Studio and network executives say that this year they heard more pitches than ever before for shows about the changing dynamics of men. "Manliness is under assault," says Todd Holland, executive producer of "Free Agents." "That's the premise." Some call the trend "wussification" or "feminization." Others say it's just wimpy guys who want to be macho and have no clue how to do it. But it's subtler than that.

The findings of "Adaptation Amidst Prosperity and Adversity" include: As incomes rise, so do expectations, reducing the happiness that the increased prosperity may have brought about. This "paradox of unhappy growth" is present in a broad range of countries, both developed and developing. Consequently, "rising incomes do not translate into ever-increasing levels of happiness." When incomes fall or remain low, individuals in many societies are able to successfully adjust their expectations. "Remarkably adverse circumstances, such as high levels of crime and corruption or very poor standards of health, do not seem to result in equivalently low levels of happiness." Life difficulties can be overcome by increases in income, but the amounts required are substantial. The average individual in the United States or the United Kingdom would need to produce an estimated $60,000 in income to overcome the unhappiness resulting from job loss, and $100,000 to overcome divorce. While the correlations between stated satisfaction with different life aspects were all positive with per capita gross domestic product (GDP), but were all negative with economic growth. For example, life satisfaction levels had a 0.788 correlation with GDP but a -0.082 correlation with economic growth. All measures of social connections - both the support that they get from others and the support that they give to others - were significantly and positively correlated with life satisfaction across the countries.

Hamleys, which is London's 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink "girls" and blue "boys" sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage. Rather than floors dedicated to Barbie dolls and action figures, merchandise is now organized by types (Soft Toys) and interests (Outdoor). That free-to-be gesture was offset by Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, will hit stores this month with the goal of becoming a holiday must-have by the fall. Set in fictive Heartlake City (and supported by a $40 million marketing campaign), the line features new, pastel-colored, blocks that allow a budding Kardashian, among other things, to build herself a cafe or a beauty salon. Its tasty-sounding "ladyfig" characters are also taller and curvier than the typical Legoland denizen. So who has it right? Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings? Or is Lego merely being realistic, earnestly meeting girls halfway in an attempt to stoke their interest in engineering?

Ever since YouTube became a place where anyone could realistically become a celebrity, brands have been trying to figure out how and what makes a viral video. What's significant about this year's top-viewed ads is the fact that they have more of a web presence on YouTube than on TV.

Riley has an important message for all the toy makers and marketers out there: stop trying to force pink stuff on girls. They like other colors, too. And while you're at it, some girls like superheroes just as much, if not more, than princesses. If you were looking to add some inspiration to your Christmas Eve, watch this little girl's impassioned speech against gender stereotypes in toy manufacturing. We only wish we had been this articulate and impassioned when we were her age.

A history of advertising info graphic

Here's an article that offers the other side of the issue the SOPA bill was written to address. A California appeals court yesterday rejected Universal Music's claim that video-sharing service Veoh didn't do enough to protect content owners. All eyes now turn to New York where another influential court is set to rule on the same issue-who should be responsible for copyright enforcement.

Male and female images As one dramatic example, the image and representation of women and girls in the media has long been a subject of concern. Research shows that there are many fewer females than males in almost all forms of mainstream media and those who do appear are often portrayed in very stereotypical ways. Constantly polarized gender messages in media have fundamentally anti-social effects. In everything from advertising, television programming, newspaper and magazines, to comic books, popular music, film and video games, women and girls are more likely to be shown: in the home, performing domestic chores such as laundry or cooking; as sex objects who exist primarily to service men; as victims who can't protect themselves and are the natural recipients of beatings, harassment, sexual assault and murder. Men and boys are also stereotyped by the media. From GI Joe to Rambo, masculinity is often associated with machismo, independence, competition, emotional detachment, aggression and violence. Despite the fact that men have considerably more economic and political power in society than women, these trends - although different from those which affect women and girls - are very damaging to boys.

Facebook plans to migrate its Sponsored Stories ad platform into users' news feeds early next year, the company says. Introduced last January, Sponsored Stories - a new ad format integrating your Facebook friends' activities into small ads - began appearing in the column on the right side of the News Feed. Last month, the ads began appearing in the Ticker as well. Perhaps anticipating criticism for the latest migration of Sponsored Stories, a Facebook rep emphasized that the ads will be used sparingly. Most users, she says, will see the maximum of one ad per day in their News Feeds. The speed at which the ads cycle through the News Feed, meanwhile, will depend on various factors that Facebook hasn't yet determined, a Facebook rep says.

