Left, Brett Favre. Image: David Erickson. Right: Elle MacPherson. Image: WBUR Boston’s NPR News Station

Every year, Sports Illustrated comes out with its famous swimsuit edition. But without the bikini, women aren’t as welcome on the magazine’s cover. A recent analysis of 11 years of SI covers shows that—if you take out the swimsuit issue—women appear just 4.9 percent of the time.

Even when they do appear on the cover, they’re rarely the focus. “Of the 35 covers including a female, only 18 (or 2.5 percent of all covers) featured a female as the primary or sole image,” the study explains. “Three covers included females, but only as insets (small boxed image), or as part of a collage background of both male and female athletes.”

In fact, women showed up on more covers of SI between 1954 and 1965 than they did between 2000 and 2011. A lot more. Those early years of the magazine had women on the cover 12.6 percent of the time.

Pacific Standard points out that just putting women on more covers doesn’t solve the problem either (as the SI swimsuit edition clearly shows):

Then again, if women athletes were on SI’s cover more often, they might have to sacrifice their dignity for the publicity. A recent survey of Rolling Stone covers found 83 percent of female musicians were portrayed in a sexualized fashion (often wearing minimal clothing), compared to just 17 percent of men.

This, of course, happens on Sports Illustrated‘s covers too. A few years ago, the Atlantic wrote a piece on how women can get on the cover of Sports Illustrated more often, including tips like “get famous before 1962″ and “be a cheerleader” and “put on a bathing suit.” Take the Anna Kournikova cover from June 5th, 2000. The authors of the new study describe how the tennis star is “lounging on a pillow in her street clothes, peering seductively into the camera, and clearly not prepared for any sanctioned sports activity. Even the author of the interior story suggested  she was not on the cover for her athleticism: ‘She won’t win the French Open, but who cares? Anna Kournikova is living proof that even in this age of supposed enlightenment, a hot body can count just as much as a good backhand.’”

Women do, in fact, play sports: there’s no dearth of female athletes to feature on a sports magazine cover. But if any of those talented women hope to make the cover of SI, their best bet might be to go swimming.

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Left: Women’s Media Center, Right: Ms. magazine

Mary Thom, feminist editor, writer and behind-the-scenes activist, died earlier this week in a motorcycle accident in Yonkers. Thom was the editor-in-chief at the Women’s Media Center. The center’s co-founders said:

“We who are Mary’s friends and family haven’t absorbed her loss yet; it’s too sudden,” said Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda, co-founders of The Women’s Media Center. “Ms. Magazine, the Women’s Media Center, the women’s movement and American journalism have suffered an enormous blow. Mary was and will always be our moral compass and steady heart. Writers from around the world have been able to share their words and ideas because of her. Wherever her friends and colleagues gather, we will always ask the guiding question: What would Mary do?”

Thom might be best known for her role at Ms. magazine, where she joined in 1972 as an editor and where she eventually became the executive editor. As Ms. she pushed the magazine to cover more politics, specifically the actions of lawmakers surrounding things like abortion and birth control—issues that remain at the forefront of women’s rights struggles today. The other editors at Ms. found Thom a refreshing presence, according to the New York Times:

At Ms., she often stayed late into the night reading letters to the editor. “It was incredibly moving and exciting, to just get that kind of response,” Ms. Thom recalled in a 2005 interview. “And no one had expected it.”

Her former colleagues said she brought a pragmatic, self-deprecating viewpoint to the magazine, which some saw as too serious.

Eventually, Thom wrote a book about the history of Ms., and helped to produce an oral history on the congresswoman Bella S. Abzug with the epic title Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad From the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

The accident happened on the Saw Mill Parkway in Yonkers, where Thom was riding motorcycle, which many called her one true love. Thom never owned a car, they say, and it was the 1996 Honda Magna 750 that got her where she needed to go, both physically and mentally.

The next issue of Ms. will feature more on Thom’s life both at the publication and beyond.

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Photo: Fabiana Zonca

Your significant other isn’t the only one interested in knowing what you’re thinking about as you sit in silence. Psychologists have long sought to record and study these inner monologues, Ferris Jabr writes for Scientific American. 

Some people have tried to eavesdrop on the silent conversations in other people’s minds. Psychologists have attempted to capture what they call self-talk or inner speech in the moment, asking people to stop what they are doing and write down their thoughts at random points in time. Others have relied on surveys or diaries.

