nuclear-news

Sometimes being a parent feels like a tedious vigil against death. The other day, when I asked my 4-year-old not to show me her somersault skills at the top of an unusually steep flight of stairs, she looked at me with wounded confusion.
“Why?” she asked.
“Well,” I said, “because there’s a small chance you might fall, and you would land on the stairs, so you would keep falling, faster and faster, and every time you hit the ground you might break a bone, and maybe the broken end of your arm bone would be sticking through your skin, and there would be blood everywhere, or maybe you would break your spine, and you might not ever be able to walk or dance again.”
“But, papa,” she said. “I’m not going to fall.”
There’s no winning. In the game of life, “parent” is a defensive position: You stand about midfield…