Wendy Doniger in The Times of India:

William Dalrymple was in the chair at the London lecture on November 12, 2003, where someone lobbed an egg at me, missing me in more ways than one; in his article on Indian history he described the incident and continued: “Within India, mobs mobilized by the Hindu Right have occasionally attacked art exhibitions, libraries, publishers, and movie houses for their alleged unpatriotic and anti Hindu bias; but for the first time the campaign now seemed to be spreading onto campuses worldwide.” American scholars are the small fry in the larger global community at risk; we are relatively safe. But we too have our troubles.When books published by American scholars — Jeffrey Kripal, Paul Courtright, Jim Laine — were attacked in India, the Indian editions were suppressed, and although the books remained in print in America, the offending American scholars received death threats here.

In what I have now come to think of, wistfully, as the (good) old days, in illo tempore, whenever I gave a lecture on Hinduism, afterward, in the question period, an elderly Hindu gentleman (always a man) would rise, pay me an elaborate compliment, and proceed to give a mini-lecture of his own, often learned and sometimes relevant, as if to say, I know things that this American woman does not know. There was no malice in it, just, perhaps, an understandable desire to have the upper hand, the last word, or even, perhaps, to reclaim Hinduism for himself, a Hindu and a man. Usually he added something of value and of interest, and we would often continue the conversation after the lecture, at the reception. Sometimes it was just a ritual gesture, in which the content was largely irrelevant; it was the act of standing up, of claiming the space, that was important. That ritual gesture remains at the heart of the more recent interventions, but now there is certainly malice, and the people on the Internet are not nearly so learned as those old gentlemen used to be. I never thought I would miss those guys, but I would be greatly relieved to have some of them in my audiences now.

The Hindus who object to the books about Hinduism by non-Hindus are primarily concerned with three problems:

1. Non-Hindus rather than Hindus are writing about Hinduism;

2. Some non-Hindus (and indeed some Hindus, too) are writing about the “wrong sort” of Hinduism; and

3. Prominent authors, non-Hindu or Hindu, are writing from an academic rather than a faith stance.

More here.

Adam Barnett in Dissent from a few weeks ago (image Kurds celebrating Newroz, Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 2013 (Alberto Tetta / Flickr)):

One of the experiences that sets the life of a reporter apart from other pursuits is the realization that when you enter a building in a foreign country and see the portrait of a convicted terrorist proudly displayed on every wall, you know you’re in the right place. Such was my experience upon entering the offices of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, or Halklarin Demokratik Partisi (HDP), in a side street near Istanbul’s central square, where I hoped to gain a Kurds’-eye-view of the war against ISIS in northern Syria.

I use the word “terrorist” with hesitation, not only because of its nebulous quality and widespread abuse, but because to millions among Turkey’s Kurdish minority, Abdullah Ocalan (whose portrait beamed down from the walls of the HDP offices) remains the symbolic leader of their decades-long struggle for dignity and human rights. In Turkey, where the label “terrorist” is applied with as much cynicism and bigotry as in Israel, the picture of Ocalan hangs over the fragile peace talks between Ankara and his Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, after three decades of war and misery that claimed at least 35,000 lives, most of them Kurdish.

The HDP is the latest attempt by Turkey’s Kurds to advance their interests by parliamentary means, and plays a crucial role in these talks—not yet negotiations—with its delegates relaying messages to and from Ocalan as he serves out his life sentence in an island prison. The party has much to its credit. A social-democratic bloc of Kurds, secularists, feminists, LGBT activists, and greens with twenty-eight seats in the Turkish national assembly (making it the fourth-largest party), the HDP has roots in the Turkish left of the 1960s and a lineage that goes back to the Democracy Party of Leyla Zana. It advocates equal rights for all minorities (including Alevis and Armenians) and state neutrality on matters of religion, as well as mandating at least one female co-chair at every administrative level and applying a sort of “affirmative action” for LGBT candidates. Already this puts most European and American parties to shame.

