Hit the "scan" button on your car radio and you're just as likely to land on a station with a right-wing pundit lambasting health care reform as the latest Rihanna hit. Talk radio is thriving: About 3,500 American radio stations use that format today, up from about 1,750 in 2007 and just 500 in 1991. Political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry and sociologist Sarah Sobieraj, both of Tufts University, argue that the boom is more a matter of money talking than politics.

Americans like to think of themselves as a restless people, always ready to pack up and move in search of opportunity. But in the past 30 years, they have been increasingly stuck in place.

The specter of cyberwar haunts American leaders. “The next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack,” Leon Panetta warned last year when he was still CIA director.

In 1946, poet and critic R.P. Blackmur sent a letter to many of America’s most prominent writers and critics. “For reasons that will later become apparent,” it began, “we should be very grateful for your best opinion as to what literary magazines now being published in the United States are of the most use to literature.” The impetus behind the query was the Rockefeller Foundation, which had decided to support literary magazines and had asked Blackmur to determine which were the most deserving.

The debt ceiling fracas that consumed Washington this summer made it seem as if restoring economic health was only a matter of finding a new balance of taxes and spending. But Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute and Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute argue that policymakers are neglecting a transformational development on the horizon”: Health care and education are on track to become “the heart of the economy." That is, or should be, the central issue, they argue.

Unlike many fields, health care and education will enjoy solid demand and wage growth for the foreseeable future. They’ve already accounted for the vast majority of job gains in recent memory: Employment in health care, education, and other parts of the public sector increased by 16 percent over the past 10 years, while employment in all other sectors fell by eight percent. And the trend will only continue. The way the modern economy has evolved means that Americans use a smaller percentage of their income for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, freeing up money for secondary but still integral services such as education and health care. What’s more, even in hard times, people refrain from tightening their belts when it comes to these secondary services: In 2008, at the height of the panic over the financial system, personal spending on education and health care continued to rise.

Kling and Schulz note that it is also hard “to squeeze

In an age when most information is just a few keystrokes away, it’s natural to wonder: Is Google weakening our powers of memory? According to psychologists Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard, the Internet has not so much diminished intelligent recall as tweaked it.

The trio’s research shows what most computer users can tell you anecdotally: When you know you have the Internet at hand, your memory relaxes. In one of their experiments, 46 Harvard undergraduates were asked to answer 32 trivia questions on computers. After each one, they took a quick Stroop test, in which they were shown words printed in different colors and then asked to name the color of each word. They took more time to name the colors of Internet-related words, such as modem and browser. According to Stroop test conventions, this is because the words were related to something else that they were already thinking about—yes, they wanted to fire up Google to answer those tricky trivia questions.

In another experiment, the authors uncovered evidence suggesting that access to computers plays a fundamental role in what people choose to commit to their God-given hard drive. Subjects were instructed to type 40 trivia-like statements into a dialog box. Half were told that the computer would erase the information and half that it would be saved. Afterward, when asked to recall the statements, the students who were

Women may be underrepresented in Congress, but those who get elected to office are no shrinking violets. Research by political scientists Sarah F. Anzia of Stanford University and Christopher R. Berry of the University of Chicago shows that congresswomen are more effective on Capitol Hill than their male counterparts. Female legislators secure nine percent more federal discretionary spending for their districts than congressmen do—on average, a difference of $49 million per district annually. They also sponsor about three more bills per Congress than their male peers (the average per member is 18), and cosponsor roughly 26 more bills.

Would Congress be more effective if more women were elected? (They’ve held an average of just 17 percent of the seats in recent years.) It’s not likely, Anzia and Berry say. Congresswomen aren’t overachievers because women are intrinsically better legislators, the authors argue, but because the barriers to entry for women in congressional politics are so high that those who succeed simply have more talent and put in more effort than the average man who wins at the polls. If those barriers were to fall, so would the performance level of most female legislators.

The authors attribute women’s superior performance in Congress to what they call the “Jill Robinson effect.” Like the famed African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson, whose combination of great athletic talent and outstanding character

Consider the potato: It’s dull in color, bland in taste, and prone to rot. Europeans initially suspected the spud of being poisonous because it bore a resemblance to the skin of leprosy victims. But the humble tuber has spurred great things, according to economists Nathan Nunn of Harvard and Nancy Qian of Yale. The significant increase in population and urbanization in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries owed a good deal to the incorporation of the spud into regional diets.

The potato’s unappealing exterior masks an abundance of virtues. “Because potatoes contain nearly all important vitamins and nutrients, they support life better than any other crop,” Nunn and Qian report. Add milk, with its stores of vitamins A and D, and you’ve got a diet that humans can live on. Potatoes are also packed with energy. An acre of spuds yields about three times more calories than an acre of wheat, barley, or oats. Plus, potatoes are easy to grow in tandem with other crops, and they make great fodder for cattle and other livestock.

The potato is native to South America, and was brought to the Eastern Hemisphere by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Most of the countries of Europe were lucky enough to have the kind of rocky, fertile soil suitable for growing this modest-seeming wonder food. They began to cultivate the potato in earnest in the early 18th century.

Living standards and life expectancies in potato-friendly areas soon improved, pushing up

Attacks on stores and restaurants that celebrate Valentine’s Day. Protests against artists and writers who link Hindu gods with sexuality. The arrest of couples who put their arms around each in public. These incidents in India today aren’t isolated, argues the Indologist Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago. Throughout much of the country, Hindu fundamentalists are engaged in “pervasive and often violent moral policing.” Many of them blame the West for tainting India with lasciviousness, but they’re pointing a finger in the wrong direction, Doniger writes.

India has a rich tradition of eroticism, and a tradition, just as old, of what Doniger calls “Hindu Puritanism.” The Rig Veda, India’s earliest Hindu sacred text, written around 1500 BC, “revels in the language of both pleasure and fertility.” Various other texts, including the Upanishads and the Tantras, which appeared in subsequent centuries, refer to ritual sex. But sexual acts coexisted with the path of meditation and asceticism—some interpreted the acts as intended to occur only on a symbolic level—and so a kind of religious doublethink arose that fostered tolerance.

The more secular Kamasutra, a book that today is referred to much more often than it is read, appeared in the third century AD. Some of the views that the author, Vatsyayana, expressed about women and homosexuality are liberal even by today’s standards in India. Yet &

Air pollution is not good for anybody, but it’s particularly harmful to children. With their high respiration rates, kids take in more polluted air relative to their body weight than adults do. And because their bodies are still developing, they are especially vulnerable to pollution’s effects. Lead and manganese, for example, have a direct impact on children’s brains. “Children exposed to air pollution perform worse on cognitive functioning tests and have impaired neurological function and lower IQ scores compared with other children,” report Paul Mohai, who teaches environmental policy at the University of Michigan, and three colleagues. In light of this evidence, say the authors, it’s bad news that many schools are located very close to significant sources of air pollution.

In a study of Michigan’s 3,660 public schools, Mohai and colleagues found that almost half were in the most polluted parts of the state. Two-thirds of students were attending schools sited in the bottom fifth of geographic tracts in terms of air pollution. (Each tract is one square kilometer.) Moreover, within individual school districts, most schools were located in the worst-polluted neighborhoods. The authors also uncovered stark racial disparities: While 44 percent of white students were attending schools in the worst-polluted tenth of geographic tracts, 82 percent of their black peers and 62 percent of their Latino peers were enrolled in such schools.