"Want to Be Happier? Spend Some Money on Avoiding Household Chores"

"New research finds that we’d all be much happier and healthier campers if we eased up on the cooking, scrubbing, and grocery shopping and instead threw a little money at these problems.

“We feel like we don’t have enough time to do everything we want to do, and that makes us feel like we’re unable to cope with the demands in our everyday life,” says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ashley V. Whillans, who studies how people navigate trade-offs between time and money. “We know that buying into positive experiences—like the movies—is a good predictor of daily happiness. This is one of the first studies to look at buying our way out of the negative moments in the day as another key to happiness.”

As incomes have risen in many countries over recent decades, more people have reported greater “time scarcity.” Those who feel time stress show signs of lower life satisfaction, including more anxiety, poorer eating and exercise habits, and increased insomnia."

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/want-to-be-happier-spend-some-money-on-avoiding-household-chores?utm_source=SilverpopMailing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=11.15.2017%20(1)

Related: The Stanford study they mentioned 

FB: "It may seem obvious that deleting miserable chores from our to-do lists would lift our mental well-being, yet people don’t outsource unpleasant jobs all that much—even those who can well afford to do so."

“'Quiet Desperation' of Academic Women”

“While some issues in the report mirror concerns raised in other venues (such as the difficulty for women in particular of balancing work and family responsibilities), others receive more attention here than elsewhere. For example, service responsibilities are seen as a significant source of both sexism (women receive more of the assignments) and career roadblocks (the service work doesn't count for tenure). 

Those interviewed in the report even go so far as to criticize the NSF program that sponsored the research because it also urged Irvine to create "equity" positions in which faculty members -- typically women -- helped to review searches to be sure that diverse pools and perspectives were being sought. "To paraphrase one participant who wished anonymity: 'They'll not get the next promotion, or the next raise. And it also made them lightening rods for all the frustration on campus that women are getting special treatment. So it was a perfect example of service that helps the institution but really hurts the individual.'"

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/12/women

FB: “Generally, the women interviewed described the offices and services designed to help them as places that were focused on legal and technical issues, and given that many of their frustrations weren't legal, they didn't rely on these services. In addition, the women interviewed -- citing in part a desire not to have their careers hurt -- tended to focus on figuring out informal ways to deal with problems, rather than seeking policy changes. Women are "extremely adept at detecting the academy's cues," the study says. "Many feared backlash and retribution if they agitated openly for change."”

"Twenty-First Century Victorians"

"Today, spin classes, artisanal food, and the college application process have replaced Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons. But make no mistake, they serve the same purpose: transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social dominance... 

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers... 

But the capstone of the modern quest for Bildung is surely the college application process. There is no good nineteenth-century analogue for this ridiculous new ritual, although Dickens would’ve been perfectly able to satirize its inherent absurdity: Millions act as if a system weighted very heavily toward privilege is in fact some kind of meritocracy, and that a person’s worth can be judged by the prestige of the school where they have been accepted."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/victorian-values-fitness-organic-wealth-parenthood/

FB: "We should care about health, food, and education. But instead of seeing them as ways to prop up class dominance, we should improve them for everyone." 

"After 200 years without land title, Nova Scotia black communities offered hope"

"The problem can be traced back two centuries, when the government gave plots of land to Black Loyalists for their support during the American Revolutionary War and to Black Refugees, former slaves who sought refuge after the War of 1812. The government, however, did not give deeds, which meant those who settled never officially owned the land they lived on.

The repercussions today are that, without clear title, residents cannot sell their property or legally pass it down to other relatives. The province says that out of the 1,620 total land parcels in Cherry Brook, East Preston and North Preston, for instance, about a third are without clear title."

http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/nova-scotia/legal-title-black-loyalists-north-preston-1.4309505

"DISPATCHES FROM THE RAP WARS"

"I’m thinking, There is no real reason this kid should know this much about gang presence on the South Side, because he’s from another side of town. It wasn’t just territory they had down cold. They were up on the latest of basically every gang war in the city.

I asked these kids how the hell they knew all this. They looked at me like I was an idiot. “Music,” they said...

