Childhood

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague. " It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them. The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?"

When some filmmakers focus on children or childishness, they're often just interested in nostalgia for childhood. The kids in Wes Anderson's films and in a lot of movies Steven Spielberg produces are generic placeholders or evocations of other times and eras and experiences — loss of virginity, love of movies, discovery of a bygone world, precociousness as a means of self-flattery. It's not always false. But with a director like Hirokazu Koreeda, you never feel a childhood being remembered or a quaint longing for a lost moment in time.

An American who serves as a commander with a Somali militant group says in a new autobiography that he had a "privileged" childhood in Alabama before he joined the al-Qaida linked militants. Omar Hammami, also known as Abu Mansur al-Amriki, says in his online diary released Wednesday that his "bad temperament" runs in his family and that he showed anger to his teachers when he was in kindergarten. He says he is releasing the first part of his autobiography now due to the "unpredictable nature" of jihad.

The Tri-Town Early Childhood Program, located at Old Rochester Regional High School in Mattapoisett, is accepting applications for the 2012-2013 school year. A limited number of spaces is available, officials said. Applications are being taken on a first-come, first-served basis. The enrollment policy is based on a balance of 3- and 4-year-old students, a balance of boys and girls, and a balance among residents of the three member towns, Rochester, Marion, and Mattapoisett. The program provides early childhood education to preschoolers as well as offering high school students a chance...

The poet James Fenton has written about the purity and intensity of joy we experience as young children through activities as simple as dancing, jumping, and singing. There is a kind of mercy, he says, in what he calls the "primal erasure," the forgetting of these moments, or else their loveliness might spoil us for life. Yet there is also a kind of perverse pleasure in trying to recall them nonetheless, at least for Romantic artists such as Schumann. In his "Kinderszenen" ("Scenes From Childhood")

Over 50 New Hampshire chefs and restaurant staff are participating in a culinary event to raise money to fight childhood hunger. Taste of the Nation Manchester is being held the night of Wednesday, April 18, at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester. It's sponsored by the nonprofit group Share Our Strength. The event has raised more than $756,000 to fund programs to combat childhood hunger in the state. Area charities that have benefited include The New Hampshire Food Bank, Children's Alliance of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Farm to School Program and the Manchester...

MONTPELIER - The Vermont House has voted to uphold a philosophical exemption for parents who want to skip the requirement that their children get a series of vaccinations before being allowed to attend school or child care. The House voted against an amendment to eliminate the exemption that public health officials have blamed for lowering Vermont's childhood vaccination rate from 93 percent for incoming kindergarteners in 2005 to 83 percent in 2010. The Senate earlier passed a version of the bill ending the philosophical exemption.

THE GLOBE does a great service by highlighting child poverty and its consequences ("A rising hunger among children; BMC sees more who are dangerously thin and facing lasting problems," Page A1, July 28). Massachusetts' relative wealth obscures the sobering reality that 186,000 of our children live in poverty. The recession has hit no one harder than low-income children. I am retiring after 20 years as executive director of Greater Boston Legal Services and 43 as a lawyer for low-income individuals.

Q. My mother was physically and mentally abused as a child. I know because I have been listening to the horror stories since I was 5 years old. I am now in my 40s and, quite frankly, am running out of compassion for her. First of all, I resent her dumping this on me when I was so young. Second, I know plenty of people who had rotten childhoods, but they eventually made peace with the past and stopped whining about it all the time. I understand venting is a part of the healing process, as I have been in therapy myself.

Before she wrote her first memoir, Mary Karr was already a poet. If every word matters to a prose writer, to a poet the words matter that much more. Take “Lit,’’ Karr’s dazzling new memoir, which picks up her story just after a harrowing small-town Texas childhood and adolescence. “Lit’’ evokes the combustibility of Karr’s family, famously chronicled in her stunning debut, “The Liar’s Club.’’ That book begins on the night Karr’s mother set fire to her dolls in a moment of psychosis that begs to be read as metaphor for the insanity, alcoholism, neglect, and strange searing love which...

An American who serves as a commander with a Somali militant group says in a new autobiography that he had a "privileged" childhood in Alabama before he joined the al-Qaida linked militants. Omar Hammami, also known as Abu Mansur al-Amriki, says in his online diary released Wednesday that his "bad temperament" runs in his family and that he showed anger to his teachers when he was in kindergarten. He says he is releasing the first part of his autobiography now due to the "unpredictable nature" of jihad.