One researcher, Andrew Irving from the University of Manchester, devised a new means of studying strangers’ inner voices. He started by asking terminally ill patients to walk around with a recorder and vocalize their thoughts rather than keep them to themselves. He told Jabr:

“I realized that you could see somebody sitting in a chair or walking along the street and it may seem like nothing much is happening—but actually an incredible amount is happening. In their heads they may be going from childhood to religion to questioning God to trying to imagining what exists beyond death.”

After those initial experiments, Irving moved on to studying everyday people. He approached around 100 random people walking, sitting or standing alone through New York City and asked them what they were thinking. For those that responded favorably, he asked them to wear a digital recorder and speak their thoughts out loud while he followed closely behind (but outside of earshot) with a video camera. From those encounters came these voyeuristic but completely relatable videos:

You can find more over at Scientific American. But however fascinating, these videos likely only represent a limited and skewed view of the voices in our heads. The participants knew they were being recorded and could have been thrown off by the oddity of speaking rather than thinking personal thoughts. Most likely, we’ll only ever know for sure what the voices in our own heads are saying, regardless of the probing questions we might ask our loved ones.

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Second Thoughts 
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Photo: Francesco Carpi

If you’re a famous sports star, singer, dancer or actor, watch out. New research published in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine helps to confirm a long-held stereotype about fame, showing that the price for making it big in performance-related careers may be a shorter life.

To arrive at this morbid finding, researchers analyzed New York Times obituaries. Making it into the Times obits, they reasoned, indicates some degree of career success and celebrity. The researchers sampled 1,000 such consecutive notices published between 2009 to 2011 and documented each person’s gender, age, occupation and cause of death. The occupation categories were divided into four broad groups: performance and sports-related pursuits; non-performing creatives (such as writers and visual artists); business, military and political careers; and professional, academic and religious occupations.

Men dominated the obituary headlines, they found, by about a factor of four. Younger ages tended to be connected to performers, athletes and creatives, whereas older people usually fell into the professional or business categories.

Honing in on cause of death, the researchers found that early deaths were often caused by accidents, or illnesses such as HIV and some cancers. Specifically, lung cancer tended to kill people with performance-based careers about five times more frequently than those with professional or academic jobs. The authors think this probably points to a live-hard-die-young lifestyle of chronic smoking and other unhealthy choices.

In a statement about the study, co-author Richard Epstein summarized the significance of the findings:

A one-off retrospective analysis like this can’t prove anything, but it raises some interesting questions. First, if it is true that successful performers and sports players tend to enjoy shorter lives, does this imply that fame at younger ages predisposes to poor health behaviours in later life after success has faded? Or that psychological and family pressures favouring unusually high public achievement lead to self-destructive tendencies throughout life? Or that risk-taking personality traits maximise one’s chances of success, with the use of cigarettes, alcohol or illicit drugs improving one’s performance output in the short term? Any of these hypotheses could be viewed as a health warning to young people aspiring to become stars.

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Pick your tax haven, any tax haven. Photo: CBC

“No one knows for certain how much of the planet’s private wealth is parked in tax havens,” says the CBC. “One estimate is that there’s $32 trillion stashed offshore; a more conservative calculation puts it at a minimum of $8 trillion. Either way, that means tens – if not hundreds – of billions of dollars in lost tax revenues for the world’s governments.”

A massive investigate project by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists saw reporters dig through 2.5 million files, revealing “the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con men and the mega-rich the world over.”

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.

ICIJ’s investigation is an incredibly thorough look at the global tax game, one played by “the wife of Russia’s deputy prime minister,” “Indonesian billionaires with ties to the late dictator Suharto,” along with “American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.”

Talk of tax havens, loopholes and secret bank accounts and international offices (not always illegal, mind you) comes up all the time when discussing how some extremely rich people or corporations avoid paying taxes. Perhaps you’re curious as to how this seemingly other world works. To that end, the CBC has put together a fun interactive that lets you walk through the steps of how to set up your own tax haven, everything from picking the kind of sham business you want, picking your favorite tax-friendly nation, and deciding whether to use your own name on the documents of one of a “nominee.”