It’s surprising how much strategy goes into the making and posting of these videos on YouTube and SoundCloud. CBE members are constantly considering how to get the most views. (At least one of their videos has exceeded five million.) The thinking is that if a video pulls enough, record labels will start calling. Sometimes the guys will record a video but wait to release it until a rival gang member—preferably one they’ve called out—is shot, so that it seems like CBE is taking credit. It’s all about convincing viewers that CBE really does the violent stuff that they rap about—and often they do...

I once asked him why he projects such a violent persona in the videos. He flipped the question back on me: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?”

He was right. As one of the other CBE rappers would always say, “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”...

The more clout you have, the more cloutheads—easily exploitable groupies—you have. A.J. has a lot of cloutheads. And he won’t just ask them to take off their clothes; he’ll ask them for money, meals, new iPhones—almost always in exchange for the promise of sex. Since most of the guys in CBE are really bad at dealing drugs—they usually smoke up their own supply—the gang relies on the rappers to bring in cash this way. The whole exchange between rappers and cloutheads is a bizarre modern twist on sex work."

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/October-2016/Chicago-Gangs/

I wanted to pull every part of this. It's voyeuristic, for sure, but it's also *revelatory, a peek in, an opening into... can't think of words* 

This is what it can actually look like to try to get out of poverty under conditions of systematic oppression.

I mean, look at the number of detective dramas on TV; true crime podcasts; our society is obsessed with stories about murder, might as well commercialize it

FB: "For the gang—and other gangs like it—the rappers are designated as the ticket out of poverty. It becomes the responsibility of the rest of the members to support and protect them. Each rapper has one or two “shooters.” These are the members who make good on the threats the rappers dish out in their lyrics and on social media. And, yes, that means shooting—and sometimes killing—people. CBE has about a dozen shooters. A.J. may be the one holding an automatic weapon in his Instagram photos, but he has never shot at the opps.

The rest of CBE—there are about 30 members total—are known as “the guys.” Some are just loosely affiliated with the gang, but others play more active roles, acting as producers or cameramen. Geo and Marcus, for example, basically serve as the tech department. They do stuff like steal the local school’s Wi-Fi password."

or

"I remember a moment when A.J. started to feel her drift away because he had refused her demand that their relationship become monogamous. So he played his trump card. It was clear she had long had a slumming, voyeuristic desire to come down to the Lincoln Homes, so he invited her to visit during a repass—a celebratory wake—for a resident who had been shot. It was a total bash, everybody outside wearing T-shirts with “CBE” silk-screened across the front. A.J. gave her a tour, walking her around and pointing out things like “Here’s my niggas playing dice” and “You know, the opps might ride through here anytime and shoot up the block.”"

"When Free Speech Dismantles Diversity Initiatives"

"The conservative base of students, we are told, are reluctant to speak up about their ideologies because they fear being silenced, or even vilified by their left leaning Marxist faculty and other students.

Vilified or silenced by whom? Weren’t diversity initiatives conceived to make legitimate spaces for promoting dialogues about forms of marginality and social justice issues? Weren’t these the same initiatives created to include the gender and identities of those that were historically marginalized?

While these above questions have remained unanswered, some colleges have new strategies to minimize vilification or silencing of conservative students on campus. Their plan: Enroll more conservative students...

It has become amply clear to those who are fighting against fascism and White supremacy on college and university campuses, that the agenda of groups like alt-right and some conservative campus clubs like Identity Evropa, Young Americans for Freedom, Vanguard America, Turning Point USA (that also maintains the Professor Watchlist) is to not promote any view point diversity.  Instead, their sole agenda is to disrupt the legal and cultural protections to protect justice by asking for platforms to legitimize ideologically racist and culturally conservative indoctrination in the name of  “political diversity.”... 

In 2015, The Nation published “The New Thought Police: Why are campus administrators invoking civility to silence critical speech?” by Joan W Scott. Scott reminds us by quoting social theorist Nancy Fraser that, “Once a certain space or style of argument is identified as civil, the implication is that dissenters from it are uncivilized. “Civility” becomes a synonym for orthodoxy; “incivility” designates unorthodox ideas or behavior.”... 

Backed by powerful and conservative funders, in Trump’s America there is a growing fear that if one challenges the white supremacists and their narratives of culturally and morally oppressive stances, such disruptions are seen as “too disruptive,” “too offensive,” “too uncivil.” "

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/31/when-free-speech-dismantles-diversity-initiatives/

Related: free speech not principled 

FB: "The turbulent 60s and 70s that gave rise to departments such as Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, and various social justice related movements on college campuses (under the broad banner of “multiculturalism”) challenged Eurocentric models of knowledge.  Such diversity-based models of education are obviously offensive to those who want to “Make American White Again.”

