Over the past month, conservative commentators on Fox News repeatedly downplayed and disparaged the criminal charges facing Donald Trump in New York, framing them as a partisan witch hunt intended to tarnish the former president and destroy his chances in the upcoming election. Yet they struck a righteous tone after a jury convicted Trump on all 34 charges on Thursday. Fox’s most-high-profile pundits expressed disappointment with the verdict but argued that it will...

Elie Honig, once a colleague of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, called Bragg’s “contorted” case against former President Donald Trump an “ill-conceived, unjustified mess” in a Friday op-ed for New York Magazine. Honig served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2004 to 2012 and worked alongside Bragg. Honig, who now works as a legal analyst for CNN, criticized the legitimacy of the case. He noted its “unprecedented” and “...

The desire to become a parent is at once an incredibly simple biological impulse and a complex psychological decision. As mammals, we have an innate evolutionary drive to reproduce and pass on our genes. As humans, we may feel compelled to nurture a child, to grow a family, to leave a lineage and legacy behind…or we may not. Some people don't feel the desire to have children, but research shows most young adults do. The phenomenon known as "baby fever" is real, and it happens to both women and men. For women, the desire for a baby tends to start off strong and decrease with age and after having children, whereas for men baby fever tends to increase as they get older. But how does popular culture impact that desire? Do parenting depictions in media and advertisements have an influence one way or another? Those are the questions researchers from the UBC Sauder School of Business explored in a 2022 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. “Advertising and social media play an important role in how we view the world. In general, what we see on Instagram and Facebook are positive portrayals of parenthood, with #blessed and #bestkidsever. How often do we see parents post #mykidsareterrible?” asked study co-author Dr. Lisa Cavanaugh. “We wanted to see if, by simply showing pictures of kids in advertising, we could affect the desire to have children.”The study authors observed 1,093 childless young adults between the ages of 18-35 as they viewed positive and negative parent-child advertisements and ads with the children removed (neutral images). Positive images showed things like a parent and child smiling while interacting or doing something fun and creative together, while negative images showed children having meltdowns or parents clearly exasperated with a child's misbehavior. What they found was that positive parenting images increased the participants' desire to have a child by 22 percent compared to the neutral images. However, there was no inverse effect with the negative parent-child images. — (@) In fact, there was no negative effect at all. Seeing parenting being portrayed negatively did not change participants' minds about wanting to have a child.“These are people who don’t yet have children, so it could be they see the comedy in kids behaving badly. When it’s not you trying to clean up the mess or get a child to eat before you go to work, it can be humorous,” Dr. Cavanaugh posited. “But we can say with certainty that people without children who saw these negative parent-child moments were not dissuaded.”One thing the authors found in measuring how negative parenting images impacted "baby fever" was that both positive and negative parenting images evoked a sense of empathy in participants, which correlated with a greater desire to have children. Even the negative parenting images tended to create an empathic response (though not as significantly as the positive parenting images did) leading to a slight increase in desire to have a child. "Further bolstering the importance of empathic emotions in understanding the desire to have children, our results indicated that the depiction of negative parent–child moments also increases the desire to have children via empathic emotions," the authors wrote. "This finding suggests that the valence of parent–child images (i.e., that they are positive and sweet) may be less critical to the increased desire to have children. Instead, empathic emotions seem to be critical in predicting the desire to have children."So perhaps the quips we see on social media posts of misbehaving children or stressed out parents about them being "birth control" really are just jokes. According to this study, "baby fever" isn't so easily brought down.