But what truly distinguishes the HDP, and could have wider resonance across an ever more fragmented Middle East, is its call for a radical decentralization of powers from Ankara to regional assemblies, along the lines of the democratic experiment being conducted in the area of northern Syria known to Kurds as Rojava. This program would include granting rights to local assemblies to choose an official language for public life and education (the rights most famously denied to Kurds by successive Turkish governments)—“devolution plus multiculturalism,” to put it in policy terms. This formula may sound rather anodyne, but it strikes at the lungs of Turkish nationalist ideology, which in its most virulent form denies even the existence of non-Turkish minorities in Turkey.

More here.

Michelle Goldberg on the reaction Laura Kipnis's recent piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in The Nation (image University Hall, Northwestern University (CC-BY-SA-3.0)):

Last Monday, about thirty Northwestern anti-rape activists marched to their school’s administrative center carrying mattresses and pillows. The event was a deliberate echo of the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who is lugging a mattress everywhere she goes on campus for a year to draw attention to the university’s failure to expel her alleged rapist. At Northwestern, the target of the protest was not a person accused of assault, but the provocative feminist film professor Laura Kipnis. Her offense was penning a February essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe,” which argues against her school’s ban on sex between professors and students, and more broadly against the growing obsession with trauma and vulnerability among feminists on campus.

“If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama,” she writes. “The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.”

Including, apparently, their vulnerability to articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education. As the protesters wrote on a Facebook page for their event, they wanted the administration to do something about “the violence expressed by Kipnis’ message.” Their petition called for “swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article,” and demanded “that in the future, this sort of response comes automatically.” (University President Morton Schapiro told The Daily Northwestern, a student newspaper, that he would consider it, and the students will soon be meeting with the school’s Vice President for Student Affairs to further press their case.) Jazz Stephens, one of the march’s organizers, described Kipnis’s ideas as “terrifying.” Another student told The Daily Northwestern that she was considering bringing a formal complaint because she believes that Kipnis was mocking her concerns about being triggered in a film class, concerns she’d confided privately. “I would like to see some sort of repercussions just so she understands the effect something like this has on her students and her class,” said the student, who Kipnis hadn’t named.

Kipnis could hardly have invented a response that so neatly proved her argument. Not the argument about prohibiting student-teacher sex—there’s still a good case to be made for that. Certainly, Kipnis is right that some undergrads enjoy flaunting their erotic power, but such power is fleeting and ultimately no match for the institutional authority wielded by professors. Yet the reaction to Kipnis—the demands for official censure, the claims of emotional injury—demonstrated how correct she is about the broader climate.

More here.

Gaby Wood in The Telegraph:

“Someone asked me what I was doing in my 10‑year break,” says Kazuo Ishiguro with a boyish chuckle. “And I thought: yes, there has been a 10-year break since my last novel, but I personally haven’t been taking a 10‑year break!”

I suppose it does take some explaining: Ishiguro is one of Britain’s best living novelists, and look how he keeps us waiting. “It takes me a long time to find a project that I think is going to be good enough,” he explains when I visit him at home in Golders Green. “I think I just reject a hell of a lot of stuff now. Often I have themes or a story – the emotions, even, that have to come out of it – but I haven’t got that last piece of the jigsaw.”

The Buried Giant, his first novel since Never Let Me Go, has been met with breathless anticipation – and a little perplexity, since it is set, as he puts it, “on the eve of England”, just before the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Britons in what some historians believe to be an act of genocide. It is a bleak, wild land, populated by ogres and dragons and the weary leftovers of King Arthur’s court. If the setting seems unexpected, no one expected it less than the author himself. “It’s not what I’m used to,” he says. In the book, the west of the country and possibly more is subjected to a plague of forgetting, a “mist” that turns out to be formed by the breath of the she-dragon, Querig, who must be slain if anyone is to remember anything – but dare they remember everything, and what are the risks?

More here.

Kiera Butler in Mother Jones:

Wansink runs Cornell'S Food and Brand Lab, devoted to studying how our physical surroundings—everything from supermarket layout to food packaging to the color of your kitchen walls—affect what and how we eat. The lab, which he founded at the University of Illinois in 1997 and moved to Cornell in 2005, draws funding from government agencies and industry trade groups. It houses two full-time faculty members, six to eight staffers, and 15 or so grad students, postdocs, and visiting scholars from such varied fields as food science, agriculture, economics, marketing, and psychology.

