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A Pew poll from a few weeks back asked Americans how they felt about capitalism versus socialism. The results said all you need to know about how much longer we’re going to have to wade through this misery. You guessed it: until the Boomers finally croak.

For maybe the first time in modern history, we now have a generation that actually has warmer feelings about socialism than it does capitalism: 49% to 46%.

And a few days later, amid a multi-billion dollar war on public sector workers, another poll was released demonstrating that a whopping 69% of Millennials think teachers are underpaid (compared to 56% for Americans of all ages).

Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.

In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities.

The House has proposed cutting food stamp benefits by $40 billion over 10 years — that’s on top of $5 billion in cuts that already came into effect this month with the expiration of increases to the food stamp program that were included in the 2009 stimulus law.

Meanwhile, House Republicans appear satisfied to allow farm subsidies, which totaled some $14.9 billion last year, to continue apace.

Tellingly, a recent Time magazine cover story has pointed out a marked generational difference in how people view these matters: 70 percent of those age 18 to 34 sampled in a poll said they believed that Snowden “did a good thing” in leaking the news of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

Hannah Arendt made an observation about what she called “the banality of evil.”

Paying the bills becomes a work of algebraic artistry as you find out how much they'll take in order to not shut off your gas. Then calculate on the fly the smallest amount of money you need to survive for the next four days, then subtract that from your current bank account, then make adjustments where necessary and eventually arrive at X ... where X equals how much today's bill is going to fuck you for the next three weeks.

You get to a point where you stop worrying about exact numbers, and you start to drift into a place where rounding off the bills and bank account isn't a big deal. But your mind still panics when you realize that you don't know exactly how much money is in your checking.

Forget about fresh produce or fresh baked goods or fresh anything. Canned vegetables are as cheap as a gang tattoo, and every poor person I knew (including myself) had them as a staple of their diet. Fruit was the same way. Canned peaches could be split between three kids for half the cost of fresh ones, and at the end you had the extra surprise of pure, liquefied sugar to push you into full-blown hyperglycemia.

If it wasn't canned, it was frozen. TV dinners, pot pies, chicken nuggets ... meals that can be frozen forever, and preparation isn't more complicated than "Remove from box. Nuke. Eat."

The crux of his argument isn't new: Cul-de-sacs discourage mobility and increase our dependence on cars to get around. Not surprisingly, the health of Americans who have chosen to live outside of city centers is slowly eroding. These maze-like neighborhoods "engineer their travel behavior," which studies have shown can have tangible effects in several areas of their lives

Consider Atlanta. The average working adult in Atlanta's suburbs now drives 44 miles a day. (That's 72 minutes a day behind the wheel, just getting to work and back.) Ninety-four percent of Atlantans commute by car. They spend more on gas than anyone else in the country. In a study of more than 8,000 households, investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology led by Lawrence Frank discovered that people's environments were shaping their travel behavior and their bodies. They could actually predict how fat people were by where they lived in the city. Frank found that a white male living in Midtown, a lively district near Atlanta's downtown, was likely to weigh 10 pounds less than his identical twin living out in a place like, say, Mableton, in the cul-de-sac archipelago that surrounds Atlanta, simply because the Midtowner would be twice as likely to get enough exercise every day. [Slate]

suburban group-think has largely deviated from the practical grid layout featured in older, bigger cities

Many of the people who pursue a gluten-free diet out of choice believe themselves to be gluten-sensitive, a far less serious condition in which limited symptoms of celiac's manifest without any damage to the small intestine.

According to the National Foundation for Celiac Awareness, as many as 18 million Americans may have non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS). Since the condition has only been recently described and is poorly understood, it's currently diagnosed via a process of exclusion. If a patient's test for celiac disease comes back negative, but symptoms improve on a gluten-free diet, then he or she is diagnosed with NCGS.

Instead of receiving a proper diagnosis, however, many people are self-diagnosing as gluten-sensitive and eating gluten-free by choice. Noticing this trend, Jessica Biesiekierski, a gastroenterologist at Monash University and a leading researcher into the effects of gluten, sought adults who believed they had NCGS to participate in a survey and a clinical trial.

like any meticulous scientist, Gibson wasn't satisfied with his first study.

Moreover, there were many more variables to control! What if some hidden confounder was mucking up the results? He resolved to repeat the trial with a level of rigor lacking in most nutritional research.

Twain’s decree will be put to the test when the University of California Press publishes the first of three volumes of the 500,000-word “Autobiography of Mark Twain” in November.

Versions of the autobiography have been published before, in 1924, 1940 and 1959. But the original editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, was a stickler for propriety, cutting entire sections he thought offensive; his successors imposed a chronological cradle-to-grave narrative that Twain had specifically rejected, altered his distinctive punctuation, struck additional material they considered uninteresting and generally bowed to the desire of Twain’s daughter Clara, who died in 1962, to protect her father’s image.

While Ötzi wore the oldest known leather shoes prior to this discovery (his were grassy socks held together with straps of bear and deer leather), 7,420-year-old sandals made from plant material were previously found in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri. The newly discovered lace-up moccasin is thought to narrowly pre-date the first known slip-on shoe, which is 4,680 radiocarbon years old.

Talk about vintage footwear—an international team of archeologists has discovered the world's oldest leather shoe.

Near a place called Lake Turkana, archaeologists David Braun found two intriguing groups of items: The bones of fish, turtles, and even crocodiles with the scars of stone tools still showing, and stone fragments that Braun says come from the simple tools these hominins used to carve up the marine animals.

Russia is generally freer now than it was under communism, but its spy-chiefs are, if anything, even more entrenched. No longer is it the government that is running the spies. The spies are running the government.

The effect, less commonly observed, is that post-communist Russia has emerged, not as a police state, but as a secret-police state—something of a novelty in international relations, and with its own characteristics.

Five ways Apple's new gadget and its cousins are transforming global politics.

After oil and water, coltan might soon be among the world's most contested resources.

Foxconn finally agreed to raise wages 30 percent amid rising criticism over the deaths, but the iPhone maker is only a small part of a larger trend affecting the Chinese labor market.

The interviewed experts don't expect to be any more able to understand clouds and the other uncertainties by 2030—even if funding for such research were tripled in the next 20 years. That matches real world results, since the experts interviewed back in the 1990s were just as uncertain about clouds and the like as when re-interviewed in the 2000s. Or, as climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the experts interviewed this time and last, told me last year: "We don't know much more than we did in 1975" about climate sensitivity.