So they have begun a well-funded effort to invoke the principles of “free speech” to dismantle various diversity initiatives that have provided equal opportunities to the protected classes."

"The Public’s Distrust of Biotech Is Deepening. Commercialization May Be to Blame."

"Parents approached for the project have reportedly been concerned about data privacy, potential bias from insurers who may equate genetic variants as preexisting conditions, and the uploading of their newborn’s data onto federal databases. I suggest the low enrollment underscores how a public fascination with genetics — half of parents on a previous survey said they were “very” interested in the project — is coupled with distrust in the commercialization of biotech, which is creating new social and economic inequalities... 

“We were kind of taken aback,” Elias told me when I met him in 2013, not long before his death from cancer. “The rationale was that if someone carries a genetic mutation that is ‘actionable,’ meaning that doctors can do something about it, then the patients and doctors must be informed.” Elias and Annas believed the College was overreaching. Genetic mutations, or predictive markers, are often only “associated” with a certain disease. Elias was fulminating that the field was anxious to show off its dazzling abilities to use genetics, while many of the genetic variants might not be causative. “Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Elias said. “Knowledge is seductive. That’s until we’re faced with knowledge that we’re all at risk.”"

https://undark.org/article/biotech-commercialization-trust-genetics/?utm_content=buffer27115&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"Researchers grapple with the ethics of testing brain implants"

"The episode highlights a tricky dilemma for companies and research teams involved in deep brain stimulation (DBS) research: If trial participants want to keep their implants, who will take responsibility—and pay—for their ongoing care? And participants in last week’s meeting said it underscores the need for the growing corps of DBS researchers to think long-term about their planned studies... 

“The big issue becomes cost,” she says. “We transition from having grants and device donations” covering costs, to patients being responsible. And although the participants agreed to those conditions before enrolling in the trial, Mayberg says she considers it a “moral responsibility” to advocate for lower costs for her patients, even it if means “begging for charity payments” from hospitals. And she worries about what will happen to trial participants if she is no longer around to advocate for them. “What happens if I retire, or get hit by a bus?” she asks."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/researchers-grapple-ethics-testing-brain-implants?utm_content=buffer28b00&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

FB: People are asking to keep implanted devices from clinical trials, and researchers are searching for ways to provide care for them after the end of the trial 

"Christians were strangers"

"

"Apart from the small and ethnically circumscribed exception of the Jews, the ancient world had never known an exclusivist faith, so the rapid success of early Christianity is a historical anomaly. Moreover, because some form of Christianity is a foundational part of so many peoples’ lives and identities, the Christianisation of the Roman empire feels perennially relevant – something that is ‘about us’ in a way a lot of ancient history simply is not. Of course, this apparent relevance also obscures as much as it reveals, especially just how strange Rome’s Christianisation really was... 

Paul was a Christian, perhaps indeed the first Christian, but he was also a Roman. That was new. Even if the occasional Jew gained Roman citizenship, Jews weren’t Romans. As a religion, Judaism was ethnic, which gave Jews some privileged exemptions unavailable to any other Roman subjects, but it also meant they were perpetually aliens. In contrast, Christianity was not ethnic... 

In a cosmopolitan Roman empire, where cities sucked in expendable labour from the countryside, and where artisans and craftsmen had to travel a very long way from home, that kind of community could not be taken for granted or created casually. Christians would and did look after one another, sometimes exclusively so... 

From a fringe movement, Christianity had become a central fact of urban life. Yet the religion’s normalisation made it suddenly vulnerable in the middle of the third century, when – thanks to dynastic instability, epidemic disease and military incompetence ­– imperial government went into a potentially terminal decline... 

By placing the authority of the Roman state and the imperial office to police and enforce right belief, Constantine created a model that would have a long and ambiguous history. Councils of bishops, ostensibly informed by the Holy Spirit, would henceforth define what was orthodox... 