Nestled in a stately building on the campus of Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the lab occupies a suite of offices and classrooms, plus what at first glance looks like an unremarkable seminar space: large rectangular table, white board, sleep-deprived grad students. But on experiment days, out come the tablecloths, dishes, and cutlery. Researchers configure furniture to resemble a restaurant or a home dining room and use hidden cameras and two-way mirrors to document their subjects' actions.

After our lunch, I watch Wansink teach a graduate seminar on eating behavior. The students take turns reporting on their progress. A wiry postdoc named John is trying to figure out why people who indulge in novelty items like deep-fried Snickers bars at the state fair are thinner than those who opt for more conventional fare, like hamburgers. A slim, bespectacled Ph.D. candidate is using two versions of a clip from the movie Harold to study satiety. She has found that students who view a clip in which the characters finish their meal eat a little less afterward than those shown a version that ends with a meal in progress.

More here. [Thanks to Elatia Harris.]

The piece about Bill Clinton I wish I could take back, and nine other things about which I no longer hold the same opinion.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

Changing my mind isn’t all that painful a process; in fact, it can be both liberating and enjoyable to realize that earlier beliefs were mistaken.

To inspire a bit more reflection and self-criticism by both academics and maybe even a few politicos, I offer here the Top 10 Things About Which I Changed My Mind.

No. 1: The origins of World War I

I’ve been reading and teaching about the causes of World War I since I got my first academic job, but my account of how and why the war broke out has changed significantly over the years. When I first started teaching in the mid-1980s, I was heavily influenced by Richard Ned Lebow’s Between Peace and War, which portrays the July Crisis as a series of misperceptions and tragic accidents, driven by both organizational and psychological pathologies. I also embraced the “cult of the offensive” explanation offered by Jack Snyder and Stephen Van Evera, which links the war to widespread European beliefs that conquest was easy and that the war would be very short and cheap. I also read key works from the “Fischer school” (which emphasizes German responsibility), but I saw that as a background condition rather than the primary cause.

But over the years, I began to rethink this interpretation, and my understanding was greatly influenced by my former student Dale Copeland’s detailed analysis in his book, The Origins of Major War. He pins the blame almost entirely on Germany — and especially Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg — and I have yet to see any account that does a better job of uncovering the central cause of the war. But given how historiographical traditions keep evolving, and given the ability of new theories to shape how we view the past, I could always change my mind again in the future.

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Behind all those canned compliments for older adults — spry! wily! wise! — is an appreciation for something that scientists have had a hard time characterizing: mental faculties that improve with age. Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence. Still, young adults who consult their elders (mostly when desperate) don’t do so just to gather facts, solve crosswords or borrow a credit card. Nor, generally, are they looking for help with short-term memory or puzzle solving. Those abilities, called fluid intelligence, peak in the 20s. No, the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought. The postdoctoral fellows Joshua Hartshorne of M.I.T. and Laura Germine of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed a huge trove of scores on cognitive tests taken by people of all ages. The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition — fluid in the young, crystallized in the old — masked several important nuances.

…The picture that emerges from these findings is of an older brain that moves more slowly than its younger self, but is just as accurate in many areas and more adept at reading others’ moods — on top of being more knowledgeable. That’s a handy combination, given that so many important decisions people make intimately affects others. No one needs a cognitive scientist to explain that it’s better to approach a boss about a raise when he or she is in a good mood. But the older mind may be better able to head off interpersonal misjudgments and to navigate tricky situations.

More here.

