Family Life

They don't make many power couples like this: He's a self-proclaimed whistle blower, the focus of international headlines and Obama administration ire. She describes herself as a "world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero. " Edward Snowden and Lindsay Mills lived in a modest blue clapboard house with white trim here in a Honolulu suburb until about six weeks ago. Their former neighbors described them as quiet and private. On Sunday, Snowden announced that he was responsible for leaking secrets about America's telephone and Internet surveillance pograms to the media, reviving a global debate about Big Brother-style government surveillance of private citizens.

From Bangor to Peoria, in the Huffington Post and in Forbes Magazine, the press is focusing on the minimum wage. While we hear and read about it constantly these days, many of us never take the time to reflect on what it really means. When seen up close, as I do every day here in Baltimore at the Center for Urban Families, the real meaning of "minimum" becomes painfully apparent. Minimum is just that. As Merriam Webster says: "the least quantity assignable, admissible, or possible.

In the beginning, there was only rock 'n' roll.Now there are car pools and soccer practices and PTAs.To tap into the expanding interests of maturing rock fans, Rolling Stone magazine creator Jann Wenner has added a new publication, Family Life, to his growing list, which also includes Men's Journal. His newest effort hit newsstands this week with a $2.50 cover price. (A one-year subscription is $12.97.)"I like to publish magazines that I feel passionate about," Mr. Wenner says from the New York offices of his company, Straight Arrow Publishers Inc.Family life is a topic about which one would presume Mr. Wenner is passionate these days.

Two women, one a shy British housewife and the other a groundbreaking social scientist, who changed significantly the landscape of family life, died in recent days - and it is worth taking a moment to remember them and their courage. Judith Wallerstein, a psychologist whose research concluded that children bear the scars of their parents' divorce well into adulthood, died at 90 at her daughter's home in Piedmont, Calif. And Lesley Brown, the mother of the world's first "test-tube baby," died of a gall bladder infection at 64, surrounded by the two daughters she bore through in vitro fertilization and her five grandchildren.

I DON'T KNOW about you, but I haven't said anything right in my house for a long time. My opinions are always unsolicited and inevitably unappreciated. No one cares what I think. But I can't seem to keep my mouth shut, and as a result, I am always in trouble with some member of my family. One harmless little comment from me about, oh, say, a wardrobe choice or a possible college major, and someone gets upset. Sheesh. What a prickly group. I was complaining to my friend Susan, the flight attendant, about the poor reception my comments get, when she flashed me a smile that would melt the chocolate bar in your pocket.

MY AMBITION this summer is to organize and clean out the cellar, the vault for things I think need keeping.Unfortunately, in my case, that means almost everything. I can't bring myself to throw things out. Over the years, I've saved family mementos, the paper routine of my life, and tons of stuff that has come my way.It's all down in the cellar -- not a club room, not a basement, but the kind of rock-walled, humid cavern common to houses built in 1871.My definition of cleaning out the cellar is to go through every box, throw out only what has proven to be worthless, and repack everything worth keeping.

At the point in the baby's birth when the head appeared, male spectators at Harbor Hospital Center could no longer contain themselves."Oh, my God!" yelled one, amazed."

Bill Sims is a blues musician with a serious drinking problem who took over the household roles of child-rearing and cooking. He's black. Karen Wilson is a corporate manager, the family's primary breadwinner, but she's seriously ill and facing a hysterectomy. She's white.Cicily, their oldest daughter, is away at an elite college and getting one painful lesson after another in elitism and race, while Chaney, their "baby," faces adolescence and her own battles with identity as she tries to start dating.

From Bangor to Peoria, in the Huffington Post and in Forbes Magazine, the press is focusing on the minimum wage. While we hear and read about it constantly these days, many of us never take the time to reflect on what it really means. When seen up close, as I do every day here in Baltimore at the Center for Urban Families, the real meaning of "minimum" becomes painfully apparent. Minimum is just that. As Merriam Webster says: "the least quantity assignable, admissible, or possible.

Marie has a house and kids. Bill has a house and kids, too. Now they're going to marry and take on one of life's great challenges: blending families. So where should they all live?Ideally, the newlyweds should resist the temptation to move the whole troop into either Bill or Marie's home. Instead, they should find a third home where everyone in the blended family can make a fresh beginning, therapists and housing specialists agree."I vote for new for everybody," says Carolyn Janik, author of "Positive Moves," a guide to relocation.

