Um.   Right.  Just do the post, Guhin.

Quit!  I’m not sure I can, bust still…

Dr. Siegel, a psychologist and president of Impact Group, management consultants in Los Angeles, is on a bit of a crusade. He wants there to be less e-mail in the world. So he’s helping his business clients organize activities such as a “no e-mail Friday” in order to increase productivity.

That’s right: increase productivity.

“E-mail is not a communication device, it’s a broadcasting device,” says Siegel. “It will actually truncate communication. And in the truest sense of the word, it has become a psychological dependency. We have convinced ourselves that we can’t live without it.”

E-mail takes up more and more of our time at work, according to Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., research and consulting firm. E-mails sent by a company’s workers are projected to increase 27 percent this year, to an average of 47 a day – up from 37 a day in 2006. And that’s not the upper ranks of a company, where even more e-mails can accumulate.

The question then becomes “Do we really want our company to be spending so much of its time doing something that ultimately isn’t productive?”

But how can we live without it?

Take, for example, my full-time job at National Public Radio. I get e-mails nonstop all day long: e-mails about stories, e-mails from human resources, e-mails about people looking for lost Blackberrys or books that they left in a recording booth, e-mails purportedly from high-ranking folks in Nigeria who want to give me lots of money, e-mail about…. You get the picture.

I can almost hear Siegel smiling on the phone as I recite this litany. He’s obviously heard this before. “And how many of those e-mails are you really glad you got?”

Truthfully? Not all of them, for sure.

From the WSJ:

Everyone knows the potent force of the Christian right in American politics.

But since the mid-1990s, an increasingly influential religious movement has arisen on the left, mostly escaping the national press’s notice.

This new religious left does not expend its political energies on the cultural concerns that primarily motivate conservative evangelicals. Instead, working mostly at the state and local level, and often in lockstep with unions, its ministers, priests, rabbis, and laity exert a major, sometimes decisive, influence in campaigns to enforce a “living wage,” to help unions organize, and to block the expansion of nonunionized businesses like Wal-Mart.

The new religious left is in one sense not new at all. It draws its inspiration in part from the Protestant “social gospel” movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially Baptist Minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who believed that the best way to uplift the downtrodden was to redistribute wealth and forge an egalitarian society. Rauschenbusch called for the creation of a kingdom of heaven here on earth — just as presidential candidate Barack Obama did last week at a church in South Carolina.

Just to prove nobody’s smart all-around.

James Watson provoked widespread outrage with his comments to The Sunday Times, which quoted the 79-year-old American as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Why do some religions get away with stuff?

 The Amish are, as reputed, quiet people. But they have also consistently dodged many of the U.S. laws scrupulously followed by other Americans, including labor, Social Security, and education laws. Meanwhile, Mormon fundamentalists—splinter groups from the main church—live outside the law, in some instances violating bigamy, welfare, and sometimes even statutory-rape laws. As we’ll see, the fate of these two groups before the legal system after 50 years of struggle with the state is very different. The Amish have “won” in the sense that, for most of the issues they care about, American law has either changed or been left unenforced. Mormon fundamentalists, meanwhile, have settled for zoning: Polygamists are unmolested, provided they remain with certain geographic limits and stay out of public view. All this shows how America in this century has used tolerance of lawbreaking to give more room to groups that want to live differently.

This is important:

Immigration law remains founded on the notion that immigrants are not full members of American society until they become citizens, writes Professor Kanstroom, who is also a practicing immigration lawyer. The reduced protections in modern-day law were shaped by some of the darker episodes of the 20th century, he writes, including the prosecution of immigrant dissidents, like the Australian union leader Harry Bridges, in the 1930s; and the mass roundups of Mexican workers in the 1950s.

Arising from that landscape, the courts that handle immigration cases are part of the Justice Department, not the judiciary. Even immigrants who have lived here legally for many years, lawyers said, can run afoul of the immigration laws with minor infractions or misdemeanors. A late filing of visa renewal papers or a shoplifting citation can quickly spiral into an order for the ultimate penalty: deportation. Immigrants who fight the orders have more limited bail rights than American criminals and can spend years behind bars while their cases inch through the overburdened court system.

The Year of Living Biblicically:

I’ve never understood people’s aversion to good, clean religious warfare—guys (like my venerable friend Christopher Hitchens) who like to dump all the world’s ills in religion’s lap, claiming it is the source of most violence. To which I say, “Yeah, so?” Sad as it is, the human animal is a violent one. It will always find something to fight about. There’s at least an outside chance that religion, practiced correctly, refines or subverts that impulse. In fact, it has plenty of times. Sometimes it doesn’t and is practiced incorrectly. But think about the stupidity that usually provokes your average bar fight: looking at someone the wrong way, spilling a beer on their shoes, cutting the line for the dartboard. On balance then, religion provides a much nobler reason to cuff somebody.

Now, back to Jesus-is-love/turning-the-other-cheek. About a decade ago, I covered one of those mass Moonie weddings at RFK Stadium, with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon officiating. There were thousands of tittering Asian girls on a football field in full bridal regalia putting rings on their own fingers, because their Moon-appointed grooms couldn’t get travel visas. The story, as you can imagine, wasn’t terribly nice. Afterward, my editor received an angry letter from a Washington Times editor (the Times being owned by Moon), who pointed out that my piece was a little too easy. He said a lot of people think it’s pretty dopey that we believe a guy was nailed to a piece of wood for our sins, then rose from the grave three days later. My editor pushed the letter at me with a satisfied smile. He’s Jewish.

On faith.  Woe-be-gone! 

But here in an old brownstone church at an ancient ceremony, there is a moment of separation from all the griefs of this world. Ten men and women are singing a cappella, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name,” and their voices drench us fugitive worshippers kneeling, naked, trembling, needy, in the knowledge of grace, and when we arise and go out into Baltimore, the blessing follows us.

It followed me as I ate a dozen oysters that afternoon and hung around the library and paid homage to H.L. Mencken’s house on Union Square, that hearty old sinner who said, “Church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.”

Where are the Jesuits?  Geez.  I know you don’t like those dirty liberals, but come on!

Okay.  I’ve worked with a lot of inner-city kids.  I know the reality of what’s happening.   But geez–shouldn’t this be a wake-up call that sometimes abstinence training is a good idea?

Parents and school officials are preparing to battle tonight in a debate about the sexual health of children at one Maine school district.

Administrators at a Portland middle school are considering a bold proposal that would allow students to access a broader range of contraceptives from the school’s health center.