Raza Rumi in Fair Observer:

The brutal, cowardly murder of freethinker Avijit Roy on the streets of Dhaka is a reflection of embedded intolerance in many Muslim societies. Bangladesh, despite its secular credentials, is no exception. On February 26, Roy was hacked to death by extremists with machetes, while his hapless wife, Rafida Bonya Ahmed, was also injured. What’s even more shocking was the fact that a good number of people witnessed the crime but did not intervene. Many were taping the violence on cellphones. Worse, according to media reports, the attack took place near a police check-post, erected for traffic control. This incident left me deeply disturbed. As someone who was also subjected to (missed) bullets in 2014, Roy’s murder brought back memories of my close brush with death, subsequent exile and the fear of returning to my own country, Pakistan. Like Roy and many others, Islamist extremists found my views unacceptable to the extent that physical elimination was the only answer. I miraculously escaped the assassination attempt, but my driver was killed and another companion was injured. While a few gunmen were arrested, the trial lingers on. But from my experience as an analyst, Pakistani courts seldom punish attackers, and the masterminds are never apprehended or brought to book.

I had never met Roy, but I was aware of his powerful work. It is not easy to profess atheism when you belong to a Muslim country. Roy lived in the United States and ran a blog called Mukto Mona, (free mind), and he was vocal in opposing religious bigotry and intolerance. While he remained in the relatively safer climes of the US, he was still part of the discourse in Bangladesh, and this is why he was a threat to Islamist extremists. He received regular threats on social media — an irony of the ostensibly postmodern 21^st century. The online store that sold Roy’s books was also harassed, and later it stopped displaying them altogether. In 2014, an Islamist said that Roy would be killed when he returned to his native country. So the doomed blogger had gone back to Bangladesh for his book promotion when extremists found the right opportunity to attack and kill him. His latest book, Bishwasher Virus (The Virus of Faith), says it all.

More here.

For a few weeks, anthropologist and 3QD friend Scott Atran has been on the front lines with the Peshmarga fighters in Kurdistan facing ISIS troops just a few hundred meters away. He had sent me this report some days ago by email:

by Scott Atran

Scott Atran on the frontline of Kurd/ISIS fighting

Today we were near the front at Kirkuk. Peshmarga and and the Islamic State are separated by a narrow channel of water less than 100m wide with embankments and trenches on both sides. We were able to talk to 3 captured IS guys, at least two of whom will likely be executed in short order because they carried out pretty nasty killings. It is a hard war along a 1070 km front in Iraq alone. One of their Kurdish captors has been wounded 17 times, his brother killed. The other has a brother who was paraded by IS the other day in a cage with the captured Peshmarga fighters in Hawija. He knows his brother will be butchered and there is nothing he can do to save him. The three IS fighters were all young, in their twenties, two with wives and children and the eldest my son's age. A former senior US General in Iraq who was with me agreed that the failed security environment for their families created in the wake of the US invasion was in large part responsible for closing off any avenue of hope for these young people and making them susceptible for recruitment to IS. This is also the assessment of the senior Peshmarga (KDP/KRG) leadership. The stories these young fighters tell through our experiments and interviews help make this clear (but details later another time). One thing is clear, they know nothing about the Quran or Islamic history other than what they've heard in their upbringing and from AQ and IS. None have more than elementary school education.

Much has been written about foreign fighters, although their reality here on the ground is somewhat different than what has been widely presented by analyzing social media. In fact they come here to fight and die and almost none are ever captured: the westerners often die in suicide attacks; those from the former Soviet republics (Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Dagestan) with long fighting experience go on as operational leaders and snipers until they are killed, or captured and executed on the spot. Foreign fighters can return to home country only if they escape IS or are sent by IS, because IS will execute them under the slightest suspicion of defection. Peshmarga consider the foreign fighters to be the best, most committed and most dreaded.

IS used to pierce Peshmarga lines with suicide attacks in armored vehicles that barreled through barrages of RPGs. But now the Peshmarga have Milan anti-tank missiles from Europe that can stop this cold. Yet the US insists that the Peshmarga obtain permission from the central gov't in Baghdad (which is coordinating operations with Iran's Al Quds force Tikrit and elsewhere – a recipe for disaster on several planes) to keep the weapons flowing that keep the Kurds alive. All this to keep the Kurds tied to a gov't they hate and which hates them.

Some IS fighters are leaving the Tikrit front and infiltrating into Kirkuk with their families, but Kurdish forces do not expect major actions here.