Below, our take on the top 10 digital trends for 2012 that will go mass.

Starting March 1, InStyle will take over a 19-by-42-foot storefront at the bustling corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue and the windows, enabled with touch-screen technology, will show six spring looks. The venture is overseen by the magazine's publishing side, although the products featured in the window will be inspired by the title's March issue. Collages, in a similar vein to Polyvore's model, can be created and instantly sent as a digital postcard to smartphones. Essentially, these cards provide a detailed shopping list, with special offers and a photo stamp (women can personalize the cards further by having their photos taken at the storefront). Geo-targets from the cards will direct shoppers to a given brand's closest preferred retailer. It can get as specific as, say, "see Linda on the third floor of Bloomingdale's, in the northwest corner of the store."

But the relentless mass marketing of cool has tainted this style of behavior and made it seem inauthentic or contrived to a growing number of individuals. It is almost inconceivable that anything could happen, at this late stage, that would restore to cool the freshness and vitality it possessed in the fifties and sixties. Cool now lacks conviction and energy. Above all, its economic force is diminishing. And this, more than anything, will accelerate its decline. The arbiters of taste - at record labels, in films and TV, in consumer marketing, in media - will respond to these economic shifts rather than lead them. But follow they must, or disappear from the scene. Their successors will not make the same mistakes. Over time, this will transform even the last institutional bastions of cool into promoters of the postcool worldview. One of the most interesting spectacles of postcool society will involve the dominant forces of the old paradigm scrambling to co-opt the new one. Packaged and slick and phony will attempt to become down-home and natural and authentic. We can see this playing out in many arenas - from music to clothing, politics to daily news. But let us take one sector of our economy and show how this works.

Post-production enhancement of beauty advertising has been standard operating procedure from the age of the air brush to the age of Photoshop, but an action seen by some as long overdue from the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus against Procter & Gamble Co.could change that. The NAD today announced that P&G had discontinued superior-performance claims and a post-production-enhanced photograph in print advertising for its CoverGirl NatureLuxe Mousse Mascara after the industry self-regulatory forum launched an inquiry into the claims and photos.

Some of you were asking about Wikileaks. This story is about the army private who gave the confidential material to Wikileaks and his upcoming trial. When he worked in Iraq, Manning allegedly downloaded thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables and shared them with the website WikiLeaks. He faces 22 criminal charges that could keep him behind bars for life.

Need a bit of inspiration this morning? Check out this video from Erica Gorochow, explaining how the most iconic of brands can be built from the simplest of building blocks.

How are people using social media to interact with brands, and how are companies using the power of social media to reach more customers? Who is most receptive to brands on Twitter? How about on Facebook?

The latest on the OPA bill.

the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently making its way through the House of Representatives, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are supposedly intended to combat copyright violations on the Internet. Unfortunately, these bills are written so broadly so as to not only eliminate Internet piracy but replace the innovative and democratic aspects of the Internet with a tangled bureaucratic mess regulated by the government and corporations.While holding companies accountable for their role in copyright infringement is important, this legislation threatens to turn the whole Internet on its head, disrupting innovation in business and technology and muting democratic dialogue, by allowing copyright holders to unilaterally impose sanctions on companies accused of copyright infringement without due process. Based solely on an accusation (not a conviction, mind you) of a copyright violation, the U.S. Attorney General, and sometimes the copyright holding companies themselves, will be able to block access to and business transactions with websites accused of such violations. Financial institutions will be forced to stop transferring legal funds to accused websites, search engines will be forced to block accused websites, and advertisers will be forced to stop placing ads on accused websites. Moreover, the bill is written so broadly as to override the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to operate freely. Unfortunately, under SOPA, if a user on YouTube or Facebook were to mistakenly or unintentionally upload copyrighted material to the sites, those websites could also be shut down

This year in viral video ads feels a lot like last year - many advertisers chose to evolve successful concepts and characters, such as Old Spice pairing Mustafa with Fabio for an old-fashioned Internet duel, and DC Shoes continuing Ken Block's hugely popular Gymkhana series.

Video of a police officer dousing Occupy protesters with pepper spray was one of the top three news-related memes of 2011, according to the analysts who follow this sort of thing at Know Your Meme. Also in the group: a photo of President Obama and his top advisers awaiting word of Osama bin Laden's death and the news that Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs had died. They fit perfectly into the somewhat loose definition of a meme. All three started as one thing - in the case of "pepper spray cop" it was video of a University of California, Davis, officer casually walking down a line of seated protesters as he shot the stinging spray into their faces - and became something else entirely as people used digital tools to add their own interpretations and comments.