This is: National Holocaust Remembrance Day. To participate in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's names reading ceremony and other forms of web-based programming, visit their Facebook page.
Spirit food: "Religion is not supposed to provide certainty. [...] [T]here can be no certainty about God. Nobody has the last word about God. God exceeds our dogmatism. God exceeds our limited little ideas. God is what the Jewish mystics call Ein Sof, without end. And we are plunging into mystery. And that if we try to limit God and make Him fit neatly into a simplistic ideology, then we're cutting God down to size." -- Karen Armstrong on "Voices on Antisemitism" (via ushmm.org)
Brain food: A 9 year-old boy---the son of a paleoanthropologist---has discovered the fossilized remains of a previously-unknown hominid species: Australopithecus sediba lived almost two million years ago in what is now South Africa. (via The New York Times)
Young adults today...: are unlikely to believe that certain kinds of intimate behavior count as "sex." (via CBS News)
A joy: Tonight, PBS's Masterpiece will air a new adaptation of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl made for the BBC. This original screenplay is supposedly more faithful to the text of Frank's diary than any previous version.
A concern: Last month 23,000 public school teachers were laid off in California. This is terrible news for the state's children and also terrible news for those young adults who have chosen to go into education: because of a state law mandating that newer teachers be laid off first, they are vulnerable to having their careers derailed right at the start.
Churchy things: If you didn't go to service this morning but still want to be enlightened, check out Tapestry, a radio show produced by the CBC that describes itself as "a weekly exploration of spirituality, religion and the search for meaning." Episodes dating back to 1994 can be streamed for free online.
Unchurchy things: In addition to being Holocaust Remembrance Day, it's also Barbershop Quartet Day. Celebrate the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America---now the Barbershop Harmony Society---by watching this classic episode of The Simpsons.
Young adult(s) of note: The geniuses at MIT have done it again: somebody (or more likely several somebodies) has installed a den, upside-down, outside the Media Lab, supposedly for the amusement of students arriving for "preview weekend." (via The Boston Globe)
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