As social advancement came to depend on being a Christian, and as the civic calendar of non-Christian beliefs was increasingly dismantled, the majority of urban Romans actively thought of themselves as Christians by the end of the fourth century."

https://aeon.co/essays/how-an-obscure-oriental-cult-converted-a-vast-pagan-roman-empire

I feel like the key to any movement is to provide people with a community, and a sense of purpose and meaning. And once you've gained that power, you can control people by threatening to take those things away. 

Related: Christianism; Aquinas and sex; 

"Gun research could save lives, but America won't fund it"

"In order to prevent gun injuries and deaths, we need accurate information about how they occur and why. While police reports and FBI data can provide some detail, they don’t include the thousands of cases that go unreported each year. Between 2006 and 2010, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that more than a third of victims of crimes involving a firearm did not report the crime to police. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which collects victimization data from about 90,000 households each year, helps to fill in this gap. However, even this survey has its drawbacks. It doesn’t collect data from youth younger than 12, it doesn’t include murder and it doesn’t help us fully understand the offender’s motivations and beliefs.

Social scientists like me need more research in order to get the level of detail we need about gun crime. There’s just one major roadblock: The federal government won’t fund it... 

According to Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Programat the University of California, Davis Medical Center, fewer than five private organizations are willing to provide gun research funding... 

State funding may be another option. In 2016, California announced its intent to fund the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center. This is the first time a state has stepped forward to fund a research center focused on guns. California remains the only state to take this step."

https://www.popsci.com/gun-research-funding

FB: "The CDC wasn’t the only federal agency affected. In 2011, Congress added a similar clause to legislation that regulated funding for the National Institutes of Health. However, due to a directive from the Obama administration, the NIH continued to provide funding for gun research. That push faded as the Obama administration left office."

"On Minimization as a Patriarchal Reflex"

“It all happens automatically. Changing it can feel like changing the way I breathe. This is part of the reason why, I believe, men can be so insulted by descriptions of this stuff. We’re being asked to deconstruct something that feels essential to the way we are in the world. What would be left if those defences were taken away?

How does that moment feel? Like I’ve been invaded and have to push out or strike back. My neck gets stiff with narcissism: I can’t let the other person have a legitimate problem without making it about me. I have to react instantly. I can’t pause, take it in, nod, reflect, try to differentiate the other’s feelings from my own. I can’t let it be, without fixing it, which really means casting it aside.

What do I do? Never anything that I couldn’t justify according to some arbitrary spectrum of “normal emotional responses”. Maybe a little exasperated sigh, a tiny smirk that no-one but a partner would pick up on (so it’s even worse), an eye-roll. Maybe I change the subject too quickly. I might squint my eyes and shake my head. If I get going a little, my voice becomes irritated or more emphatic. This all happens below the threshold of “conflict”, and within the realm of being able to pretend to be innocent. At least according to me. The net effect of all of these gestures, not to mention the verbal deflections I’m working up to, is to say that the problem my partner is bringing to me is hers alone...

At the microlevel, when my partner suggests I take a cab at 3:30am, my ingrained response is to feel she’s infringing on my space. There are elements of personal and familial psychology at play for me here – some of them reasonable. But misogyny has hardwired me to belittle her concern, so that I can own more space...

I have to climb a mountain, forty years high, to look a little boy in the eye and tell him it’s okay to feel his pain and sorrow. To tell him it’s a good thing, actually. That it will help him learn to listen, and listening will help him let other people have their feelings as well.”

http://matthewremski.com/wordpress/minimization-patriarchal-reflex/

Do this work! Whatever position of oppression you might occupy, Investigate yourself and your failings, even when there is no obvious solution. Condemn yourself to uncertainty and ambiguity for awhile, learn from it.

FB: “The locker-room comments amongst my middle-aged cohort aren’t as sexually objectifying as they are gender-objectifying. When a woman partner is mentioned, there’s a general groan. There’s an expectation that a story of nagging or craziness is about to unfold. I get on edge when I feel this happen, because I know it will be hard to point to anything distinct to call out or in. It’s hard to call out a general feeling, as old as bone. If I’m feeling up for at least pretending to do ally work that day, the most I can say is “Well maybe she feels like x, because of y,” referring to some aspect of patriarchy that wouldn’t otherwise get discussed. This is always awkward, because I’m interrupting not only a discharge, but veering out of a well-worn groove.”

