There's nothing quite like the feeling of pure, ice-cold hydration. Some of us get our water for free from the tap. The rest pay for it -- at the cost of roughly $100 billion a year. At that steep a price tag, you might assume buying the bottled stuff would be worth it. In most cases, you'd be wrong. For the vast majority of Americans, a glass from the tap and a glass from the bottle are virtually identical as far as their health and nutritional quality are concerned. In some cases, publicly-sourced tap may actually be safer since it is usually tested more frequently. There are exceptions, however -- people living near private wells do not enjoy the same rigorous testing as those whose water comes from public sources, and some public sources are not properly screened, as was recently seen in Flint, Michigan. But there are plenty of reasons to stop shelling out for bottled water. Click ahead to find out all the things you didn't know about your drinking water. Follow the link to see the 14 reasons bottled water is a sham: goo.gl/TL1YVi
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Whether they’re in a monogamous relationship or they have multiple sexual partners, many people feel that practicing safe sex is nonnegotiable: No condom, no sex – it’s that simple. This reality makes a new sexual trend particularly disturbing. Called stealthing, it’s a practice in which a straight or gay man intentionally and secretly removes a condom during intercourse without a partner’s consent. It’s happening around the country, and there’s even an online community where men swap stories about the practice, according to a paper published in the April 2017 Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, though just how common it is remains unknown. Not surprisingly, the practice carries potentially serious physical and emotional repercussions for the victim. For starters, there’s concern about the risk of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy. “If your partner is agreeing to use a condom, you have an expectation that you’re being protected from an STI and unintended pregnancy,” says Dr. Barbara Levy, vice president for health policy at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “Also, if the partner is removing that condom without your knowledge or consent, that is domestic abuse if you use the broadest sense of the word. This is taking control of a situation where it should be equal partners making decisions together and making it one partner making decisions for the other. Clearly, this is an activity that is victimizing one member of the sexual encounter.” THIS WEEK'S CIRCULARS Naturally, this turn of events can produce psychological fallout for the victim, too, particularly a deep sense of violation. “It’s a betrayal, and the victim may have trouble trusting future partners,” says psychologist Linda Louden, assistant director for the Texas Woman’s University Counseling and Psychology Services in Dallas and Houston. “It can also change how victims view themselves – they may come to see themselves as damaged or vulnerable. All of these effects can increase the risk of depression and anxiety, especially if the person has a history of sexual trauma.” Plus, when you don’t know if you’ll catch an STI or become pregnant, the fear of what might happen can increase anxiety, notes Perry Halkitis, a public health psychologist and incoming dean at the Rutgers School of Public Health in Piscataway, New Jersey. “This can lead to unhealthy behaviors, such as drinking or eating too much, to manage those emotions. There’s a ripple effect.” Part of that ripple effect may include the financial stress associated with the cost of STI testing or emergency contraception. Given the potential harms, why do men do it? It’s not about men wanting to reap more pleasure from having sex without a condom, experts say; if it were, that could be negotiated ahead of time. It’s more about exercising control or changing the rules in a single-handed way. “The condom is a physical and an emotional barrier: While I believe people should be having safer sex, for some people, the condom reduces the intimacy between partners,” Halkitis explains. “There’s also a power differential in relationships, and it’s difficult for some people to negotiate this. Increasingly, women are feeling empowered to say, 'You have to wear a condom.' For some men, [stealthing] may be a way to reclaim that power in the relationship’s dynamic.” But that doesn’t mean it’s OK, Halkitis is quick to add. “It’s a violation, plain and simple,” he says. “It’s emotionally hurtful to the person it’s happening to.” And it can lead to feelings of shame and reduced feelings of self-worth, as the victim wonders what this says about how the partner views her or him, experts say. How to Protect Yourself Given that this is happening, it’s wise to take steps to guard against it. For starters, it helps to know and thoroughly trust the person you’re having sex with. It’s also wise to “insist that your partner has STI testing before you have sex,” Levy says. But stealthing can happen even in committed relationships, so it’s important to take extra precautions. “To prevent pregnancy, use a more reliable form of contraception – such as long-acting reversible IUDs or implants, injectable contraceptives or oral contraceptives – in addition to condoms,” Levy advises. “If you’re in an abusive situation where he’s trying to force you to become pregnant, you can have an IUD placed without your partner knowing.” If you become a victim of stealthing despite your efforts to guard against it, you can protect yourself from pregnancy afterward – by buying emergency contraception (such as Plan B) over the counter within 72 hours, getting a prescription for ella or having a copper IUD inserted within five days after unprotected sex, Levy says. Besides tending to your physical health, “talk to someone you trust about it – a best friend, a parent or a counselor – to get the social support you need to help you process this,” Louden advises. Especially if this has happened to you multiple times, it can take a particularly steep toll on you psychologically. “Victimization has long-lasting negative effects on a person’s well-being,” Halkitis notes. “This may be traumatizing for someone.” In which case, it’s certainly in your best interest to seek professional counseling. Meanwhile, there’s a push to define stealthing as a form of sexual assault under the law. In the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law article, Alexandra Brodsky, a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, calls stealthing “rape-adjacent.” And she suggests that a new tort should be created to “provide victims with a more viable cause of action and to reflect better the harms wrought by nonconsensual condom removal.” The hope is that framing this as a form of sexual violence and a clear-cut crime would serve as a further deterrent to its happening in the future. U.S. News & World Report - Health Stacey Colino 5/4/2017 I have some bad news: Your dog doesn't like being hugged, even though you love to hug them.
