I sometimes read the advice columns in the paper, primarily for entertainment but occasionally for insight. Some days it’s hard to avoid reading at least one of them, since The Washington Post carries at least four. All those plus the horoscope and that’s pretty much the Style section on a bad day.

I like Carolyn Hax, partly because she deals with issues that are more likely to be relevant to me than the others do, but mostly because I like her style. She tells people what they need to hear, gets snarky when she needs to, and doesn’t pull any punches.

I’m more familiar with Amy Dickinson from her role as a panelist on Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! than I am from reading her column, which I don’t do often, so I don’t have a good feel for her style. But the headline on her column caught my eye the other day and I read this (go look: I’m not making this up):

Amy responds that “if at all possible you should interact with your children (at least sometimes) in play” and recommends that “Tired” and the rest of us watch the Babies documentary so we can see how important play is.

I suspect that Carolyn would not have been so mild in her response. And certainly I won’t be:

Seriously, people: go read the “The Last Taboo.” Even if you don’t care about or believe in the long-term impacts that human overpopulation is having on the planet you might be able to appreciate its impacts on people living today in overpopulated countries like India (17 percent of the human population squeezed into 2.5 percent of the Earth’s land; 53 percent of the population living in poverty). The article discusses the links between overpopulation, poverty, literacy, education, human rights, women’s rights, birth reproductive rights, and environmental degradation, and explores how microlending is helping with all of this.

A related article discusses the Catholic church’s untenable position on family planning and looks at how close the Vatican came in 1966 to allowing birth control.

It all got me thinking about Mother Teresa, who I recently learned is being honored with a U.S. postage stamp later this year. Apparently Americans still hold the image of Mother Teresa as a great humanitarian (though most, I suspect, are vague on what she’s meant to have done) and don’t realize that she was a fanatic and a fraud. Most people believe that Mother Teresa spent her life trying to improve the lot of India’s poor, when in fact she glorified poverty and suffering and did little to alleviate either. She vigorously opposed the one thing that could have done the most good for the population she claimed to care about: birth control.