From my favorite magazine, The Atlantic Online, some odd blips on the literary radar.
Why do women fall off academia’s science track at a faster clip than men? The cause is not innate sex differences, a new study suggests, but neither is it a simple matter of gender discrimination. If a problem exists, the authors conclude, it’s about motherhood, not women in general.
—“Does Science Promote Women? Evidence From Academia 1973–2001,” Donna K. Ginther (University of Kansas) and Shulamit Kahn (Boston University)
May I point out the obvious? Motherhood is an "innate sex difference." And there is this revealing study of poverty and privation about the world:
How do the world’s poorest citizens get by on less than $2 a day? . . . Despite variance in living conditions—only 2 out of 100 poor rural Tanzanians had electricity, for example, but only 1 out of 100 equally poor rural Mexicans lacked electricity—poor people around the world reported high rates of sickness and infirmity and low rates of access to the financial infrastructure . . . .
—“The Economic Lives of the Poor,” Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
What this tells you, apart from the obvious fact that poor people don't have a lot of money, is that the phrase "living on $2 a day" is all but meaningless. If that income turns on everybody's lights in Mexico, and nobody's lights in rural Tanzania, then it isn't really the same income, is it? A chart on the same page did reveal some very interesting things. Almost 70% of the folks "living on $2 a day" in rural Panama and Peru own land. More than 60% of the urban two buckers in both countries have a TV set. I hope that $2 buys them electricity as well.
And there is this shocking news from the book review section:
Women prefer food to sex with their husbands—and that’s OK.
That might sound disturbing to some husbands out there, but not to me. You see, I can cook.
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