There’s no medical reason anyone needs to have their period every month, and many reasons why it can be best to avoid monthly bleeding. And yet patients in the US who are advised to take hormonal birth control pills continuously, which would enable them to skip their periods, are frequently denied insurance coverage when it’s time to get their medication.
It would be nice if, to address racism and sexism, we could simply call on people to change their subconscious prejudicial impulses. Unfortunately, despite the hype around “implicit bias” as a psychological tool for improving workplace diversity, it doesn’t work that way. As Quartz has previously reported, there are numerous methodological flaws with the most commonly used implicit-bias test, and relying on current techniques meant to address implicit bias doesn’t product strong long-term results. But that doesn’t mean we should give up on addressing bias altogether, argued Neil Lewis, professor of communication and social behavior at Cornell University, at this year’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference.
More than 60 years after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories on language were published, the artificial intelligence behind Google Translate has provided a practical example of his hypotheses. Patrick Hebron, who works on machine learning in design at Adobe and studied philosophy with Wittgenstein expert Garry Hagberg for his bachelor’s degree at Bard College, notes that the networks behind Google Translate are a very literal representation of Wittgenstein’s work.
A man is suing his parents for giving birth to him without his consent. That might sound ridiculous, but he has a point. The plaintiff behind the lawsuit, 27-year-old Raphael Samuel, believes in “anti-natalism,” namely the philosophical theory that parents do not have moral standing to bring an unwitting child into the world. And there are some seriously legitimate philosophers who advocate for this argument.
Let’s say a man who’s bald as bowling ball, à la Bruce Willis today, has the opportunity to re-grow those locks so as to resemble a more luscious-locked Willis from his Die Hard days, or an even floppier hairstyle, perhaps like that Willis sported in his Moonlighting era. How much would he pay for this opportunity? This is, quite literally, the question posed by three Appalachian State University economists in a preprint of a paper published online in January and appropriately titled “Willingness Toupee.”
After weeks of darkness and cold, spring is finally upon us—or, at least, it is according to the 1,200-year-old Anglo-Saxon calendar. More than a millennium ago, winter officially started on Nov. 7 and ended on Feb. 6.
Great news for stoner bros: Harvard University researchers have uncovered evidence that marijuana, far from hurting male fertility as previous research has suggested, is associated with a higher sperm count.
Those who warned of slippery slopes can start crowing: The city of Denver, one of the first places in the US to legalize recreational marijuana, will vote on whether to decriminalize magic mushrooms in May. The city’s election division announced last week that a petition from the Denver Psilocybin Mushroom Decriminalization Initiative had 5,559 valid signatures—well above the 4,726 signatures (5% of the total votes from the most recent mayoral election) required to mandate a city-wide vote.
Pharmaceutical and consumer-goods company Johnson & Johnson (J&J) sees a lot of robotic surgery in its future. “We’re taking an outlook that digital surgery will be an important dynamic for the next five, 10 and 15 years,” chairman Alex Gorsky said during the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call on Jan. 22. The same day, Bloomberg reported that J&J is looking to buy $2 billion medical robotics company Auris Health, which would add to its already-sizable robotics surgery investment; in 2015, for example, J&J partnered with Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences to create the startup Verb Surgical, focused on robotic-assisted tools for surgeons.
A child goes to the doctor, has their finger pricked to draw blood, and reacts with pain. How much pain? There’s no way to quantify someone’s pain other than to try and interpret their responses, and according to recently published research, adults perceive that a child suffers more if they believe that child is a boy rather than a girl.
Anyone who’s spent time with young children knows that they can be surprisingly (and sometimes inconveniently) perceptive. Psychologists from Northwestern University have found that children as young as four show signs of racial bias, suggesting they pick up on cues to act intolerant from the adults around them from a very early age.
Following repeated scandals at Facebook in 2018, #DeleteFacebook briefly trended as users quit the site in protest of the social networks’ questionable ethics and privacy violations. When it comes to protecting your own privacy though, quitting social media isn’t enough.
