In America today, it’s easy to believe that marriage is a social good—that our lives and our communities are better when more people get and stay married. There have, of course, been massive changes to the institution over the past few generations, leading the occasional cultural critic to ask: Is marriage becoming obsolete? But few of these people seem genuinely interested in the answer.
More often the question functions as a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand, a way of stirring up moral panic about changing family values or speculating about whether society has become too cynical for love. In popular culture, the sentiment still prevails that marriage makes us happy and divorce leaves us lonely, and that never getting married at all is a fundamental failure of belonging.
But speculation about whether or not marriage is obsolete overlooks a more important question: What is lost by making marriage the most central relationship in a culture?
The Vatican has ordered two of its own tombs to be searched — the latest twist in the mysterious disappearance of a teenager, 36 years ago.
Emanuela Orlandi was 15 when she vanished without a trace in the summer of 1983. The daughter of a prominent employee of the Institute for the Works of Religion — better known as the Vatican Bank — Orlandi was last seen at a music lesson in the grounds of Sant’Apollinare basilica in Rome.
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On Tuesday, Gian Piero Milano, the Vatican’s Promoter of Justice, authorized two exhumations in response to a petition launched by the teenager’s family, who believe that her body is buried at the Teutonic Cemetery in Vatican City.
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Demonstrators gather around Orlandi’s brother Pietro, center, during a event marking the 30th anniversary of her disappearance in St Peter’s Square in 2013.
A man was sunbathing in his London garden when a body hit the ground feet away from him.
It was a stowaway who fell off a Kenya Airways flight from Nairobi last week as the plane approached London’s Heathrow Airport. The person, who authorities have not named, didn’t survive.
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Most stowaways don’t. Over 77% of the people who have attempted to hitch an illegal ride on an aircraft have died, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
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At least 126 people have tried it since 1947, the FAA said.
Enjoying a transcendent meal is a little like having a wedding or a car accident—time slows to a crawl.
That’s the sensation I had in Kyoto while I negotiated biting into an umeboshi plum sheathed in translucent tempura batter, a dish so lovely that I nearly couldn’t bring myself to eat it. So many others arrived as part of this unforgettable three-hour lunch that I began to lose track: a perfect sphere of seafoam shiso sorbet; a clay teapot filled with a dark broth of shiitake mushrooms, gingko nuts, and custardlike tofu; pearly squares of wheat gluten fragrant with the aroma of yuzu.
More memorable still was a cube with the color and consistency of the freshest buffalo-milk burrata. I pointed at it and the server spoke the words ebi imo. After fumbling with a translation app, I learned that I’d eaten a taro native to the Kansai Plain called a shrimp potato. Count me among its fans.
A quake with a magnitude of 7.1 jolted much of California, cracking buildings, setting fires, breaking roads and causing several injuries while seismologists warned that large aftershocks were expected to continue for days, if not weeks.
The Friday night quake — preceded by Thursday’s 6.4-magnitude temblor in the Mojave Desert — was the largest Southern California quake in at least 20 years and was followed by a series of large and small aftershocks, including a few above magnitude 5.0.
There is about a 1-in-10 chance that another 7.0 quake could hit within the next week, said Lucy Jones, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology and a former science adviser at the U.S. Geological Survey.
The chance of a 5.0-magnitude quake “is approaching certainty,” she added.
Aftershocks from the new main quake could occur for years, Jones said.
However, the quake was unlikely to affect fault lines outside of the area, she said, noting that the gigantic San Andreas Fault was far away.
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Alaska hit record-breaking temperatures on Independence Day, shattering the previous heat record by 5 degrees.
At 5 p.m. local time Thursday, Anchorage reached 90 degrees for the first time in the state’s recorded history, topping the previous record set at Anchorage International Airport of 85 degrees on June 14, 1969.
“Breaking an all-time record by this much is pretty unheard of in the climate community,” NBC News meteorologist Bill Karins said. At least three other cities and towns in Alaska also reached new record temperatures, according to Karins.
“A plethora of daily and all-time records were set across southcentral and southwestern Alaska” on Thursday, the National Weather Service said Friday.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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London garden where a body hits the ground
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James' World 2 