I’m proud to say that the information exchange we created for people wanting to volunteer skills and services to help support rebuilding Haiti (from wherever they are) is still very much alive and active. There are constantly new posts and offers on the website from around the world – and the twitter feed broke 13,000 …followers yesterday with over a hundred new followers since then! Thanks, everybody.

Years ago, I was shocked into muteness to find out that incarcerated women sometime suffer the practice of giving birth in shackles? Really? In the United States? In the post-antebellum United States (as in the Civil War, not Lady Antebellum)?

I first found out about it nearly a decade ago, when I met Kemba Smith at a criminal justice conference and heard her recount the story of her own shackled childbirth. The whole idea of such a thing seems incredibly cruel, not to mention absurd. What is the fear — that an incarcerated woman in labor is bound to go all “Kill Bill” on someone any second… mercilessly taking out the hospital room staff and karate chopping her way to freedom? It makes about as much sense as passing the newborn through a metal detector before entering the nursery.

Tonya Williams of SPARK Reproductive Justice Now has spent two years researching the treatment of pregnant incarcerated women in the state of Georgia. Not so shockingly, it ain’t a pleasant story. Dignity, anyone? She wrote an article about this issue a few months ago. And now, after decisions in Washington state and Arkansas found that the practice violates civil rights and a major class action suit pending in Illinois, NPR has also picked up story.

Turns out that the World Cup finalists are also the two prettiest teams (as determined by this survey from a dating site for Beautiful People only. They would know.) We’re all winners! Especially when they swap shirts.

Some of the African players should have ranked much higher (ahem, Ghana, hello?) but this is entertaining nonetheless. Christiano Ronaldo is probably more peeved about losing this contest to Spain than the actual World Cup (Spain’s Torres, apparently, out-hotted him).

New York has plentiful daily plagues and irritations, some of which are lethal, but most are just nuisances. They have given New Yorkers a well-deserved rep for being neurotic. I Googled “neurotic New Yorker” (with the quotes) and came up with no less than 219,000 results.

Who wouldn’t be a psychosomatic bundle of stress with so many physical threats, especially those of the itty-bitty-hard-to-spot variety? A few short months back at home and I am already obsessive about hand sanitizer and the lurking presence of bed bugs.

My three years in Atlanta were clearly a sanitized bubble. I’m starting to understand why my mom (not a native New Yorker) used to wash all the clothes we wore on the subway train with disinfectant.