If there's any Hollywood star that embodies agelessness, positivity and good old-fashioned fun, it's Dick Van Dyke. The legendary comedic actor has had a 70-year long career in film, television and stage productions and he shows no signs of stopping. In fact, at 98-years-old, he says he'd love to take a one-man show on the road. “Cary Grant did it,” Van Dyke told Deadline. “And Gregory Peck. Went on the road and talked about their careers. I think it’d be fun.”The man behind the iconic dance scenes in “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” has always shown off his seemingly endless energy in his physical performances, but the fact that he’s still going strong at 18 months shy of 100 is genuinely impressive. His secret? “Genuinely enjoying myself,” he said. He insists his success isn’t due to any particular ambition or drive, but rather that he sees his work as play. “I always loved what I was doing. If it had felt like work, I probably would have stopped it a long time ago, but I just loved it." And it wasn’t that he was specifically trained for the work. He started at 17 as a radio announcer and then joined a comedy troupe, in fact, he’d never even had a dance lesson before he landed some of his most well-known roles.“I was always pretty light footed,” Van Dyke told Entertainment Weekly. “When I auditioned for Bye Bye Birdie, [director] Gower Champion said, ‘You have the part.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Champion, I don't dance.’ He said, ‘I'll show you.’ And he did. He saw that I had the physical ability to do it, and it was like learning to fly.”As is typical for his age, Van Dyke’s long-term memories are sharp while he forgets things like what he ate for breakfast. But his wife, Arlene, whom he’s been married to for 12 years, helps keep him going.“She keeps me in shape, feeds me and I love her more everyday,” he told Forbes. “We’re just getting closer and closer.”Arlene (52) also shared with Forbes how Van Dyke has made her a better person, reinforcing that his loveable, jolly demeanor is just who he is.“I was very cynical, I think, when I first met him,” she said. “He’s such a great human being and he’s so pure in his thoughts and his heart, that it’s rubbed off on me. Just all the wholesome things of life—that’s what he has and he’s just made me a better person.”Van Dyke doesn't see himself the way the rest of us do, as a legend and an icon. “It’s a little hard for me to get my brain around that,” he told Deadline. “I don’t see myself that way and I can’t comprehend myself as that."However, the recent CBS television special that showcased his life and career in a variety show, "Dick Van Dyke 98 Years of Magic" made it clear that his legendary status is solidly understood. Between the joy his performances have brought to children and adults alike, the positivity he exudes on screen and off, the longevity and vitality he displays on every level, he's proven himself to be entertainment and aging goals personified. With age comes a lot of loss, however, and Van Dyke admits there's a bit of sadness in seeing his career being showcased, as most of the people he's worked with have passed. He told Deadline that Carl Reiner's death hit him particularly hard. "“I think I learned more from Carl Reiner than anyone else,” he said. “He understood comedy. He understood drama. He had a sense of timing like nobody else. And he was just so sharp and bright and a philosopher on top of it. He was the finest human being I ever knew.”But regardless of age, Van Dyke has no plans to retire, ever. He just did his first soap opera spot on "Days of Our Lives," and he delights in seeing how his work—his "play"—continues to make an impact. “I’m on my third generation now of kids who are writing to me," he told Deadline. "And I’m getting wonderful mail from their parents thanking me for providing good entertainment for their kids. They’re so kind about it. That I really appreciate. I’m so lucky.”

Laughter is one of the most natural impulses in humans. Most babies start to laugh out loud at around 3 to 4 months, far earlier than they are able to speak or walk. Expressing enjoyment or delight comes naturally to us, but we're not the only creatures who communicate with giggles.Researchers at UCLA have identified 65 species of animals who make "play vocalizations," or what we would consider laughter. Some of those vocalizations were already well documented—we've known for a while that apes and rats laugh—but others may come as a surprise. Along with a long list of primate species, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, mongooses and three bird species are prone to laughter as well. (Many bird species can mimic human laughter, but that's not the same as making their own play vocalizations.)Primatologist and UCLA anthropology graduate student Sasha Winkler and UCLA professor of communication Greg Bryant shared their findings in an article in the journal Bioacoustics.The authors explored various play vocalization sounds, recording them as noisy or tonal, loud or quiet, high- or low-pitched, short or long, a single call or rhythmic pattern.But really, what we want to see is what animal laughter sounds like from various species, right? While the researchers said that it can be hard to document laughter in the wild, especially among animals with quieter vocalizations, we do have some examples captured on video.Check out these foxes laughing like little kids:Or maybe little kids on helium. How fun is that?Ever seen a bonobo chimp laugh? Just as cute. I'm not sure if tickling a baby bonobo is sweet or torturous, though these researchers surely know what they're doing. It's always delightful to see the instinctual playfulness of primates. Laughter in some animals isn't as audibly apparent as it is in these foxes and chimps, though. Researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin found that rats laugh when they are tickled—and appear to enjoy tickling, as they seek it out—but their vocalizations are ultrasonic, so it's hard to hear them without special instruments. The UCLA researchers shared that the study of laughter in animals can help us better understand our own evolutionary behavior.“This work lays out nicely how a phenomenon once thought to be particularly human turns out to be closely tied to behavior shared with species separated from humans by tens of millions of years,” Bryant said, according to UCLA.“When we laugh, we are often providing information to others that we are having fun and also inviting others to join,” Winkler said. “Some scholars have suggested that this kind of vocal behavior is shared across many animals who play, and as such, laughter is our human version of an evolutionarily old vocal play signal.”Raise your hand if you just want to see a cow laughing for real now. This article first appeared on 1.14.22