That isn't definitive, nor is it every single dog (#NotEveryDog) - Louboutina, for instance, is seemingly all about hugs. But chances are, your dog isn't. And that's just scratching the surface of the many misconceptions we often ascribe to our canine family members. What other commonly held beliefs about dogs are wrong? And what does it mean for our relationships with the dogs in our lives? To learn more, I spoke with Alexandra Horowitz, a dog-cognition researcher and author of "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know" and "Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell." Read more: goo.gl/m10o3h Relationship experts share the worst mistakes they see couples make — and how to avoid them. Click here to read more goo.gl/zVT0ly
We made up the weekend the same way we made up the week. The earth actually does rotate around the sun once a year, taking about 365.25 days. The sun truly rises and sets over twenty-four hours. But the week is man-made, arbitrary, a substance not found in nature. That seven-day cycle in which we mark our meetings, mind birthdays, and overstuff our iCals—buffered on both ends by those promise-filled 48 hours of freedom—only holds us in place because we invented it.
We abuse time, make it our enemy. We try to contain and control it, or, at the very least, outrun it. Your new-model, even faster phone; your finger on the “Close” button in the elevator; your same-day delivery. We shave minutes down to nano-seconds, mechanizing and digitizing our hours and days, paring them toward efficiency, that buzzword of corporate America. But time wasn’t always so rigid. Ancient cultures like those of the Mayans and the pagans saw time as a wheel, their lives repeating in stages, ever turning. The Judeo-Christians decided that time was actually linear, beginning at creation and moving toward end times. This idea stuck—and it’s way more boring than a wheel. Becoming efficient is a way of saying “I’m going to conquer time before it conquers me.” To slow down, to stop fighting time, to actually feel it—this is an act of giving in, which is weakness. Bragging “I never take a weekend” is a gesture of strength: I corralled time, I beat it down. Actually, taking a weekend means ceasing the fight with time, and letting it be neutral, unoccupied. Why isn’t this a good thing? “Time is now currency: It is not passed but spent.” Not long ago, free time was a defining political issue. The first instance of American workers rising up in unity wasn’t about child labor, or working conditions, or salaries—it was about shrinking long work hours. Those who came before us fought—and died—for time. As the industrial revolution changed the very nature of work, things got worse. The new machines required uninterrupted tending to avoid the costs of starting and stopping. Dickensian misery abounded. Windowless factories locked in darkness. Rats scurrying. The deformities of child laborers with soft, bendable bones and knees pointed inward from standing in the cotton mills. The “mill girls” who populated the factories of Lowell complained of working the looms in the dark at both ends of the day, their eyes strained by the candles that provided their only light. The clock became the ubiquitous new boss. Previously, workers tended to complete their work organically, in accordance with natural laws: the sherman’s tasks beholden to the tides; the farmer’s to the seasons. But with industrialization, clocks now determined the task, and the measure of productivity was how much labor could be wrung out of a worker over a period of time. Time had a dollar value, and became a commodity, not to be wasted. “Time is now currency: It is not passed but spent,” wrote historian E. P. Thompson. Clocks in factories would often mysteriously turn forwards and backwards. Bosses were stealing unpaid hours from workers, who feared to carry their own watches for, as one factory worker wrote in his memoirs in 1850, “it was no uncommon event to dismiss any one who presumed to know too much about the science of horology.” Mondays were the original weekends Before the weekend became official, many workers took it anyway. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries in England, vast numbers of employees didn’t bother to show up on Monday, playing the religious-holiday card by saying they were “keeping Saint Monday” (there is no Saint Monday, it turns out). Benjamin Franklin rather prissily bragged that as a young man he got promoted simply by showing up on Mondays for his job in a London printing house: “My constant attendance (I never making a St. Monday) recommended me to the master.” Binge work leads to binge play, and many workers were hungover on Mondays, recovering from bar games at alehouses, outdoor dog fights, and boxing matches. They were paid on Saturday, and stuck in church on Sunday, so they stole that Monday to burn through their paychecks and have some fun. (The idea of the weekend as the time to blow the paycheck holds today: Americans spend the most money on Friday and Saturday nights, and the least on Mondays and Tuesdays.) Low-paid workers were actually willing to lose out on a much-needed day’s salary in exchange for a day of freedom, so deeply felt was the need for two days’ reprieve. It’s a trade-off most of us make all the time: time versus money. Do I pay the parking ticket or challenge it and lose an