Latest news with #Childs
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
My husband asked me to change my last name to his when we got married. Years later, he apologized.
After getting engaged, I joked to my husband that we should both change our last names together. He didn't find it funny and really wanted me to take his last name. A few years ago, he apologized for suggesting that I take his name over mine. In the early days of our engagement, one of my favorite ways to tease my husband was to come up with new last names we could take when we got married. I would joke that rather than taking his last name, we could both go through the identity change together. We could start fresh with something cool, something that was just ours. But my future husband, whose extended family throws reunions that are essentially small festivals, didn't find it funny. It wasn't that I was emotionally tied to my previous last name. Saying and spelling "Childs" for the rest of my life was just easier than "Nieslanik". Not to mention, it feels weird to think of yourself as one person with one name for so many years, only to change that. My name was a fundamental part of who I was. To change it in my mid-thirties felt strange. Plus, there is the bureaucratic red tape that comes with changing your name. Birth certificate, driver's license, passport, and bills. Changing your name is like updating your entire identity one tedious form at a time. At the end of the day, though, I knew how much it would mean to my husband if I took his last name. And part of that was because I had already changed my name once. My last name when I met my husband wasn't the one I was born with. Ironically, in my late teens, I'd already gone through a name change after a short-lived first marriage. My maiden name had been a mouthful that people always messed up, so adopting a simpler one was a relief. Plus, no one in my immediate family shared my last name. My mom had given me her maiden name, but she remarried and took my stepfather's last name, as did my half-brother, whom they had together. I was the only one left with a hard name no one else seemed to want. The fact that I had changed my name before, no matter the reason, didn't sit well with my soon-to-be husband. If I had changed it before, he argued, why wouldn't I be willing to change it again? This time, for him. It felt like a personal slight, which I understood. Beyond that, my husband comes from a large, close-knit family who do all share the same last name. Every summer, they gather in the hundreds for a family reunion and have streets named after them in towns sprinkled across the Western Slope of Colorado. As an only child, he felt we needed to carry on the name for his family branch by having me take his name. He had a strong internal belief that members of the same family should have the same name. Although his family is relatively liberal, they shared the cultural expectation that a woman takes her husband's name when they marry. And he had some pride wrapped up in the idea that I would carry his name—that when people met us, they would know that we belonged together. Since I had no strong objections, I did end up changing my name, and I never really looked back. I used a service that helped me change all my accounts, IDs, and paperwork in one (mostly) easy go, so the hassle was more minimal than expected. Now, more than a decade later, I see several upsides to having changed my last name. For example, it's uncommon, so I rarely get confused with anyone else. As a writer, I find that beneficial. I like having the same last name as our children, and I'm glad I didn't have to think about whose name we should give them or if we should hyphenate. And I've realized that my last name has a lot of personality. If that means I have to spell it an extra time or two, the trade-off is now worth it in my opinion. A few years ago, my husband apologized to me for "making" me change my name. He mentioned how silly he thought his reasonings were now, that he understood having the same last name is kind of arbitrary. He pointed out that it affects literally no part of our lives together in a substantial way. My favorite realization that he mentioned was how our love is so much greater than a shared last name. Then, he asked if I'd like to change my name back. The thought of returning to the ease of "Childs" as a last name has its appeal, but I couldn't help but laugh. I have zero desire to go through that paperwork again. Not unless he wants to revisit that original idea of picking a brand-new name together. And he's willing to file the forms himself this time. Read the original article on Business Insider
Yahoo
06-07-2025
- General
- Yahoo
My husband asked me to change my last name to his when we got married. Years later, he apologized.