No one is recommending that you actually do this. While holding money in offshore accounts, setting up businesses overseas and many of the other routes taken to hiding money from the tax collectors are not in themselves inherently illegal, moving money in and out of these holdings in ways that allow you to skirt taxes are, meaning that there’s little reason to go to all the effort if you just plan to keep things above board.

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Eeeeeee. Photo: Wenliang Chen

The science of the Internet’s virality—the psychological and neurological understanding of which stories people share and why they share them (and why BuzzFeed exists)—has come up with the three key components of a well-traveled story: cats, cats and babies. Actually, it’s a little more complex than that, writes John Tierney in The New York Times. But stories that are shared widely online do have a few things in common.

For one, the most shared stories evoke strong emotions, with positive feelings of awe and joy trumping feelings of disgust or outrage. People tend “to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared.”

What else do widely shared stories share? They remind us of other people. Let’s say your friend really loves dolphins. Well, you’ll probably want to send them that super emotional story you just saw about dolphins. The key is not necessarily that you care about the story so much as that you think the person you’re sending it to will care about the story.

But, says Tierney, people are still super self-centered. People get really excited when they “are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves.”

“In fact, the study showed, it’s so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.”

The internet, says Tierney, runs counter to the “if it bleeds it leads” mantra of the traditional press. Though wars and plagues and trauma are important, they’re also heavy emotional burdens that people may not want to put on their friends. Instead, it’s funny pictures of corgis all the way down. (Look at their little legs!)

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Photo: ponte 1112

Deborah Blum, a journalist who specializes in poisons, first picked up on the disturbing frequency of pet poisonings after setting up a Google alert on poisoning events and accumulating more 300 news stories on poisoned pets over the course of one year. Then, she began receiving unsolicited emails from pet owners who had lost animals. When she began looking into it, she also stumbled upon forums where pet haters who wanted to rid themselves of their neighbor’s pesky dog or cat would post messages such as:

I want to know the best way to kill next door neighbors’ cat, with out them suspecting anything. Its her closest pet and I need it to be gone. It kills bird and it comes in my back yard. Is there any way to poision it or dart it?

Last year when Blum wrote a piece for PLoS Blogs on the topic, the comment section turned into a bragging forum on the best ways to kill a messy cat or poison a barking dog.

So why do people chose to harm others’ pets? From the hundreds of news stories, comments and emails Blum has combed through, she explains on Wired, she found a few culprits that cropped up again and again:

• Common crime. For example, a California burglar recently poisoned two dogs in order to break into a house.
• Neighbors or people we know. Estranged spouses or exes may kill an animal as a form of revenge upon their former flame. Others do it to terrorize or send a threatening message to enemies. (Think of the horse head scene from The Godfather.) Neighbors often poison pets in order to quiet a noisy dog or stop a cat from digging up the rose garden or stalking the birds.
• Random cruelty. Still others chose to poison pets for the heck of it, Blum writes, leaving poison-laced treats in public parks.

As Women in Crime Ink writes, the link between animal cruelty and crime is well documented in scientific literature. Killing a noisy dog or an irksome cat is only a step or two removed from carrying out similar violence upon fellow humans. So there is ample reason for anyone who suspects their pet was poisoned to feel nervous.

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Image: Cali4beach

Anyone who’s spent any time on the internet is familiar with trolls. From politics to sports to science, trolls take pleasure in bashing a story from every possible angle. Science is no exception, and recent research shows that when it comes to science news, the trolls are winning.

The University of Wisconsin reports on a recent study that tried to quantify just how much of an impact trolls could have on a reader. Basically, the researchers showed comments on a blog post about nanotechnology to study participants. They surveyed their users pre-existing ideas about nanotechnology and measured how those ideas might change based on the blog and the comments beneath it. What they found was that negative comments, regardless of their merit, could sway readers. The University of Wisconsin writes:

For rapidly developing nanotechnology, a technology already built into more than 1,300 consumer products, exposure to uncivil online comments is one of several variables that can directly influence the perception of risk associated with it.

“When people encounter an unfamiliar issue like nanotechnology, they often rely on an existing value such as religiosity or deference to science to form a judgment,” explains Ashley Anderson, a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University and the lead author of the upcoming study in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

At Mother Jones, Chris Mooney puts it this way:

The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

In the context of the psychological theory of motivated reasoning, this makes a great deal of sense. Based on pretty indisputable observations about how the brain works, the theory notes that people feel first, and think second. The emotions come faster than the “rational” thoughts—and also shape the retrieval of those thoughts from memory. Therefore, if reading insults activates one’s emotions, the “thinking” process may be more likely to be defensive in nature, and focused on preserving one’s identity and preexisting beliefs.

