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he essence of Team Obama's reelection strategy was to capitalize on their man's strength with what National Journal's Ron Brownstein calls "the coalition of the ascendant" has long been clear. Back in May, I wrote a cover story for the magazine laying out Chicago's plan to focus laser-like on four key voting blocs: African-Americans, Hispanics, college-educated white women, and voters of all ethnicities aged 18-29. At bottom, their theory of the case was that, despite the fragility of the recovery and the doubts that many voters had about Obama's capacity to put America firmly back on the road to prosperity, the deft and aggressive exploitation of coalition politics (along with the ruthless disqualification of Romney as a credible occupant of the Oval Office) could secure the president a second term. That in 2012, in other words, demographics would trump economics.

A quick glance at the exit polls confirms the extent to which the coalition of the ascendant is responsible for that performance. Contrary to the assumptions of the Romney campaign, the electorate that turned out on Tuesday was more diverse than 2008's, not less. Nationally, the share of the vote comprised by whites fell from 74 to 72 percent, while the black vote held steady at 13 and rose among Hispanics from 9 to 10, among Asians from 2.5 to 3 percent, among women from 53 to 54 percent, and among young voters from 18 to 19 percent. Obama's share of each of those blocs was overwhelming: 93 percent of African-Americans, 71 percent of Latinos, 73 percent of Asians, 55 percent of the ladies, and 60 percent of the kids. T

the challenges facing the Republican Party are far greater and far graver; indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that they are existential. Before Election Day, there were some in GOP yakkety-yakosphere who were warming up to pin the blame for Romney's impending defeat on Hurricane Sandy, a dubious proposition rendered utterly absurd by what happened yesterday. Not only was the problem not Sandy — it wasn't even simply Romney. True, the weaknesses of the Republican nominee were manifold and glaring, but they had nothing to do with the party's having squandered its chance to take back control of the Senate by pissing away two eminently winnable seats (in Missouri and Indiana) by dint of having nominated abject cretins (Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock). Or with the passage, for the first time, of ballot initiatives in two states (Maine and Maryland) legalizing same-sex marriage, and the legalizing of marijuana in two others (Colorado and Washington).

blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue “in all its tones.”

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. “Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development,” said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

terrified of exceedingly rare side effects from drugs that can help them.

thighbones to snap in two have shaken many osteoporosis patients so much that they say they would rather take their chances with the disease.

“Ninety percent of patients, when you talk to them about starting one of these drugs, won’t go on,”

preparing for a series of raids that would target for deportation hundreds of families who have flocked to the United States since the start of last year

first large-scale effort to deport families who have fled violence in Central America

target only adults and children who have already been ordered removed from the United States by an immigration judge

In studies, men as a whole display less cautious behavior than women, such as driving at higher speeds and closer to other cars, not wearing seat belts, and driving while intoxicated more often.

However, this slight edge in ability doesn’t translate into better driving records.

According to one study, men are more than three times as likely to be ticketed for “aggressive driving” than women, and more than 25 percent as likely to be at fault in an accident.

This may explain the shape of our movie monsters: creatures with sharp teeth or snake like appearance.

scary movies don’t actually activate fear responses in the amygdala at all. Instead, it was other parts of the brain that were firing – the visual cortex – the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information, the insular cortex- self awareness, the thalamus -the relay switch between brain hemispheres, and the dorsal-medial prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain associated with planning, attention, and problem solving.

Unfortunately for Aristotle, research has shown the opposite – watching violence actually makes people MORE aggressive.

Information overload sucks, so we aggressively filter. Noise becomes signal.Lack of meaning is confusing, so we fill in the gaps. Signal becomes a story.Need to act fast lest we lose our chance, so we jump to conclusions. Stories become decisions.This isn’t getting easier, so we try to remember the important bits. Decisions inform our mental models of the world.

There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.

It is Obama’s unfortunate fate that the high-water mark of his presidency occurred in the first months, when the world flirted with financial calamity. The prospect of another Great Depression — a long period of worsening economic decline — was not far-fetched.

In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.

Then as now, mass protest was a powerful weapon deployed by enraged citizens who felt they had nowhere else to turn but the streets. Thirty years later, it’s clear how far Korean democracy has advanced. Then, South Korea was a dictatorship, protests were outlawed and the threat of torture, imprisonment and martial law ever-present.

Students have long been at the vanguard of South Korea’s robust history of protest, drawing on deep-rooted Confucian traditions that elevated scholars as guardians of morality.

Yonsei produced its own martyr, 21-year-old Lee Han-yol, who died after a tear-gas canister hit him in the head.

Not just any old green, of course: Pantone 15-0343, colloquially known as greenery, which is to say a “yellow-green shade that evokes the first days of spring.”

That is, the Color of the Year for 2017.

“This is the color of hopefulness, and of our connection to nature. It speaks to what we call the ‘re’ words: regenerate, refresh, revitalize, renew. Every spring we enter a new cycle and new shoots come from the ground. It is something life affirming to look forward to.”