The legality of abortion is one of the most polarized debates in America—but it doesn't have to be.People have big feelings about abortion, which is understandable. On one hand, you have people who feel that abortion is a fundamental women's rights issue, that our bodily autonomy is not something you can legislate, and that those who oppose abortion rights are trying to control women through oppressive legislation. On the other, you have folks who believe that a fetus is a human individual first and foremost, that no one has the right to terminate a human life, and that those who support abortion rights are heartless murderers.Then there are those of us in the messy middle. Those who believe that life begins at conception, that abortion isn't something we'd choose—and we'd hope others wouldn't choose—under most circumstances, yet who choose to vote to keep abortion legal.It is entirely possible to be morally anti-abortion and politically pro-choice without feeling conflicted about it. Here's why.There's far too much gray area to legislate.No matter what you believe, when exactly life begins and when “a clump of cells" should be considered an individual, autonomous human being is a debatable question.I personally believe life begins at conception, but that's my religious belief about when the soul becomes associated with the body, not a scientific fact. As Arthur Caplan, award-winning professor of bioethics at New York University, told Slate, “Many scientists would say they don't know when life begins. There are a series of landmark moments. The first is conception, the second is the development of the spine, the third the development of the brain, consciousness, and so on."But let's say, for the sake of argument, that a human life unquestionably begins at conception. Even with that point of view, there are too many issues that make a black-and-white approach to abortion too problematic to ban it.Abortion bans hurt some mothers who desperately want their babies to live, and I'm not okay with that.One reason I don't support banning abortion is because I've seen too many families deeply harmed by restrictive abortion laws.I've heard too many stories of families who desperately wanted a baby, who ended up having to make the rock-and-a-hard-place choice to abort because the alternative would have been a short, pain-filled life for their child.I've heard too many stories of mothers having to endure long, drawn out, potentially dangerous miscarriages and being forced to carry a dead baby inside of them because abortion restrictions gave them no other choice.I've heard too many stories of abortion laws doing real harm to mothers and babies, and too many stories of families who were staunchly anti-abortion until they found themselves in circumstances they never could have imagined, to believe that abortion is always wrong and should be banned at any particular stage.I am not willing to serve as judge and jury on a woman's medical decisions, and I don't think the government should either.Most people's anti-abortion views—mine included—are based on their religious beliefs, and I don't believe that anyone's religion should be the basis for the laws in our country. (For the record, any Christian who wants biblical teachings to influence U.S. law, yet cries “Shariah is coming!" when they see a Muslim legislator, is a hypocrite.)I also don't want politicians sticking their noses into my very personal medical choices. There are just too many circumstances (seriously, please read the stories linked in the previous section) that make abortion a choice I hope I'd never have to make, but wouldn't want banned. I don't understand why the same people who decry government overreach think the government should be involved in these extremely personal medical decisions.And yes, ultimately, abortion is a personal medical decision. Even if I believe that a fetus is a human being at every stage, that human being's creation is inextricably linked to and dependent upon its mother's body. And while I don't think that means women should abort inconvenient pregnancies, I also acknowledge that trying to force a woman to grow and deliver a baby that she may not have chosen to conceive isn't something the government should be in the business of doing.As a person of faith, my role is not to judge or vilify, but to love and support women who are facing difficult choices. The rest of it—the hard questions, the unclear rights and wrongs, the spiritual lives of those babies,—I comfortably leave in God's hands.Most importantly, if the goal is to prevent abortion, research shows that outlawing it isn't the way to go.The biggest reason I vote the way I do is because based on my research pro-choice platforms provide the best chance of reducing abortion rates.Abortion rates fell by 24% in the past decade and are at their lowest levels in 40 years in America. Abortion has been legal during that time, so clearly, keeping abortion legal and available has not resulted in increased abortion rates. Switzerland has one of the lowest abortion rates on earth and their rate has been falling since 2002, when abortion became largely unrestricted.Outlawing abortion doesn't stop it, it just pushes it underground and makes it more dangerous. And if a woman dies in a botched abortion, so does her baby. Banning abortion is a recipe for more lives being lost, not fewer.At this point, the only things consistently proven to reduce abortion rates are comprehensive sex education and easy, affordable access to birth control. If we want to reduce abortions, that's where we should be putting our energy. The problem is, anti-abortion activists also tend to be the same people pushing for abstinence-only education and making birth control harder to obtain. But those goals can't co-exist in the real world.Our laws should be based on reality and on the best data we have available. Since comprehensive sex education and easy, affordable access to birth control—the most proven methods of reducing abortion rates—are the domain of the pro-choice crowd, that's where I place my vote, and why I do so with a clear conscience.This article originally appeared on 01.22.19