So without a background in nanotechnology—or whatever other subject you might be reading about—an emotionally charged comment is going to trigger your brain to act far before a logical explanation of how something works. And emotionally charged comments are a troll’s weapon of choice.

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Photo: Striking Photography by Bo Insagna

The “broken window theory” has had its day. This criminological theory, which argues that keeping urban environments neat and tidy deters would-be criminals, first popped up in social science in 1969, with a famous experiment detailing the fates of two different cars left out on the street in the Bronx and in Palo Alto with their hoods open and license plates removed. (Spoiler: the car in Palo Alto fared better—until the researcher broke its window, after which it was quickly stripped down.) The theory gained popularity through the ’80s, when The Atlantic first covered it, and ’90s, when New York City used it to design policing strategy, before, in 2000, it helped journalist Malcolm Gladwell make his career with The Tipping Point. The book earned the author whopping $1 million advance, and introduced to the theory to a much wider audience—many readers remember  most vividly the broken window section of Gladwell’s best-seller.

Turns out, however, that the broken window theory doesn’t really apply that well to reality. New research shows that New York City’s historic decline in crime rates during the 1990s cannot be attributed to CompState, the NYC police department’s dynamic approach to crime, introduced in 1994, that included carrying out operations in accordance with the broken window theory. The crime decline has nothing to do with enhanced enforcement of misdemeanors, the research published in Justice Quarterly by New York University professor David Greenberg reports, nor is there any link between arrests in misdemeanors and drops in felony charges, including robberies, homicides and assaults.

“While the 1990s drop in felonies is undeniable, what remains unsolved is the cause, or causes, behind this significant change in New York City’s crime rates,” Greenberg said in a statement.

In addition, neither the number of police officers per capita nor the rate of prison sentences doled out to criminals turned out to be related to a reduction in violent crime. To arrive at these findings, Greenberg examined crime data across NYC’s 75 precincts from 1988 to 2001. During this time, crime rates fell nearly uniformly across the city. (Incidentally, Los Angeles, San Diego and other major cities underwent a similar shift in crime during this time.)

His analysis found no relationship between the decline in violence crime and CompStat or any of the other actions inspired by broken window theory. While violent crime decreased over the 13 year period, Greenberg found, misdemeanors increased in all but 11 precincts, invalidating the theory’s basis. Felonies, on the other hand, dropped consistently across the city, independently of a shrinking police force, imprisonment rates or enforcement levels, which varied greatly around the five boroughs.

“While many may point to greater enforcement of lower-level offenses as a factor in curbing more serious crimes, the data simply don’t support this conclusion,” Greenberg said. He added that he has no idea why the crime dropped—only that it had nothing to do with broken windows.

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Photo: Ahmad Hashim

The news is often dubbed the “first rough draft of history,” the first crack at making sense of the struggles and triumphs of our time. A new artificial intelligence engine, however, might be able harvest those drafts to figure out the future. By using advanced computational techniques to parse through two decades of New York Times stories and other resources, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology scientist Kira Radinsky, think they might be able to identify the underlying connections between real-world events and predict what will happen next.

The trick is that many newsworthy events—riots, disease outbreaks—says the BBC, are preceded by other other less dramatic news stories. But, by digging through such a vast wealth of stories, these otherwise overlooked associations can be pulled out.

In their research paper, the two scientists say that using a mixture of archived news reports and real-time data, they were able to see links between droughts and storms in parts of Africa and cholera outbreaks.

For example in 1973 the New York Times published news of a drought in Bangladesh, and in 1974 it reported a cholera epidemic.

Following reports of another drought in the same country in 1983, the newspaper again reported cholera deaths in 1984.

“Alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,” wrote researchers Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research, and Kira Radinsky, PhD student at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

This model doesn’t necessarily mean that, for Bangladesh, drought will always lead to cholera. But, by viewing the occurrences with an eye to the future, an impending drought could be a sign to Bangladeshi water managers to keep a closer eye on their treatment programs, or for healthcare workers to be wary of an outbreak.