afternoon to the process? The financial hit of that lost Monday was real, so when the paid half-Saturday was offered, most workers were glad to accept the compromise. Saint Monday faded from tradition, and the half-Saturday holiday became the standard in Britain in the 1870s. Henry Ford’s capitalist contribution One of the key agents in normalizing the weekend for the rest of American workers was actually a staunch anti-unionist, auto tycoon Henry Ford (he was also a well-known anti-Semite, which makes his championing of the Sabbath a little delicious). A Marxist might point out that the weekend is an act of corporate trickery, a dangling carrot that keeps workers tethered to their jobs. In 1914, Ford raised the daily wage in his factories from $2.34 per day to $5.00. It was a radical move, and a PR sensation. Thousands showed up hoping for work, causing a near riot that was damped down when the police department turned firehoses on men in bitter winter. But the raise wasn’t exactly the Owen-style socialism it superficially resembled; Ford was convinced to go along with an increased wage only when his vice president, James Couzens, pointed out that not only would the move be great publicity, but more money would give the workers an incentive to spend—perhaps on cars. In 1926, Ford echoed this argument when he introduced the five-day workweek. “People who have more leisure must have more clothes,” he argued. “They eat a greater variety of food. They require more transportation in vehicles.” Ford, probably by accident, articulated a contradiction that sits at the heart of the weekend as we have come to know it: It’s both a time of rest and a time of consumption. A Marxist might point out that the weekend is an act of corporate trickery, a dangling carrot that keeps workers tethered to their jobs. As the economist John Kenneth Galbraith put it, the mission of production—and business—is to “create the wants it seeks to satisfy”—and the weekend is the time of satisfying wants. All of which is probably true, but it’s just as true to say that the yearning for a weekend doesn’t arise solely from a desire to shop. With work quelled, space opens up in which to be with others, or in solitude with the self—or both. The clock that propels us all those other days is silenced (or quieted, at least), and time opens up, awakening our own desires, our thoughts and impulses. It was less poetry than pragmatism, however, that finally cemented the two-day weekend. During the Depression of 1929, many industries began cutting back to a five-day schedule. In a tumultuous, underemployed economy, fewer hours for some would mean more work for others (an idea that still reverberates in some European countries: In Germany, the response to the 2008 economic crisis was to implement a nationwide work-sharing program called Kurzarbeit, meaning “short work”). Americans experienced what it was to work less, and—shocker—they liked it. Politicians noticed. Guided along by organized labor, with President Roosevelt signing off, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 enshrined the modern weekend: Americans were now promised the eight-hour day, and the forty-hour workweek. Say hello to the weekend The weekend skipped across the globe over the next several decades. By 1955 the two-day weekend was standard in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and short Saturdays were common across Europe. By the 1970s, no European country exceeded a 40-hour workweek—many worked less—and all observed the weekend. The financial boon to a country that keeps hours in line with the West has altered the shape of the weekend. In the Middle East, Friday-Saturday weekends became the norm over the last half of the 20th century, while some Gulf and North African countries booked off Thursday and Friday. But as economies have reoriented from local to global, the financial boon to a country that keeps hours in line with the West has altered the shape of the weekend. Oman switched from a Thursday-Friday weekend to a Friday-Saturday weekend in 2013. The same year, Saudi Arabia followed suit with a royal decree that looked a lot like an open-for-business sign. The state of the weekend is an ongoing battle in Israel, where the official weekend is the day and a half that constitutes the Sabbath, from Friday evening through Saturday. But Israel’s weekend is changing, too—tensely. Some Orthodox Jews, appalled at Sabbath-breakers, have reportedly thrown stones at Israelis taking the bus on Saturdays. With Arabs and Christians to please, there have been calls for a full, two-day Friday-Saturday weekend to accommodate holy days for all groups. Whether it’s motivated by the push of business or the pull of the soul (or some combination of the two), two days off is what feels normal and human. After hundreds of years of debate, bloodshed, and dogma, a weekend should be an enshrined right—yet that isn’t exactly what happened. It took a century to win the weekend. It’s taken only a few decades to undo it. This is an excerpt from The Weekend Effect: The Life-Changing Benefits of Taking Time Off and Challenging the Cult of Overwork by Katrina Onstad. Copyright @2017 by Katrina Onstad, published by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. |
AuthorKeith Kelly currently lives in Rio Rancho New Mexico. Archives
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