I got a promotion a few days ago, so I decided to stop for a drink on my way home — just me and my sense of accomplishment.I ended up alone in the bar, running defense against a bouncer who held my ID hostage while he commented on my ass (among other things) and asked me vaguely threatening questions about my sex life.This is not a Yelp review. It's not an angry rant, and it's definitely not something women need to be reminded of.As far as I can tell, there is only one good lesson to pull out of this otherwise shitty and all-too-familiar interaction: In my experience, a lot of thoroughly decent men are still having trouble understanding this.I have a friend who once joked that it was all right for him to catcall women because he's good-looking. I had another ask me in faux outrage why it was OK for me to describe a cupcake (as in an actual chocolate baked good) as a “seven," but not OK for him to rank women the same way. I was recently at a house party where a group of guys referred to a soundproofed recording studio in the basement as the “rape room" 45 times.Some of these jokes were a little funny. Some of them really weren't. But they were all endemic of something more sinister, and I honestly don't think the men in question even realize it.So to the generally well-intentioned men in my life, please consider this:I have a friend who once joked that it was all right for him to catcall women because he's good-looking. I had another ask me in faux outrage why it was OK for me to describe a cupcake (as in an actual chocolate baked good) as a “seven," but not OK for him to rank women the same way. I was recently at a house party where a group of guys referred to a soundproofed recording studio in the basement as the “rape room" 45 times.Some of these jokes were a little funny. Some of them really weren't. But they were all endemic of something more sinister, and I honestly don't think the men in question even realize it.This has made me defensive. It has put me more on my guard than I would like to be.Decent male humans, this is not your fault, but it also does not have nothing to do with you.If a woman is frosty or standoffish or doesn't laugh at your joke, consider the notion that maybe she is not an uptight, humorless bitch, but rather has had experiences outside your realm of understanding that have adversely colored her perception of the world.Consider that while you're just joking around, a woman might actually be doing some quick mental math to see if she's going to have to hide in a bathroom stall and call someone to come help her, like I did three days ago.Please adjust your mindset and your words accordingly.This article was written by Laura Munoz and originally appeared on 03.08.16.

Seeing a musical confidante. The post The Pete Townshend quote that made Joe Walsh “flattered beyond belief” first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

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