In terms of box-office grosses, this is an extraordinary week for Hollywood: The No. 1 movie in America features a mixed-race cast. Granted, that movie is Fast Five, the fifth installment of the Fast and Furious action series. Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris called these films “loud, ludicrous and visually incoherent,” but added that they are “the most progressive force in Hollywood today.” As Morris noted, nonwhite actors played major roles in only two of the 30 top-grossing films of 2010. Studio executives believe white audiences prefer to see white characters, while ... Read More
College Costs Linked to Risky Teen Behavior
April 25, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Why do some teenagers engage in risky behavior such as drinking, drug use and multiple sex partners? Washington State University economist Ben Cowan has discovered a startlingly simple correlation that provides at least part of the answer. The more it costs to attend community college, the more likely it is that teens will act in self-destructive ways. “I find that lower college costs in teenagers’ states of residence raise their subjective expectations regarding college attendance and deter teenage substance use and sexual partnership,” Cowan writes in the Economics of Education ... Read More
Judges’ Decisions More Lenient After Lunch
April 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In addition to showing up on time and not wearing loud ties, criminal defense attorneys would do well to think about the care and feeding of the judges who hear their clients' cases. A hungry, tired judge, it turns out, is much less likely to grant a defendant's request than one who has just eaten or taken a break. At least that's the finding of an ingenious new study looking at the rulings made by Israeli parole board judges in relation to when they had taken a meal break. Overall, prisoners saw a 65 percent success rate if their cases were heard early in the workday or immediately ... Read More
American Idolatry: So Bad You Just Gotta Be Good
March 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Here in Williamstown, Mass., where I live, there is a contractor who won’t work with you if you watch shows about construction on HGTV. He simply got fed up with being told how to do his job by people who think they know what they’re talking about but haven’t got a clue. Being unskilled is an obvious problem. But when we truly lack skill, we suffer a dual burden: We do not have the skills to perform well, and we don't even have the skill required to tell whether we're performing well or not. This problem affects us everywhere, in education, crime, politics, construction, government, ... Read More
Staunching Aggression From the Womb
March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Crime and delinquency have roots in the womb, and so the risks can and should be addressed early on, even before a child is born, a University of Pennsylvania researcher says. According to a large body of research, the early risk factors that may predispose a child to violence include teen pregnancy, birth complications, lead exposure, head injury, child abuse, and maternal stress and depression. Jianghong Liu, an assistant professor at Penn’s School of Nursing and School of Medicine, argues that these factors, whether biological, psychological or environmental, can interact with each ... Read More
Standing in Alcohol Won’t Get You Drunk
March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Sorry, folks. It turns out you can't get drunk by submerging your feet in alcohol. The belief is widespread in Denmark, where, apparently, there's not much to do during those long winter nights but experiment with different, and frankly bizarre, ways of inviting alcohol into your pores. But according to research in the December issue of the British Medical Journal, there's really no point to stomping around in vats of alcohol — unless you're making wine, of course. The study was led by Dr. Peter Lommer Kristensen from Denmark's Hillerød Hospital, who recruited three adult volunteers to ... Read More
I Gave It a Nudge But It Won’t Budge
January 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Legal scholar Cass Sunstein and behavioral economist Richard Thaler unleashed an incredibly seductive idea in 2008 with their popular book Nudge. Many of society's biggest problems, they suggested, from poor public health to environmental degradation to lousy retirement planning, could be solved without expensive interventions or intrusive regulation. All policymakers have to do is alter the environments in which people make decisions, gently nudging them toward the choices that would improve their lives — away from the potato chips, say, or toward that corporate 401(k) match. "To ... Read More
