestral mansion where her people have lived for almost two centuries, was often bare. If her father couldn't snag a free batch of rejected TV dinners from a nearby pie factory, he'd have to borrow money from the local gas station proprietor for groceries. Her mother, a solitary (and, by all signs, depressed) Polish fiber artist -- who had thought she was marrying into a wealthy urban clan -- would only shout from the kitchen, "You'll have to eat shit for dinner if you can't dig up any cash!"

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The title of Moore's book, "How to Create the Perfect Wife," explains what Day was up to. From an early age -- sniffing at the revelry in that 18th-century party school, Oxford -- Day knew exactly how he intended to live. He planned to commit himself to "the unremitting practice of the severest virtue." He would adopt an austere existence in the country, thinking, reading, writing and doing good works, while receiving few visitors. The one thing he required to achieve this nirvana was a mate, and for that, too, he had something very particular in mind.

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Yet Koenig, in reality, is an eminently reasonable, very funny 30-something Brooklynite whose STFU, Parents happens to sum up the exasperation that plenty of us – the child-free and breeders alike – feel when dealing with the parental self-righteousness and oversharing that permeates our social media feeds.

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But you will find very few corresponding stories about heterosexual men's struggle with childlessness. And that is weird, according to researchers at Keele University. Because, as one study found, they are kind of baby crazy, too.

Researcher Robin Hadley carried out a survey of 81 women and 27 men who did not have children, and asked them if they wanted them. He found that men were almost as likely as women to want children -- 59 percent to 63 percent -- but actually more likely than women to feel depressed, angry and jealous if they didn't have them.

Of the men who wanted children, 50 percent experienced isolation because they did not have them, compared with 27 percent of women; 38 percent experienced depression, compared with 27 percent of women; and 56 percent experienced jealousy of those with children, compared with 47 percent of women.

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Actually, no. According to a new study published in the May issue of the journal Pediatrics, adolescents are having less sex than you think. The study's lead author, Lawrence Finer, says, "Policymakers and the media often sensationalize teen sexual behavior, suggesting that adolescents as young as 10 or 11 are increasingly sexually active. But the data just don't support that concern," he said. "Rather, we are seeing teens waiting longer to have sex, using contraceptives more frequently when they start having sex, and being less likely to become pregnant than their peers of past decades."

Go ahead and reread that paragraph above. Let it sink in. Teens are waiting longer to have sex than you and your peers did at their age. They're also more likely to use contraception and less likely to get pregnant than previous generations. In other words: Kids these days are doing it (or not doing it) better than you did.

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Children are not sex objects; children are not things. Middle schoolers are not old enough to make responsible, safe decisions about sex. This marketing sends the message, ‘the younger, the better,’ which harms young girls’ self-esteem and pressures them into engaging in risky sexual behavior before they are ready to make informed, consenting decisions about sex and their bodies.

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In a very satisfyingly worded statement Thursday, the American Academy of Pediatrics – that's "60,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults" – officially made policy its endorsement of same-sex marriage. Citing its support for couples "regardless of sexual orientation" as "the best way to guarantee benefits and security for their children," the AAP's Benjamin Siegel issued a statement that "there should be equal opportunity for every couple to access the economic stability and federal supports provided to married couples to raise children." Fancy that. Stability. It's good for children.

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Our children are both 13 now. They live in different towns and move about in different circles, and they will, when the time comes, pick their own damn prom dates. And though it should have been obvious back then -- especially for a gay-friendly, big city mom whose children would grow up going to pride parades with their lesbian aunts -- not every boy is going to go to the dance with a girl. Not every little princess dreams of marrying a prince. I had been talking about my children's world as a strictly heterosexual place while they were still in the womb, even though I knew it wasn't. But I'm trying to do better now.

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Thanks for your thoughtful column. I'm not sure what advice you can offer me, but I feel compelled to write.

I'm a happily married woman in my mid-40s, with three children ranging in age from 8 to 15. I am well-educated and work full-time in a rewarding job, and I feel very fortunate.

Twelve years ago our baby daughter passed away at 11 months, as her brain never developed properly, but she was never diagnosed. Long ago I made peace with her death and only raise it now because it taught me to appreciate the present.