There is nothing normal about "Next to Normal"at Columbia's Red Branch Theatre Company. This 2009 Broadway musical is a tuneful consideration of a family that is being ripped apart by the mother's mental illness. It's not the cheerful musical norm, that's for sure. The rock-oriented score by Tom Kitt energizes the book and lyrics by Brian Yorkey. Anything but shy when it comes to tackling such a sensitive topic, Yorkey even boldly rhymes "sociopath" with "Sylvia Plath," a poet who committed suicide.

For 32 years, I have felt defined by my daughter. When I encounter someone at work or in the community, the first question I'm often asked is, "Where is Annie?" As if we were permanently joined at the hip. As if she has no life without me. As if I have no life without her. I sometimes wonder what people think of me - of my life - and of Annie. I sometimes feel that people see me as a one-dimensional caretaker of a perpetual child. The mother who sacrificed a "real career" to accommodate the needs of her daughter.

    So it's official. No one really cares that Newt Gingrich is an egotistical, vainglorious scoundrel, at least where women are concerned. Sure, his ex-wife went on TV two days before the South Carolina primary and re-dished a bunch of dirt about their marriage, but based on the outcome there, it seems GOP voters got over the whole family values thing a long time ago. At the very least, it seems that unapologetic combativeness is proving a more effective campaign strategy than bragging about the longevity of your marriage or releasing enviably wholesome family portraits.

Joseph Claver Richardson, a retired teacher and World War II veteran who was the patriarch of a family of nearly 60 children and grandchildren, died of cardiac arrest related to asthma Jan. 8 at Sinai Hospital. He was 89 and lived in Walbrook Junction. Born in Baltimore and raised on Madison Avenue, he attended St. Peter Claver and St. Pius V schools. According to a 1944 Afro-American article, he had been recommended for ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood by Archbishop Michael J. Curley.

Many bottles of pinot noir have been sold in the seven years since director Alexander Payne's "Sideways" took moviegoers through California's wine country. His long-overdue new movie, "The Descendants," was worth the wait. Maintaining a delicate balance between its comic and dramatic elements, "The Descendants" is one of the year's most emotionally satisfying movies. Although some of its later scenes seem forced and its overall tone flirts with being facile, these are relatively minor reservations.

The walls of Pat O'Brien's Cockeysville home are canvases painted in both vivid jewel tones and subtle pastel shades, representing her family, and — like their lives — they are a constant work in progress. "I believe a house should reflect your family," said Pat O'Brien, a professional muralist and mother of four sons. "And we have a loud, lively family." Fourteen years ago, she and her husband, Jerry, a 55-year-old defense contractor, as well as their four small boys, moved into a new home in a small development called The Abbey in northern Baltimore County.

THE STARTLING discovery that affiliation with the Republican Party is genetically determined, announced by scientists in the current issue of the journal Nurture, threatens to overshadow the announcement by government scientists that there might be a gene for homosexuality in men.Reports of the gene that codes for political conservatism, discovered after a long study of quintuplets in Orange County, Calif., have sent shock waves through the medical, political and golfing communities.Psychologists and psychoanalysts have long believed that Republicans' unnatural and frequently unconstitutional tendencies result from unhealthy family life -- a remarkably high percentage of Republicans had authoritarian, domineering fathers and emotionally distant mothers who didn't teach them how to be kind and gentle.

Joseph Claver Richardson, a retired teacher and World War II veteran who was the patriarch of a family of nearly 60 children and grandchildren, died of cardiac arrest related to asthma Jan. 8 at Sinai Hospital. He was 89 and lived in Walbrook Junction. Born in Baltimore and raised on Madison Avenue, he attended St. Peter Claver and St. Pius V schools. According to a 1944 Afro-American article, he had been recommended for ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood by Archbishop Michael J. Curley.

When James H. McDonald was 16, back when Baltimore was legally segregated, he set out to apply for a job in a drugstore a few blocks into the white side of town. Almost as soon as he'd set foot over Fulton Avenue, the dividing line, he had company. "This gentleman - he said he was a policeman - asked what I was doing there," said McDonald, now 80. McDonald, who was followed to the store to prove that there was indeed a job opening, offered the story Monday as an example of life before the civil-rights activists made inroads, before the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and long before a black man was elected president.

Moments before he was sentenced to four life terms for killing his parents and two younger brothers, 16-year-old Nicholas W. Browning turned to his remaining relatives in a Towson courtroom yesterday and, tears streaming down his face, asked for their forgiveness. Apparently too overcome to read the handwritten statement he had composed, he handed it to one of his lawyers. "I cannot make the pain go away," recited the attorney, Joshua R. Treem. "I never considered what effect my actions would have.