“UCI trio designs educational computer game that immerses players in 18th-century Ghana”

““Sankofa” gets its name from a word in Twi meaning “go back and seek it,” which, according to Seed, is how players of the interactive, three-dimensional game learn the history of the Asante Kingdom, a West African society located in modern-day Ghana.

Gamers follow a young girl as she wanders through the local marketplace; creates a storytelling cloth; and explores Asante folk tales, spirits and legends. The ethnographically authentic landscape allows players to discover aspects of 18th-century Ghanian life that they might not encounter in a classroom.

“It’s a unique game,” says El Zarki, director of UCI’s Institute for Virtual Environments & Computer Games. “The learning goals are different from other games, because this is really about teaching an underrepresented culture.””

https://www.cs.uci.edu/bringing-history-to-life/

"Call of Duty, Wolfenstein, and the Joy of Killing Virtual Nazis"

"Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, deals explicitly with the theme ofresistance. Like Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Man in the High Castle,” it imagines an alternative reality in which Hitler has won the war and invaded the United States. Jack-booted German officers and hood-wearing Klansmen patrol the streets of America by day, and the game goes out of its way to portray them not as mere pop-up targets for the trigger-happy but as cruel, morally decrepit deviants who must be stopped because of what they stand for. This gives Wolfenstein II a resonance with the contemporary political landscape that its creators couldn’t have imagined when they began development. The recent rise of nationalism in Europe and North America has emboldened the far right to such an extent that conservative pizza-makers feel the need to publicly demand that Fascists stop buying their products. Thanks to the movement’s successful co-opting of young, disenfranchised men—a big video-game demographic—the use of Nazis as cannon fodder feels, ludicrously, somehow transgressive and confrontational... 

The game’s tagline, “Make America Nazi-Free Again,” makes clear its developers’ feelings on Donald Trump. (Curiously, Trump’s brother Robert serves on the board of directors at ZeniMax, Wolfenstein II’s publisher.) The game itself apparently received some last-minute updates before it was released, including a newspaper interview with a “dapper young KKK leader,” another Spencer reference. Was this a cynical publisher’s attempt to profit from a few memes? Maybe. But if these games manage, even ambiently, to communicate why the Allied forces fought Fascism, as well as how and where they fought it, their status is surely elevated from slick shooting galleries to something morally instructive."

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/call-of-duty-wolfenstein-and-the-joy-of-killing-virtual-nazis?mbid=social_facebook

“Wimpy White Boy Syndrome’: How Racial Bias Creeps Into Neonatal Care"

“Stanford University School of Medicine researchers analyzed more than 18,600 hospital records for California-born babies with a very low birth weight (3.3 pounds or less). Intended to measure performance and care disparity, researchers scored the records on whether the patient received care within standard medical practices and outcomes. The scores indicated that Latino infants and those listed with “other” as an ethnicity were treated the worst. Hospitals with the best patient outcomes treated white patients better, while Blacks received better care in poorer-quality NICUs...

Although statistics back up the belief that prematurely born Black babies will do better than white infants in most cases, it is not a guarantee of positive health outcomes. Yet, the aggressiveness in treatment for surviving premature babies of color is proportional to these assumptions. According to the Stanford study, Black infants received less steroid therapy for lung development; did not have timely exams for retinopathy of prematurity, a disease causing the abnormal growth of blood vessels in the eye; weren’t given human breast milk as often; and developed more infections due to careless hospital handling than whites, Latinos, or Asians...

The study also does not take into consideration anecdotal responses to care such as the unofficial diagnosis of “wimpy white boy syndrome” (WWBS) used in many hospitals throughout the U.S. Dr. David G. Oelberg, a neonatologist with the Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters in Norfolk, Virginia, defines this condition in his Neonatal Intensive Care editorial as “a neonatal white boy with adjusted gestational age of 35-40 weeks who is failing to achieve the developmental landmarks of weaning to an open crib and/or not taking all of his oral feeds as expected.” Mostly, NICU staff will “diagnose” a baby with WWBS if he is failing to improve in the absence of other obvious medical conditions.”

https://rewire.news/article/2017/10/18/wimpy-white-boy-syndrome-bias-neonatal-care/

"Book Review: The Ordeal of Appalachia"

"Stoll refuses to accept that there is something intrinsically lacking in Appalachians — people who, after all, managed to carve out a life on such challenging, mountainous terrain. Something was done to them, and he is going to figure out who did it. He links their fate to other threatened agrarian communities, from rice growers in the Philippines to English peasants at the time of the Enclosure Acts. “Whenever we see hunger and deprivation among rural people, we need to ask a simple question: What went on just before the crisis that might have caused it?” he writes. “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins.”... 

