Animals

• Cats relax to music, especially classical.

Drugs

• There’s an association between long marijuana usage in teens and a smaller hippocampus.  In short, the more you smoke marijuana as a teen, the more likely your long-term memory will be affected.
• An interesting story about prosthetic hands and feet for women.  Many women complain because the prosthetics look too manly.  Why is this?  The prosthetics were mainly made for soldiers, which were usually male.  The doctors who made them were male.  The default was male hands and feet.  But now with women needing prosthetics, there is a feminine line that they are tapping into.

Economics

• The more unequal a society is, the more polluted and degraded environment it will have.
• Marrying outside one’s socioeconomic class can be problematic and complex.
• Generous welfare benefits make people more likely to find work, not less.
• Economic inequality is far worse than you think.

Education

• Finland is phasing out “teaching-by-subjects” and integrating “teaching-by-topic.”  From the article itself:

Subject-specific lessons – an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon – are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching – or teaching by topic. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take “cafeteria services” lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages (to help serve foreign customers), writing skills and communication skills. More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union – which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.

Ethics

• Study shows that when it comes to moral dilemmas, women are more deontological-based and men are more utilitarian-based.  The cognitive abilities based on gender were negligible, and women were more empathetic to other people’s feelings than me.

Family

• When should you keep your kid from school?  It’s best when the child has pinkeye, stomach flu, coughing, fevers, sore throat, and lice.  Otherwise, it’s fine.
• Stephanie Coontz makes the case for paternity leave.
• Marriage is not a safeguard against poverty.  From the article itself:

Allowing children to live in poverty is a policy choice, not the inevitable result of a given family structure. As author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich has often argued, poverty is not a lack of character, it is a lack of money. Our tendency to shame single mothers or low-income families and express grave concern about their growing numbers improves nothing. Rather, it fosters a climate in which politicians fear a backlash for supporting programs that supposedly “validate” nontraditional family structures. Ambitious family-friendly policies that have potential to dramatically improve the lives of struggling families cannot succeed in a political climate where the nuclear family unit is valued over all others.

Health

• Chewing and spitting sugar-free gum can trap and remove bacteria from the mouth. (via Useful Science)
• I’ve mentioned this before, but having cats could affect your health.

Gender

• To survive in the movie industry, actresses have to be more picky in their movie choices.

Politics

• Conservatives reference the past more; liberals reference the future more.
• Arguments for and against compulsory voting.
• The libertarian argument for supporting gay rights and refusing to serve gays in businesses.
• A map of the US of the most liberal and conservative cities in each state: 

Race

• Lots of great articles about race.

Religion

• A flaw with the ontological argument?

Relationships

• Polyamory 101
• A story of a straight man falling in love with his best friend.  In other words, being heterosexual doesn’t mean being heteroromantic.

Sexuality

• Gary Gutting wrote an article saying that the Catholic Church ought to embrace same-sex marriage and the likes of Robert P. George and John Finnis ought to get rid of unworkable natural law ethics. George and Finnish respond to Gutting.
• I’ve mentioned this before, but now there are two articles showing that there is little connection between porn usage and sexual dysfunction among heterosexual men.  Indeed, it shows a greater sexual responsiveness.
  • But then see this to refute one of the article’s results.
• Is it really sexual addiction, or is it just lack of self control?

Time

• Three different pictures of the metaphysics of time.

Trolleyology

• The famous Trolley problem in philosophy gets more complicated when you look at the race, gender, class, or socioeconomic status of the person who is being sacrificed.