No toy—and that’s all these video games are—should ever have gruesome as an option.

Ah for the days when Uncle Wiggily and Chinese Checkers were all the rage . . .

At the risk of sullying First Things with a matter that wouldn’t make the category of Eleventh Things, I was struck by word this week that Jamie Lynn Spears, the sixteen-year-old kid sister of pop tartlet Britney Spears, is pregnant.

Jamie Lynn announced the news on Tuesday and the celebrity-industrial complex went into overdrive. Some of the stories have been kind to the young lady. Many have not been. There’s a lot of clucking on the blogs about rednecks getting knocked up early and whatnot. That’s fine.

But we ought to pause, for just a moment, and appreciate Ms. Spears for doing something fairly bold for a girl in her position: Not murdering her baby. Spears is the star of a Nickelodeon’s Zoey 101 and, like Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore and other teen actresses before faced the prospect of much work before her, most of it quite commercial and hence, likely to be quite profitable. Having a baby will derail at least some of that; at the very least it will probably disqualify her from the teen ingénue roles that are the bread-and-butter of her class of actress.

One suspects that there were probably a few, perhaps many, forces which counseled Spears to “take care” of the “problem.” It’s not hard to imagine that conversation with a bullying adult from some other side of the business. And while I don’t know that there’s any data on this, again, one suspects that young actresses have routinely faced with this sort of choice for the last eighty years or so. I wonder how many of them chose the life of their baby over financial rewards and business pressure.

Obviously, becoming pregnant while unmarried, and at sixteen, is not optimal. But Spears deserves credit for choosing life. I wonder if the pro-choice feminists will celebrate her boldness and sacrifice.

The blog Canterbury Tales has this list of the Nine Worthies, broken down into three categories: Pagan, Hebrew, and Christian.

Imagine different categories, with more contemporary examples:

Atheist
George Orwell
George Bernard Shaw
Bjørk

Spiritualist/New Age
Edgar Cayce
Deepak Chopra
Shirley MacLaine

Relativist
Michel Foucault
Jean-Paul Sartre
Bill Clinton

Webkinz
Reindeer
Black Friesian
Googles

Can you think of other lists—or modern examples of the original categories? No? OK, just asking . . . calm down.

The cover story of this week’s New York Times science section asks the question of the nature of the laws of nature. It’s a fascinating article. First we see Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University who, on the Times’ editorial page asserted that all of science operated on the faith that the universe had order and that we could know that order. Davies is correct, of course. As the then Cardinal Ratzinger observes in the first chapter of Introduction to Christianity, in order to believe anything, man must have faith–which cannot be fully logically proved–in something. If we are to claim that science tells us real truths about the world, we must first believe that such truths exist and that we can know them. The belief in the order of the universe was, after all, what drove the beginning of modern science in the first place.

But other scientists differ whether faith in order is the foundation of science, and what this order is exactly. Some think that science has been confirming order for 2,000 years–in other words science predicts order and finds it, proving itself. That seems a bit shaky to me, but I’m not a scientist. There is the “ultimate Platonist” Max Tegmark of MIT who “maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics.” There are also scientists who do not believe in the laws of nature, or who believe that its fundamental law is the unpredictability of the particles of matter.

The one thing the scientists interviewed can agree on, however, is that there is no reason for the universe to have any order at all. If that is the case, then it might be worth asking the question of why it should have order and what or who could have given it that order. But that is the topic of many articles that have already been written, and, no doubt, many articles that are yet to come.