The confused legal property claims offered the aspiring coal barons a window: They could approach longtime inhabitants and say, essentially, “Look, we all know you don’t have full title to this land, but if you sell us the mineral rights, we’ll let you stay.” With population growth starting to crimp the wide-ranging agrarian existence, some extra cash in hand was hard to reject. Not that it was very much: One farmer turned over his 740 acres for a mere $3.58 per acre — around $80 today. By 1889, a single company, Flat Top Land Trust, had amassed rights to 200,000 acres in McDowell County in southern West Virginia; just 13 years later, McDowell was producing more than five million tons of coal per year... 

Such rapaciousness did not leave much of the commons that had sustained the makeshift agrarian existence. Of course, there was a new life to replace it: mining coal or logging trees. By 1929, 100,000 men, out of a total state population of only 1.7 million, worked in 830 mines across West Virginia alone. But it is in that very shift that Stoll identifies the region’s turn toward immiseration. With the land spoiled and few non-coal jobs available, workers were at the mercy of whichever coal company dominated their corner of the region. They lived in camps and were paid in scrip usable only at the company store; even the small gardens they were allowed in the camps were geared less toward self-reliance than toward cutting the company’s costs to feed them."

FB: things our country lets happen to its own citizens -" “Banks in coal counties couldn’t invest in home construction or other local improvements because the greater share of their deposits belonged to the companies,” Stoll writes. “No sooner did that capital flow in than it flowed out, depriving banks of funds stable enough for community lending.” Not only had the coal industry, along with timber, supplanted an earlier existence, but it was actively stifling other forms of growth and development."

“Geneticists are starting to unravel evolution's role in mental illness”

“Many of schizophrenia's symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and jumbling sentences, involve brain regions tied to speech, says Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. Over the course of hominid evolution, he says, the ability to speak could have outweighed the small, but unavoidable risk that the genes involved in language could malfunction and result in schizophrenia in a small percentage of the population...

People who live in European regions with relatively lower winter temperatures, they found, were slightly more genetically prone to schizophrenia. Polimanti suggests that if genes that helped people tolerate cold were located close to variants that promote schizophrenia in the genome, then the latter could have been inadvertently carried along during evolution as a “fellow traveller”...

An overactive immune system is thought to be involved in many psychiatric disorders, such as depression2, but a stronger immune system would have made human ancestors more resistant to diseases, says Stranger.“

http://www.nature.com/news/geneticists-are-starting-to-unravel-evolution-s-role-in-mental-illness-1.22914?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews&sf132191802=1

"Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence"

"First, they’re rare, and the people doing the shooting are different. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides... 

Second, the people killed in mass shootings are different from the majority of homicides. Most gun murder victims are men between the ages of 15 and 34. Sixty-six percent are black. Women — of any race and any age — are far less likely to be murdered by a gun. Unless that gun is part of a mass shooting. There, 50 percent of the people who die are women. And at least 54 percent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence — with the perpetrator shooting a current or former partner or a relative... 

policies aimed at reducing gun deaths will likely need to be targeted at the specific people who commit or are victimized by those incidents. And mass shootings just aren’t a good proxy for the diversity of gun violence. Policies that reduce the number of homicides among young black men — such as programs that build trust between community members, police and at-risk youth and offer people a way out of crime — probably won’t have the same effect on suicides among elderly white men. Background checks and laws aimed at preventing a young white man with a history of domestic violence from obtaining a gun and using it in a mass shooting might not prevent a similar shooting by an older white male with no criminal record."

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/?ex_cid=story-facebook

FB: "If we focus on mass shootings as a means of understanding how to reduce the number of people killed by guns in this country, we’re likely to implement laws that don’t do what we want them to do — and miss opportunities to make changes that really work."