In Needham, we lived across the street from the birthplace and childhood home of one of America's most famous illustrators, N.C. Wyeth. After moving to Chadds Ford, Pa., Wyeth missed Needham terribly. It is said that every evening for 30 years, he went outside, faced Needham, and mentally projected himself back to his far-away childhood homestead. Perhaps it was his father's longing that prompted painter Andrew Wyeth to create "Far From Needham. " I recently completed 25 years in the Foreign Service living as far from Needham as one can get — Bangladesh, Malawi, Kenya, Egypt, and Namibia.

MONTPELIER - The Vermont House has voted to uphold a philosophical exemption for parents who want to skip the requirement that their children get a series of vaccinations before being allowed to attend school or child care. The House voted against an amendment to eliminate the exemption that public health officials have blamed for lowering Vermont's childhood vaccination rate from 93 percent for incoming kindergarteners in 2005 to 83 percent in 2010. The Senate earlier passed a version of the bill ending the philosophical exemption.

Over 50 New Hampshire chefs and restaurant staff are participating in a culinary event to raise money to fight childhood hunger. Taste of the Nation Manchester is being held the night of Wednesday, April 18, at the Radisson Hotel in Manchester. It's sponsored by the nonprofit group Share Our Strength. The event has raised more than $756,000 to fund programs to combat childhood hunger in the state. Area charities that have benefited include The New Hampshire Food Bank, Children's Alliance of New Hampshire, New Hampshire Farm to School Program and the Manchester Boys...

Louise Doughty's sixth novel, "Whatever You Love," is an unflinching reckoning with sudden, unbearable loss and obsessive vengeance. We witness the shattering and reconstruction of Laura Dodgson as she faces the mutability of love. The novel is both elegy and thriller. What's left to say about the death of a young child after Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist" or Jeremy Page's "The Wake"? Laura's unmoored but passionate strength adds a gripping new voice to the compelling genre.

Q. I'm 16 years old, and I have two best friends, "Krystina" and "Tayler," who mean the world to me. Lately, Krystina has been full of drama. She often says she feels left out and hurt. But, Annie, we never do anything without including her. Recently, she's been pulling this whole "you guys never tell me anything until two weeks later" thing. But I usually tell her everything at the same time I tell Tayler. She even knows stuff about me that Tayler doesn't. But she claims that Tayler tells me personal things that she doesn't repeat.

In Needham, we lived across the street from the birthplace and childhood home of one of America's most famous illustrators, N.C. Wyeth. After moving to Chadds Ford, Pa., Wyeth missed Needham terribly. It is said that every evening for 30 years, he went outside, faced Needham, and mentally projected himself back to his far-away childhood homestead. Perhaps it was his father's longing that prompted painter Andrew Wyeth to create "Far From Needham. " I recently completed 25 years in the Foreign Service living as far from Needham as one can get — Bangladesh, Malawi, Kenya, Egypt, and Namibia.

Louise Doughty's sixth novel, "Whatever You Love," is an unflinching reckoning with sudden, unbearable loss and obsessive vengeance. We witness the shattering and reconstruction of Laura Dodgson as she faces the mutability of love. The novel is both elegy and thriller. What's left to say about the death of a young child after Anne Tyler's "The Accidental Tourist" or Jeremy Page's "The Wake"? Laura's unmoored but passionate strength adds a gripping new voice to the compelling genre.

Q. Growing up with older brothers, I was exposed to sex early through the magazines, parties, etc. that came with them being in high school and entering puberty. I was even sharing a room with a teenage brother who snuck his girlfriends in while I was "asleep. " On my block, there was a group of us, boys and girls, who would play "doctor. " My problem: When I was 11 or 12, I was asked to baby-sit a neighbor's kids. One of them was a girl about 6 or 7 with whom I played doctor until I saw a fear in her that stopped me dead.

ORLANDO, Fla. - Walt Disney World is retooling an Epcot exhibit on childhood obesity after critics complained it was insensitive to obese kids and reinforced stereotypes. The interactive exhibit, Habit Heroes, featured animated fitness superheroes Will Power and Callie Stenics and super-size villains Snacker and Lead Bottom, who eat junk food and watch too much television. Critics said the exhibit reinforces stereotypes that obese children are lazy and have poor eating habits.