Similar links between drought and cholera, says MIT’s Technology Review, were identified for Angola.

In similar tests involving forecasts of disease, violence, and a significant numbers of deaths, the system’s warnings were correct between 70 to 90 percent of the time.

Techniques like this one are used in science all the time. Neural networks, machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches have helped YouTube discover—without human intervention—what cats are and have helped paleontologists speed up the fossil hunt. Because they can analyze vast swaths of data, computers are particularly well-suited for pulling out some of the non-obvious trends that permeate history. MIT’s Tom Simonite:

Many things about the world have changed in recent decades, but human nature and many aspects of the environment have stayed the same, Horvitz says, so software may be able to learn patterns from even very old data that can suggest what’s ahead. “I’m personally interested in getting data further back in time,” he says.

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Image: Leonard John Matthews

Lance Armstrong’s drug use has cost him a lot. His Tour de France medals have been taken away, his sponsors are backing away slowly, and he’s stepping down from his charity. Now, readers who bought his books want their money back, and they’re suing to get it. CNN reports:

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in California, also mentions Armstrong’s other book, “Every Second Counts,” and accuses the cyclist and his publishers of fraud and false advertising.

“Throughout the book, Defendant Armstrong repeatedly denies that he ever used banned substances before or during his professional cycling career,” the suit said.

Buyers, they say, bought the book as a work of non-fiction, when what Armstrong was really peddling was lies. And the lawsuit isn’t just asking for the price of the book back. The plaintiffs want “any statutorily permissible damages, attorneys’ fees, expenses and costs.” Not only would they have not bought the book, had they known about Armstrong’s doping, but they would have enjoyed it less, they argue. Which is worth some money. The Los Angeles Times writes:

The lawsuit says Stutzman, who was an aide to former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, bought “It’s Not About the Bike” and “read it cover to cover.”

“Although Stutzman does not buy or read many books, he found Armstrong’s book incredibly compelling and recommended the book to several friends,” the suit says.

Wheeler is described in the filing as an avid cyclist who also bought Armstrong’s first book. He was “so impressed,” the court papers say, that he bought the athlete’s next book as well.

Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly summarized Armstrong’s first book, It’s Not About the Bike, is :

In 1996, young cycling phenom Armstrong discovered he had testicular cancer. In 1999, he won the Tour de France. Now he’s a grateful husband, a new fatherAand a memoirist: with pluck, humility and verve, this volume covers his early life, his rise through the endurance sport world and his medical difficulties. Cancer “was like being run off the road by a truck, and I’ve got the scars to prove it,” Armstrong declares…. “The real racing action was over in Europe”: after covering that, Armstrong and Jenkins (Men Will Be Boys, with Pat Summit, etc.) ascend to the scarier challenges of diagnoses and surgeries. As he gets worse, then better, Armstrong describes the affections of his racing friends and of the professionals who cared for him. Armstrong is honest and delightful on his relationship to wife Kristin (Kik), and goes into surprising detail about the technology that let them have a child.

The Amazon description of the follow-up, Every Second Counts, includes these inspiring lines:

His new book addresses the equally daunting challenge of living in the aftermath of this experience and making the most of every breath of life. Armstrong candidly discusses his prickly relationship with the French and the ultimately disproved accusations of doping within his Tour de France team, and he writes about his recent achievements, including celebrating five years of cancer survival and how he restored a magnificent chapel in his beloved Spain.

A fresh perspective on the spirit of survivors everywhere, Every Second Counts will invigorate and enthrall Armstrong’s millions of admirers.

Armstrong’s admission of doping certainly makes many wonder just how much of both of those stories is fact and how much is fiction. And the readers suing Armstrong don’t just feel deceived—they feel cheated.

In the past, publishers have refunded buyers for faked memoirs. When a memoir by Herman and Roma Rosenblat, two Holocaust survivors, turned out to be faked, publishers of a spinoff children’s version refunded their customers. The New York Times writes:

A children’s author, Laurie Friedman, was so inspired by an online news article she read about the Rosenblats that she wrote a children’s book based on his story. Lerner Publishing, the publisher of the book, “Angel Girl,” released in September, said Monday that it would not proceed with any reprints and would offer refunds for returned copies. The book has sold 2,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales.

