Health

• A study about standing desks shows that it increases productivity by as much as 12% as well as combat childhood obesity.

Justice

• Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson makes a case for inequalities we can live with:

Current justifications for extreme inequality of income and wealth grossly exaggerate their positive incentive effects, and underestimate their negative effects. Consider the fact that top German and Japanese executives earn far less than their counterparts in the U.S. or U.K., but their firms are just as productive. Even within the U.S., there is virtually no correlation between pay and performance for top executives. Studies show that excessive incentives for work requiring innovative thinking can actually depress productivity by focusing people’s minds on money rather than the task at hand.

Politics

• Rebecca Roache writes a controversial post: “If you’re a Conservative, I’m not your Friend.”
• Well-respected journalist Seymour Hersh reports that the death of Osama bin Laden was not an American-planned action, but a collaboration between American/Pakistani officials, and that the Pakistani government held bin Laden since 2006 for leverage with the Saudi government’s approval.
  • In response, Max Fisher argues that the story doesn’t hold up because Hersh’s main source is “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.”  In the end, Fisher argues that Hersh’s reporting sounds like a conspiracy theory than actual facts.

Religion

• A study from last year shows that children exposed to religion have a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction.

Sexuality

• Most female mammals have sex when they are in heat.  Humans are the exception: women can have sex anytime.  Evolutionarily speaking, why is this possible?  After all, female humans best get pregnant during ovulation.  One study suggests that women engage in sex even during their nonfertile phase to garner investment from male partners. But if this is true, then women would be able to initiate sex more during their nonfertile (the luteal-phase) phase.  The results showed that women initiate sex during the nonfertile phase, but not the fertile phase, when they see their partners’ investment lag behind their own.  One drawback to this study is that the sample size was 50 heterosexual women.
• Free birth control does not make women promiscuous.
• Women’s masturbation + feminism  = women’s empowerment.
• Non-monosexual females report there is no differentiation of sexual arousal if they are with men or women, whereas monosexual females do report a differentiation.