After getting engaged, I joked to my husband that we should both change our last names together. He didn't find it funny and really wanted me to take his last name. A few years ago, he apologized for suggesting that I take his name over mine. In the early days of our engagement, one of my favorite ways to tease my husband was to come up with new last names we could take when we got married. I would joke that rather than taking his last name, we could both go through the identity change together. We could start fresh with something cool, something that was just ours. But my future husband, whose extended family throws reunions that are essentially small festivals, didn't find it funny. It wasn't that I was emotionally tied to my previous last name. Saying and spelling "Childs" for the rest of my life was just easier than "Nieslanik". Not to mention, it feels weird to think of yourself as one person with one name for so many years, only to change that. My name was a fundamental part of who I was. To change it in my mid-thirties felt strange. Plus, there is the bureaucratic red tape that comes with changing your name. Birth certificate, driver's license, passport, and bills. Changing your name is like updating your entire identity one tedious form at a time. At the end of the day, though, I knew how much it would mean to my husband if I took his last name. And part of that was because I had already changed my name once. My last name when I met my husband wasn't the one I was born with. Ironically, in my late teens, I'd already gone through a name change after a short-lived first marriage. My maiden name had been a mouthful that people always messed up, so adopting a simpler one was a relief. Plus, no one in my immediate family shared my last name. My mom had given me her maiden name, but she remarried and took my stepfather's last name, as did my half-brother, whom they had together. I was the only one left with a hard name no one else seemed to want. The fact that I had changed my name before, no matter the reason, didn't sit well with my soon-to-be husband. If I had changed it before, he argued, why wouldn't I be willing to change it again? This time, for him. It felt like a personal slight, which I understood. Beyond that, my husband comes from a large, close-knit family who do all share the same last name. Every summer, they gather in the hundreds for a family reunion and have streets named after them in towns sprinkled across the Western Slope of Colorado. As an only child, he felt we needed to carry on the name for his family branch by having me take his name. He had a strong internal belief that members of the same family should have the same name. Although his family is relatively liberal, they shared the cultural expectation that a woman takes her husband's name when they marry. And he had some pride wrapped up in the idea that I would carry his name—that when people met us, they would know that we belonged together. Since I had no strong objections, I did end up changing my name, and I never really looked back. I used a service that helped me change all my accounts, IDs, and paperwork in one (mostly) easy go, so the hassle was more minimal than expected. Now, more than a decade later, I see several upsides to having changed my last name. For example, it's uncommon, so I rarely get confused with anyone else. As a writer, I find that beneficial. I like having the same last name as our children, and I'm glad I didn't have to think about whose name we should give them or if we should hyphenate. And I've realized that my last name has a lot of personality. If that means I have to spell it an extra time or two, the trade-off is now worth it in my opinion. A few years ago, my husband apologized to me for "making" me change my name. He mentioned how silly he thought his reasonings were now, that he understood having the same last name is kind of arbitrary. He pointed out that it affects literally no part of our lives together in a substantial way. My favorite realization that he mentioned was how our love is so much greater than a shared last name. Then, he asked if I'd like to change my name back. The thought of returning to the ease of "Childs" as a last name has its appeal, but I couldn't help but laugh. I have zero desire to go through that paperwork again. Not unless he wants to revisit that original idea of picking a brand-new name together. And he's willing to file the forms himself this time. Read the original article on Business Insider
USA Today
05-06-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Child Childs reflects on his fight with Kobe Bryant in 2000
Child Childs reflects on his fight with Kobe Bryant in 2000 Back in the 1999-2000 season, the Los Angeles Lakers had a 21-year-old guard named Kobe Bryant who was emerging into a legitimate superstar. He was still tapping into his potential that year, but he averaged 22.5 points, 6.3 rebounds, 4.9 assists and 1.6 steals per game while being named to the All-Star team for the second time. He came up big in a few of the Lakers' biggest games and moments during the Western Conference finals and NBA Finals as they powered their way to their first world championship in a dozen years. But along the way that season, he dipped his toes into the pool of indiscretion. During a late-season matchup versus the New York Knicks at what was then known as Staples Center, Bryant got into a fight with Chris Childs. The two started talking trash, and right after Bryant threw an elbow at Childs, the Knicks guard reacted by throwing two punches. At the time, one motive behind Childs punching Bryant may have been presumed to be disrespect. Back then, plenty around the league were leery of Bryant, who grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and in Italy and seemed to lack the street cred that many other players self-assuredly carry. But in a recent interview with Brandon "Scoop B" Robinson, Childs professed "nothing but respect" for the late Lakers legend. 'We never sat down and talked about it; we were competitors,' Childs said recently. 'We weren't friends. We didn't go to dinner, but we had mutual respect for each other as far as how we played the game and how we prepared, and I have nothing but respect for that man for what he's done on the court and off the court.' Childs ended up playing nine seasons in the NBA, with four and a half of them coming with the Knicks. A native of Bakersfield, Calif., he lacked skills but was the type of prototypical 1990s scrapper whom no one wanted to double-cross. He averaged 6.9 points and 4.9 assists in 25.2 minutes a game for his career. He went undrafted in 1989 and had to pay his dues in the now-defunct Continental Basketball Association for several years. Along the way, he also had to overcome an alcohol problem before he finally made his way into the roster of the then-New Jersey Nets for the 1994-95 season. After his NBA career ended in 2003, he watched as Bryant's legend grew, both on and off the court. 'If I can take a fraction of that and give back to the community; give back to girls basketball and give back to what I do which is mentoring young men and trying to help them become exceptional men,' Childs said, 'then I've done his legacy proud and hopefully others can follow suit.' If Childs lacked respect for Bryant in 2000, the fact that his tune has drastically changed speaks to Bryant's success, resume and legacy.