When James Frey’s famously faked memoir A Million Little Pieces was found out, the publishers were sued by readers to the tune of $2.35 million. The Guardian wrote:

The total payout includes legal fees for the 12 plaintiffs from across the US who brought the case, as well as a donation to charity. And for the disgruntled readers it will not be simply a case of returning a receipt. The publisher wants to see hard evidence.

In the case of those who bought the US hardback edition for $23.95, readers must return both the receipt and page 163 of the book. Paperback readers must send in the front cover of the book to earn their $14.95 refund, while buyers of the audio book, which cost $34.95, must send in some of the packaging.

So Lance isn’t the first faker whose readers want their money back. And it’s possible that the publishers might just have to shell it out.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Is It Too Late To Forgive Lance Armstrong?
The Journalist Who Says ‘I Told You So’ About Lance Armstrong
Lance Armstrong Surrenders Against Doping Charges and Will be Banned for Life

The culprit signature. Photo: whitehouse.gov

Above, you can see signature of Jacob J. Lew, reportedly the top candidate to be the country’s new Treasury secretary. This scribble—a slinky? a bit of fuzz? a doodle of a caterpillar?—may be printed on every single new dollar bill. The signature is causing no shortage of judgment from media outlets like The New York Times and New York, which writes:

If Lew is confirmed as Treasury secretary, his signature will occupy the lower-right-hand spot on U.S. paper currency. And that signature, which was widely mocked when it surfaced on a September 2011 memorandum, is legitimately crazy.

Meanwhile (as if journalists are known for their handwriting’s legibility) the Times chides:

Amazingly, while this looks like an arbitrary series of loop-the-loops, he’s actually mostly consistent about having seven full loops each time. Maybe they stand for the seven letters of “Jack Lew” (as he is known); maybe seven is his lucky number. Clearly we need to consult another graphologist.

New York calls for Lew to upgrade his penmanship. It wouldn’t be the first time a politician amended his natural scrawl in favor of something more legible. The current Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, now on his way out, changed his signature just for the dollar bill. As he told Marketplace:

Well, I think on the dollar bill I had to write something where people could read my name. That’s the rationale.

I didn’t try for elegance. I tried for clarity.

However, a counter movement is at play. A petition has sprung up to save Lew’s signature, and a graphologist concluded that the signature—which supposedly shares similarities with Princess Diana’s—reveals the current chief of staff’s softer side.

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Photo: christoph.ch

Good news for journalists, editors and newspapers: The New York Times‘ paywall seems to be working. After a year and a half, the paywall has helped boost the paper’s subscription dollars. For the first time, paper and paywall subscriptions from will exceed the money made from advertising, Bloomberg reports.

Since the Times installed its paywall in March 2011, journalists and bloggers have disputed its value. Amidst an ever tightening budget noose publishers argued that they cannot give away free content, while the blogger crowd purported that paywalls turn off readers who are accustomed to receiving free content on the Web.

Digital subscriptions will generate $91 million this year, accounting for 12 percent of total subscription sales, which totalled about $768 million. Print subscriptions continued to slip this year, but online readership increased 11 percent since last June. Web readership may soon rival print subscriptions if the trend continues.

Still, this all comes in the context of dropping revenue from advertising. Annual ad dollars have fallen for five straight years, and Techdirt argues that subscribers can’t solve all the paper’s financial troubles:

Even if you think the NYT’s paywall should be judged a “success” it doesn’t change the fact that its revenue continues to drop (and not just its print revenue — digital revenue is struggling too). Perhaps the paywall may have limited the revenue collapse, but it has done little to create a new and sustainable business model.

There’s more to that argument, but even skeptics have to admit that the paywall experiment is far from the total disaster once predicted.

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Image: Janusz Stachoń

The pope is officially on Twitter now, under the handle @pontifex, and his tweets are officially “part of the church’s magisterium.” Which means that anything he tweets is the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

A lot of what the pope says falls into the category of the magesterium, according to the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church of Christ, which says:

…that the Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra, that is, when carrying out the duty of the pastor and teacher of all Christians by his supreme apostolic authority he defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the universal Church, through the divine assistance promised him in blessed Peter, operates with that infallibility with which the divine Redeemer wished that His church be instructed in defining doctrine on faith and morals; and so such definitions of the Roman Pontiff from himself, but not from the consensus of the Church, are unalterable.

