EZ Reads 4/5/11

Clearing out all the posts I've been meaning to put up in the last week...

• How Israel could become an energy giant (WSJ)
• R' Herschel Schachter on What Is Orthodox? (Matzav - HT: YS)
• Nice piece on Mimulo flower shop in Brooklyn by The New York Times, which also has some interesting insights into the Chabad/Orthodox world surrounding it. (HT: Hirhurim)
• Great news piece by WBAL about a teacher in Ner Israel - Baltimore who has been teaching for 75 years, including 51 at NIRC. (Aish)
• Full transcript of Netanyahu's YouTube interview (DaledAmos). Really interesting.
• An interesting collection of thoughts on James Kugel's recent book (Fink or Swim)
• What adopting a white girl taught one black family (Newsweek). I don't know that the biases are so much more true for black parents of a white child than the reverse - I think it's natural to suspect an adult tending to a child that looks nothing like them, and distinctly recall having similar concerns on a whitewater rafting trip where my friend and I were on a raft with a black child with white adoptive parents. (Their continuous negativity didn't help much.) That said, I think there's a reasonable case to be made for taking race into some kind of consideration in adoption - if in a specific case the race of the child or parents could become a troubling factor for the child as they try to grow up it may not be a good situation. Similarly, I think there's a preference (or should be) to keep children with people of the same general religion and the like - I know OHEL tries to move Jewish children into Jewish foster homes, for example.