Time of India
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
$244 billion a year: The cost of Canadian wildfire crossing borders across US?
If any Canadian import should be tariffed out of existence, it's one that President Donald Trump couldn't tax even if he wanted to: wildfire smoke. Unfortunately, it's a product in increasing and borderless abundance across North America and the world, endangering lives and inflicting billions of dollars in economic damage every year. In fact, a new study suggests wildfire smoke is a bigger threat to American health and prosperity than many other climate-change effects combined. In recent days — almost exactly two years after Canadian smoke made breathing difficult across a wide swath of the US from Chicago to New York — another huge cloud of the stuff has invaded the Lower 48, spoiling air quality from North Dakota to South Carolina — and, again, Chicago and New York. Some of it even crossed the Atlantic to Europe. The risk of more incursions will linger for several days, with 202 active fires stretching from British Columbia to Ontario as of this writing, 104 of which were out of control. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Secure Your Child's Future with Strong English Fluency Planet Spark Learn More Undo It's no fluke this has happened in two of the past three years. The heat from a relentlessly warming planet has made wildfires more frequent and intense (and weird) around the world. Along with a century of wildfire suppression and increasing human incursions into the wildland-urban interface, this has turned wildfire season into a year-round event in the US, and no longer limited to the far West. 'It's remarkable how quickly this risk is changing and how many people are affected in places historically not affected by this risk,' Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford University, told me in a Zoom call with Marissa Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. 'Ten years ago, it was only in the West. Now everyone is accustomed to it.' Live Events The acreage of US land burned by wildfires has doubled in the past 20 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. And in each of the past five years, Americans in the contiguous US have been exposed to at least twice as much wildfire smoke-related fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5) as they were between 2006 and 2019, according to a preprint study by Childs, Burke and other researchers. 'There's no part of the US that won't experience wildfire smoke eventually,' Childs said. 'Even if there are small parts of the country not impacted recently, they will be at some point.' All this smoke has undone decades of progress in cleaning the air Americans breathe by lowering pollution from factories, power plants and automobiles. Some researchers have suggested wildfire smoke is far more toxic than those other pollution sources. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lisa Jarvis has written, wildfire smoke hurts much more than just lungs, raising the risk of everything from dementia to premature births. Burke was involved in a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, led by Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University (who also worked on the PM2.5 preprint), trying to measure the economic damage of this novel and growing danger to human health. Their findings are alarming in at least a few ways. For one thing, they estimate that global heating of 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages — the path the world is currently traveling — will lead to 46,200 extra deaths from wildfire smoke every year in the US, doubling the rate from 2011 to 2020. And each of those deaths represents an economic loss. In yet another NBER paper last year, the prolific Qiu, Childs, Burke and other colleagues estimated those smoke deaths would cause $244 billion in annual US damage by 2050. What's also surprising is that most economic models haven't yet incorporated the health risks of wildfire smoke into estimates of what's known as the 'social cost of carbon.' This is a dollar amount economists assign to the damage done by each additional ton of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, further warming the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency's social-cost-of-carbon model takes a stab at including smoke-related mortality, Qiu told me in a phone call, but uses antiquated wildfire data and so underestimates damage by a factor of seven. Each additional ton of carbon we pump into the atmosphere, thus warming the planet, will lead to enough wildfire smoke to do roughly $15.10 in US economic damage,the new NBER paper suggests. This may not sound like a lot, but multiply that by roughly 40 billion tons of global CO2-emissions each year, and very quickly you're talking real money. In fact, deaths from wildfire smoke alone could be