Weekly Links: Rainbow Recipes, Horror vs. Terror, and more!

Some good reading for your weekend:

"27 Rainbow Recipes that Will Bring Joy to Your Life": So pretty.

"Why the Shift from Horror to Terror on 'CSI' Is a Problem":

There is a fine line between accurate storytelling—wherein a crime show might show some violence to tell an honest story about the consequences of wrongdoing—and gratuitous depiction, in which violence is portrayed not for the sake of the story but for the spectacle of it. 

"Fittest Type of All Disciples: Bartholomew/Nathanael":

Because of the way Nathanael is brought to Jesus, commentator Rudolf Stier calls Nathanel "the fittest type of all disciples." God has already been at work on him in multiples ways; he is summoned by the witness of another disciple; and he is introduced directly to Jesus, converted by his word. Nathanael's faith is the occasion of Jesus first "truly, truly I say to you" statement.

"Mincemeat: on Writing":

As a writer and a mother of two children, I thought I didn't have any spare time. And then we added twins to our family, and I wondered what I used to do with all that spare time. 

"The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think":

. . . human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else. 

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

"Am I Empty?":

Empty.  It needs to be said.  Infertility and miscarriage leave one empty.  There is pain.  There is loss. Someone is missing. That needs to be acknowledged. Years later, there are scars.  I felt it then; I feel them now.  I contemplated the starkness of the word, the label.  My label.  My label?

"Measles Is Horrible":

Before the vaccine, the United States saw approximately 4 million cases of measles each year and 400 to 500 deaths. These are the stats that vaccine-deniers tend to emphasize—a relatively low number of deaths compared with the number of infections. However, those statistics alone leave out a big part of measles infections. Prevaccine, almost 48,000 people were also hospitalized each year because of measles and measles complications. One in 20 of those infected developed pneumonia. More rarely but more seriously, each year 1,000 became chronically disabled due to measles encephalitis. 

Measles is not a benign disease.