One reason why the pope’s entry into Twitter is surprising: not that long ago, during his annual message for the World Communications Day, he told everyone on social media to be quiet . He wrote:

The process of communication nowadays is largely fuelled by questions in search of answers. Search engines and social networks have become the starting point of communication for many people who are seeking advice, ideas, information and answers. In our time, the internet is becoming ever more a forum for questions and answers – indeed, people today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were unaware. If we are to recognize and focus upon the truly important questions, then silence is a precious commodity that enables us to exercise proper discernment in the face of the surcharge of stimuli and data that we receive.

And, in fact, the pope has Tweeted before, saying “Dear Friends, I just launched News.va Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI.” The pope also has several other social media accounts, like a YouTube channel and a number of Facebook apps.

This time, however, it’s all official. Quartz writes:

The pope will also be tweeting in at least six other languages: German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portugese, and Arabic. It’s also been reported he’ll be tweeting in French, but that account does not appear to exist yet, and given that it’s suspended, someone may have already tried to claim it. As in real life, Twitter already has its share of false popes.

So far the pope has around 85,000 followers (of the 1.2 billion Catholics walking the Earth). But the pope won’t be tweeting his own tweets, says Reuters:

Benedict will be pushing the button on his first tweet himself on December 12 but in the future most will be written by aides and he will sign off on them.

But while the pope will be one of the world’s most high-profile tweeters and have many followers, he will not be following anyone himself.

“This is the new market of ideas and the Church has to be there. We want to use any method to spread the message. It’s cost-effective and not very labor intensive and it is aimed at young people,” Burke said.

This is a far cry from how popes used to communicate with the common people: generally, they spoke through the church hierarchy of Bishops. Sometimes the pope would put out a papal bull—a letter that communicated the thoughts of the pope. But they were far longer than 140 characters.

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Photo: D()MENICK

Oxytocin, also known as the “love hormone” or the “trust hormone,” frequently makes its way into the news in connection to the latest studies on topics ranging from fidelity to morality to hugs. The most recent addition to the scientific literature, published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, finds that oxycotin may keep committed men from so much as moving into the vicinity other attractive women.

To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers administered either an oxytocin nasal spray or a placebo to healthy, straight men. Some were in committed relationships; others were not. An hour later, an attractive female assistant entered the room. She altered her distance to each of the men, who were supposed to indicate when she seemed to be at an “ideal distance” or when she stood at a “slightly uncomfortable distance.” Though all of the men, including the ones in relationships, agreed that the attendant was attractive, their comfort levels based upon her physical closeness differed.

i09 details the results:

Interestingly, going into the experiment Hurle­mann’s team predicted that the men, because they had just been administered oxytocin, would be more comfortable as the woman came closer; it is the “trust hormone” after all. But surprisingly, the exact opposite happened. The researchers observed that the men in committed relationships (but not those who were single) kept a greater physical distance between themselves and the woman.

And importantly, committed men who were given the placebo did not insist on the same distance as those administered oxytocin, an indication that the hormone discourages partnered — but not single men — from getting too close to a female stranger.

Before women with husbands and boyfriends rejoice, however, a few notes of caution. Science journalist Ed Yong takes a more pragmatic approach to oxytocin, as he wrote a few months back at Slate:

Oxytocin hype might be storming the heavens, but oxytocin science is still finding its footing. Early studies certainly bathed the hormone in a shiny glow, but later ones uncovered a darker side. The “love hormone” fosters trust and generosity in some situations but envy and bias in others, and it can produce opposite effects in different people. A more nuanced view of oxytocin is coming to light—one that’s inconsistent with the simplistic “moral molecule” moniker.

Researchers’ understanding of the complex physiological and social drivers behind oxytocin’s regulation and effects on individuals remains minimal. And though the science lags behind, Yong writes, hyped coverage of the hormone spurs parents into rushing out to buy oxytocin nasal spray for their children with autism or depression. This creates a potentially dangerous scenario since there have been no studies on the long-term consequences of taking oxytocin. Yong concludes:

In many ways, oxytocin epitomizes what happens when enthusiasm, salesmanship, and optimism runs ahead of evidence and careful experimentation. The true moral of the moral molecule may be that ideas that are too cleanly packaged are probably just fragments.

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