"Women Aren’t Ruining Food"

"Any form or style of food or drink is, literally, a matter of taste. It is also all gender neutral, though that hasn’t stopped people from associating tofu and chocolate with women or bitter alcohols with men. Whether that’s because women do most of the buying, or because marketers have an insatiable appetite for turning human enjoyment into target-based profit, we wind up with things like chocolate bars that say they’re “not for girls.” “Women’s” foods tend to be sweet (cupcakes, macarons, wine coolers); thought of as healthy (yogurt, froyo, diet soda, smoothie bowls, salad) or otherwise “fussy” (unicorn lattes, pumpkin spice anything); and come in pink. “Men’s” foods tend to be bitter (hops, coffee, whiskey), spicy (hot sauce, tacos, Flamin’ Hot Cheetohs), and hearty (meat!).

When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don’t have minds of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods."

https://www.tastecooking.com/women-arent-ruining-food/

Related: women + food other one about food tech

"Why Are Prosecutors Putting Innocent Witnesses in Jail?"

"Across America, some prosecutors—arguably with the authority of state and federal laws—are jailing innocent crime victims and witnesses, in hopes of insuring their testimony in court. In Washington State, a sexual-assault victim was arrested and jailed to secure her testimony against the alleged perpetrator. (He was found guilty of kidnapping, attempted rape, and assault with sexual motivation.) In Hillsboro, Oregon, a Mexican immigrant was jailed for more than two years—nine hundred and five days—to obtain his testimony in a murder case. (The case was being brought against his son.) And in Harris County, Texas, a rape survivor suffered a mental breakdown in court while testifying against her assailant. Afraid that the woman would disappear before finishing her testimony, the court jailed her for a month...

In 1984, Congress reaffirmed the right to jail material witnesses, but also noted that their testimony should be secured by deposition, rather than imprisonment, “whenever possible.” Jailing crime survivors and innocent witnesses, in other words, was legal but undesirable... In late 2001, the Department of Justice used material-witness laws to target Muslims, often arresting them at gunpoint and later placing some in solitary confinement. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government eventually apologized to at least thirteen people for wrongful detention as material witnesses, and released dozens more without charges... 

As the trial for the second defendant neared, however, Mitchell’s relationship with the D.A.’s office soured. Mitchell, according to the A.C.L.U. and Civil Rights Corps lawsuit, felt that prosecutors “seemed more intent on telling him what had happened than actually listening to Mr. Mitchell’s account of the shooting.” Equally troubling, he told me, was that the D.A.’s office had made—but not kept—certain promises intended to allay his fears about his safety...

Mitchell felt that the prosecutors hadn’t taken into account how being arrested and jailed would affect him, or others like him. “They were looking for awards and promotions,” he told me. “We’ve still got to go on and live, even afterward.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-are-prosecutors-putting-innocent-witnesses-in-jail?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "In parts of the country, prosecutors are using these orders to put crime victims—especially poor victims, and, in cities like New Orleans, victims of color—in jail in order to get swift victories in court, sometimes, puzzlingly, in minor cases." 

"In one corner of the law, minorities and women are often valued less"

"The 4-year-old’s case is a rare public look at one corner of the American legal system that explicitly uses race and gender to determine how much victims or their families should receive in compensation when they are seriously injured or killed.

As a result, white and male victims often receive larger awards than people of color and women in similar cases, according to more than two dozen lawyers and forensic economists, the experts who make the calculations. These differences largely derive from projections of  how much more money individuals would have earned over their lifetimes had they not been injured – projections that take into account average earnings and employment levels by race and gender...

Law professors who study the practice in the United States say it deserves a fresh look, given America’s increasing awareness of the role race plays in the justice system – as well as the progress women have made in closing other economic disparities. Some other countries, including Canada and Israel, have moved away from using the averages in the name of equality. And the United States has banned the use of race and gender averages in some other calculations. The Affordable Care Act, for example, outlawed the practice of charging women more for health insurance than men...

Still, even some economists acknowledge the practice has problems. For example, most economists don’t attempt to account for how the earnings and employment gaps between men and women will change over time. “If I had used [averages] for females back in 1970, I probably would have underestimated their incomes substantially,” said Bill Brandt, a forensic economist in Washington state...

none of the discussion in court directly addressed G.M.M.’s demographics, according to court records. Yet that wasn’t the end of the story. Although the judge banned discussion of the boy’s ethnicity in the court, the jury still had access only to calculations of damages that included ethnicity as a component."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/wonk/settlements/