Magic mushrooms create novel brain connections

Discover - This is your brain on psychedelic drugs
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Business Insider - How tripping on mushrooms changes the brain

Researchers gave subjcts 2 mg of psilocybin (the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms") intravenously and then measured their brain activity (using fMRI), specifically using a new method that tries to find connections between different areas of the brain. The subjects who took the dose had a sort-of stimulative effect in their brains compared to the placebo, where connections (albeit mostly fleeting ones) between usually unconnected parts of the brain were formed. The surprise was that all the new connections weren't fleeting: some novel pathways remained well after the effects of the dose wore off. The findings help explain behavior during psychedelic experiences. This may further the theory that mushrooms are good for depression. It was thought that portions of the brain that correlate to sense of self became muted, now it may be instead that those portions connect to a wider context to alleviate obsessive, solipsistic thoughts.

Liberal cities are more expensive, but the relation to liberalism isn't known yet

The Atlantic - Why middle-class Americans can't afford to live in liberal cities

There is some evidence that cities with more liberals have worse income inequality and higher real estate prices. It seems that this is so in aggregate, since some conservative cities also have high real estate prices as well. So overall, there are higher average per square foot prices in more liberal cities than conservative ones, with the politics being measured by margin of victory in Romney vs Obama. In California, a 2010 study found that more liberal cities issued fewer new housing permits. However, it is difficult to pick apart the politics from historical or geographic reasons: in Texas, for instance, where land is flatter and cities aren't constrained by geography in their expansion, more real estate, and hence more affordable housing, is easier to come by than, perhaps, cities within peninsulas or on mountain slopes. The definitive causes remain unknown, and researchers offer different reasons: liberals might be more concerned about environmental impacts of development, or perhaps want to apply "historic preservation" more than market-driven conservatives would.

US suburbs are growing, but also growing poorer

Slate - How the Suburbs Got Poor

There are multiple factors that have contributed to the relative decline of suburban life; though Slate may misinterpret the facts about the decline: while suburban poverty grew twice as much as urban poverty did from 2000-2011, there is still a higher rate within US cities, notably because three times as many Americans live in the suburbs than the cities. But still, in the last decade, the growth in suburban life (most especially in the US South, in conjunction with job growth) has been accompanied by an historically disproportionate growth in the suburban poor. Partly this is because low-paying jobs accompany higher-paying ones, as middle- and upper-class people occupy the suburbs. Another reason is because of urban gentrification that pushes the poor to the suburbs. Long-standing historical forces include successive waves of white flight even from suburbia, and the great diminishing of the single-earner, two-parent household for the single-household/single-parent phenomenon. With living preferences changing, so is the appeal of the house maintenance and civil engagement common in the post-war era. The implication is there is a negative feedback loop, from white flight & urban gentrification to diminishing property values to fewer local revenues to, finally the Ferguson-esque methods of preying on the poor in search of local revenue: exorbitant traffic fines and penalties that prop up town budgets. The article talks about the two kinds of successful suburban landscapes: walkable towns with mixed use buildings and living arrangements, and, paradoxically, staunchly middle- and upper-class suburbs that fiercely protect their property values (and pay concomitant property taxes) to protect the "character of their neighborhoods".

Adult intervention can hamper child social development

Janet Lansbury - Share… Wait Your Turn… Don’t Touch… Playdate Rules That Limit Learning (And What To Try Instead)

This blog post uses examples to discuss how to treat children who are playing together. The initial examples highlight potential conflicts between children and how they are alleviated not be insisting on "taking turns" or adjudicating who deserves the object of mutual desire (a toy that both children want), but by acknowledging the conflict and expecting the children to work it out themselves. The idea here is that using adult intervention in the conflict will not help children play together, instead it separates, focuses on objects rather than people, and trains the child to rely on the adult to manage a situation. While a firm "no hurting each other" rule is in place, most of the adults in the alternate daycare discussed here pay attention to a situation and reflect the situation as it unfolds, openly and verbally. The idea is to let the children learn that struggle in social interactions is acceptable, even expected.

Fear of sickness from "night air" persisted in the US until just a century ago

Wired - Fantastically Wrong: Why People Were Terrified of Nighttime Air Until the 1900s

A summary of a summary: this article mainly summarizes the essay from Peter Baldwin's "How Night Air Became Good Air" in Environmental History. The speculation is that humans have a biological fear of the dark (or, at the very least, an apprehension), and that it was this fear that continued to influence our thinking about the "night air" even once we moved past the hunting-gathering stages of our history and into agrarian and urban civilization. According to the essay, Americans suspected the night air of carrying sickness, a combination of a fear of "miasma" emanating from swamps and other decaying (organic) bodies and the coolness of night "moisture, which brought the chills. There were skeptics, as proved by John Adams' recollection of an attempt to shut himself into a room he was sharing with Benjamin Franklin, who refused, and lectured him about the silliness of the dread deep into the night. Further dissent came when examining the air within houses that were poorly ventilated: this air was worse due to the excrement we give off from exhaling and through our pores, argued Catherine Beecher and Beecher-Stowe. This led to the belief that the higher the concentration of people, the worse the air: the urban slums would be the worst. Thus in the 1800s the early examples of the affluent fleeing the urban core. Perhaps, however, there was some wisdom in the practice of shutting up the house since (at least in North America), native mosquitoes are most active at night and can carry many serious diseases. Ultimately, the blame was turned to mosquitoes, and interesting methods of eliminating them were tried, including, notably, pouring huge amounts of kerosene into lakes, ponds, and un-drained swamps to discourage breeding!

The GOP is in a low point in the "Culture War" (Opinion)

Politico - How Republicans Lost the Culture War

This piece focuses on two issues in the "culture war" between liberals and Christian conservatives: women's reproductive rights (contraception and abortion) and homosexual rights (in this case, marriage). How is it that the GOP has lost? Gay marriage is soon to be legal for over half the US population (according to the states where it is either legal or soon to be), and regarding abortion, current GOP candidates are refining and "recalibrating" their message to be softer. (There is likely going to be some debate as to whether these candidates' messages constitute a trend.) Perhaps the changing electorate makes this loss explainable, but the argument is that 3 major errors over the past 20 years lead to a GOP loss on these social issues:
1. The GOP stopped trying to find weak points in liberal positions and hammer them and instead tried for all-out victory. The GOP had pursued an incremental strategy of limiting and circumscribing abortions during the Clinton era, but accelerated as the GOP took control of Congress and the White House. The incremental strategy was "abandoned" during Obama's presidency due to the extreme reaction the GOP had to Obama. Instead, a focus on ideological purity became prevalent. Thus the roles reversed: GOP candidates were seen as having incoherent or uncompromising views and it was the Democrats turn to hammer on them.
2. The GOP lost its way on birth control: interestingly the same mandated coverage that the GOP either tolerated or advanced during the GW Bush presidency was renounced when it became part of the ACA. Again, author attributes this to the negative reaction to Obama.
3. The GOP made the wrong bet on gay marriage. While the gay marriage issue propelled GOP voter turnout in 2004 for GW Bush, it was entirely predictable that attitudes against it would wane, especially with younger and more urban voters. Continuing to oppose this was a loser for the GOP, yet they held on to it well past when it was tactically fortuitous.