Word: mothering
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...Cera is Nick Twisp, the hyper-intelligent son of a divorced Oakland, Calif., couple, foolish Estelle (Jean Smart) and aggrieved George (Steve Buscemi), who would rather not pay child support. Nick, a self-proclaimed voracious reader of "classic prose," watches in disgust as his mother makes out with her scam-artist boyfriend Jerry (Zach Galifianakis, cinematic slob du jour). Across town, Dad is groping his young girlfriend, Lacey (Ari Graynor, Cera's hilarious co-star from Nick & Norah...
...Given his exquisite dorkiness, Nick appears to have no chance of losing his virginity anytime soon, but naturally, sex is all he thinks about. His chances brighten when Jerry, on the lam, takes Nick and his mother with him to a trailer park near Clear Lake called "Restless Axles." (The film was shot in Michigan, not Northern California, which may explain why Arteta uses Claymation and graphics to depict all the road trips; it might have been a penny saver.) There, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a luscious teenager who is just as pretentious as Nick and not quite...
...mother, at 52, was pretty late in catching on to the whole Facebook thing. When she finally signed up a few months ago, she received a friend request from a high school classmate she hadn't talked to in 30 years. He had read her brother's obituary in the local paper and wanted to give his condolences. It was through this overture on Facebook that this man, who had once been a close family friend, came to learn that my mom's parents had also recently passed away. He responded by explaining how he felt when his mother died...
...asked Ella what she thought was going on. "Finally, the story comes out," he says. "She had been molested as a child, both within her family and outside it. She tried to escape by marrying at 15, at her mother's urging. It was a disastrous marriage - her husband was crazy jealous. They divorced in two years. She remarried. Her new husband was also jealous. He was convinced that when she was out hanging the laundry, she was sexually posturing to attract the neighbors...
...McGill University in Canada and his colleagues have shown how such environmentally induced traits can be passed down - then undone, also by environment. Meaney studied rats with differing maternal styles - some were naturally nurturing (they licked and groomed their pups constantly), others were less attentive and even neglectful (mother rats placed in stressful environments like isolation had greatly decreased capacity for nurture). What researchers found was that these behavioral traits were passed down to future generations: pups born to neglectful mothers endured stressful childhoods and grew up to become neglectful mothers themselves. But when babies born to stressed or less...