Scott also has an article with Douglas M. Stone in the New York Times today:

The Islamic State continues to control a huge section of Syria. But in Iraq, its advance has stalled. While Shiite militias and their Iranian allies fight the Islamic State ferociously, the Kurds have held a 640-mile front against the Islamic State’s advance. Their steadfastness should prompt America to rethink its alliances and interests in the region and to deepen its relationship with the Kurds — who are sometimes described as the world’s largest stateless nation.

Last week, the Sunni town of Tikrit (Saddam Hussein’s hometown) fell to largely Shiite forces from Iraq, backed by Iran. An offensive to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city and the heart of Arab Sunni nationalism, is now within reach. The Kurds plan to enter eastern Mosul, where many Kurds lived before the Islamic State seized the city in June, but they say that moderate Arab Sunnis must lead the effort to retake the rest of the city — not Baghdad’s predominantly Shiite forces or the Iranian-backed Shiite militias. The Kurds point out that it was grievances against Shiite rule that helped drive Sunni support for the Islamic State in the first place.

Together with Lydia Wilson and Hoshang Waziri, our colleagues at Artis, a nonprofit group that uses social science research to resolve intergroup violence, we found that the Kurds demonstrate a will to fight that matches the Islamic State’s. The United States needs to help them win.

More here.

Scott Atran is an American and French anthropologist who is a Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University in England, Presidential Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and also holds offices at the University of Michigan. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence and religion, and has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders.

Imtiaz Dharker. Untitled.

Drawing by a most talented poet!

More here, here, and here.

Thanks to Nargis Raza.

Martha C. Nussbaum reviews ON OPERA and ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 1959-2002, by Bernard Williams, in The New Rambler:

Bernard Williams died in June, 2003, at the age of only 73, after a long and sometimes painful struggle with multiple myeloma.[1] I still dream that he is alive – not least while working on this review. He had a quality of vivid aliveness that makes it next to impossible to concede that he is not here any longer. So I shall not concede, but shall continue to use the present tense. Being in Williams’s presence is at times painful because of that intensity of aliveness, which challenges the friend to something or other, and yet it was, and is, not terribly clear to what. To authenticity, I now think: to being and expressing oneself more courageously and clearly than one had done heretofore. Given the tendency of his brilliance to expand, filling the whole space around him, individuality was, nonetheless, and is, one of the most difficult things one could possibly attempt in his presence, and the attempt was, and is, never without struggle.

Williams’s last consecutive book, Truth and Truthfulness, appeared in 2002, before his death. Three posthumous collections of essays have preceded these two books, gathering his major articles on moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. (Williams was a serious scholar of both ancient Greek literature and philosophy and Descartes’ rationalism.) These two collections, separated from one another by more than a decade, represent the last publications we may expect to see from him, so they seem unusually precious. Both exemplify to an unusually high degree a quality of willingness to put one’s whole intellectual and emotional character on the line that always characterized his way of doing philosophy.

More here.

Melissa Davey in The Guardian:

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.

More here.

Preeti Dawra in Live Mint:

“One has to continually erase so much of what has been read and heard about this country in order to arrive at the messy truth of the present moment of Pakistan,” says Ayesha Jalal , one of Pakistan’s leading historians and an eminent global South Asian scholar.

“You really have to come here and live its daily contradictions to understand the reality of modern day Pakistan,” adds Jalal, who is the Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University in the US where she teaches both in the history department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She has also taught at Harvard and Columbia University.

Jalal, an elegant woman in her mid-fifties with a feisty intellect and sharp tongue, was born in Lahore. Her father is Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and she is the grandniece of the renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto.

She explains that when she moved to New York as a teenager, where her father was posted at the Pakistan’s United Nations mission in 1971, she had difficulties reconciling the official narratives of the Pakistani state with daily news reports of atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistan army in then East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh.

“This led me to ask questions about Pakistan’s history and self-representations, which in time came to define my research interests.”

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Last summer, I met Granny. I was on a whale-watching boat that had sailed south from Vancouver Island, in search of a famous and well-studied group of killer whales (orcas). Two hours after we set off, we started seeing black fins scything through the unusually calm and glassy water. We saw a dozen individuals in all, and our guide identified them by the shape of their fins and the white saddle patches on their backs. Granny, for example, has a distinctive half-moon notch in her dorsal fin.

