The Yes! Digest -- June 10th, 2010

AND WE'RE BACK!  The Yes! Digest will continue all summer long. Check in every Thursday!

This has been: National Headache Awareness Week. According to the press release put out by the National Headache Foundation to commemorate the event, there are 30 million migraine sufferers in the United States. To learn about how migraine headache affects people of all ages, check out the New York Times Migraine blog, which concluded in March 2008.

Spirit food: "Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest being, something that needs our love." --Rainer Maria Rilke

Brain food:

• Could it be that caffeine doesn't actually make you more alert? (via Cosmos)
• "Plastic never leaves. It accumulates in the environment, in our food chain, and in our bodies." Drink from one of this art installation's polluted water coolers and you'll never look at a Snickers wrapper the same way again. (via Fast Company) 
• "You might be surprised just how much that amount of oil could power, if it weren't being used to kill pelicans and ruin fishermans' lives."  (via BuzzFeed)

Today's young adults are:

• "...bright and ambitious, but they are horribly cursed with a breathtakingly narrow frame of reference.” 
• ...highly educated but still poor.
• ...constipated? (via Reuters)

UU news:  "Delegates to the Unitarian Universalist Association’s 2010 General Assembly will vote June 26 on whether to boycott Phoenix, Ariz., as the site of the 2012 General Assembly. The boycott has been proposed by the UUA Board of Trustees in response to the passage of a new Arizona state law, Senate Bill 1070, that would give local police expanded powers to prosecute undocumented workers and those employing, transporting, or 'harboring' them." (via UU World. It's a complicated issue, and not everyone agrees---click the link to find out more.)


UU voices: Shawn of Live Laugh Write talks at Magpie Girl about being a "soft" Unitarian Universalist.

A joy: "Transgender travelers no longer will need surgery in order to change their stated genders on U.S. passports." (via AP)

Good question!: “Why does God have an initial capital letter?” Secular Huminists want to know.

Churchy things:

• The honey in "the land of milk and honey" may actually have been...honey? Who knew?
• Stephen Hawking says that the existence of God---in the form of "a human-like being with whom one can have a personal relationship"---"seems most impossible".
• California's Fair Political Practices Commission may be fining the LDS church more than $5,000 for its role in the Proposition 8 campaign, which denied equal marriage rights to gay couples in California. The LDS (or Mormon) church contributed large amounts of money---some of it unreported---in order to get Prop 8 passed. (Thanks to Cindie for the link!)

Unchurchy things:

• If a real show choir did the kind of mashups performed on Glee---violating copyright laws in the process---how much would they have to pay in fines? A heck of lot, actually.
• Looking for something to read this summer? The Los Angeles Times has 60 books for you.

How to: Save your local public library! (via GOOD)

Young adults of note: These 20 writers (who all happen to be under the age of 40) are producing great works of fiction. Several of them were interviewed on NPR this week---you can listen to the segment here. (via The New Yorker and WBUR)