The FDA’s decision this week to lower from 17 to 15 the age at which young women may purchase Plan B emergency contraception without a prescription was not exactly a bold move by the Obama administration.

It was, at most, the halfhearted removal of the thumb Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius had jammed into the FDA’s eyeball in December 2011, when Sebelius overruled Commissioner Margaret Hamburg’s recommendation that all age and point-of-sale restrictions—such as limiting its sale to clinics and pharmacies, keeping it behind the counter, and requiring ID—be removed from the so-called morning-after pill. Hamburg’s recommendation flowed from research indicating that the pills are safe and easy to use. Sebelius’s rejection was widely slammed as based on politics—specifically, the fear that conservatives would accuse President Obama of greasing the path to hot tween orgies.

Were our esteemed forebears actually cannibals? New archeological evidence indicates a firm yes. According to Smithsonian magazine, a recent excavation in the Jamestown Colony in Virginia finally turned up evidence of what’s long been hinted at. During particularly harsh beginnings upon landing in the New World, desperate colonists resorted to human flesh for sustenance. But that’s not the only malady that befell early settlers. Here are some reasons to be thankful you arrived on this continent in the four centuries since.

It Was Originally All Men

Three shiploads of men docked at Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. Three weeks later, they had settled Jamestown, an unused bit of land the Native Americans had deemed undesirable. The next year, two brave women set foot in the colony, but then it took another 13 years for a crop of young unmarried or widowed women to arrive.

‘It’s Not True’

Diane Sawyer didn’t start the interview gently—she launched into a list of unflattering names Knox has been called: “concertante of sex,” “sphinx of Perugia,” “she-devil with an angel face.” Knox looked pained, but she said being slandered by the media was nothing new. “It’s another thing to be sitting in a courtroom, fighting for your life, while people are calling you a devil,” she said.

The media world has utterly embraced Jason Collins for coming out as the first openly gay NBA player, practically giving him an ovation.

Indeed, the starting team did just that on Good Morning America, applauding on Tuesday after the program aired George Stephanopoulos’s exclusive interview with the journeyman athlete. “The way he has handled himself thus far has been so incredibly impressive,” Robin Roberts said.

I know from five years of experience that playing with young kids can be difficult. They make up unreasonable rules and then suddenly lose interest and try to eat a puzzle piece. So it’s no surprise that parents are self-medicating, and with marijuana becoming increasingly decriminalized, it seems a growing number of moms and dads are proudly admitting that, for them, familial bliss is smoldering at the end of a joint.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive, or even allergic to it, but I’ve had enough uncomfortably psychedelic experiences with this century’s super pot to be terrified of it. The last time I sampled some, called Sour Monkey, I made it through five minutes of the movie Looper before confusion and panic set in, causing me to change course and feverishly organize my father’s ethernet cords. I can’t fathom caring for a kid when I’m so helplessly distracted by taking my own pulse.

Yes, Elvis actually was in the building.

There was a swarming media scrum in front of the federal courthouse in Oxford, Mississippi, last week to cover a man accused of one the most serious crimes imaginable: the attempted assassination of the president of the United States, a U.S. senator, and a local judge. It had all the makings of high drama, but few of the locals paid it much notice.

As I squeeze into my dress blues for the first time since 2009, I think of my grandmother. She’d told my brother and me that Americans were once embarrassed to be seen in public with young men not wearing a military uniform. Then she’d shake her head, say that had been a long time ago, and ask if we wanted another bowl of Raisin Bran.

My grandmother was a practical woman and a career Navy wife, so nostalgia didn’t soak her words when she said this. Just consideration. She passed away 10 years ago. The World War II–era America she referenced has been dead far longer than that.

Never Again is the theme of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s 20th anniversary. A two-day tribute begins Sunday for the victims and witnesses of the Nazi slaughter and to the thousands of World War II veterans who will gather on the Mall in Washington, D.C. to reflect on both the past and the future.

Bill Clinton, who dedicated the museum two decades ago, is giving the keynote address. Survivor Elie Wiesel, the founding chairman, will present special awards to Susan Eisenhower, the granddaughter of General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, for his singular leadership of Polish-Jewish relations following the war.

A week after her father, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, allegedly set off a bomb near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring hundreds more, 3-year-old Zahara Tsarnaev was seen happily playing on a slide in her grandmother’s backyard in Rhode Island.

Zahara is likely oblivious to her father’s suspected crimes and perhaps to her father’s death in the early hours of April 19, when he was shot by police trying to apprehend him and his brother, Dzhokhar, who ran him over with a car in a desperate attempt to escape the police.