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Proposed changes to the psychiatric profession’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5, have caused a recent uproar, with critics worried that the new label of “alcohol abuse disorder” will overdiagnose young problem drinkers — as many as 40% of college students — who eventually outgrow their dysfunctional behavior. Editors of the DSM-5 countered that the change in [...]
When the story is written of how Hollywood flipped off heterosexual women, Exhibit A will be Brad Pitt’s beard. Remember when he started appearing in public with the icky nesting material and debris in his facial hair? That benign eccentricity signaled the beginning of A-list actors masquerading as homeless men. Skeevy celebrities with greasy, uncombed [...]
The Centers for Disease Control just reported a 44% decline in the teenage birth rate since 1990, the lowest level in almost 70 years. The decline represents an actual decrease in teen pregnancy, not an increase in abortion, and this is due in turn to two changes: more girls are delaying onset of intercourse, and [...]
Do today’s kids make terrible entry-level workers? That’s a question much on employers’ minds as graduation season kicks off and young adults begin their first full-time jobs. We’ve all heard the stories: assistants who won’t assist, new workers who can’t set an alarm, employees who can’t grasp institutional hierarchies. Bosses who toiled in the pre-self-esteem [...]
People over 40 love to regale one another with stories of their outlandish childhood freedoms. Walking a mile by themselves at the age of 7 to the bus stop, testing the semifrozen ice on a neighborhood pond, operating table saws, jumping from rooftops, swimming in the open ocean. We did many such things unsupervised and [...]
Good news for Ohio’s gay and lesbian students: You can be openly gay once a year now that Wayne Local School District officials have granted a small concession, after a little nudge from a lawsuit, and cleared Maverick Couch, 16, to wear his “Jesus is not a homophobe” T-shirt to school exactly one time. The [...]
Goldman Sachs has hit rock bottom and started to dig. Just when you thought the investment banking firm couldn’t look any less appealing, we learned over the weekend, from a damning New York Times report by Nicholas Kristof, that it is a minority stakeholder of Village Voice Media’s Backpage, an online peddler of child prostitutes. Following on the [...]
If you were handed a can of bug spray, you might start killing a lot of insects around the house. And if you had reason to believe that the bugs were poisonous — maybe because your neighbor told you there was an infestation, or you had seen a show about creepy crawly things on the [...]
We’re under threat again from American women’s rampaging libidos! You may have heard something recently about 50 Shades of Grey, an underground romance novel that has grown women in a hot flash. Annointed “mommy porn” in some circles, its popularity—and the fact that adult women have sexual fantasies—seems be taking people by surprise. Is anyone else [...]
It’s been another busy week for the male guardians of women’s bodies. We had the multimarried Rush Limbaugh attacking Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, who had testified to House Democrats on behalf of women in need of contraceptive coverage. While she did not speak at the actual congressional hearing about the health-insurance debate, Limbaugh still [...]
There was lots of excitable talk last week about birth control, with President Obama dialing back his initial plan for mandating contraceptive coverage to exempt employers who object to such coverage on religious grounds. In those cases, the health-insurance provider, rather than the employer, will be on the hook to pay for the services. Tellingly, health-insurance [...]
In January, the FBI announced that it is finally updating its ancient definition of rape to conform to a more thorough understanding of sexual assault. While many states have already adapted their criminal codes, decades of national statistics on sexual assaults have relied on the FBI’s definition dating back to 1927 that rape was essentially [...]
Hating Twilight is so 2009, and with the newest installment, Breaking Dawn, ruling the box office, the juggernaut hardly needs defenders. But the virulent seriousness of the haters is surprising. Many of the reviews have heaped disproportionate and moralizing scorn on an Oscar-winning director’s fantasy enactment of a young girl’s dreams and fears. Kristen Stewart [...]