One day, Conan O’Brien’s show will end. In time, the TV host will fade from public memory, relegated to a footnote in wonky discussions about early-21st century talk shows. Eventually, he will be entirely forgotten.
Those who believe growing a beard is a personal fashion choice need to reconsider. The bristly facial hair of men is, in fact, the physical embodiment of deep ethical and aesthetic considerations. Henry Pratt, philosophy professor at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, wrote a detailed analysis of such philosophical conundrums in his aptly titled paper, “To Beard or Not to Beard: Ethical and Aesthetic Obligations and Facial Hair.”
Legal and moral philosopher John Finnis is an original thinker, eminent within his field, and highly controversial. The Oxford University professor, who mentored Supreme Court judge Neil Gorsuch while the latter was a Marshall Scholar, has a moral theory that argues there are several basic goods and it’s immoral to intentionally harm them. For example, life is a basic good and so, by Finnis’ moral theory, abortion, the death penalty, and euthanasia are always wrong, as they cause direct harm to life. According to Finnis, heterosexual marriage is also a basic good, and one that’s further enriched by procreation. As such, he’s opposed to homosexual sex (and masturbation, adultery, and bestiality, which he groups in the same category).
We don’t just think with our minds, we think with our bodies, too.
Palestine has some of the highest rates of mental illness in the world. A quarter of Palestinian adolescents have made suicide attempts; about 23.2% have post-traumatic stress disorder (according to a survey of 1,369 over three years) compared to around 6-9% in the US; and the Palestinian territories have by far the highest levels of depression in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Samah Jabr, chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health and one of just 32 psychiatrists in the Palestinian territories, doubts those statistics.
A Haitian ethics professor who sought asylum in the United States and spent two years in detention is unimpressed by the ethics of his asylum process. Though Ansly Damus hasn’t committed a crime, Immigration and Customs Enforcement kept him incarcerated in an Ohio jail from October 2016 until December 2018. Damus was twice granted asylum by an immigration court, but the US government appealed the rulings and refused his request for parole, which meant he remained in detention.
Last summer, astronomers were astonished and puzzled by a mysterious, bright light, quite unlike anything they’d seen in the universe. It was 10 to 100 times brighter than a supernova, which were then the largest explosions ever seen by humans. And it flared up and largely died out in just 16 days, which, given that many light phenomena last for millions of years, is extraordinarily short.
Wildly inaccurate facts and spurious arguments are unavoidable features of social media. Yet no matter how infuriatingly wrong someone is, or just how much counter-evidence you have at your disposal, starting arguments on the internet rarely gets anyone to change their mind. Nearly a century-and-a-half ago, British philosopher John Stuart Mill explained, in a few clear sentences, why certain arguments simply won’t go anywhere. As historian Robert Saunders notes, Mill’s analysis neatly applies to heated and futile internet debates.
This year, I can’t rouse any enthusiasm for potential New Year’s resolutions. I spent much of 2017 in medical crisis, going through multiple spinal surgeries, and 2018 has been stupendously, staggeringly amazing by contrast. It feels churlish, somehow, to think about what should change or be improved, instead of being grateful for all that I’ve got. Plus, I cannot shake the lesson I learned last year, that resolutions and good intentions are no match for the devastating impact of bad luck.
There’s no time I love my body more than when I’m swimming. Twice a week, I go to the pool and, before I enter the water, I briefly look in the mirror. I am tall, with muscular shoulders and, on my lower back, hidden beneath my tired navy-blue swimsuit, I have a scar about five inches long and half an inch thick. The scar marks the site where surgeons cut through my flesh, 12 years ago, to take out a piece of disc that was crushing the nerves in my spinal canal. And again, the same skin and muscles were cut open twice last year: Once when surgeons drilled six massive, metal, three-inch screws into my spine, and then when they took those screws out nine months later.
No fewer than three books on female anger came out in 2018: Good and Mad, Rage Becomes Her, and Eloquent Rage, all of which emphasize the value of anger as a political emotion. Articles on the subject published in the past few months have made similar arguments, telling of women’s personal reckoning with their own anger, the ways in which women have been taught to express their anger, and why female rage is justified.
