Hits and Misses
HIT: Before the midterms, Pennsylvania was one of 11 states that had an all-male congressional delegation. That changed last week when Democrat Mary Gay Scanlon was sworn in to serve out the seven remaining weeks of the term of Republican Pat Meehan, who resigned from the Delaware County-based seat in April. Scanlon will be on Capitol Hill for at least two years, because she also won a full two-year term on Nov. 6, along with the special election to fill the seat until January. She will be joined by three other women, a record for Pennsylvania. Before now, Pennsylvania had never sent more than two women to Congress at any one time. And there’s every likelihood that Pennsylvania will never have an all-male congressional delegation again.
MISS: We’ve long been skeptical of “trigger warnings” that have landed on some college and university syllabi to alert students to potentially disturbing content in classroom reading material. Now, some theater companies are adopting the concept. According to The New York Times, troupes in Denver, Baltimore, Philadelphia and elsewhere have taken to offering detailed warnings to customers about when they might encounter disturbing material in their stage productions. It’s even gotten to the point where a Brooklyn, N.Y., company handed out cards to patrons entering the theater warning them that the beloved, well-worn musical “Oklahoma!” contained “moments of darkness and violence.” What about the whole notion that a night at the theater should be provocative or contain some shocks? Susie Medak, the managing director of the Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, told the Times, “We have a generation coming of age that expects to be protected from discomfort, and a lot of companies succumb to that. To me, it’s a frustrating trend – what’s the point of experiencing art if you don’t expect to be surprised?”
MISS: Some of the headlines were rather alarming, raising the specter that perhaps cellphone use might pose a brain cancer risk. But when one drills down into the details of a newly released study, it suggests that there’s not too much reason to worry. The study in question began during the Clinton administration and involved exposing thousands of rodents to high levels of radio waves from a certain type of cellphone. Yes, it seems that the exposure increased the risk that male rats would develop brain cancer. But according to a report in The New York Times, “the exposure levels and durations were far greater than what people typically encounter,” and the radio frequency used in the study was “associated with an early generation of cellphone technology, one that fell out of routine use years ago.” To be extra safe, it’s probably not a good idea to have a cellphone glued to the side of your head every waking moment, but it seems most of us aren’t in too much danger.