Seeing her, I felt an intense and solemn respect. She is the oldest member of the group, perhaps the oldest orca on the planet. Her true age is unknown, but a commonly quoted estimate puts her at 103, which would make her a year older than the Titanic, and far more durable. Imagine all that she has seen in that time: the generations of her children and grandchildren; the countless pursuits of fleeing salmon; the increasingly noisy presence of fishermen, scientists and gawking tourists. Decades of knowledge and wisdom live in her brain. Ad that knowledge might explain one of the most unusual features of killer whale biology—their menopause.

Animals almost always continue to reproduce until they die. There are just three exceptions that we know of: humans, short-finned pilot whales, and killer whales. In all three species, females lose the ability to have children, but continue living for decades after. That’s menopause. Female killer whales go through in their 30s or 40s. Why? Why sacrifice so many future chances to pass on your genes to the next generation?

More here.

A Walk With History

how do you write history in a language that has no
past tense?

i don’t ask for it
more than once
history stumbles over me

how is it that you are part of history
if you haven’t fine-dined with her?

it was the railroad worm in adam’s apple
it was the pine bark turned into rye bread
it was the rotten meat ration on the battleship potemkin
it was a hike in the price of oil
it was a viss of rice for a lot of vice
it was the iron chef in hell’s kitchen at fuli restaurant

what’s up in your hometown?

a turnpike,
a flyover is under construction
over the juncture of history

when did clio land?

this morning, about half past two

did she have anything to declare?

nothing
they strip-searched her anyway

what did they find on her?

a whistleblower, a conch-shell blower
a critically endangered cheroot industry
a pair of cheap putsches
the crowd psychologist dr. state with
his twin sons, racism and reverse racism
an albino cockroach, a fake hypocrite, and
an immigrant, whose name
you will never get

.
by ko ko thett
fromThe Postscript Journal, 2

____________________________________

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi in Harper's:

Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who enter the top 1 percent of earners are less likely to remain there if they are not white. Individualism in the United States was correlated with the rise of white-collar jobs. Hedge-fund managers who look trustworthy attract more clients than managers who look undependable, but the latter generate larger returns. Brides in 1930s Connecticut who were judged agreeable and emotionally stable by their bridesmaids lived longer. U.S. counties in which residents more frequently tweet “bitches,” “haters,” “jealous,” “drama,” “cunt,” “grrr,” “sooo,” “fucked,” and “Mondays” have more heart-disease deaths. The blindfolded lead the nonblindfolded in estimating the severity of everyday impairment caused by blindness. The legs of adult British Columbians cramp in the night twice as often during the summer. Swiss prison guards report contentedness. New Zealanders in a doctor’s office are fourteen times more likely to steal gossipy magazines than serious ones. Dutch chimpanzees who moved to Edinburgh now grunt like locals. Wolf society, not human domestication, gave dogs their social skills.

High school girls who underwent virtual-reality assertiveness training reported less sexual victimization, and college men who took online sexual-violence-awareness tutorials reported committing less rape. Old banned chemicals may be weakening polar bears’ penile bones. Sugary-drink consumption correlates with early menarche. Teen pregnancy rose by 30 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Iraq. Caesarean delivery, vacuum-assisted delivery, maternal fatigue, and violent partners were associated with pain in postpartum vaginal intercourse. Labor augmentation does not cause autism, but Romanian orphanages may. Dutch babies laugh, smile, and cuddle more than American babies. An Arizona toddler mistakenly given scorpion antivenin for methamphetamine poisoning exhibited immediate improvement. Targeted social rejection worsens asthma in popular adolescents. Teen boys who wrongly think themselves fat often grow up to be fat. A woman who received a fecal transplant from her obese sixteen-year-old daughter rapidly became obese herself. Repeated blows to the head were linked to cognitive impairment.

Camponotus fellah ants who become isolated from others walk around continuously, fail to digest their food, and have one tenth the life span of social ants.

More here.