• Are We Politicians or Citizens?—A thoughtful essay in The Progressive by noted historian Howard Zinn that argues against a compromise on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and asserts that citizens, unlike politicians, must ever “speak for what is right, not for what is winnable.”

• Poor Behavior Is Linked to Time in Day Care—A concerning piece by Benedict Carey of the New York Times on a recent “report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care [that] has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.”

• A World Where Lies Are True—A provocative and cautionary essay in TruthDig by Chris Hedges that describes how the propagators of creationism “seek the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth…[which] is a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements.”

• Working to Diagnose Marine Animal Die-Off—An interesting article by Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post on the Working Group on Marine Mammal Unusual Mortality Events, a team of government researchers that seeks to “unravel the mystery” of why dolphins, whales, and other marine mammals sometimes die off en masse.