The Atlantic | Study: No News is Better Than Fox News A survey by Farleigh Dickinson University asked 1,185 random people about their news consumption and also random questions about domestic and current events like whether Bashar al-Assad was still in power, the American unemployment rate, and which party holds the most seats in the House of Representatives right now. And this is what they found:

The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all.

[Image: Reuters]

You don’t say

Mother Jones | The founder of I Can Haz Cheezburger helped pay for a billboard targeting Texas Rep. Lamar Smith for his support of SOPA.

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the noob yorker | shortformblog points out a disturbing scientific discovery on Slate,

This seems like a story with the words “bad idea” written all over it.

The final paragraph of the piece,

…But here we run into one of the consistent criticisms of evolutionary psychology, which is that there can be a “just-so story” to explain every data set. Perhaps the effects reported by Goetz and her team can be interpreted just as well from a non-evolutionary perspective. (If you think so, I’d be curious to hear your ideas in the comments section below.) However you interpret them, results like these can feel self-evident, given that “obviously” men would find drunk and air-headed women easy to screw. But we also must be on the lookout for our own retrospective biases: After all, I’m not so sure most people would have predicted that men would also find such women more attractive. All else being equal, would you really have thought that the average man would subjectively perceive such women to be physically more alluring than their sober, bright-minded peers?

If that sounds disgusting to you, congratulations because it should. From the introduction to Susan McKinnon’s Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology,

In an era when the divisive politics of “family values” has created fault lines that threaten to render the United States asunder, evolutionary psychologists tell us that they have the single key to understanding the value of family. At a time when ideas about sex and gender are rapidly changing and deeply contested around the globe, evolutionary psychologists tell a story about how gender difference was fixed forever in the depths of human evolutionary and genetic history. At a moment when the principles by which humans wish to organize society are up for grabs, evolutionary psychologists reduce social relations to a reflex of genetic self-maximization guided by the forces of natural selection. In a time when Angle-American neo-liberal economics both dominates and is deeply resented and resisted in much of the world, evolutionary psychologists give us a theory of evolution that naturalizes neo-liberal values. In short, at a time when there is an urgent need for a nuanced understanding of the complexities and varieties of social life, evolutionary psychologists provide instead astonishingly reductive myths and moral tales.

And this is why I’m not a fan of these types of stories, the disclaimer at the end of the article at Slate is honest but for all of the wrong reasons.

fotojournalismus | An Afghan boy pushed a wheelbarrow next to U.S. Army soldiers as they secured an area during a joint patrol with the Afghan army in Senjaray, Afghanistan, May 23, 2012. [Credit : Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters]

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(Source: mattbors.com)

Apparently J. Crew’s theme for this season is colonial racism. It’s no surprise that the company that took so long to feature non-white models, would turn to the orientalist visions of their waspy ancestors. Normally the company’s chief offense is being boring, the suburbanite aspirations of those who wished they lived in cooler cities. J.Crew’s promise has always been that of a bourgeoisie fantasy, of using seasons as verbs and cafe hopping in cobbestoned towns. Naturally after exhausting New England settings, and then European ones, they’ve arrived at the East. Bringing their ‘signature’ aka re-issued ad nauseum saturated sweater sets, button-downs, insipid ‘school boy’ blazers and clunky jewelry to Bali. In short, White people please stop. This is tiring, I had already tweeted about this phenomenon today I didn’t need it mailed to me. It’s 2012 not 1870.