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They Had It Coming The parents indicted in the college-admissions scandal were responding to a changing America, with rage at being robbed of what they believed was rightfully theirs. Felicity Huffman leaves a federal courthouse on April 3. GRETCHEN ERTL / REUTERS Updated at 5:23 p.m. ET on April 9, 2018. Sweet Christ, vindication! How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers, I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking,  Could this be a bit too much? Let’s back up. Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I mo

The inconvenient truth about genetics and success By  KATHRYN PAIGE HARDEN |   NEW YORK DAILY NEWS   | APR 19, 2019  |   11:11 AM    By reminding us that we don’t have perfect control over every aspect of our lives, genetics can encourage us to be more compassionate of ourselves and more tolerant of the differences we see in other people. Some of us are born with genes that make us struggle to lose weight and keep it off. This was the conclusion of a new  genetics study  published this week, where scientists analyzed information from over 2 million locations in people’s genetic code. Middle-aged adults who had the highest genetic risk were  25 times  more likely to be obese than those who had the lowest genetic risk. This type of research has been  greeted with cheers by activists fighting fat phobia : If body weight is seen as genetic, then heavier people might be less stigmatized as lazy or unable to control themselves. We’ve seen