harper’s FINDINGS Researchers concluded that who is president is the largest factor in U.S. income inequality. U.S. health-care costs rise in part because the system does not put a monetary value on human life. Attorneys with less-masculine voices win Supreme Court cases more often. Old American men adhere to a 1950s and ’60s ideal of masculinity that fails to prepare them for senescence. Mortality fell in Spain during their economic crisis because the lives of poor people became either less risky or more healthy. Brexit may alter the pattern of nurse migration to the U.K. The “Afghan Girl” was arrested for violating I.D. laws. Among Swedish men born in 1933, 15% were found to have become permanently stressed by age fifty. Jung’s anti-Semitism was found to have been mild. Rational and ridiculing arguments were found to be equally effective in countering conspiracy theories. Linguistic analysis revealed that pro-vaccine comments about Mark Zuckerberg’s baby on Facebook were less logical and rational than anti-vaccine statements. Gaëtan Dugas, referred to as H.I.V.’s Patient Zero, was actually Patient “O” but was subsequently misidentified. Fifteen percent ofhomeless Los Angeles youth are Juggalos. Agent Orange was not understood as a poison among residents of A Luoi until the late 1990s. Humans are good at recognizing partially obscured snakes. Great white sharks were becoming trapped in diving cages. A new theory of gravity may explain the existence of dark matter.
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The idea of cooperation among chimpanzees was cast into doubt, because such cooperation requires that the dominance of any given group member be artificially constrained. Mob behavior allows hyenas to wrest food from lions. If voice commands conflict with gestural commands, dogs obey the gestures. Authoritarian parents exhibit reduced neural response to seeing their adolescent children win money; adolescents with permissive parents exhibit reduced neural response to seeing their parents lose money. By “losing” both stamped and unstamped letters around Perth and seeing how many were eventually mailed, Australian researchers concluded that both financial costs and low socioeconomic status dampen altruism. The more severe the violation of a social norm, the more reluctant bystanders are to call it out, for fear of retaliation. Time pressure does not change the behavior of subjects playing dictator games. Women playing dictator games are more altruistic if they have been exposed to an odorous compound derived from testosterone. Debate continued as to whether the tears of women dampen the sexual responses of men. Sixteen heterosexual men reported an interest in ejaculating on women’s faces while generally believing that the women themselves would not be interested. It remained unclear whether there are benefits to unrealistic optimism.
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Quantitative bioscientists described an oscillating tragedy of the commons. Every aspect of life on earth has been affected by climate change. In 2017, the world’s 2nd largest hypersaline lake was at 20 percent of its 1960 level. Thousands of scrotum frogs were found dead near Lake Titicaca. Tropical bedbugs were reported in Florida for the first time in sixty years. A North Korean zoo chimp continued smoking a pack a day. The odds of a multidecade megadrought occurring in the U.S. Southwest this century are as high as 50%t, and Mayan civilization may have collapsed because of a failure to change habits of consumption during water shortages. The bulwark of old, stable Arctic sea ice was rapidly disappearing. Greenlandic fossils revealed the recoveryof life on earth after 90% of all species died at the Permian–Triassic boundary. It became easier to identify the last signals from stars that were consumed by black holes. Water-rich planets orbiting Proxima Centauri are probably habitable. n 22
ICON | JULY/AUGUST 2021 | ICONDV.COM
INDEX % by which the number of international borders with barriers has increased since 2014: 48 Year in which the U.S. Census Bureau added a category for people from the Middle East and North Africa: 2020 % of immigrants seeking asylum who are successful in an Atlanta court: 2 In a New York City court: 84 # of statues in New York’s Central Park that depict women: 19 % of those statues that depict fictional women: 100 # of Shakespeare’s plays that the Oxford U. Press now co-credits to Christopher Marlowe: 3 # of emoji acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2017: 176 % change since 2000 in the purchasing power of U.S. Social Security checks: –22 Portion of new U.S. parents who have taken a lower-paying job because it offered better family benefits: 1/2 % of U.S. teachers who leave the profession each year: 8 Average % pay cut a U.S. worker would take to be able to work from home: 8 Average salary of a Harvard University cafeteria worker, including a raise given after a strike in: $35,000 Total value of Harvard’s endowment: $35,700,000,000 # of deaths in Japan attributed to overwork in 2015: 189 % of donated organs in New England that came from victims of drug overdoses in 2010: 4 2011: 27 # of years in prison to which an Indonesian woman was sentenced for poisoning a friend’s iced coffee: 20 % by which the café has raised the price of its iced coffee since the murder: 37 % change since 2003 in the number of bank heists in the United States: –46 In complaints of internet fraud: +131 Chance that an American adult is searchable in facial-recognition databases used by U.S. law-enforcement agencies: 1 in 2 % of local U.S. jails that have implemented video visitation: 14 Portion of those jails that have abolished in-person visitation: 3/4 # of African countries that opted to withdraw from the International Criminal Court: 3 % of people charged by the International Criminal Court who are African: 97 Length, in years, of the maximum jail sentence under a proposed South African law criminalizing racial slurs: 10 Estimated # of gay and bisexual men whom the United Kingdom posthumously pardoned for sexual crimes: 50,000 Portion of the leaders of Scotland’s major political parties who are gay or bisexual: 3/5 Estimated portion of female parliamentarians worldwide who have been subject to physical violence while in office: 1/4 # of members of the Pirate Party elected to the Icelandic parliament in October: 10 # of hours after the first U.S. election polls closed that the Canadian Immigration Services website crashed: 5 Average % change in the stock value of the five largest U.S. defense contractors the week after Trump’s election: +8 Estimated # of votes by which Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin: 27,000 Of registered Wisconsin voters who lacked voter identification: 360,000 # of newly elected senators who are non-white females: 3 Year in which the U.S. population of eligible voters is projected to be majority minority: 2052 # of men elected to the U.S. presidency before 2016 despite losing the popular vote: 4 Portion of those victors who went on to be one-term presidents: ¾
SOURCES: 1 Élisabeth Vallet, Université du Québec à Montréal; 2 U.S. Census Bureau (SuitlanMd.); 3,4 Executive Office for Immigration Review, U.S. Department of Justice (Falls Church, Va.); 5,6 New York City Department of Parks and Recreation; 7 Gary Taylor, Florida State University (Tallahassee); 8 Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.C.); 9 Senior Citizens League (Barboursville, Va.); 10 Social Security Administration (Baltimore); 11 Bright Horizons Family Solutions (Watertown, Mass.); 12 Learning Policy Institute (Palo Alto, Calif.); 13 Amanda Pallais, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.); 14 Local 26 (Boston); 15 Harvard Management Company (Boston); 16 Scott North, Osaka University (Suita, Japan); 17,18 New England Organ Bank (Waltham, Mass.); 19 Central Jakarta District Court (Indonesia); 20 Olivier (Jakarta); 21,22 Federal Bureau of Investigation; 23 Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology (Washington); 24,25 Prison Policy Initiative (Los Angeles); 26,27 International Criminal Court (The Hague); 28 South Africa Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (Pretoria); 29 U.K. Ministry of Justice (London); 30 Stonewall Scotland (Edinburgh); 31 Inter- Parliamentary Union (Geneva); 32 Pirate Party (Reykjavík, Iceland); 33 Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (Ottawa); 34 NASDAQ (N.Y.C.); 35 Associated Press (Washington); 36 Leland Beatty (Austin, Tex.); 37 Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, N.J.); 38 Brookings Institution (Washington); 39,40 Gil Troy, McGill University (Montreal).
