Those ‘Low-Calorie” sections that are increasingly popping up in restaurant menus, according to a new study appear to have a backfire effect.

In a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research, placing low-calorie dishes into their own low-calorie category can cause consumers to instead choose higher calorie meals that could be making them fatter.

To Jeffrey Parker, an assistant professor of marketing at Georgia State University, the restaurant menu provides the perfect conditions for testing decision-making. When the Build Your Own Salad menus in New York began making an appearance in every corner deli, he had to wonder how that could affect consumer choice. Then, New York mandated calorie postings for restaurants with franchises of 15 or more locations.

‘And everyone was well, is that actually helping people make choices?” he asked. Together with Donald R. Lehmann, a Columbia Business professor, Parker hypothesized that placing calories next to dishes didn’t really help people make healthier choices and placing all those low-calorie dishes in their own section helps even less.

‘For a lot of people low-cal, healthy things kind of sound like not very big, […]

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Toxicologists have a saying: ‘The dose makes the poison.” In other words, there is no such thing as ‘toxic” or ‘non-toxic”-it always depends on how much of a substance you consume.

So what’s a toxic level of mercury in your diet? This has long been a concern, because many fish contain measurable levels of mercury, which can cause profound neurological disease and death if consumed in sufficient amounts. The issue gained new urgency last week when a study in the journal Nature showed that mercury concentration at the ocean surface has tripled since the beginning of the industrial era.

How does mercury get into fish, anyway?

In the 19th and 20th centuries, factories dumped massive amounts of methylmercury-the most dangerous form of mercury, bonded to carbon and hydrogen-directly into waterways. The most infamous example occurred in Japan in the 1950s and ’60s, when industrial mercury poisoned more than 2,000 people who ate fish from Minamata Bay. (The neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning is called ‘Minamata disease” after the tragedy.)

Mercury dumping has been a problem in the United States, too. I grew up a […]

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Two crucial battles broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, this week. The first began with the public airing of sorrow and rage after the death of the eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, who was shot by a police officer, on Canfield Court, in the St. Louis suburb, at 2:15 P.M. last Saturday. Then came the local law enforcement’s rejoinder to the early round of protests. Officers rolled in with a fleet of armored vehicles, sniper rifles, and tear-gas cannisters, reinserting the phrase ‘the militarization of policing” into the collective conscience. The tactical missteps by the town’s police leadership have been a thing to behold. (They’re also to be expected; anyone doubting as much should pick up Radley Balko’s ‘The Rise of the Warrior Cop.”)

One moment, we see a young man with a welt from a rubber bullet between his eyes; the next, three officers with big guns are charging at another black man who has his hands up. On Thursday, Jelani Cobb filed a powerful account from the sidewalks and homes of Ferguson. Cobb asks about ‘the intertwined economic and law-enforcement issues underlying the protests,” including, for instance, the court fees that many people in Ferguson face, which often begin with minor infractions and […]

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For someone seeking a full-time job as a church pastor, Justin Barringer would seem to have the perfect résumé. He’s a seminary grad, an author and book editor, and a former missionary to China and Greece. But despite applying to nearly a hundred jobs over the course of two years, Barringer, who lives in Lexington, Kentucky, could not secure a full-time, salaried church position.

So he splits his time among three jobs, working as a freelance editor, an employee at a nonprofit for the homeless, and a part-time assistant pastor at a United Methodist Church. ‘I am not mad at the church,” Barringer says. ‘However, I wish someone had advised me against taking on so much debt in order to be trained for ministry.”

Barringer’s story is becoming increasingly typical as Protestant churches nationwide cut back on full-time, salaried positions. Consequently, many new pastors either ask friends and family for donations (a time-honored clerical tradition) or take on other jobs. Working two jobs has become so common for clergy members, in fact, that churches and seminaries have a euphemistic term for it: bi-vocational ministry.

Working multiple jobs is nothing new to pastors of small, rural congregations. But many of those pastors never went […]

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Three high school students have developed a mobile app to hold police accountable in communities nationwide. The app, Five-O, is a timely development, since the shooting of Michael Brown last weekend sparked a national conversation about police brutality and law enforcement in the U.S.

Caleb, Ima, and Asha Christian, three siblings from Decatur, Georgia, created Five-O for individuals to document and rate their encounters with police officers. With the app, citizens can discuss the reason behind their police encounters, and what occurred during their interactions. Moreover, individuals can transfer the recorded information to law enforcement, which can be used in cases where legal action is necessary. Five-O allows citizens to input relevant demographic information, including age and race, and rank officers’ level of professionalism.

‘We’d like to know which regions in the US provide horrible law enforcement services as well as highlight the agencies that are highly rated by their citizens. In addition to putting more power into the hands of citizens when interacting with law enforcement, we believe that highly rated police departments should be used as models for those that fail at providing quality law enforcement services,” explained Ima, the eldest of the three siblings.

The mobile app will be available […]

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