at least as economically destructive as every other factor cranked into most social-cost-of-carbon models, Qiu noted — suggesting most previous estimates of the damage of climate change have been too low by about 100%. Even these larger estimates are still undercounting. They don't measure the hit to labor productivity when people struggle to breathe, along with the medical costs of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, premature births and more. A 2024 working paper from the Dallas and Philadelphia Federal Reserve banks and the UCLA Anderson School of Management found wildfires drive up credit-card debt for people living many miles from the flames, thanks to higher health costs. And, of course, we haven't even mentioned the damage wildfires keep inflicting on the struggling home-insurance industry, as the Los Angeles fires exposed this winter. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School used the EPA's social-cost-of-carbon measure to suggest US corporate emissions will do $87 trillion in economic damage by 2050. In light of this new paper, maybe corporate America actually owes us $174 trillion. While we wait for those checks, we'll have to be smarter about wildfires and smoke. We could start by quitting fossil fuels. A tariff of sorts to recoup some of this damage, in the form of a carbon tax, would be helpful. But even if we did all that tomorrow, fire risk would keep increasing for decades because of the heat already in the system. Better forest management, including controlled burns, can help mitigate that risk, as can moving humans out of the wildland-urban interface. Meanwhile, public officials must do a better job of warning people of the dangers of smoke and make breathing centers, high-quality face masks and HEPA filters available to everyone who needs them. The Canadian smoke that invaded the US two years ago caught everybody by surprise. We're not in much better shape today. 'Not enough has been done to prepare,' Childs said. 'While in the longer term we need to think about how to manage forests and climate change, in the short term we need to protect people from exposure. That includes not relying on people to protect themselves.' We literally can't afford to be so unprepared anymore.
Mint
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Where There's Smoke, There's $244 Billion a Year in Damage
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- If any Canadian import should be tariffed out of existence, it's one that President Donald Trump couldn't tax even if he wanted to: wildfire smoke. Unfortunately, it's a product in increasing and borderless abundance across North America and the world, endangering lives and inflicting billions of dollars in economic damage every year. In fact, a new study suggests wildfire smoke is a bigger threat to American health and prosperity than many other climate-change effects combined. In recent days — almost exactly two years after Canadian smoke made breathing difficult across a wide swath of the US from Chicago to New York — another huge cloud of the stuff has invaded the Lower 48, spoiling air quality from North Dakota to South Carolina — and, again, Chicago and New York. Some of it even crossed the Atlantic to Europe. The risk of more incursions will linger for several days, with 202 active fires stretching from British Columbia to Ontario as of this writing, 104 of which were out of control. It's no fluke this has happened in two of the past three years. The heat from a relentlessly warming planet has made wildfires more frequent and intense (and weird) around the world. Along with a century of wildfire suppression and increasing human incursions into the wildland-urban interface, this has turned wildfire season into a year-round event in the US, and no longer limited to the far West. 'It's remarkable how quickly this risk is changing and how many people are affected in places historically not affected by this risk,' Marshall Burke, an associate professor at Stanford University, told me in a Zoom call with Marissa Childs, an assistant professor at the University of Washington. 'Ten years ago, it was only in the West. Now everyone is accustomed to it.' The acreage of US land burned by wildfires has doubled in the past 20 years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. And in each of the past five years, Americans in the contiguous US have been exposed to at least twice as much wildfire smoke-related fine particulate matter (known as PM2.5) as they were between 2006 and 2019, according to a preprint study by Childs, Burke and other researchers. 'There's no part of the US that won't experience wildfire smoke eventually,' Childs said. 'Even if there are small parts of the country not impacted recently, they will be at some point.' All this smoke has undone decades of progress in cleaning the air Americans breathe by lowering pollution from factories, power plants and automobiles. Some researchers have suggested wildfire smoke is far more toxic than those other pollution sources. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Lisa Jarvis has written, wildfire smoke hurts much more than just lungs, raising the risk of everything from dementia to premature births. Burke was involved in a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, led by Minghao Qiu, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University (who also worked on the PM2.5 preprint), trying to measure the economic damage of this novel and growing danger to human health. Their findings are alarming in at least a few ways. For one thing, they estimate that global heating of 3 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages — the path the world is currently traveling — will lead to 46,200 extra deaths from wildfire smoke every year in the US, doubling the rate from 2011 to 2020. And each of those deaths represents an economic loss. In yet another NBER paper last year, the prolific Qiu, Childs, Burke and other colleagues estimated those smoke deaths would cause $244 billion in annual US damage by 2050.(1) What's also surprising is that most economic models haven't yet incorporated the health risks of wildfire smoke into estimates of what's known as the 'social cost of carbon.' This is a dollar amount economists assign to the damage done by each additional ton of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere, further warming the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency's social-cost-of-carbon model takes a stab at including smoke-related mortality, Qiu told me in a phone call, but uses antiquated wildfire data and so underestimates damage by a factor of seven. Each additional ton of carbon we pump into the atmosphere, thus warming the planet, will lead to enough wildfire smoke to do roughly $15.10 in US economic damage,(2)the new NBER paper suggests. This may not sound like a lot, but multiply that by roughly 40 billion tons of global CO2-emissions each year, and very quickly you're talking real money. In fact, deaths from wildfire smoke alone could be at least as economically destructive as every other factor cranked into most social-cost-of-carbon models, Qiu noted — suggesting most previous estimates of the damage of climate change have been too low by about 100%. Even these larger estimates are still undercounting. They don't measure the hit to labor productivity when people struggle to breathe, along with the medical costs of asthma, heart attacks, strokes, premature births and more. A 2024 working paper from the Dallas and Philadelphia Federal Reserve banks and the UCLA Anderson School of Management found wildfires drive up credit-card debt for people living many miles from the flames, thanks to higher health costs. And, of course, we haven't even mentioned the damage wildfires keep inflicting on the struggling home-insurance industry, as the Los Angeles fires exposed this winter. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School used the EPA's social-cost-of-carbon measure to suggest US corporate emissions will do $87 trillion in economic damage by 2050. In light of this new paper, maybe corporate America actually owes us $174 trillion. While we wait for those checks, we'll have to be smarter about wildfires and smoke. We could start by quitting fossil fuels. A tariff of sorts to recoup some of this damage, in the form of a carbon tax, would be helpful. But even if we did all that tomorrow, fire risk would keep increasing for decades because of the heat already in the system. Better forest management, including controlled burns, can help mitigate that risk, as can moving humans out of the wildland-urban interface. Meanwhile, public officials must do a better job of warning people of the dangers of smoke and make breathing centers, high-quality face masks and HEPA filters available to everyone who needs them. The Canadian smoke that invaded the US two years ago caught everybody by surprise. We're not in much better shape today. 'Not enough has been done to prepare,' Childs said. 'While in the longer term we need to think about how to manage forests and climate change, in the short term we need to protect people from exposure. That includes not relying on people to protect themselves.' We literally can't afford to be so unprepared anymore. — 'It's Become Harder to Breathe' graphic by Carolyn Silverman More From Bloomberg Opinion: (1) In 2019 dollars; in 2025 dollars, that would be more than $300 billion. But such specificity isn't helpful; there's a lot of uncertainty built into these numbers. (2) In 2020 dollars; in 2025 dollars, that would be closer to $19. Again, remember all the uncertainty. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. He previously worked for the Huffington Post and the Wall Street Journal. More stories like this are available on