Building the best life does not require fealty to feelings in the name of authenticity, but rather rebelling against negative impulses and acting right even when we don’t feel like it. In a nutshell, acting grateful can actually make you grateful.

some people are just naturally more grateful than others. A 2014 article in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience identified a variation in a gene (CD38) associated with gratitude. Some people simply have a heightened genetic tendency to experience, in the researchers’ words, “global relationship satisfaction, perceived partner responsiveness and positive emotions (particularly love).” That is, those relentlessly positive people you know who seem grateful all the time may simply be mutants.

Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

Wrong, wrong, wrong — to the very end, we got it wrong.

in the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right.

The first signs that something was amiss in the coverage of the Tea Party era actually surfaced in the 2014 midterms. Oh, you broadcast network newscast viewers didn’t know we had important elections with huge consequences for the governance of your country that year? You can be forgiven because the broadcast networks hardly covered them.

was in response to President Trump’s decision on Friday to bar several news organizations from a White House briefing, including The Times.

“When The New York Times is under attack, what do we do?” Michael Zorek, a stay-at-home father from the Upper West Side of Manhattan screamed to the crowd. “Stand up! Fight back!” The group boomed back, responding with the mantra as Mr. Zorek shouted again, listing names of news organizations from BuzzFeed to the Public Broadcasting Service.

“When you look at history, the first thing dictators do is shut down the press.”

It's not that it's impossible for governments to hold down obesity; France, which had rapidly rising childhood obesity early this century, instituted an aggressive set of public-health interventions including school-based food and exercise shifts, nurse assessments of overweight kids, visits to families where overweight kids were identified, and so forth. Their childhood obesity rates stabilised at a fraction of America's.

The problem isn't that it's not possible; rather, it's that America is incapable of doing it.

America's national governing ideology is based almost entirely on the assertion of negative rights, with a few exceptions for positive rights and public goods such as universal elementary education, national defence and highways. But it's become increasingly clear over the past decade that the country simply doesn't have the political vocabulary that would allow it to institute effective national programmes to improve eating and exercise habits or culture. A country that can't think of a vision of public life beyond freedom of individual choice, including the individual choice to watch TV and eat a Big Mac, is not going to be able to craft public policies that encourage people to exercise and eat right. We're the fattest country on earth because that's what our political philosophy leads to. We ought to incorporate that into the way we see ourselves; it's certainly the way other countries see us.

A FUNNY thing has happened in the United States over the last few decades. Men’s average testosterone levels have been dropping by at least 1 percent a year

Testosterone appears to decline naturally with aging, but internal belly fat depresses the hormone further, especially in obese men. Drugs like steroids and opiates also lower testosterone, and it’s suspected that chemicals like bisphenol A (or BPA, commonly found in plastic food containers) and diseases like Type 2 diabetes play a role as well.

Clinical testosterone deficiency, which is variously defined as lower than 220 to 350 nanograms of testosterone per deciliter of blood serum, can cause men to lose sex drive and fertility. Their bone density often declines, and they may feel tired and experience hot flashes and sweats.

These are hard times for economists. Their reputations are tarnished; their favorite doctrines are damaged. Among their most prominent thinkers, there is no consensus as to how — or whether — governments in advanced countries can improve lackluster recoveries.

economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a retrospective study of its economic forecasts. This qualifies as an act of bureaucratic courage, because the record was predictably dismal

Interestingly, one item not on the list is “too much austerity.” The OECD economists found that they generally hadn’t underestimated the effects of spending cuts and tax increases intended to shrink budget deficits in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and elsewhere

Turns out you really can have a gut feeling about something, because evidence has been mounting that those microbes in the body may be important for our emotional health as well as our physical health.

PRIA TEWARI: Growing up in India we believe that what you eat influences your thoughts.

MAYER: We found that the type of community you have, of microbes you have in your gut, is reflected in some ways in some basic architectural aspects of the brain.

Judy Y. Chu reports on her two-year study in which she followed a group of boys from pre-kindergarten through first grade.

She concluded that most of what we think of as "boy" behavior isn't natural or authentic to boys, but is something they learn to perform. Boys aren't stoic or aggressive or hierarchical; they aren't bad at forming relationships or unable to express themselves. They pick up all these traditional traits of masculinity by adapting to a culture that expects and demands that they do so.

it seems like they become boys through learning from other boys; it's boys teaching themselves to be boys. So where do you see the inauthenticity or unnaturalness there?

Every time a research paper about violent video games makes it into the news, it feels like we’re in a time loop. Any claims that the study makes about the potential positive or (usually) negative effects of playing games tend to get over-egged to the point of ridiculousness.

At best, the measures of aggression that are used in such work are unstandardised; at worst, the field has been shown to be riddled with basic methodological and analytical flaws. These problems are further compounded by entrenched ideologies and a reluctance from some researchers to even talk to their ‘adversaries’, let alone discuss the potential for adversarial collaborations

All of this means that we’re stuck at an impasse with violent video games research; it feels like we’re no more clued up on what the actual behavioural effects are now than, say, five or ten years ago.