I love my family dearly, and my children bring me great joy.  So what's the problem then? I worry that I've brought them into a world whose future holds overpopulation (for which I myself feel a bit responsible) and global warming. My children have such bright futures ahead, which may be completely devastated by these global crises.

I feel guilt at having brought them into the world, and yet I can't imagine not having them in my world. I feel so hopeless that I am unable to make the world a better place for them. My happiness in the present is marred by my heartache thinking of their future.

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The 3-year-old has a particular affection for Donkey Kong, but wasn't so wild about always playing the Mario character. In fact, she wanted Pauline to save the plumber for a change. She wanted to "play as the girl," as Mika wrote for Wired Magazine.

In a civilian household, this request may have been added to the pile of kid questions that are acknowledged and promptly ignored. ("I understand you want to eat Pop Rocks for every meal. It must feel frustrating that you can't.") But this wasn't any old household, this was a bonafide cool feminist geek kingdom. And Mika, a game developer by trade, knew he could actually do something about his daughter's request. So he set out to hack Donkey Kong and let his daughter save Mario from the barrel-tossing gorilla:

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I don’t mean that I took my father’s cremains, as they’re known in the parlance of modern undertaking. His cremains are gone. We dumped those in the lake where we always went for vacation when I was a kid. He really liked it out there, and my mother thought he might still, even though he’s no longer a person but rather a few pounds of ash that have the appearance and feel of fresh cat litter.

Well, actually, he was a few pounds of ash. I don’t know what he is now, since we dumped him in the lake. He probably no longer looks and feels like cat litter. I’d imagine that, in keeping with the spirit of scattering someone’s cremains in a body of water, he melded somehow with the lake, broke down further into the constituent parts that, combined, made him corporeal in the first place. Maybe by now he’s been transformed into a bit of aquatic flora, or else gobbled up into the creepy appendage-like mandibles of a crayfish that was, in turn, eaten by one of the chain pickerel my father and I used to catch when I was a kid, and so on.

My father is now part of the lake. Or parts of the lake.

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The shirt was disturbing enough that the boy's teacher alerted authorities, and Bagour, along with her brother who bought Jihad the shirt, are being charged with "glorifying crime."

But Bagour thought the shirt would “make people laugh,” and her brother insists that "It's the day (of) his birth I wanted to highlight, not the year," the BBC reports. Bagour attempted to defend herself, saying, "We were never trying to claim responsibility for this thing or defend a cause."

Prosecutors are hoping to fine them more than $5,000, collectively. “Idiocy is often the best alibi to hide the real intentions. The most scandalous thing is that they’ve used and manipulated a three-year-old child to voluntarily convey the words of a terrorist," lawyer Claude Avril told Sky News.

The trial will conclude on April 10.

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As we all well now know, Oscar night 2013 will be remembered as that time Seth MacFarlane made joshing reference to Quvenzhané Wallis as an imminent object of George Clooney's sexual attentions, and then the Onion drastically upped the ante by calling her "kind of a cunt." (They later deleted and apologized for it.) The backlash to both outbursts was swift and loud, followed inevitably by the "Can't you take a joke?" backlash to the backlash.

One of the most agonizing side effects of a controversial comedy routine – generally a crude one that involves violence, tragedy, or is at the expense a minority group  -- is the scramble to explain why some things are funny and some are not. And explaining a joke is only slightly more magic-defusing than watching how sausage is made. Comedy is alchemy. The minute we say, "That's not funny because…" we risk the approbation of those who'd call us humorless scolds, uptight and fussy party poopers.

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Nothing unusual except that in the middle of it, I found it physically painful to get out of bed. All day, going about my stay-at-home mom business, I cried. I cried while asking my kids if they wanted their morning bagels with cream cheese or peanut butter. I cried while driving them to school. I cried at the coffee shop where I go to write and in the dried foods aisle of Trader Joe’s. There was no sobbing, no blubbering or nose blowing, just a stream of tears stopping and starting all day long without any real cause.

My husband worried. My children were fussy and confused. And I couldn’t blame them. I knew exactly what they were going through, because long before I knew what depression was, before I’d ever heard of mood disorders or anxiety, I knew what it felt like to live with someone who was often, inconsolably, unhappy.

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