NASA projects often have romantic names that link into a long history of exploration and adventure: Atlantis and Discovery, for example.

To apply for a gifted program, children as young as 4 are required to sit through hour-long verbal exams.

Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.

Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it's landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of American virtues: justice, individual freedom, and the power of one innocent soul to save the world.

That's not a convincing argument. Public sector jobs are cyclical. Teachers get fired when money is tight, then rehired when things get better. Manufacturing jobs, on the other hand, aren't coming back. They're relics of a past age.

It's a fact that within the space of a few decades, women have achieved a massive shift in the role they play - in the way they act in public, and in the way they have conquered areas of the working world that were until recently considered a man's domain.

Breast-feeding does not belong in the realm of facts and hard numbers; it is much too intimate and elemental.