Web Reads: Mourning with China's orphaned parents

When an only child dies. What does China’s one-child policy have to do with the disappearance of Flight 370? For many Chinese parents it means the death of an only child. The Telegraph newspaper reports on the “devastating phenomenon: that of the ‘orphaned’ parents who, through accident or illness, lost the only child the Chinese government allowed them to have.”

Bad data? Divorce: It’s Way Bigger Than We Thought is the title of an article on the Family Studies blog. In it, Kay Hymowitz argues that the decline in divorce rates since the 1980s comes from bad data collecting rather than an actual decline.

A father’s pain. Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree, interviews Peter Lanza about Sandy Hook and the indescribable sadness that comes from being the father of a son who becomes a mass killer.

Picking Southern fiction. The website Brain Pickings features an excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” an essay in which the great Southern writer discusses the grotesque in literature. The link connects to a rare recording of O’Connor giving a speech based on an early draft of the essay.

New neighborhoods. Many housing voucher programs move low-income families from high-crime housing projects into Section 8 housing that still concentrates the poor in neighborhoods with bad schools and high crime. Baltimore has tried to change that through a program with specific criteria: “Families could only use the vouchers to move to neighborhoods where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent, where the population was less than 30 percent black, and where fewer than 5 percent of residents were already living in subsidized housing.” The Washington Post examines the outcome.